Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh was born in Kerman, Iran. Prior to his retirement he was professor and head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Tehran. He was written numerous books on psychiatry and written and published extensively on the subject of Sufism. Dr. Nurbakhsh, currently residing in London, is the Master of the Nimatullahi Order of Sufis, a position that he has held since he was twenty-six years of age.

Terry Graham is a writer and filmmaker. A graduate of Harvard University in History and Literature, he has done post-graduate work in Persian literature at Tehran University. He spent twelve years in Iran, working for Iranian television and English-language newspapers. He has written numerous articles on Sufism and translated the fifteen volumes of Sufi Symbolism by Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh from the original Persian into English.

Zailan Moris graduated with a Ph.D. in philosophy from The American University, Washington D.C., U.S.A. She is currently a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, University of Sains Malaysia, Malaysia.

Farhang Jahanpour is a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan in Iran. He also taught Persian for five years at the University of Cambridge and was a Senior Fullbright Research Scholar at Harvard University. For a number of years he was a news editor for the Middle East and North Africa at the BBC Monitoring Service in Reading, England. For the past few years he has been a part-time tutor at the Department for Continuing Education and a member of Kellogg College at the University of Oxford.

Sachiko Murata received a B. A. in family law from Chiba University in Japan and a Ph. D. in Persian literature from Tehran University. She then became the first woman and the first non-Muslim to enroll in the division of jurisprudence (feah) at Tehran University's Faculty of Theology, where she received an M. A. and was well on her way to a Ph. D. when the revolution broke out. She teaches Islam and Oriental religions at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Among her books are Temporary Marriage in Islamic Law and a Japanese translation of Maalem al-osul by Shaykh Hasan, a classic text on the principles of jurisprudence.