Omer Salem is a Senior Fellow of the Foundation of Religious Diplomacy, New York City, and is the founder of the Ibn Rushd Institute for Peace based in Egypt and the USA, an interreligious research association. Salem promotes and encourages the use of Islamic moral values as the basis for conflict resolution. Salem has been invited to various places of worship and international conferences, where he has spoken before audiences that included members of the U.S. Senate in Washington, D.C. Salem is an honorary member of the Worldwide Association of al-Azhar Graduates.
He holds a Ph.D. from the Islamic studies department at GTF (dissertation supervised by Al Azhar University professors), a master’s degree from the Yale University Divinity School and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.
Salem is the author of three books. (1) The Missing Peace: The Role of Religion in the Arab- Israeli Conflict and (2) The Struggle for the Holy Land. (3) Seek the Peace of Jerusalem, published by Westbow Press.
Other backgrounds:
Salem, an American Muslim, was born in Egypt (1960), spent a career in engineering, and real estate development in California’s Silicon Valley, and is a frequent preacher among the New Haven, Connecticut Muslim community. In California, he assembled a group of representatives of various faith communities in the USA and the Middle East to consider options for peace in the Holy Land that are based on Biblical and Quranic moral values. The group produced a related white paper that has gained support from various religious and civil society organizations and Stanford University.
• Salem presented and discussed research papers on a proposed Islam-West dialogue at the al-Azhar University Graduates’ annual conferences. In 2009, 2012, and 2014, Salem travelled by car from Cairo to Jerusalem on fact-finding tours and to meet with Muslim and other religious leaders in the Levant.
• Salem has led several presentations and workshops about the religious undercurrent of the Middle East conflict through the International Organization for Peace (“IOP”), an ad hoc multi-religious research group in Palo Alto, California.
• Salem currently lives with his wife and five children in Windsor, Connecticut USA.
