He graduated from the University of Missouri in 2006. He has said he is running to be president of Egypt’s Hamas-linked political party, the Freedom and Justice Party. He ran for vice president in the 2014 elections, in which the party boycotted the race, taking part in negotiations but not the contest.
Ahmed Qorei has a PhD in Political Science from the Department of Political Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Before pursuing a PhD in 2013, Qorei was a professor of political science at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He got his PhD in political science from the University of London in 1998. He was named a distinguished professor in political science at the school in 2010.
As professor at the college, Qorei taught courses on Middle Eastern politics and the history of Europe and studied the “cosmological origins” of the universe. He also chaired the science department, an academic unit that assesses student achievement in government and policy, at the college. The college commissioned a study by one of his students, which found that he was more “intellectual and serious” than his counterparts in other universities and credited him with boosting his reputation in an academic setting.
Younes Allam, a professor of accounting at the college, said Qorei was “kind, and very easy to work with.” He told The Post and Courier that when Qorei became involved in the struggles in Syria, “he communicated with other faculty members and we mobilised financial support from students and the student government to make these decisions.” He said the Syrian War was one of the “distractions” he became involved in in his research.
When the Syrian War turned violent in 2011, Qorei volunteered to help the Civil Defense, an organization of volunteers that became known as the White Helmets. The volunteers help the wounded in the rebel-held areas in Eastern Ghouta. Their work was highlighted by the Red Cross and other aid groups that have worked with them and by activists during attacks on the area.
An academic, Qorei has supported political change in Iran and in Washington, D.C. The New York Times wrote in 2015 that he was “a leading advocate” of a US-led policy “to influence Iranian behavior away from terrorism and through democratic change.”
The Daily Beast wrote that his family travels “thousands of miles a year” to get him to visit them and that as a result he “crashed” a thousand times “on freight trains, subways, boats, bicycles, and jitneys.”
In addition to his PhD from the University of London, Qorei has received postgraduate degrees from the universities of California, New Mexico, and Massachusetts. Qorei served as an assistant at the University of Virginia from 2009 to 2014.