Ed Husain is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) focused on U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East generally, and specifically at the intersection of Arab-Israeli relations after the Abraham Accords, the geopolitical interplay of Arab Gulf states, China-Muslim world dynamics, and Islamist terrorism. He is a professor at both the School of Foreign Service (SFS) at Georgetown University and the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University, where he teaches classes on global security, Arab-Israeli peace, and the shared intellectual roots of the West and Islam.
In his recent tenure as director of the N7 Initiative from 2023 to 2024 at the Atlantic Council, Dr. Husain led an international summit in Tel Aviv that convened a high-level gathering of Arab, Muslim, and Israeli government ministers, financiers, and global leaders.
Dr, Husain was a senior adviser to former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair from 2014 to 2017. Thereafter, he worked with several European and Middle Eastern governments on counterterrorism issues. Between 2010 and 2014, he was a senior fellow at CFR where his policy innovation memorandum led to the creation of a Geneva-based global fund to combat political violence.
Dr. Husain brings extensive experience from the Middle East, having lived for several years in Damascus, Syria, Jeddah, and Saudi Arabia, and travelled widely from Morocco to Oman. He speaks Arabic. His ancestors hail from the Hadhramaut region in modern-day Yemen, Arabia, and his parents arrived via Bengal to Great Britain in the 1950s.
Dr. Husain is author of several widely-acclaimed books, The Islamist (2007), House of Islam (2018), and Among the Mosques (2021). His writings have been published widely in the global press, including in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC, and others.
He has a bachelor’s degree (Hons.) in history and a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), at the University of London. His doctoral thesis, a history of ideas to synthesize Islam and the West, was supervised by the eminent English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton at the University of Buckingham.
