Nasr Muhammad Arif is a Visiting Professor at St Andrews University, UK, and a Professor of Political Science at Cairo University in Egypt. He served as Professor of Islamic Studies and founding Executive Director of the Institute for Islamic World Studies at Zayed University, UAE. He has published many works on political and social development, Islamic thought and movement and Muslim culture and adaptions in English and Arabic. His works have been published in Arabic and translated into English, Spanish, Hungarian, Kurdish, Persian, Indonesian and Urdu. His research concentrates on Islamic traditions and political thought, the history of Islamic cultures, political development, and comparative political systems. He received a Ph.D. degree in Political Science, in 1995, from Cairo University, Egypt, and the University of Maryland, College Park, USA.
Chai Shaojin is a faculty member of the Department of International Relations at the University of Sharjah, the UAE. Previously He taught international relations courses at Zayed University in the UAE and was a non-residential research fellow on Islamic studies at Hebei University in China. He has also served as a senior research fellow and advisor in the UAE Ministry of Culture & Knowledge Development and an international think-tank. He has published articles and book chapters on Chinese global ethics & and governance, China-Middle East relations & and soft power, and Islam in China. He is a co-editor of Zhenghe Forum: Connecting China and Muslim World (2016) & and a co-author of "Chinese Muslim Diaspora Communities and the Role of International Islamic Education Networks: A Case Study of Dubai" in Chinese Religions Going Global (2021). He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Notre Dame, IN, USA in 2014