Simon Ross Valentine

Simon Ross Valentine is a freelance lecturer, consultant and writer in religion, specialising in Islamic Studies and Christianity.

Born in Liverpool in 1958 his family moved to nearby Skelmersdale in Lancashire where he attended Up Holland Grammar School. Educated to doctorate level in Law, Religious Studies and Islamic Studies he spent twenty five years as a High School teacher and part time lecturer at the Universities of Leeds and Bradford. He has also given seminars and training sessions to the police force in Yorkshire on Islam and counter-terrorism.

Although greatly enjoying teaching, in 2001 Simon decided to throw caution to the wind and travel round the world, lecturing, exploring and writing. As such he has visited various countries including Saudi Arabia; Pakistan, Kashmir and Iraq.

Simon has written several books including a major study of Wahhabism, a puritanical form of Islam the ideology of which forms the basis of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. He is the only westerner, and non-Muslim, to have written a comprehensive study on the Ahmadiyya Jamaat, a Muslim minority group regarded by main-steam Islam as apostates due mainly to the group’s allegedly unorthodox teaching on prophesy within Islam.

Between 2015-2018, while in Kurdistan, Simon spent much time living with peshmerga (the Kurdish army) on the frontline observing the war against ISIS. This research led to the publication of his fifth major book in 2018, Peshmerga: Those Who Face Death.

Simon has written extensively as a journalist in various newspapers and as an academic in encyclopaedias, journals and book reviews. Concerning Christianity Simon is the sole biographer of John Bennet (1714-1759) one of the pioneer Methodist preachers in England in the eighteenth century, the man who reputedly “stole” and married John Wesley’s fiancée, Grace Murray.

When not travelling, Simon – a keen walker, film buff and supporter of Liverpool Football Club - is based at Bradford, west Yorkshire, England.