Board of Advisors
-
Lord Hylton
-
Lord Sheikh
Lord Sheikh is Chairman of the Conservative Muslim Forum and also the Chairman of the Conservative Ethnic Diversity Council. He became a life peer in 2006. He was raised in a multi faith and multi cultural society and is able to speak six languages, including several African and Asian.
Lord Sheikh is Chairman of Camberford Law plc which has offices in Bromley as well as in The Royal Exchange in the City of London and writes insurance business nationwide.
Lord Sheikh has been the President of the Insurance Institute of Croydon and a member of the National Council of the Chartered Insurance Institute. He was Regional Chairman of the British Insurance Brokers Association on two separate occasions and was a Director of the main board of the Association for four years. He has also held senior positions in other financial and insurance organisations.
For a period of 12 years Lord Sheikh was a visiting lecturer at various colleges and polytechnics and in addition to lecturing he has also written educational material. He belongs to three Livery companies and is in fact a Freeman of the City of London.
He has founded and funds a registered charity, the charity amongst other things recognizes and rewards the attainment of young people who are the rising stars and hopefully will be the future leaders. Lord Sheikh is married to Shaida and receives considerable support from her in his social and political work.
-
Judge Marilyn Mornington
Marilyn Mornington is District Judge as well as a lecturer and writer on Family Law and in particular, domestic violence and elder abuse. Both nationally and internationally, she has worked on multiple publications in these areas.
She has been involved in various advisory and consultative capacities with the BBC, the Foreign Office, the Pakistani Government and Police force, the British Council and the Home Office, among many others.
In the last year alone she has contributed to an NSPCC report on abuse in UK Asian Communities, acted as patron to Karma Nirvana, an Asian men and women's project, contributed to a Home Affairs Select Committee on Domestic Violence and Forced Marriage and worked on an International Foreign Office exhibition and publication on the subject of integration. She also lectured on International Law and Human Rights at LSE, the Commonwealth Institute, Sheffield University and Punjab Law School in 2007 and 2008.
In 2005, Marilyn received the ‘Friends of Islam’ All Party UK Parliamentary Group Award for furthering relations between Islam and the West
-
Prof. Revd Simon Robinson
Professor of Applied and Professional Ethics, Leeds Metropolitan University, Associate Director, Ethics Centre of Excellence, and Visiting Fellow in Theology, University of Leeds.
Educated at Oxford and Edinburgh universities, Professor Robinson entered psychiatric social work before ordination in the Church of England in 1978. He served in university chaplaincy at Heriot-Watt and Leeds universities, developing research in areas of applied ethics and practical theology.
Ongoing research interests: religious ethics and care; interfaith pastoral care; professional ethics; ethics in higher education; spirituality and professional practice; corporate social responsibility; and ethics in global perspective. Among his publications: Moral Meaning and Pastoral Counselling; (ed. with Chris Megone) Case Histories in Business Ethics; Living Wills; (with Kevin Kendrick and Alan Brown) Spirituality and Healthcare; Ministry Amongst Students; (ed. with Clement Katulushi) Values in Higher Education; (with Ross Dixon, Chris Preece and Kris Moodley) Engineering, Business and Professional Ethics.
-
Prof. Paul Weller
Professor of Inter-Religious Relations at the University of Derby and Head of Research and Commercial Development in its Faculty of Education, Health and Sciences; Visiting Fellow in the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford; and Vice Chair of the Multi-Faith Centre at the University of Derby.
Current interests: issues in the relationships between religion, state and society. Recent publications: Time for Change: Reconfiguring Religion, State and Society (London: T. & T. Clark, 2005) and ‘Fethullah Gülen, Religions, Globalisation and Dialogue’, in R. Hunt and Y. Aslandoğan (eds.), Muslim Citizens of the Globalized World: Contributions of the Gülen Movement (Somerset, NJ: The Light Inc. and IID Press, 2006). He is editor of Religions in the UK: Directory, 2007-2010 (Derby: University of Derby and Multi-Faith Centre at the University of Derby, 2007).
-
Prof. Max Farrar
Prof Max Farrar, a cultural sociologist, is the head of community partnerships and volunteering and professor for community engagement at Leeds Metropolitan University. An adviser to several boards and organisations on the issue of race, Professor Farrar has previously lectured in sociology and written research papers on the subject. He is the author of a book about Chapeltown in Leeds, The Struggle for ‘Community’ in a British Multi-Ethnic Inner-City Area ( Edwin Mellen Press, 2002 ). He is also co-author of Teaching Race in the Social Sciences. He has worked in adult and community education, at a community Law Centre, for a ‘race’ think-tank and as a freelance writer and photographer. His life-long interest, both as a scholar and as an activist, is in the movements for social justice emanating from the multi-cultural inner cities of the UK. His current research focuses on the rise of Islamism.
-
Fiyaz Mughal OBE
With over 15 years experience in the community and voluntary sector, Fiyaz has worked in a number of organizations. Currently, Fiyaz Mughal is the Director of a not for profit organization called Faith Matters (www.faith-matters.org.uk) which works on reducing extremism and developing platforms for discourse and interaction between Muslim, Sikh and Jewish communities across the UK.
Fiyaz is also a Councillor in Haringey. A previous Deputy President of a mainstream political party in the UK, he campaigned heavily on Black and Minority Ethnic (group) inclusion within political parties and discourses. He was appointed to be on the Working Group for Communities that was linked to the Extremism Task Force developed in 2005 after the 7/7 bombings. In early 2008, Fiyaz became an elected member of IDeA Peer Mentor for national work with local authorities on the Preventing Violent Extremism agenda.
Fiyaz has recently been appointed by the Secretary of State for the Department for Communities and Local Government to be a member of the Local Delivery Advisory Group on Preventing Violent Extremism. More recently, he has been appointed as the Advisor to the Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg MP, on interfaith and preventing radicalism and extremism.
-
Bill Park
Bill Park: Senior Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department, War Studies Group, of King’s College, London University, based at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham. Formerly, Principal Lecturer at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich; 1981–1991 Visiting Lecturer in International Relations at City University, London; 1975–1978, Lecturer in International Politics, Liverpool Polytechnic. Author of Defending the West: A History of NATO (Brighton : Wheatsheaf, 1986) he has written a number of journal articles and book chapters on NATO, European security, and Turkey, including an Adelphi Paper (no. 374) entitled ‘Turkey’s policy towards northern Iraq; problems and prospects’, (London: IISS, May 2005). He is an occasional contributor to The World Today and Jane’s Intelligence Review, and to TV and radio as a Turkey expert. Currently writing a book (for Routledge) on ‘Turkey and Globalization’.
-
Dr Michael Barnes
Dr Michael Barnes has been Senior Tutor at Heythrop, a member of the Academic Board and a Governor of the College where he lectures in the theology of religions and religious studies. He taught Buddhism at the Pontifical Gregorian University for some years and has also been Director of Westminster Interfaith, a diocesan agency of the Diocese of Westminster dedicated to developing good relations between communities of faith in the London area.
He has been a consultant to the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue in Rome. He is a member of the Roman Catholic Committee for Other Faiths and is a theological consultant to the ecumenical Churches Commission on Inter-faith Relations. From 1996 to 2001 he was General Editor of The Way journals.
His main academic interests include the relationship between Christianity and other religions, Indian philosophy and religion, inter-faith spirituality, and philosophical and hermeneutical issues in the history and theology of religions.
-
Dr Mumtaz Khan
One of the pioneering counselling psychologists in the UK, he has served as assistant editor of 'Counselling Psychology Review' and held memberships of a number of BPS boards/committees over the last twenty years. These currently include the Professional Practice Board, Standing Committee for Psychologists in Health & Social Care, Standing Committee for Promotion of Equal Opportunities, The Psychologist Policy Committee and Psychology Education Board. Mumtaz has also been serving on the BPS Registration Committee for Psychologists Specialising as Psychotherapists since 2002.
Mumtaz teaches at Leeds Metropolitan University in the areas of personality and individual differences, abnormal psychology, clinical and counselling psychology and critical and philosophical issues in psychology. His research interests are individual differences; race, ethnicity, identity and culture; work stress; cognitive behavioural psychotherapy; hypnosis and neuro-linguistic-programming; issues of diagnosis in mental health. Mumtaz’s doctoral research focused on ethnicity, culture and communication in applied psychology education. Additionally he is also contributing to the University's links with Islam and Muslim issues in the West.
Currently, Mumtaz is the Faculty of Health's Diversity Champion and is a member of the Equality and Diversity Group.
-
Dr Steve Wright
Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Global Ethics and an Associate Director of the Praxis Centre, Leeds Metropolitan University. For almost thirty years, Dr Wright has lectured extensively across five continents on the social implications of new internal security tactics and technologies.
His most recent work covers new border control technologies and the climate change crisis. Concerned that the US ‘War on Terror’ may be masking new and unsustainable global security agendas, his ambition is to evolve human security programmes based on mutual respect which put the well-being of people first. His PhD thesis is entitled ‘New Police Technologies and Sub-State Conflict Control’, Lancaster University.
-
Revd John Carter MA
John Carter is a press officer for the Church of England, and for the past eleven years has been Director of Press and Communications for the Diocese of Ripon and Leeds. He has lectured on issues of faith and media at Durham University, the Gregorian University, Rome, St John's College Nottingham, Leeds Trinity and Mirfield Colleges – and continues to advise churches and faith groups including the Dialogue Society. His career began in BBC radio where he became a journalist, producer and presenter of regional news and current affairs programmes, reporting on events such as the Toxteth Riots and the Miners’ Strikes during the 1980’s. He later trained for ordained ministry in the Church of England, and subsequently gained an MA with research into faith and media issues. John continued to broadcast while serving as a parish priest for ten years, before taking up his present role. In May 2008 he joined with the Dialogue Society to organise a visit to Turkey by a group of journalists from the BBC, Guardian, Channel 4, together with Roman Catholic and Sikh newspapers. He has lectured at the Dialogue Society on the subject of faith and media.
Lord Hylton was educated at Eton College, and Oxford University. He has been an active member of the House of Lords since 1971, an independent member since 1982 and an elected member since 1999. He has a particular interest in Russia/CIS, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East.
In the past he has been Chairman of the following organisations; National Federation of Housing Associations; Catholic Housing Aid Society; Housing Associations Charitable Trust; Help the Aged Housing Trust.
He founded the Kilmersdon Rural Housing Association; helped start the Ammerdown Centre (A Christian college promoting inter-faith dialogue) and Kilmersdon Grain Cooperative.
Presently active with Forward Thinking (an organisation aiming to bridge the gaps between Muslims and the rest of the UK community); Partners in Hope (an organization to help street children and young people in Russia); and Chairman of MICOM (working towards conflict resolution in several countries).