Tarif Khalidi has been the Shaykh Zayid Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the American University of Beirut since 2002. He was the Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic at Cambridge between 1996-2002 and is the author of Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (1994), The Muslim Jesus (2001), The Qur'an: A new translation (2008) and Images of Muhammad: Narratives of the Prophet in Islam Across the Centuries (2009).