Dr. H.A. Hellyer

Professor of Islamic Thought, Politics, and International Affairs

Visiting Faculty, Bayan Islamic Graduate School

Bayan Email: hhellyer@bayanonline.org

Dr. H.A. Hellyer FRHistS FRUSI has more than 20 years of experience in think-tanks and academia, focusing on geopolitics, security studies, and belief, in the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia. He currently serves as Senior Associate Fellow in International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies; a globally top-rated security studies institute, it is the world’s oldest think-tank. Having held different senior research posts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, and the Gallup Organisation, governments in the US, Europe, MENA, and Southeast Asia have repeatedly called upon him for his expertise. He was elected as Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts, as well as being appointed to the RISSC-Georgetown University “Muslim 500” list from 2017 onwards. His insights on current events are regularly sought by international media networks such as CNN and the BBC, with op-eds for publications like the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, the New York Times, the Guardian, and Politico.

Dr Hellyer’s academic career has included posts at Cambridge University, Harvard University, the American University in Cairo, and Warwick University, and the UTM RZS Centre for Advanced Studies on Islam, Science and Civilisation, where he has taught and researched topics including:

Modern Arab politics, with a focus on Egyptian history
Contemporary Palestine/Israel studies
Western Muslim communities
Islam and modernity
Security studies
Sufism

His ten books include:

A Revolution Undone: Egypt’s Road beyond Revolt (Hurst/Oxford University)
Muslims of Europe: the ‘Other’ Europeans (Edinburgh University)
Rethinking Religion & Radicalisation: Terrorism and Violence Twenty Years after 9/11 (Bloomsbury)
Suppressing Dissent: Shrinking Civic Space, Transnational Repression and Palestine/Israel (One World/Simon & Schuster)
A Sublime Way: The Sufi Way of the Sages of Makka (Fons Vitae)
The Islamic Tradition and the Human Rights Discourse (Atlantic Council)
The Egyptian Revolution of 1919: Legacies & Consequences (Bloomsbury)

Dr Hellyer’s degree in law was read at the University of Sheffield’s School of Law, with an advanced degree in international political economy at the University’s Department of Politics, followed by a multidisciplinary PhD in the social sciences at Warwick University, as a UK Economic & Social Research Council scholar. He also researched the Islamic intellectual tradition in the Arab world, South Africa, and Southeast Asia, and was appointed as the first senior scholar of the renowned South African seminary, Azzawia Institute, and the first professorial fellow in Islamic Studies at Cambridge Muslim College.