Stephen Schwartz
Stephen Schwartz is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP), a transnational network of moderate Muslims, at www.islamicpluralism.org. Although brought up without religion, he has been Muslim since 1997, and is active in interfaith activities involving Muslims, Christians, and Jews. His books include The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism (2002), which introduced the non-Muslim reading audience around the world to the extremist Wahhabi sect that inspired Al-Qaeda. In 2008, his volume The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony, on Islamic spirituality, was published. CIP issued a major study in 2009 titled A Guide to Shariah Law and Islamist Ideology in Western Europe, 2007–2009. Schwartz’s other works include a collection of writings on Muslim-Jewish relations in the Balkans, Sarajevo Rose (2005), and Kosovo: Background to a War (2000). Schwartz’s writings on Islam have been translated and widely read in Muslim countries. He served from 1989 to 1999 as a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle. His articles have been printed in the Wall Street Journal, the Globe and Mail (Toronto), the Weekly Standard, the Spectator (London), the New Criterion, and many other leading periodicals.
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