Speaker Biographies

Sadanand Dhume is a Bernard Schwartz fellow at the Asia Society. He covered Indonesian economics, politics, and society as a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Wall Street Journal Asia. Mr. Dhume has also written for YaleGlobal Online, Foreign Policy, and the Harvard International Review, among other publications. He has worked as a journalist in India and Chile and as an associate Internet producer for MSNBC. Mr. Dhume is based at the Asia Society’s Washington, D.C., center, where he writes mainly about political Islam and economic development in Asia. His book on the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia, My Friend the Fanatic, will be published in summer 2008.

Michael A. Ledeen, the Freedom Scholar at AEI, is an expert on U.S. foreign policy. His research areas include state sponsors of terrorism, Iran, the Middle East, Italy, intelligence, and Africa (Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe). A former consultant to the National Security Council and the U.S. State and Defense Departments, he has also written on leadership and the use of power. He most recently authored The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction (St. Martin’s Press, 2007) and The War against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened, Where We Are Now, How We’ll Win (St. Martin’s Press, 2002).

C. Holland Taylor is the chairman of the LibForAll (“Liberty for All”) Foundation, which he and former Indonesian president Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid established to promote tolerant strains of Islam worldwide. Mr. Taylor’s work with LibForAll follows a career as a global telecom executive, during which he served as CEO of USA Global Link. An expert on Islam and the processes of Islamization in Southeast Asia, he has lived, studied, and worked in the Muslim world for more than four decades.

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