Asma Barlas is a Pakistani-American writer and academic and author of Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (Saqi Books, February 2019). She was one of the first women to be inducted into the foreign service in 1976. Six years later, she was dismissed on the orders of General Zia ul Haq. She worked briefly as assistant editor of the opposition newspaper The Muslim before receiving political asylum in the United States in 1983. She was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity at Ithaca College, the Spinoza Chair in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and she is currently a professor of politics at Ithaca College.