Rafaat Ludin, born in Afghanistan in 1963, is the son of an Afghan diplomat. He thus spent much of his childhood in Germany and received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt in 1993 before coming to the US, where he received an MBA from the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California Irvine in 2003. He has pursued a career in international business; his company, International Home Finance and Development, LLC, is currently working to develop parcel 1 of Phase 1 of Kabul New City, the largest development project in the history of Afghanistan, which will upon completion house some 70,000 people and provide over 3.5 million square meters of commercial space. He is also past President of the Colorado Muslim Society. Rafaat has no formal religious education but has always been interested in learning about his religion through books and scholarly papers. He has developed an in-depth understanding of the historical, political and cultural circumstances evolving in Islamic and world history. Windham Loopesko is a lecturer at University of Colorado Denver in globalization and international business, as well as teaching international law and business as a visiting professor at the University of Lyon (France), Politechnika Gdanska and the University of Economics in Katowice (both in Poland), and the Universidad San Pablo in Arequipa (Peru). He has had an international consulting practice assisting American and European businesses in setting up overseas operations. He has a law degree from Harvard (1975), an MBA from the University of Chicago and a Troisime Licence en Sciences Economiques Appliques from LUniversit Catholique de Louvain (Belgium, both in 1974), and an AB in government (Phi Beta Kappa) from Dartmouth College (1970).