| Raymond Ibrahim | |
| Birth Place: | United States |
| Occupation: | Writer, author, translator, columnist |
| Alma Mater: | California State University, Fresno (MA) |
Raymond Ibrahim (born 1973) is an American author, translator, columnist, critic of Islam, and a former librarian. His focus is Arabic history and language, and current events.[1] [2] [3]
Ibrahim was born in the United States to Coptic immigrants from Egypt.[4] He is fluent in Arabic and English. Ibrahim studied at California State University, Fresno, where he wrote a master's thesis under Victor Davis Hanson on an early military encounter between Islam and Byzantium based on medieval Arabic and Greek texts. Ibrahim also took graduate courses at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and studied toward a PhD in medieval Islamic history at Catholic University.[5]
Ibrahim was previously an Arabic language specialist for the Near East section of the Library of Congress,[6] and the associate director of the Middle East Forum., he is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, an American conservative think tank.[7] He has been described as a part of the counter-jihad movement.[8]
Ibrahim is the editor and translator of The Al Qaeda Reader, which he published after discovering a hitherto unknown Arabic al-Qaeda document; Ibrahim believes the document "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".
Ibrahim has appeared on and been interviewed by Al Jazeera, MSNBC, C-SPAN, NPR, and Reuters, and "regularly lectures, briefs governmental agencies, provides expert testimony for Islam-related lawsuits, and testifies before Congress."[7]
An article Ibrahim wrote on taqiyya, which was commissioned and published by Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst on September 26, 2008,[9] [10] was later characterized by another author in Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst as being "well-researched, factual in places but ... ultimately misleading".[11] Ibrahim responded to this charge in his rebuttal, "Taqiyya Revisited: A Response to the Critics.[12]