The Saudi & GCC Security Project will be hosting a seminar with Nawaf Obaid and Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly on "The Political Future of the Muslim Brotherhood." Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Director of Intelligence and Defense Projects, will moderate.
Nawaf Obaid is the Visiting Fellow for Intelligence & Defense Projects at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He is also a weekly columnist for the pan-Arab daily, Al Hayat Newspaper. He is currently the CEO of the Essam and Dalal Obaid Foundation (EDOF).
From 2004 to 2007, he was Special Advisor for Strategic Communications to Prince Turki Al Faisal, while Prince Turki was the Saudi Ambassador to the United Kingdom & Ireland, and then the United States. And from 2007 to 2011, he worked with the Saudi Royal Court, where he was seconded as a Special Advisor to the Saudi Information Minister. Most recently, he served as the Special Counselor to the Saudi Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 2011 to 2015.
Obaid was a Visiting Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs from 2012 to 2017. He has been a Research Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an Adjunct Fellow at Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), and a Senior Fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies. He has a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and has a Master in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School. He began his doctoral coursework at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Political Science Department and completed a Master & Doctorate in War Studies from the Department of War Studies at King's College, London University.
Said Aly is a senior fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He is also the Chairman of Al-Masry Al-Youm, a leading Arabic language daily newspaper in Egypt. In 2013-16, he was Chairman of the Board, CEO, and Director of the Regional Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo. Previously, Said Aly was also the President of the Al-Ahram Center for Political & Strategic Studies in Cairo and the Chairman of the Board and CEO of the Al-Ahram Newspaper and Publishing House. He was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., in 2004 and a Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University in 2003. He co-authored Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East (London: Palgrave, 2013).
