About the Author

Geneive Abdo is a Fellow in Stimson's Middle East program as well as a Non-resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She currently chairs the Religion, Identity, and Countering Violent Extremism working group of the Atlantic Council's Task Force on U.S. Strategy in the Middle East.She specializes in issues regarding modern Iran and political Islam. Abdo directed the U.S.-Iran Advisory Group, a program on Iran, in conjunction with Heinrich Boell Stiftung, North America. She is the author of the monograph "Salafists and Sectarianism: Twitter and Communal Conflict in the Middle East," published in March 2015 by the Center for Middle East Policy, the Brookings Institution. She is also the author of "The New Sectarianism: The Arab Uprisings and the Rebirth of the Shi'a- Sunni Divide," published in April 2013 by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. She has published three books and is working on a fourth about Shi'a-Sunni relations, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Jonathan Lyons is an independent scholar and author, focusing on problems of intellectual history, epistemology, and the sociology of knowledge. He is the author of four books, including The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization, which has been translated into 12 languages, and Islam through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism. He has a PhD in sociology from Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, and a BA with honors in Russian and History from Wesleyan University. He is currently working on a revisionist history of the Islamic world.