then as Director of the Office of Resources policy responsible for monitoring the policies and budgets of the U.S. government's intelligence agencies. In 1974, he left the government to become Executive Director of the American Indian National Bank and President of its investment advisory firm, The Native American Economic Development Corporation. In 1975 he founded his own consulting firm by the same name to staff the U.S. Treasury Department's U.S.-Saudi Joint Commission for Economic Cooperation, where he produced his book, Planning the Future of Saudi Arabia. In 1976, at the request of the U.S. State Department, he served for a year as the Principal Economic and Budget Advisor to the Finance Minister in the Emirate of Bahrain to prepare a five-year plan based on this book. In September 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed Crane to be U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates to pursue two-track diplomacy by developing relations with the various Islamist movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Crane continued in a minor way to advise President Reagan on foreign policies and together with Norman Kurland was one of the two principal founders of President Reagan's Presidential Task Force on Economic Justice, in which Crane served as Chairman of the Financial Markets Committee. Muslim activism Robert "Farouk" Crane, converted to Islam in 1980. Since the early 1980s, Crane has worked full-time as a Muslim activist. From 1983 to 1986, he was the Director of Da'wa at the Islamic Center of Washington on Massachusetts Avenue. In 1986 he joined the International Institute of Islamic Thought as its Director of Publications, and then helped to found the American Muslim Council, now defunct, serving as Director of its Legal Division from 1992 to 1994. In this capacity he was the founding President of the Muslim American Bar Association. In 1994, Crane founded his Center for Civilizational Renewal in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he produced his book, Shaping the Future: Challenge and Response. In 1996 he founded the Center for Public Policy Research located in Springfield, Virginia, with Ahmad Yousef's United Association for Studies and Research and served until 2001 as Managing Director of its scholarly Middle East Affairs Journal. He then published as head of his Islamic Institute for Strategic Studies and as Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Islamic Thought. In 2011 he was recruited by the "world's largest think-tank", the Qatar Foundation in the