Author and journalist Jonathan Lyons has spent his professional and personal life exploring the shifting boundaries between East and West. After more than twenty years as an editor and foreign correspondent for Reuters, much of it in the Islamic world, he is now affiliated with the
Global Terrorism Research Centre and is completing his doctorate in sociology of religion, both at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
 
He lives in Washington, DC, and is conducting his research in Old-world style at the Library of Congress main reading room. He also teaches part-time at George Mason University. This autumn, he taught "Covering Islam Today"for the deparments of Communications and Religious Studies. This spring, he will teach an introduction to Islam, called "Islamic Religious Life." The syllabus is here.
 
In the mid 1990s, Lyons moved to Turkey where he was Reuters’ bureau chief for four and a half years. In 1998, Lyons moved to Tehran and reopened the Reuters bureau, which had been closed by the authorities thirteen years earlier. He then worked for five years in Reuters’ Washington office, before taking up his last foreign assignment in Jakarta in 2006 covering radical Islamic movements across Southeast Asia.
 
He has a BA with Honors in Russian and History from Wesleyan university and was a Fellow at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute of Soviet Studies. He also studied at the Pushkin Institute of Russian language in Moscow.
 
The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Trabsformed Western Civilization is his second book. His first, Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in 21st-Century Iran, co-authored with Geneive Abdo, was published by Henry Holt and Co. in 2003.