Michael Crawford is an independent historian who writes on the history of the Arabian Peninsula. After qualifying as a barrister, he served the British government in London and overseas, including in Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, from1981 to 2009. He was a visiting Fellow at Princeton in 2009. His incisive biography of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi movement, was published in 2014 by Oneworld in its Makers of the Modern World series.