Raymond Ibrahim is an American author, translator columnist, critic of Islam and a former librarian. His focus is Arabic history and language, and current events. He is the author of three books, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians and The Al Qaeda Reader. Ibrahim was born in the United States to Coptic immigrants from Egypt. 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.
Career
Ibrahim was previously an Arabic language specialist for the Near East section of the Library of Congress, and the associate director of the Middle East Forum. He is currently a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, an American conservative think tank. 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."
Reception
An article Ibrahim wrote on taqiyya, which was commissioned and published by Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst on September 26, 2008, was later characterized by another author in Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst as being "well-researched, factual in places but... ultimately misleading". Ibrahim responded to this charge in his rebuttal, "Taqiyya Revisited: A Response to the Critics.
