1. Rashad Hussain is an American attorney, diplomat, and professor, who served as the United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Associate White House Counsel, and as US Special Envoy of President Barack Obama to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
Rashad Hussain was US Special Envoy for strategic counterterrorism communications and served on the United States National Security Council and in the Department of Justice as a trial attorney and a criminal and national security prosecutor.
Rashad Hussain is a graduate of Greenhill School in Dallas, Texas.
Rashad Hussain completed a bachelor's degree in two years, in both philosophy and political science, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Rashad Hussain then earned a JD from Yale Law School where he served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal.
In January 2009, Rashad Hussain was named deputy associate counsel to President Barack Obama.
Rashad Hussain has worked there on national security and new media issues, and helped inform the administration's Muslim outreach efforts.
Rashad Hussain joined the President and the staff that traveled to Egypt for the speech at Cairo University in 2009.
Rashad Hussain attended the OIC Heads of State Summit in Egypt and in Mecca, Saudi Arabia is 2012, where he met with a number of leaders, including a pre-dawn Ramadan meal with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and held other meetings with President Gul of Turkey and President Karzai of Afghanistan.
Rashad Hussain led an international peacemaking delegation to the Central African Republic in 2014 to meet with President Samba-Panza and civil society leaders.
Rashad Hussain has worked on efforts to improve the protection of Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities living in Muslim-majority countries.
Rashad Hussain has sought to combat anti-Semitism by denouncing Holocaust denial and the publication of anti-Semitic materials in the Muslim world.
Rashad Hussain has traveled to a number of countries to address persecution of Muslim communities, including the Central African Republic, Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, China, India, the Rohingya population from Myanmar, and a number of European nations.
Rashad Hussain has been outspoken against anti-Semitism during his other travels, including his rebuttal of anti-Semitic tirade during a trip to India in 2010.
Rashad Hussain has been actively involved in international religious freedom and counterterrorism efforts, and his appointment as Special Envoy for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications was announced by President Obama at a White House Summit in 2015.
Rashad Hussain, who has been named one of the world's 500 most influential Muslims, outlined a strategy for countering terrorist propaganda emphasizing a shift to non-governmental messaging, helped develop messaging centers in the UAE, Nigeria, Malaysia, and in Saudi Arabia, and helped set up the framework for the US Global Engagement Center.
In 2015, The Washington Post reported that Rashad Hussain was appointed to shift US messaging efforts by building partnerships with international NGOs and other governments to counter terrorist propaganda.
Rashad Hussain co-authored a paper, "Reformulating the Battle of Ideas: Understanding the Role of Islam in Counterterrorism Policy" for the Brookings Institution.
Rashad Hussain encouraged Muslim communities to create online media content that acknowledges perceived grievances, but uses imagery and religious content to make clear that terrorists are actually killing Muslims, damaging Muslim causes, and violating Islam, not defending it.
On July 30,2021, President Joe Biden nominated Rashad Hussain to be the US Ambassador at-large for International Religious Freedom.