As senior vice-president of MENA for Junior Achievement Worldwide, Soraya Salti has the mandate to mobilize private sectors and ministries of education across the Arab World to join forces to create a new generation of business-oriented youth and entrepreneurs.     
 
Salti took over a floundering educational non-governmental organization program in Jordan — INJAZ — in 2001 and turned it into a national entity that now reaches 68,000 students a year, with the help of 1,500 volunteer teachers from the private sector and 80 corporations.

Raising her sights to the regional level in 2004, she has since led the expansion of INJAZ into 12 Arab countries and brought INJAZ to more than 300,000 Arab youth.

Linda Rottenberg is CEO and Co-founder of Endeavor (non-profit), a non-profit that identifies and supports High-Impact Entrepreneurs in emerging markets.

Since 1997, Linda has pioneered a new model for development that engages the private sector in mentoring and advising promising yet undiscovered entrepreneurs in Latin America, Egypt, India, Jordan, Turkey, and South Africa.

After screening and selecting 448 emerging-market entrepreneurs to date, Endeavor has helped them generate 100,000 jobs and, in 2008, $3 billion.

Endeavor’s model also promotes High-Impact Entrepreneurs as role models in their countries, inspiring the next generation of innovators in countries lacking a culture of entrepreneurship.

Maria Robinson earned her BA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and  has done graduate work at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

She was the fall 2008  writer-in-residence at the Robert M. MacNamara Foundation in Westport, Maine,  and was recently awarded a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center for  spring 2011.

Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Bellevue  Literary Review, the cream city review, Spork, and  Pindeldyboz among others.  She currently lives in Princeton, New  Jersey.

Maureen Bridgid Dowd (born January 14, 1952) is a Washington D.C.-based columnist for The New York Times and best-selling author. During the 1970s and the early 1980s, she worked for Time magazine and the Washington Star, where she covered news as well as sports and wrote feature articles.

Dowd joined the Times in 1983 as a metropolitan reporter and eventually became an Op-Ed writer for the newspaper in 1995. In 1999, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Clinton administration.

Dowd was born the youngest of five children in Washington, D.C. Her father, Mike, worked as a D.C. police inspector while her mother, Peggy, was a homemaker. In 1973, Dowd received a B.A. in English from Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

Susan notes: This article was pieced together from two pieces originally published by National Public Radio and BBC (see links below) in 2008 and 2009. See more stunningly beautiful photographs of the mosque here.

The role of women in Islam is an issue that's been furiously debated, especially in Turkey — an overwhelmingly Muslim country with a strict secular constitution.

The governing pro-Islamic political party was almost banned this year after it tried to allow women who wear Islamic head scarves to study at universities.

In the midst of this controversy, several Muslim women who do not wear head scarves have quietly reached a new milestone — these artists are helping build a mosque.

For centuries, Istanbul was the seat of the caliphate, the capital of the Islamic world and home to hundreds of magnificent old mosques. Now this city of countless domes and minarets is about to get a unique new addition.