Barbara Daly Metcalf (born September 13, 1941) is a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Davis.
Metcalf was called on to write to the Administrative Review Boards held at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camps.
[2] The Boards were authorized to recommend whether Guantanamo captives should continue to be held in extrajudicial detention.
One of the justifications offered for the continued detention of over three dozen of the Guantanamo captives was that they had participated in the activities of a Pakistani chapter of the Islamic missionary group named Tablighi Jamaat.
She wrote: “I will also attempt to explain why it is implausible to believe that the Tablighis support terrorism or are in any way affiliated with other terrorist or ‘jihadi’ movements such as the Taliban or Al Qaeda.”[3] She is married to Thomas R. Metcalf, also a retired historian of South Asia, and collaborated with him on a textbook history of India.