RAYMOND IBRAHIM, a widely published expert on the Middle East and Islam, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
His books include Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood against Islam (Bombardier, 2022); Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (Da Capo, 2018); Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (Regnery, 2013); The Al Qaeda Reader (Doubleday, 2007); and The Battle of Yarmuk: An Assessment of the Immediate Factors behind the Islamic Conquests (MA thesis, 2002).
Ibrahim’s writings, translations, and observations have appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York Times Syndicate, CNN, LA Times, Fox News, Financial Times, Jerusalem Post, United Press International, USA Today, Washington Post, Washington Times, and Weekly Standard; scholarly journals, including the Almanac of Islamism, Chronicle of Higher Education, Hoover Institution’s Strategika, Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, and Middle East Review of International Affairs; and popular websites, including American Thinker, Bloomberg, Breitbart, Christian Post, Daily Caller, FrontPage Magazine, NewsMax, National Review Online, PJ Media, LifeSiteNews, the Stream, and World Magazine. He has contributed chapters to several anthologies, written forewords to books, and been translated into dozens of languages.
Among other media, he has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN, PBS, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, and NPR; he has done hundreds of radio interviews and some of his YouTube videos (here and here for example) have received over a million views each.
Ibrahim guest lectures at universities, including the U.S. Army War College and the National Defense Intelligence College; has briefed governmental agencies, such as U.S. Strategic Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency; provides expert testimony for Islam-related lawsuits; and has testified before Congress regarding the conceptual failures that dominate American discourse concerning Islam and the worsening plight of Christian minorities throughout the Islamic world. He also regularly speaks at general venues, such as CPAC, and before international audiences, for example, at Germany’s Bundestag.
Ibrahim’s dual-background—born and raised in the U.S. by Egyptian parents born and raised in the Middle East—has provided him with unique advantages, from equal fluency in English and Arabic, to an equal understanding of the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets, positioning him to explain the latter to the former. His interest in Islamic civilization was first piqued when he began visiting the Middle East as a child in the 1970s. Interacting and conversing with the locals throughout the decades has provided him with an intimate appreciation for that part of the world, complementing his academic training.
After a brief athletic career—which included playing football and winning the 1993 NPC Los Angeles Bodybuilding Championship teenage division—Raymond went on to receive his B.A. and M.A. (both in History, focusing on the ancient and medieval Near East, with dual-minors in Philosophy and English) from California State University, Fresno. There he studied closely with noted military-historian Victor Davis Hanson. He also took graduate courses at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies—including classes on the history, politics, and economics of the Arab world—and studied Medieval Islam and Semitic languages at Catholic University of America. His M.A. thesis examined an early military encounter between Islam and Byzantium based on arcane Arabic and Greek texts.
Ibrahim’s resume includes serving as an Arabic language and regional specialist at the Near East Section of the Library of Congress, where he was often contacted by and provided information to defense and intelligence personnel involved in the fields of counterterrorism and area studies, as well as the Congressional Research Service; and serving as associate director of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia think tank.
He also often functions as a journalist and has been a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution and news analyst for a variety of media, for example, CBN News. His knowledge of Arabic and familiarity with Middle Eastern sources have enabled him to offer breaking news. Days before the Obama administration blamed an anti-Islamic movie for Muslim uprisings against a U.S. consul and an embassy in Libya and Egypt respectively, Ibrahim showed that the demonstrations were pre-planned and unrelated to the movie. Similarly, he was first to expose an Arabic-language Saudi fatwa that called for the destruction of any Christian church found on the Arabian Peninsula.
For over a decade since July, 2011, Ibrahim has been producing a monthly report, “Muslim Persecution of Christians,” dedicated to chronicling the abuses and slaughters Christians experience throughout the Islamic world. In certain respects, these monthly reports — there are nearly 160 of them, each averaging between 3,500-4,500 words — are the “live,” ongoing continuation of his 2013 book, Crucified Again.