Leonard Binder

Leonard Binder is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UCLA. Leonard Binder is an internationally known specialist on Middle East politics and Islamic political thought. His professorship in the Department is supported by the UCLA International Institute administration at UCLA. He is a founding member and has served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA). He has been a member of both the Comparative Politics and the Middle East Studies committees of the Social Science Research Council. He has been Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellow, and has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Jerusalem. He has served as department Chair at both the University of Chicago and UCLA. He has done field research in Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Pakistan. Professor Binder is the author of Religion and Politics in Pakistan (1961), Iran: Political Development in a Changing Society (1962), The Ideological Revolution in the Middle East (1964), In a Moment of Enthusiasm: Political Power and the second Stratum in Egypt (1978), and Islamic Liberalism (1988). His most recent (authored) book is Islamic Liberalism (1990). He is a former director of the Near Eastern Center at UCLA and former departmental chair of Political Science at UCLA and the University of Chicago.