Abdullah Al-Arian is an associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar. He is the author of Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat's Egypt (Oxford University Press) and editor of Football in the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game (Hurst/Oxford University Press). He is the editor of “Critical Currents in Islam” for the e-journal Jadaliyya. He was previously the Carnegie Centennial Visiting Fellow at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. His writings have appeared in Foreign Policy, Middle East Eye, MERIP, Muftah, and Al-Jazeera. He received his PhD in history from Georgetown University, an MA in sociology of religion from the London School of Economics, and a BA in political science from Duke University.