Nina Shea's Work on Behalf of Muslims in the Area of Religious Freedom

Hudson Institute senior fellow and former USCIRF Commissioner Nina Shea has a long record of working with and on behalf of Muslims in the area of religious freedom.  Examples follow:

-          The late Abdurrahman Wahid authored the Foreword to the recent book Shea authored with Paul Marshall, Silenced: How Apostasy & Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (Oxford University Press, 2011). Wahid was President of Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, and  headed Nahdlatul Ulama, the world's largest Islamic organization.  Prof. Abdullah Saeed and the late Prof. Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd also contributed essays on religious freedom within Islam to Shea and Marshall's book. Silenced champions hundreds of Muslim cases.

-          On July 2, 2011, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA honoured Shea with the Community's inaugural 'Ahmadiyya Muslim Humanitarian Award.'

-          For the past six years, Rebiya Kadeer, spokeswoman for the Uighur community of China, and Zainab al Suwaij, director of the American Islamic Congress, have served on the advisory board of the Center for Religious Freedom, of which Shea is the founding director.

-          Over the past six years, Shea has authored several studies on Saudi Arabia's textbooks in conjunction with the Gulf Institute and its director Ali Al-Ahmed, who is a prominent Muslim journalist.

-          Shea successfully pressed Uscirf to take up Muslim cases and provide platforms to Muslim speakers, including proposing and securing a prominent keynote presentation by Iranian author Azar Nafisi at the Folger Shakespeare Library for Uscirf in September 2004.

-          Shea supported the granting of  USCIRF fellowships to Ali Al-Ahmed in 2010 and Sheikh Suby Mansour in 2009.

-          Over several years, Shea referred several Muslim candidates for Uscirf positions.

-          Shea supported and worked well with another Muslim on staff.  In their free time in Turkey, they chose to visit a mosque together.

-           Shea and former Commissioner Imam Talal Eid co-authored an article for the Huffington Post, January 26, 2010.

-          In her capacity as director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, Shea has organized and sponsored briefings that provided a platform  in Washington  for many Muslim speakers,  and she played a key role in bringing to Hudson Institute as a Visiting Fellow former Danish MP and        Muslim leader Naser Khader.

-          Under Shea's direction, the Center for Religious Freedom produced the book Radical Islam's Rules, half of whose chapter authors are Muslim scholars and writers (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

-          Over many years Shea has repeatedly testified in Congress on behalf of Uighur Muslims in China, Rohingya Muslims in Burma, Ahmadiyya Muslims in Pakistan and Shiite Muslims in Saudi Arabia.

-          The Hudson Institute, where Shea is employed as a senior fellow, along with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, were affirmatively described as  "mainstream conservative foundations that are not Islamophobic," in the 2011 study Fear, Inc., by the Center for American Progress (emphasis added).