Wilferd Ferdinand Madelung (born 26 December 1930) is a scholar of Islam. He was born in Stuttgart, Germany, where he completed his early education at Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium.

His family moved to the United States in (or after?) 1947, and he studied at Georgetown University. In 1952, he went to Egypt and stayed there for a year. During his stay the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, initiated by the Free Officers, occurred. He also met Ihsan Abbas, the famous scholar of Islamic History, there.

On leaving Egypt he went back to Germany and completed his Ph.D in 1957, working with Spuler. In 1958 he was sent to Iraq by the German government to work at its embassy there. Shortly after his arrival in Baghdad, Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew the regime in the bloody military coup known as the 14 July Revolution. Madelung stayed in Iraq two more years. Subsequently, he taught at the University of Chicago.

Madelung was Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford from 1978 to 1998. He has written extensively on the early history of Islam, as well as on Islamic sects such as the Shi'a and the Ismailis. He has served on the editorial boards of several academic journals including the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies. He is currently a Senior research fellow at the Institute for Ismaili Studies in London

Eric Linn Ormsby, born in Atlanta in 1941, is a poet, a scholar, and a man of letters. He was a longtime resident of Montreal, where he was the Director of University Libraries and subsequently a professor of Islamic thought at McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies. Presently, he lives and writes in London, England, where he is Professor and Chief librarian at the Institute of Ismaili Studies.

Ormsby began writing poetry as a young man and began publishing in 1985. He has six poetry collections, Bavarian Shrine and Other Poems (1990), which won a Quebec prize for the best poetry of that year, Coastlines (1992), For a Modest God: New & Selected Poems (1997), Araby (2001), Daybreak at the Straits (2004), and Time's Covenant (2006). His poems have been published in various journals and magazines such as The New Yorker and The Paris Review and anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry. He has also authored a book of essays on poetry and translation, including Arabic literature. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times among others publish his book reviews regularly.