Asra Nomani

Asra Nomani got a firsthand glimpse of Islamic extremism when her dear friend and former Wall Street Journal colleague Daniel Pearl was murdered in Pakistan. When she returned home to West Virginia to raise her son, she discovered warning signs of extremism at the local mosque: exclusion of women, intolerance toward non-believers and suspicion of the West.

Her resulting campaign against extremism in the Islamic Center of Morgantown brought a storm of media attention, unexpectedly pitting her against the mosque's moderates.

Based on her gripping documentary, The Mosque in Morgantown, Nomani frames this local conflict as a means to explore the larger dilemmas facing American Islam.

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Nomani was a friend and colleague of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. In fact, he and his wife were visiting her home in Karachi, Pakistan, when he went off for the interview from which he was kidnapped in 2002. Nomani played a key role in the investigation to try to find Pearl before it was learned that he had been brutally murdered. Six years later, Nomani is a professor in the practice of journalism at Georgetown University, leading the Pearl Project, a faculty-student investigating reporting project that is seeking answers to the questions of who really killed Pearl and why they killed him. The project's reporting has taken Nomani and her class figuratively onto the streets of Karachi and into the trenches of America's "war on terror." The Pearl case serves as a window into important issues related to terrorism, national security, foreign policy and the challenges Pakistan faces in creating a civil society defined by rule of law.