Zaidiyyah

The Zaidiyyah are a group of Shia Islam named for the Prophet Muhammad's great-great-grandson Zaid.  While Zaid's brother Muhammad was designated to succeed their father as religious leader, Zaidis claim Zaid as the rightful successor because he actively resisted the corrupt rulers while his brother abstained from politics. While most Shia ascribe the Imam's religious and temporal power to certain descendants of Zaid's brother, the Zaidis look for any descendant of Ali who fights corruption.

Ahl-e Haqq

The Ahl-e Haqq, or people of truth, are adherents of a religion founded in 14th century Persia by Sultan Sahak, who is considered divine by his followers.  While some consider the sect to be Sufi or Shi'a in origin, but this is not precise, and modern practice has diverged significantly from that of Islam.  While most of the Ahl-e Haqq are Kurds, there are believers of other ethnicities, and the group does accept converts.

Druze

The Druze are a religious group that combines elements of Islam, Christianity, and other traditions, referring to themselves as Unitarians. Drawing inspiration from various traditions, they interpret such stories as Creation as metaphorical and eschew traditions and rituals such as fasting and prayers, preferring to abide by the moral statutes of the religion. The Druze do not accept converts, supposing that all living people are reincarnations of people who previously rejected the faith.

Alawi

The Alawi are a religious group that formed over a thousand years ago from a faction of Ismaili Shia Islam that was subsequently influenced by Sunni Islam, Christianity, and previous faiths.  While they consider themselves Muslims, many orthodox Muslims do not because their theology is Trinitarian, they believe in reincarnation, and they reject the Qur'an as their holy book, among other divergences; they are noted for their devotion to Ali above Muhammad.

Baha'i Faith

The Baha'i Faith was founded in the 19th century by Baha'u'llah in present-day Iran. A monotheistic faith, it claims to fulfill the prophecies of faiths such as Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. Baha'u'llah claimed be the most recent in a line of divine messengers including Muhammad, Jesus, and the Buddha, among others; the possibility remains that another messenger could become manifest. The Baha'i Faith has adherents living throughout the world.

Abdurrahim El-Keib

Abdurrahim El-Keib has been the Prime Minister of Libya since November 2011. He was elected to fill the vacancy left when Mahmoud Jibril kept his promise to leave office when Gaddafi's dictatorship had ended. Little known inside Libya prior to his election, he had fled the country in 1975, becoming an electrical engineering professor in the United States and then in the United Arab Emirates.

Awn Shawkat al-Khasawneh

Awn Shawkat al-Khasawneh has been the Prime Minister of Jordan since October 2011. Previously a judge at the International Court of Justice for over a decade, he became prime minister after his predecessor was sacked amid allegations of corruption. Educated at Cambridge, al-Khasawneh served in the Jordanian government, first in Foreign Affairs and then as Jordanian legal adviser to the Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace, after which he was Adviser to the King on international law.

Moncef Marzouki

Moncef Marzouki has been President of Tunisia since December 2011. Trained as a doctor, he was among Ben Ali's staunchest critics and lived in exile for nearly two decades. He campaigned against Ben Ali in the 1994 presidential election and was subsequently imprisoned for four months, after which he left for Paris, returning days after Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia in January 2011. During this time, he founded the political party Congress for the People.

Ahmed Ouyahia

Ahmed Ouyahia has been the Prime Minister of Algeria since 2008.  A Berber from Algeria's Kabylie region, Ouyahia served as a diplomat within Africa and to the United Nations; while he was ambassador to Mali in the early 1990s, he helped to negotiate terms of peace in that country's Tuareg Rebellion.  He subsequently became Prime Minister under Liamine Zeroual, stepping down from the position when Abdelaziz Bouteflika became president in 1998.

Massoud Barzani

Massoud Barzani has been the President of Iraqi Kurdistan since 2005.  The son of famed Kurdish nationalist leader Mustafa Barzani, he has led the Kurdistan Democratic Party since his father's 1979 death. During the Iran-Iraq War, Barzani and many Kurds fought alongside Iran, provoking Saddam Hussein, to brutally retaliate against his Kurdish subjects in Northern Iraq. When the Iraqis lost the war, they regained much of their homeland, which was protected by a no-fly zone.

Mohamed ElBaradei

Mohamed ElBaradei is the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a leading opposition figure in Egyptian politics.  Awarded the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize alongside the IAEA for his efforts toward nuclear disarmament and promotion of safe nuclear energy, he left the agency in 2009. As head of the agency, he oversaw the search for WMDs in Iraq prior to the US invasion and the inspection of Iranian nuclear facilities to ascertain whether they possessed weapon-grade material.

Ali Salman

Ali Salman is the leader of Bahrain's opposition Al-Wefaq party and a Shiite cleric. He spent several years in exile because of his role in Bahrain's protests in the 1990s, returning when King Hamad granted a general amnesty to those who had demonstrated against his father. Upon this amnesty, Salman and others founded the Al-Wefaq party in 2001; while they skipped the 2002 parliamentary election, they won almost half of the parliamentary seats in 2006.

Mir-Hossein Mousavi

Mir-Hossein Mousavi is a leading opposition leader in and former Prime Minister of Iran. An ethnic Azeri, he is related to Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the 1970s, he became involved in Islamist politics and is considered the "architect" of the Islamic Revolution, having acted as political secretary of Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Republican Party and edited its newspaper. He was Iran's Prime Minister throughout the 1980s, before the position was abolished and he retired from politics.

Abdelilah Benkirane

Abdelilah Benkirane has been the Prime Minister of Morocco since his appointment by King Mohammed VI after elections in November 2011. Elections were held a year earlier than scheduled because of reforms enacted amid the Arab Spring. Benkirane leads the winning Islamist Justice and Development Party. The recent reforms mandate that the king pick the Prime Minister from the winning party; as the party's leader, Benkirane was an obvious choice and also because of his royalist leanings.

Salam Fayyad

Salam Fayyad has been Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority since 2007. While some consider Ismail Haniyeh the Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas has twice appointed Fayyad to the position. A trained economist, Fayyad was a professor before representing Palestine at the IMF and subsequently serving as Yasser Arafat's Finance Minister. After Arafat's death, he left his cabinet position to establish the Third Way political party as an alternative to Fatah and Hamas.

Wael Ghonim

Wael Ghonim has emerged as a leader of the Egyptian revolution. A graduate of the American University in Cairo, he became a Google executive based in Dubai, where he anonymously started a Facebook group to honor Khaled Said, a young Egyptian blogger killed by the Mubarak regime in June 2010. He regularly updated it as instances of police brutality occurred, and it became the main Facebook page to coordinate the protests in Tahrir Square and nationwide.

Nabeel Rajab

Nabeel Rajab is the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. A longtime human rights defender, he has been beaten and imprisoned several times for his advocacy, which stretches back to his youth, when he was forced to switch schools after writing pro-justice slogans on school walls. It was not until Bahrain's 1990s uprising that Rajab entered organised human rights work. During this time, he worked clandestinely and was arrested several times.