by Robert Spencer
Jihad Watch
I am enormously pleased to announce that Raymond Ibrahim, whose writing appeared at Jihad Watch in 2008 and 2009, is coming back on staff and will once again be contributing regularly to Jihad Watch.
Raymond is a historian and writer on the Middle East and Islam. A Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, he maintains his own section at FrontPage Magazine, “Raymond’s Intersection,” where he explores the pivotal but ignored point where Islam and Christianity intersect, including by examining the latest on Muslim persecution of Christians, translating pertinent Arabic news that never reaches the West, and much more.
Born in the United States to Egyptian parents, Raymond was raised in a bilingual environment and is fluent in Arabic. He received his B.A. and M.A. in History from California State University, Fresno, where 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. He also took graduate courses at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and studied Medieval Islamic history and Semitic languages at the Catholic University of America.
Raymond’s resume includes serving as Associate Director of the Middle East Forum, where he is currently an Associate Fellow, and working as a Reference Assistant at the Near East Section of the Library of Congress, where he discovered hitherto unknown al-Qaeda treatises written in Arabic, which he went on to translate and annotate into the superb and essential The Al Qaeda Reader (Doubleday, 2007).
Raymond lectures regularly and has testified before Congress. He has written for many journals—including the Almanac of Islamism, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst — and has appeared on various media, including Al-Jazeera, Fox News, and MSNBC (join his free mailing list here to be sure to receive all his materials).
Raymond’s interest in Islamic civilization was first piqued when he began visiting the Middle East, especially his ancestral homeland of Egypt, as a child in the 1970s. Interacting and conversing with the locals throughout the decades — both Muslim and Christian — has provided him with an intimate appreciation for that part of the world, complementing his academic training.
I am highly honored that Raymond Ibrahim will once again be gracing us with his writing at Jihad Watch. He will be writing a weekly column here on jihad-related issues. Watch for his first one soon!
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