Direct may refer to:

Ahmed Hoosen Deedat (Arabic: احمد حسين ديدات; 1 July 1918 – 8 August 2005) was a South African writer and public speaker of Indian descent. He was best known as a Muslim missionary who held numerous inter-religious public debates with evangelical Christians, as well as video lectures, most of which centred around Islam, Christianity and the Bible. He also established the IPCI, an international Islamic missionary organisation, and wrote several booklets on Islam and Christianity which were widely distributed by the organisation. He was awarded the prestigious King Faisal International Prize in 1986 for his 50 years of missionary work. One focus of his work was providing Muslims with theological tools for defending themselves against active proselytising by Christian missionaries.^{[citation needed]} He used English to get his message across to Muslims and non-Muslims in the western world.

Ahmed Deedat was born in the town of Tadkeshwar, Surat, Bombay Presidency, British India in 1918. His father had emigrated to South Africa shortly after the birth of Ahmed Deedat. At the age of 9, Deedat left India to join his father in what is now known as Kwazulu-Natal. His mother died only a few months after his departure. Arriving in South Africa, Deedat applied himself with diligence to his studies, overcoming the language barrier and excelling in school, even getting promoted until he completed standard 6. However, due to financial circumstances, he had to quit school and start working by the time he was the age of 16.

Tariq Ramadan (Arabic: طارق رمضان‎; born 26 August 1962 in Geneva, Switzerland) is a Swiss academic and writer. He is also a Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University. He advocates the study and re-interpretation of Islamic texts, and emphasizes the heterogeneous nature of Western Muslims.

Tariq Ramadan is the son of Said Ramadan and Wafa Al-Bana, who was the eldest daughter of Hassan al Banna, who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Gamal al-Banna, the liberal Muslim reformer is his great-uncle. His father was a prominent figure in the Muslim Brotherhood and was exiled by Gamal Abdul Nasser from Egypt to Switzerland, where Tariq was born.

Tariq Ramadan studied Philosophy and French literature at the Masters level and holds a PhD in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Geneva. He also wrote a PhD dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche, entitled Nietzsche as a Historian of Philosophy.

Laurence Ferrari (born July 5, 1966) is a French journalist, best known as a former anchor of the TF1 weekday evening news Le 20H.

Ferrari was born in Aix-les-Bains, Savoie in 1966, the daughter of a former mayor of the city and member of the French National Assembly, Gratien Ferrari, and has Italian ancestry. She attended the École Française des Attachés de Presse (French School for Press Attachés) in Lyon and graduated from the Sorbonne University with a Master of 'Communication Politique and Sociale'. She is the eldest of three sisters and an accomplished pianist.

She started her career in 1986 as a stringer at the French newsagency, AFP, and Le Figaro Magazine. She also worked at the French language radio station, Europe 1, as a researcher with special responsibility for health policy. She began her television career in 1994 with Michel Drucker in Studio Gabriel on France 2 and thereafter with Jean-Pierre Pernaut in "Combien ça coûte ?" on TF1. In 2001 she co-hosted the TF1 Sunday evening magazine Sept à Huit with her former husband, Thomas Hugues. After her divorce, she moved in 2006 to Canal + to present the channel's weekly political magazine "Dimanche +" where she covered the French presidential election of 2007. In June 2008, she became the new anchor of "Le 20 Heures de TF1" (the flagship TV news programme, which has the highest ratings in Europe), replacing its long-serving anchor Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, and taking over the weekday programme on 25 August 2008.

Rupert Sanderson was born in 1966 in Penang, Malaysia (coincidentally the same Malaysian island Jimmy Choo is from). The son of a British Army officer, Rupert Sanderson lived the typically peripatetic life of an army child. After graduating from Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, London University, he worked in advertising in London before enrolling on the shoe making course at the world-recognised Cordwainers College in East London, joining a long lineage of stellar shoemakers such as Jimmy Choo. During the summer holiday of the two-year course, he rode a motorbike to Italy to visit shoe factories, tanneries and last makers, meeting artisans and learning as much as possible about the trade. Rupert Sanderson then worked in Italy firstly for Sergio Rossi, and latterly Bruno Magli. Working with the founders and the families of both these companies before they were bought by luxury goods conglomerates has put Sanderson in good stead with the close-knit Italian shoe making community. Rupert Sanderson produced his first shoe collection in 2001. By way of reinforcing his design principles, in 2006 Rupert Sanderson bought a controlling interest in the shoe factory in the outskirts of Bologna, Italy, that he had been working with from his first collection. The art of traditional craftsmanship and attention to detail can be seen in every Rupert Sanderson shoe.