Dr. Asma Afsaruddin "received her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1993 and is currently associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She previously taught at the Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities. Her fields of specialization are the religious and political thought of Islam, Qur'an and hadith studies, and Islamic intellectual history. Professor Afsaruddin is the author of Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002); the editor of Hermeneutics and Honor :Negotiation of Female "Public" Space in Islamic/ate Societies (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University, 1999); and co-editor of Humanism, Culture, and Language in the Near East: Studies in Honor of Georg Krotkoff (Winona