Member of the Month - October 2008

Dalia Mogahed

Senior Analyst
Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies
[WIIS Member since September 2008]

Dalia Mogahed is a Senior Analyst and Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, a nonpartisan research center dedicated to providing data-driven analysis on the views of Muslim populations around the world. With John L. Esposito, Ph.D., she is coauthor of the book Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think. Her analysis has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy magazine, the Harvard International Review, the Middle East Policy journal, and many other academic and popular journals.

Mogahed leads the analysis of Gallup’s unprecedented survey representing the opinions of more than 1 billion Muslims worldwide, including Muslims in the West. She also directs the Muslim-West Facts Initiative (www.muslimwestfacts.com), through which Gallup, in collaboration with the Coexist Foundation, is disseminating the findings of the Gallup World Poll to key opinion leaders in the Muslim World and the West.

Mogahed travels the globe engaging diverse groups on what Muslims around the world really think. Her audiences have included the High-Level Group of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, the Community of West and Islam Dialogue (C-100) group of the World Economic Forum, the Brookings Institution’s U.S.-Islamic World Forum, British parliamentarians, American senators, and religious leaders from every faith. She has discussed Gallup findings with a wide range of opinion leaders, including Madeleine Albright, Deepak Chopra, Stephen R., Covey, Quincy Jones, and Jeffrey Sachs; Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman; evangelical leader Richard Land; bestselling author Karen Armstrong; U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel; Muslim activist and teacher Amr Khaled; and Sheikh Habib Ali al-Jifri, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, Her Majesty Queen Rania al Abdullah of Jordan, as well as two of the highest authorities of Sunni Islam, the Grand Muftis of Egypt and Bosnia, their Excellencies Dr. Ali Gomaa and Dr. Mustafa Ceric.

Mogahed is a member of Women in International Security, serves on the leadership group of the Project on U.S. Engagement with the Global Muslim Community, and is a member of the Crisis in the Middle East Task Force of the Brookings Institution.

Mogahed earned her Master’s degree in business administration with an emphasis in strategy from the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering. Upon graduation, Mogahed joined Procter & Gamble as a marketing products researcher.

Recent Project Highlight
I recently came out with my first book: “Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think” which I coauthored with John Esposito. I have been traveling extensively speaking about the findings, including a week long summit with 20 members of congress in Paris in August organized by the Aspen Congressional program. Our book is being translated into more than ten languages and we have launched translations in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Netherlands.

Advice:
Very early in your career, establish your ‘non-negotiables’, those things that are your timeless values, on which you are not willing to compromise. Think deeply about these and refine their meaning in your life continuously. Then make these your guide and don’t let the illusion of temporary advantage make you deviate. Be more concerned about being respected than liked. And let your measure of success be how well you stuck to these principles. Counterintutively, professional success is often the outcome of working for an even more challenging goal: doing what’s right.

Contact Information:
Dalia Mogahed
Senior Analyst
Executive Director, Gallup Center for Muslim Studies
dalia_mogahed@gallup.com
202.715.3206

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