Dr. Annemarie Schimmel (7 April 1922 – 26 January 2003) was an influential German Orientalist and scholar who wrote extensively on Islam and Sufism. Internationally renowned, she was a professor at Harvard University from 1967 to 1992. She was multilingual—besides German, English, and Turkish, she spoke Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi—and her interests ranged across the Muslim landscape.

Shaykh Arif Abdul Hussain (born 29 February 1964) is an Islamic scholar and the founder of the Al-Mahdi Institute in Birmingham. After completing his initial training in the Islamic sciences from the Madrasa Imam al-Khoei in London, Shaykh Arif pursued advanced Islamic studies at the religious seminary in Iran where he attended the classes of leading scholars from Najaf and Qom. Upon returning to the United Kingdom in the mid-1990s, Shaykh Arif continued his study of the Islamic legal and philosophical sciences under the tutelage of Ayatollah Ḥusayn al-Amīnī.