Dr H A Hellyer

A scholar and author focusing on politics, international studies, and religion, in the West and the Arab world, Dr H.A. Hellyer FRSA is a Senior Associate Fellow in International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London and a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Following the 2005 London bombings, he was appointed as Deputy Convenor of the UK Government’s Taskforce as an independent academic expert, and served as the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s first Economic and Social Research Council Fellow, as a non-partisan independent scholar. Dr Hellyer was also appointed Professorial Fellow in Islamic Studies at Cambridge Muslim College, UK, and adjunct Professor at the Centre for Advanced Studies on Islam, Science and Civilisation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 

In 2020, Dr Hellyer was elected as Fellow (FRSA) of the Royal Society of Arts in London. Founded in 1754, the Royal Society’s Patron is HM Queen Elizabeth II, and its President is HRH The Princess Royal Anne. Fellowships of the RSA are awarded to individuals whom the society’s judges to have made ‘outstanding achievements for social progress and development’, and have included the likes of Judi Dench, Nelson Mandela, Stephen Hawking, David Attenborough, Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. 

Dr Hellyer’s insights on current events in the West, the Arab world, and Muslim communities worldwide are regularly sought by the international media networks such as CNN and the BBC, with several hundred op-eds for publications like the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, the New York Times, the Guardian, Mada Masr, the Globe and Mail, the National, and Daily News Egypt.

Dr Hellyer was a nonresident Fellow at the Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in DC and Research Associate at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University. He 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 and think-tanks. He previously served as the first Arab world-based Senior Practice Consultant at the Gallup Organisation, where he analysed public opinion data in a variety of countries in the Arab world and the West.

A scholar and an analyst, Dr Hellyer has held scholarly attachments at noted institutions including the University of Warwick, where he was a Senior Research Fellow, the American University in Cairo, and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies of the University of Oxford, where he authored several books and monographs & has contributed more than 25 book chapters and journal articles to various presses. While his main disciplinary home is International Relations, particularly with regards to the study of politics, security and sociology, Dr Hellyer has also published widely in Religious Studies, especially in terms of Islamic intellectual thought, religion and modernity, and contemporary Islam. His main area focuses remain the West and the Arab world.

Recent books and 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, A Revolution Undone: Egypt’s Road Beyond Revolt for Oxford University Press and Hurst& Company, A Sublime Path: the Sufi Way of the Makkan Sages for Fons Vitae, and The Islamic Tradition and the Human Rights Discourse (editor) for the Atlantic Council.

Dr Hellyer’s degree in law was read at the University of Sheffield School of Law, with an advanced degree in international political economy at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Politics. He completed a multidisciplinary PhD at the University of Warwick as an Economic and Social Research Council scholar.

Dr Hisham A. Hellyer has once again been named as one of the 'The Muslim 500: the World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims' list in its latest 2023 edition. A ‘who’s who’ of Muslim communities worldwide, the list was launched by Georgetown University (USA) and the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre (RISSC) (Jordan), and has included Dr Hellyer in its ‘Scholars’ section for six years running. The collection includes 500 names worldwide in a variety of sections, including lists of scholars, politicians, religious affairs officials, business elites, and cultural figures.