Aref Ali Nayed
He is also the secretary of the Network of Free Ulema – Libya.According to the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, Nayed is ranked 50th among the top 500 most influential Muslims in the world.
As the former Libyan government began lifting restrictions on religious teaching, he helped restore and reopen the famous Othman Pasha Madrasa in the Old Madina of Tripoli.
Nayed taught theology, logic, and spirituality there, until February 2011, when the political unrest in Tripoli escalated and the former regime's forces committed widespread violence, killings, and summary arrests of those supporting the Free Libyan movement.
In 1998, Nayed interrupted his academic career at the behest of his father and founded Agathon Systems Limited/Alada, an engineering and technology enterprise focused on building data centers, networking, and banking infrastructures across Libya.
Prior to the Libyan Revolution in 2011, Agathon represented 33 global technology companies in Libya, including IBM, CITRIX, NCR, Nortel, Microsoft, and APC.
Through Alada's projects, NAted trained over 200 young Libyan engineers and helped incubate over seven IT and communications businesses on behalf of former employees.
During the early days of the revolution, Nayed was instrumental in securing regional and international support and played a major role in convincing the United Arab Emirates to recognize the new Libyan government.
[10] Nayed brought together a selection of major international universities and training establishments to set up the Libyan Institute for Advanced Studies.
As a Muslim theologian educated in Maliki jurisprudence and classical Sufi doctrine, Nayed studied Christian theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and served as professor at the Pontifical Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies in Rome, and the International Institute for Islamic Thought and Civilization in Malaysia.
In 2006 when Pope Benedict XVI made controversial comments on Islam in Regensburg, Germany, Nayed was one of the 138 Muslim scholars who drafted a letter inviting Catholic-Muslim dialogue.
Nayed also took part in a conference of clerics who reinterpreted the 14th-century scholar Ibn Taymiyya's celebrated fatwa on jihad, arguing radical Islamists who use it to justify killing are misguided.
[11] Nayed is a senior advisor to the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, a Fellow of the Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Jordan, and was appointed to the board of advisers at the Templeton Foundation.
Nayed was among the first public figures to identify Islamists as the main destabilizing force in post-revolution Libya and as the primary enablers of the ISIL and other extremist groups.
Nayed has written and lectured extensively against extremist ideologies and cooperates with global initiatives to repudiate extremism and educate Muslims on Islam as a compassionate and tolerant religion.
