Dr H.A. Hellyer researches the interchange between politics, international studies and religion, within and beyond the academic ivory tower, in the West and the Arab world. A senior associate fellow and scholar at the Royal United Services Institute in London and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC, he publishes on populism, different forms of extremism, and religion in modernity. Dr Hellyer is currently on the steering committee for a multi-year EU-funded project on “Radicalisation, Secularism and the Governance of Religion”, which brings together European, North African, and Asian perspectives with a consortium of 12 universities & think-tanks. As a Briton of generations of heritage and upbringing in the West and several Arab countries, he works between London, DC and the wider Arab world.

Following the 2005 London bombings, he was appointed as, as a non-partisan academic, Deputy Convenor of the UK Government’s Taskforce on tackling radicalisation, and served as the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s first Economic and Social Research Council Fellow as part of the ‘Islam’ & ‘Counter-Terrorism’ teams, as an independent subject matter expert. Previously a Fellow at the Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, and Research Associate at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University, Dr Hellyer’s analysis has been published in various international outlets including CNN, the BBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Mada Masr and the Guardian. Dr Hellyer has held academic attachments at noted institutions including the University of Warwick, where he was a Senior Research Fellow, and the American University in Cairo, as a visiting professor of law.

He has authored several books and monographs & has contributed more than 25 book chapters and journal articles to various presses. While his main academic home is politics and international studies, Dr Hellyer has published widely in religion & modernity, and contemporary Islam. As the first Arab world-based Senior Practice Consultant at Gallup, he analysed public opinion data throughout the Arab world and the West. Recent books & monographs include “Muslims of Europe: the ‘Other’ Europeans” for Edinburgh University Press, “Engagement with the Muslim Community & Counter-Terrorism: British Lessons for the West” for Brookings Institution Press and “A Revolution Undone: Egypt’s Road Beyond Revolt” for Oxford University Press & Hurst. His latest co-authored works includes “A Sublime Path” (an examination of the Sufi order of the Meccan sage, Sayyid Muhammad bin ‘Alawi al-Maliki) and “The Islamic Tradition and the Human Rights Discourse”. These books received various reviews in the Financial Times, the Economist, and elsewhere.

Dr Hellyer’s degree in law from the University of Sheffield’s School of Law was followed by an advanced degree in international political economy at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Politics. At the age of 25, he completed a multidisciplinary PhD at the University of Warwick, and then continued to research Islamic thought in the UK, Egypt, Malaysia and South Africa. Regularly included in the scholarly section of the annual global ‘Muslim 500’ list of Georgetown University (USA) and RISCC (Jordan), Dr Hellyer’s research interests include Islamic law, theology and spirituality, which he studied in the UK, Egypt, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa and elsewhere. He received instruction from the likes of the Malaysian polymath, Professor Sayyid M. Naquib al-Attas, and the South African successor of the aforementioned Makkan scholar, Sayyid Muhammad b. Alawi al-Maliki, Shaykh Seraj Hasan Hendricks, who appointed Dr Hellyer as Senior Scholar of the Zawiya Institute. Dr Hellyer was also appointed Professorial Fellow at Cambridge Muslim College and adjunct full Professor at the University of Technology’s Centre for Advanced Studies on Islam, Science and Civilisation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.