About Raymond Ibrahim

Raymond Ibrahim is the associate director of the Middle East Forum and editor/translator of The Al Qaeda Reader. He writes daily for Jihad Watch.

A widely published author on radical Islam, Mr. Ibrahim regularly discusses that topic with the media, such as Fox News, C-SPAN, Reuters, NPR, CBN, PBS, and talk-show hosts, such as Jim Bohannon, Laura Ingraham, Dennis Prager, and Michael Savage. He regularly lectures at universities and briefs governmental agencies, such as U.S. Strategic Command, the Department of State, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. On February 12, 2009, Mr. Ibrahim testified before the U.S. House of Representatives’ House Armed Services Committee regarding the educational/epistemological failures that dominate American discourse concerning Islam.

Born in the United States to immigrant Coptic parents, Mr. Ibrahim was raised in a bilingual environment and is fluent in Arabic, including colloquial dialects. He received his B.A. and M.A. (both in history, focusing on the ancient/medieval Near East) from California State University, Fresno. There he studied closely with noted military-historian, Victor Davis Hanson; his M.A. thesis examined an early military encounter between Islam and Byzantium based on medieval Arabic and Greek texts.

Mr. Ibrahim has done graduate work at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies of Georgetown University, where he took courses on the history, politics, and economics of the Arab world, and participated in seminars and symposiums. He is currently studying toward his doctorate in medieval Islamic history at Catholic University.

From 2003-2009, Mr. Ibrahim worked closely with Middle East language materials, primarily Arabic, at the Near East Section of the Library of Congress, where he was employed as a library-technician/reference-assistant. He was regularly contacted by, and provided reference assistance to, defense and intelligence personnel involved in the fields of terrorism and radical Islam, as well as the Congressional Research Service.

It was at the Library of Congress that Mr. Ibrahim discovered hitherto unknown al-Qaeda tracts and treatises written in Arabic which he went on to translate and annotate into the well received Al Qaeda Reader (Doubleday, 2007). Based solely on al-Qaeda’s own words, this collection of translations, according to Mr. Ibrahim, “proves once and for all that, despite the propaganda of al-Qaeda and its sympathizers, radical Islam’s war with the West is not finite and limited to political grievances—real or imagined—but is existential, transcending time and space and deeply rooted in faith [p. xii].”

Mr. Ibrahim is author to dozens of articles, essays, and translations on radical Islam, appearing in a variety of publications, including the Chronicle of Higher Education, Middle East Review of International Affairs, Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst, and Middle East Strategy, Harvard; Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Washington Post, New York Times Syndicate, United Press International, and Financial Times; National Review, Weekly Standard, Pajamas Media, American Thinker, and FrontPage Magazine. (Links to all his writings can be found at www.raymondibrahim.com.)

Raymond Ibrahim’s interest in Islamic civilization was originally piqued in his early youth, when he first began visiting the Middle East with his parents, especially his ancestral homeland of Egypt. Interacting and conversing in Arabic with the locals—both Muslim and Christian—has provided him with a much more intimate appreciation for that part of the world, better augmenting his theoretic knowledge.

The strikes of 9/11 played a particularly pivotal role in Mr. Ibrahim’s formative outlook. As he explains in the Chronicle of Higher Education, when the terror attacks occurred in 2001, he was in the midst of doing research for his M.A. thesis, which centered on the role of the jihad in the early Islamic conquests. Immediately after 9/11, Mr. Ibrahim—then a student of history, not politics or current events—began reading up on al-Qaeda and other Islamist organizations; he began watching Al Jazeera.

He was immediately struck by the continuity evident between the words, deeds, and goals of the 7^th century mujahidin (“jihadists”), whom he had been studying for years, and the near verbatim words, deeds, and goals of 21^st century radicals. Since then, he has maintained that to truly understand contemporary Islamism, one must first understand Islamic history and doctrine.

To further this initiative, Mr. Ibrahim writes daily for JihadWatch.com. A popular website directed by New York Times best-selling author on Islam, Robert Spencer, Jihad Watch is dedicated to analyzing current events in the full light of Islamic theology and history; specifically, the doctrinal role of jihad and the phenomenon of “dhimmitude,” and their manifestations in the modern world, are closely explored and documented.

ARTICLES BY RAYMOND IBRAHIM

Raymond Ibrahim: A Response to the Critics: Taqiyya Revisited (Part II)
Jihad Watch: February 27, 2009

Raymond Ibrahim: A Response to the Critics: Taqiyya Revisited (Part I)
Jihad Watch: February 26, 2009

War and Peace - and Deceit - in Islam
Pajamas Media: February 12, 2009

Consider the Source: Jihad has Islamic, and non-Islamic, roots. . A Review of The Mind of Jihad by Laurent Murawiec
The Weekly Standard: January 26, 2009

Father Zakaria Botros on "The perverse sexual habits of the Prophet" (Part II)
Jihad Watch: January 14, 2009

Father Zakaria Botros on "The perverse sexual habits of the Prophet" (Part 1)
Jihad Watch: January 12, 2009

The ongoing exploits of Fr. Zakaria Botros: "God does not pray!"
Jihad Watch: January 4, 2009

An Analysis of al-Qa'ida's Worldview: Reciprocal Treatment or Religious Obligation?
MERIA: December 31, 2008

Examining an Orientalist Excerpt: Carl Brockelmann: "Islamophobe" or Scholar?
Jihad Watch: December 27, 2008

Are slave-girls in Islam equivalent to animals?
Jihad Watch: December 14, 2008

On Vikings and Victims: White-Guilt in Context
American Thinker: December 14, 2008