Stephen Schwartz

Stephen Schwartz is the Executive Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, DC and author of the bestselling The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role In Terrorism (Doubleday).

He was born in 1948, and has pursued a long literary and journalistic career, having published seven books on modern political history, with special attention to extremism.   He was a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle for 10 years and was secretary of the Northern California Newspaper Guild, AFL-CIO.

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, his extensive and authoritative writings on the phenomenon of Wahhabism established him as one of the leading global experts on Islam, its internal divisions, and its relations with other faiths.  

 He began a serious examination of Islam in 1990, when he first visited Yugoslavia.   Researching the history of Jews in the Balkans – for articles published in the Jewish Forward and other periodicals – he developed close relations with Balkan Islamic intellectual, religious and political leaders.  His writings in Balkan Jews were collected in the 2005 volume Sarajevo Rose:  A Balkan Jewish Notebook (Saqi/Palgrave Macmillan).


19 Articles Published | Follow:
On ADL, Turkey and the Armenian Question

I was interested to read Joey Kurtzman’s critique of Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League, and…

Stephen Schwartz’s Jewcy Summer Book: The Zohar in Muslim and Christian Spain

I may be caricaturing myself by recommending a summer book that is a) hard to…

The Walter Duranty of Saudi Arabia

In its June 2007 issue, the monthly magazine Commentary revives the genre of gullible travels.“My…

Who’s Afraid of Paul Berman?

Does moderate Islam exist? To many Westerners, the answer is absolutely not; they view Islam…

The Fort Dix Plot and the Turkish Connection

In The Weekly Standard dated May 14, I published an article titled “The Balkan Front”…

A Message in Fire

The following is a modified excerpt from Is it Good for the Jews: The Crisis…

Eric Hobsbawm’s Stalinist Homage to Catalonia

Orwell and the Spanish Civil War are all the rage again. Perhaps brought on by…

Jews Should Turn Back to the Sephardic Legacy

From: Stephen Schwartz To: Kerry Olitzky Subject: Muslims and Jews—a single “ummah” Kerry, We’ve discussed…