Bernard Haykel (born 1968)^[1] is professor of Near Eastern Studies and the director of the Institute for Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia at Princeton University.^[2][3] He has been described as "the foremost secular authority on the Islamic State’s ideology" by journalist Graeme C.A. Wood.^[4]

Haykel, of "partially" Lebanese ancestry, grew up in Lebanon and in the United States.^[4] He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in Yemen in 1992–1993. He obtained a bachelor's degree in International Politics at Georgetown University, MA, M Phil and, in 1998, Ph.D. in Islamic and Middle-Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford. After working as a post-doctoral research fellow at Oxford University in Islamic Studies, he joined New York University in 1998 as associate professor before taking up his post at Princeton.^[3] He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010.^[5] He is a member of the board of directors of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.^[6]

In addition to English, Haykel is fluent in Arabic and French and has taught advanced level Arabic at Georgetown, Oxford and Princeton.^[7]

• Saudi Arabia in Transition; Insights on Social, Political, Economic and Religious Change. (Cambridge University Press, 2015) co-editor with Thomas Hegghammer, and Stéphane Lacroix.^[8]
• Revival and Reform in Islam: the Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkānī (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization, Cambridge University Press, 2003).^[9][10]