Farouk Topan is Professor Emeritus at the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London. He has taught at the universities of Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Riyad and the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London. He is also a writer of Swahili fiction and has published several short stories and two of his plays have been part of the school curriculum in Tanzania.

Kai Kresse is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin, and Vice Director for Research at Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. He has conducted anthropological fieldwork on the Swahili coast, working on local thinkers (poets, scholars, activists), the transmission and negotiation of knowledge, and the production and interpretation of texts, with a focus largely on internal debates among coastal Muslims in post-colonial Kenya. He is the author of Philosophising in Mombasa(2007; shortlisted for the Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association) and Past Present Continuous: Swahili Muslim Publics and Post-colonial Experience (2018).

Erin Stiles is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, where she also chairs the programme in Religious Studies. Her research focuses on the intersections of religion, law and gender, and she conducts fieldwork in Zanzibar, where she has done extensive ethnographic research on Islamic family law and dispute resolution.

Hassan Mwakimako is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Pwani University, Kenya. His research focuses on the interface between colonial and postcolonial state policy and practice towards Islam, religion and politics and contemporary Islam. He has been Visiting Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, (ZMO) Berlin, Germany and African Studies Visiting Fellow at the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge.