The ‘Secular Islam Summit‘ begins tomorrow, and Gateway Pundit plans on live-blogging it. The Summit seems like it would be well worth the fee to go, but alas it would be one heck of a trip for me to get there in 12 hours.

Speakers include:

1. Irshad Manji - Irshad Manji is the internationally best-selling author of The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. She is circumventing censors by posting free translations on her website: www.muslim-refusenik.com. A senior fellow with the European Foundation for Democracy, Irshad writes columns that are distributed worldwide by the New York Times Syndicate. She is also producing a PBS documentary about Islamic reform, to be aired in 2007. Above all, Irshad is president of Project Ijtihad, which aims to reconcile Islam with freedom of thought.
2. Dr. Walid Phares is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington (2001-2006) and a Visiting Fellow with the European Foundation for Democracies in Brussels (2006). He has been a Professor of Middle East Studies, Ethnic and Religious Conflict at Florida Atlantic University from 1993 to 2006. He has published several books and articles including in the Middle East Quarterly, Global Affairs, Journal of Middle East and South Asian Studies and other specialized journals. He has been interviewed by national networks including MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, CNBC, NBC, PBS, Discovery Channel, C-Span, BBC, Sky News, CTV, CBC, Globat TV, al Jazeera, al Hurra, Abu Dhabi TV, al Arabiya as well as local ABC, CBS, PBS, NBC and others. He appears on European, Arab, South Asian and Latin American outlets and is a frequent contributor to US and international radio programs.
3. Wafa Sultan - a Syrian-American psychiatrist whose essays on Middle East issues are widely circulated in Arabic. On February 21, 2006, she appeared on Al Jazeera’s weekly discussion program “The Opposite Direction” to debate Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli. The New York Times estimated that the video of her appearance has been viewed at least one million times. In 2006 she was included in Time Magazine’s list of 100 influential people in the world “whose power, talent, or moral example is transforming the world.”
4. Amir Taheri - Amir Taheri was born in Iran and educated in Tehran, London and Paris. He has been a columnist for the pan-Arab daily Asharq Alawsat and its sister daily Arab News since 1987 and a contributor to the International Herald Tribune since 1980. Between 1972 and 1979 he was executive editor-in-chief of Kayhan, Iran’s main daily newspaper. He later served as editor-in-chief of Jeune Afrique, the French weekly specialising in Africa, as well as Middle East editor for the London Sunday Times. Taheri has written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and The Washington Post, Die Welt, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, La Repubblica, L’Express, Politique Internationale, Le Nouvel Observateur, El Mundo, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and the Daily Mail, among others. Taheri is a commentator for CNN and is frequently interviewed by other media including the BBC and the RFI. He has written several TV documentaries dealing with various issues of the Muslim world. Taheri has published nine books some of which have been translated into 20 languages.

There are others, but I didn’t recognize their names. Phares is a personal favorite of mine as I am enthralled by most of what he writes, and Sultan is famous for her words on Al Jazeera at the height of the Danish cartoon protests that was broadcast out on the Internet several times over.

I will definitely be checking in with Jim tomorrow to see what’s going on at the Summit, and I’ll check to see if any of it is covered on CSPAN or a similar network. Glenn Beck of CNN is going to do some reporting on it.