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President:iStepheniO’Brien CBE
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Muddassar is also co-founder and Chairman of the Concordia Forum, an annual leaders retreat based in Italy.
He is also founder and Chairman of the John Adams Society, the official alumni association for US Embassy exchange programs participants in England & Wales. Society members include various leaders from the corporate, media, political and community organisations. He also serves as an elected director on ENAM, a European network of American Alumni associations.
He also founded and currently chairs the Hikmah Club, an exclusive network of thought leaders and professionals from the political, media and the corporate worlds, the Hikmah club sponsors include State Street Bank, PWC, Clifford Chance, HSBC, Credit Suisse, KPMG, Barclays Wealth and Ernst & Young. He is also a Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts.
Muddassar is also a founding board member of CEDAR, a pan-European network of Muslim professionals, where he also chairs the Media committee. He is also Trustee/Director of The Adab Trust, Utopia 33 Films and The Newham Public Affairs Committee. Previously, Muddassar worked as a TV producer and presenter, having worked for the BBC, Channel 4 and Islam Channel Productions. Muddassar has also worked as corporate liaison manager for UK celebrity hypnotist Paul McKenna, where he managed a team of 10 individuals working to secure corporate support for Paul’s work.
Muddassar has also served as spokesperson/campaigns officer for the Alliance of Mosques in East London, his work was instrumental in coordinating local government policy across 50 mosques in the East London area.
Muddassar was also co-founder and presenter on the popular East London Radio Station ‘Radio Ummah’, a Muslim radio station that used to broadcast in East London during the month of Ramadan. Muddassar presented a twice weekly current affairs slot and also served as head of advertising for the station. He was also steering group member of Mosaic: the Muslim-led network founded by His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, The Interfaith Alliance in Newham and the founding General Secretary of MLM UK.
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Chief Operating Officer: Shiraz Ahmad
An MBA graduate of Harvard University’s business school and, earlier, Cornell, Professor Connolly was for many years an Executive Director and Head at UBS for Private Banking Research and a Managing Director for Global Finance Research at Citibank where he first formatted plans for developing Islamic Finance product offerings in New York, Zurich and London. He has been instrumental is setting up Islamic banking subsidiaries, working with Shariah scholars to understand capital markets and treasury products, and developing a context for rating sukuk and other Islamic obligations. He has published prolific articles about finance.
Chief Media Officer: Zahed Amanullah
Zahed is Chief Media Officer for Unitas Communications and also serves as Managing Director of Unitas Media. Zahed has over 10 years of experience in strategic planning, data acquisition and management, quality control, and customer relationship management within the unique sector of online services to Muslim communities. Zahed is formerly Managing Director of Halalfire Media, a media and consulting company based in the United States and Britain. As part of Halalfire, he has also served as Executive and Associate Editor of altmuslim.com since 2002, managing the content of an award-winning online newsmagazine geared toward Muslims in the West. His writings and analysis have been featured in a wide variety of media outlets, including BBC TV and radio, the Guardian (UK), CNN International, Press TV and many others.
He is a founding member of AMILA (www.amila.org), a San Francisco Bay Area-based Muslim community organization, and a founding board member of CEDAR (www.thecedarnetwork.com), a pan-European organization of Muslim professionals. Zahed has also served as an advisor to a variety of organisations including Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the US State Department, Britain’s Home Office, the World Halal Forum, and the Radical Middle Way on matters dealing with extremism, integration, technology, commerce, and media. Born and raised in Southern California, he is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. He currently lives in London, England with his wife and two children.
Chief Strategy Officer: Saad Awan
Mr. Saad Awan is Chief Strategy Officer for Unitas Communications. He is also Associate Director of HRH’s Pakistan Recovery Fund. In 2007, he joined Islamic Relief where he managed a national volunteers programme, receiving recognition in 2008 by HRH The Prince of Wales at the Mosaic Talent Awards. He also supervised a delegation of high-profile Islamic Relief supporters on a visit to Mandera, Kenya and led the Water for Life campaign, which raised over £500,000 to fund water and sanitation systems in 14 villages in Kenya. He later joined Mosaic as National Campaigns Manager, overseeing Mosaic’s mentoring initiatives across the UK. In 2010, he founded the White Table Dinner, a unique platform engaging a network of professional and corporate volunteers which has raised over £350,000 for various charitable projects.
Alnoor is a former MORI Partner and Director at Ipsos MORI. He joined MORI in 1997 and has more than 20 years’ experience in marketing research, much of it for service sector clients. He has worked in both research agency and in broader consultancy environments, where he has advised non-researchers on the possibilities of market research. Alnoor specialises in researching stakeholder engagement issues and is a regular speaker at industry events. He holds a BSc. (Hons) in Applied Economics and is a Full Member of The Market Research Society.
Reputation Management Consultant: Arif Zaman
Arif is an advisor to the Commonwealth Business Council on Corporate Governance and South Asia and on the Council of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS). He is also a Visiting Tutor in Reputation and Board Effectiveness at Henley Business School and author of Reputational Risk (Financial Times Executive Briefing 2004). He is on the Board of the UK-based Strategic Planning Society and the Editorial Board of the US-based Journal of Business Strategy. He also serves on the Advisory Panel of the Dinar Standard. Arif was Global Market and Industry Analyst at British Airways (1996-2005) where he won several company and industry awards including forihisicontributionitoiBA’siBusinessiPrinciplesiandisustainabilityiPolicy. In 2002-03, during his sabbatical from British Airways he was an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. In 2003-04 and in the wake of significant thawing in Pakistani-India relations, he led negotiations for the Commonwealth with SAARC which established the first collaborative programme between both organisations.
Blake is an MBA graduate in International Business from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausees in Paris and a graduate of the Institute of Business Management at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. He previously worked as a freelance agent for professional North American and European basketball players and has been a property developer and investor across 12 Countries.
Qatar Associate: Jenny Elliot
Senior Associate: Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Nafeez is an international security analyst and bestselling author. He is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London, a transdisciplinary research network for equality, sustainability and security. He has also taught at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, and lectured at Brunel University’s Politics & History Unit.
He is the author of five books on international security and foreign policy issues. In 2003, he was a finalist for the Naples Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award, and in 2010 he won the annual international Routledge-GCP&S Essay Prize. His research has also been used by the 9/11 Commission; the US Army Air University’s ‘Causes of War’ collection (2007); the UK Ministry of Defence’s Joint Services Command & Staff College Research Guide on Counter-Terrorism and the GWOT (2008); and Chatham House’s Middle East Programme.
Additionally, Ahmed has consulted on strategy, fundraising, community cohesion and conflict resolution for projects funded the UK Department for Communities & Local Government, US Department of State, British Council, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, UK Defence Academy, Metropolitan Police Service, among many others.
Associate: Catarina Tully
Cat Tully is an independent consultant working on foreign and development policy issues. Cat was formerly Strategy Project Director at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Here she led strategy projects examining cross-cutting, priority and upstream foreign policy issues, and helped build strategic capability, working directly with the Foreign Secretary David Miliband, UK members of Government, European and US leaders, and a broad network of international policy thinkers. She has also previously worked in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, developing domestic policy and strategic capability, including a strategic audit of the UK. Cat has also worked for the UN Deputy Secretary General’s office on the UN reform process, Global Compact, UN Development Programme, and with the World Bank in Geneva.
She has a business and finance strategy qualification (CIMA) and spent six years lending her expertise to improving processes and advising leadership teams in charities including Christian Aid and private sector businesses, particularly Procter and Gamble. She advises the UK and US governments and is a Visiting Speaker for the UK’s National School of Government.
Associate: Abdullah Trevathan
Abdullah is currently a senior lecturer at Roehampton University. He was previously Headteacher at the Islamia Primary School for nine years, the first state funded Muslim school in London. He has also worked extensively in the field of teacher training and has a PhD based on exploring the implications of an existentialist Muslim theology. He has also studied in both Morocco and the UK under various Muslim scholars within the Maliki school of jurisprudence as well as other areas of the classical Islamic canon.