Biography of Raymond Ibrahim

View writings by Raymond Ibrahim

Raymond Ibrahim is the associate director of the Middle East Forum, deputy publisher of the Middle East Quarterly, and editor/translator of The Al Qaeda Reader.

A widely published author on radical Islam, Mr. Ibrahim regularly discusses that topic with the media, such as Fox News, C-SPAN, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, NPR, CBN, PBS, and various radio talk-shows. He regularly lectures at universities and briefs governmental agencies, such as U.S. Strategic Command, the Department of State, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. In early 2009, Mr. Ibrahim testified before the U.S. House of Representatives' House Armed Services Committee regarding the conceptual 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 and 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 towards 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 Quarterly, Middle East Review of International Affairs, and Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst; Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Washington Times, Washington Post, New York Times Syndicate, United Press International, Weekly Standard, and Financial Times; National Review, Pajamas Media, American Thinker, and FrontPage Magazine.

From June 2008-June 2009, he wrote daily for Jihad Watch, a popular website dedicated to analyzing current events in the full light of Islamic theology and history. Much of his writing has been translated into other languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, French, Gaelic, Basque, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Polish, German, Dutch, etc. (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 and theology, not politics and 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 Islam(ism), one must first understand Islamic history and doctrine.