MFI Personnel

Officers and Board of Directors

Charles Butterworth (Vice President, director) is emeritus professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, He specializes in medieval Arabic and Islamic political philosophy. His publications include critical editions of most of the Middle Commentaries written by Averroes on Aristotle's logic, translations of books and treatises by Averroes, Alfarabi, and Alrazi, as well as Maimonides, and studies of different aspects of the political teaching of these and other thinkers in the ancient, medieval, and modern tradition of philosophy.  He has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., lecturer in the Chaire de l’Institut du Monde Arabe lecture series in Paris, France for a series of lectures entitled “Des origines de la philosophie politique en Islam,” Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science at the American University of Cairo, president of the American Academy of Liberal Education, and currently serves as an editor or as a member of the editorial committee for several learned journals.

Ramy Osman (Secretary, director) is a co-founder of Muslims4Liberty (M4L), the Virginia M4L Coordinator, and webmaster/blogger/artist for the M4L website. He volunteers for a number of charitable, community and activist causes and edited the final report for the "NYC Coalition for Muslim School Holidays" http://eidinnyc.org. For 10 years Ramy has also been organizer and occasional Imam of a Friday congregational group of over 200 Muslim government employees in the Northern Virginia area.

Shahid N. Shah, M.S. (Treasurer, director) is a cofounder of Alim Foundation, Chief Architect of The Alim Islamic Knowledge Platform, and an award-winning IT professional that consults for governments and NGOs. He has over two decades of business strategy, technology strategy, architecture, engineering, entrepreneurship, speaking, and writing experience.

Prof. Antony T. Sullivan, Ph.D. (director) is senior associate of TerraBuilt Corp. International and author of or contributor to eight books  and some 100 journal articles and academic reviews focusing on the Arab and Muslim world and holds an honorary position as Associate at the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan. Dr. Sullivan has played a major role in bringing together moderate Muslim intellectuals and their appropriate Western counterparts to address contemporary challenges that are common to both the West and the Islamic world.

Safei-Eldin Hamed, Ph.D. (director) is a scholar of environmental policy, landscape architecture, urban planning, and Arabic-Islamic Studies who has taught at Virginia Tech, University of Maryland, Texas Tech, the University of Georgia, and Chatham University in the United States; University of Guelph and the University of Nova Scotia in Canada; and King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia. Dr. Hamed has authored and co-authored several books, among which is “Planning Objectives for the Arid Middle East: An Approach to Setting Environmental Objectives, “Ecology and Islam”, “The Eleventh Commandment”, “Environmentalism in the Muslim World” “Islam in America”, “The American Empire”, “The Calamity of September”, and “Janat wa Oyoun (in Arabic).  He has worked as an Environmental Assessment Specialist at the World Bank in Washington, DC.  Currently, he lives in Washington, DC Metro area and practices as a consultant of international development.  

Board of Advisers

• Omar Altalib, Ph.D. is an international author, speaker and trainer, a former adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Education and co-author of the book Parent, Child Relations published in English and translated into Arabic, Bosnian, Malay, and Russian.
• Abdul Hafiz Shaikh, Ph.D. is a Pakistani political economist e with over 30 years of experience in economic policy-making, management and implementation who served as the 20th Finance Minister of Pakistan.

Staff and Fellows of the Institute