Daniel Pipes

Daniel Pipes (born September 9, 1949) is an American commentator on foreign policy and the Middle East.

He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal.

His writing focuses on American foreign policy and the Middle East as well as criticism of Islam.

The son of Irene (née Roth) and Richard Pipes, Daniel Pipes was born into a Jewish family in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1949.

His parents had each fled German-occupied Poland with their families, and they met in the United States.

His father, Richard Pipes, was a historian at Harvard University, specializing in Russia, and Daniel Pipes grew up primarily in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area.

Pipes attended the Harvard pre-school, then received a private school education, partly abroad.

He enrolled in Harvard University, where his father was a professor, in the fall of 1967.

For his first two years he studied mathematics but has said "I wasn't smart enough. So I chose to become a historian."

He said he "found the material too abstract."

He credits visits to the Sahara Desert in 1968 and the Sinai Desert in 1969 for piquing his interest in the Arabic language, and travels in West Africa for piquing his interest in the Islamic world.

He switched his academic interest from medieval Islamic studies to modern Islam in the late 1970s, with the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution.

He subsequently changed his major to Middle Eastern history, for the next two years studying Arabic and the Middle East, and obtained a B.A. in history in 1971.

His senior thesis was titled "A Medieval Islamic Debate: The World Created in Eternity," a study of Muslim philosophers and Al-Ghazali.

After graduating in 1971, Pipes spent two years in Cairo, where he continued learning Arabic and studied the Quran, which he states gave him an appreciation for Islam.

Pipes returned to Harvard in 1973 and, after further studies abroad (in Freiburg-im-Breisgau and Cairo), obtained a Ph.D. in medieval Islamic history in 1978.

After graduating with a doctorate from Harvard in 1978 and studying abroad, Pipes taught at universities including Harvard, Chicago, Pepperdine, and the U.S. Naval War College on a short-term basis but never held a permanent academic position.

He then served as director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, before founding the Middle East Forum.

He taught world history at the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1982, history at Harvard from 1983 to 1984, and policy and strategy at the Naval War College from 1984 to 1986.

His doctoral dissertation eventually became his first book, Slave Soldiers and Islam, in 1981.

In 1982–83, Pipes served on the policy-planning staff at the State Department in 1982–83.

He wrote a book on colloquial Egyptian Arabic, published in 1983.

In all, he studied abroad for six years, three of them in Egypt.

Pipes largely left academia after 1986, although he taught a course titled "International Relations: Islam and Politics" as a visiting professor at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy in 2007.

Pipes told an interviewer from Harvard Magazine that he has "the simple politics of a truck driver, not the complex ones of an academic. My viewpoint is not congenial with institutions of higher learning."

From 1986 on, Pipes worked for think tanks.

From 1986 to 1993, he was director of the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and editor of its journal, Orbis.

In 1990, he organized the Middle East Forum as a unit of FPRI; it became an independent organization with himself as head in January 1994.

Pipes edited its journal, the Middle East Quarterly, until 2001.

He established Campus Watch as a project of the Middle East Forum in 2002, followed by the Legal Project in 2005, Islamist Watch in 2006, and the Washington Project in 2009.

In 2003, President George W. Bush nominated Pipes for the board of the United States Institute of Peace.

A filibuster was launched by Democratic Senators in the United States Senate against Pipes' nomination.

Senator Tom Harkin said that he was "offended" by Pipes' comments on Islam, and that while "some people call [Pipes] a scholar... this is not the kind of person you want on the USIP."

While defending Pipes' nomination, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer distanced Bush from Pipes's views, saying that Bush "disagrees with Pipes about whether Islam is a peaceful religion".

Pipes obtained the position by recess appointment and served on the board until early 2005.

His nomination was protested by Muslim groups in the U.S., and Democratic leaders.

He served as an adviser to Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign.

Pipes is a critic of Islam, and his views have been criticized by Muslim Americans and other academics, many of whom maintain they are Islamophobic or racist.

Pipes has made claims about alleged "no-go zones" overrun by Sharia law in Europe and about U.S. President Barack Obama practicing Islam, and has defended Michelle Malkin's book In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror.

Pipes has written sixteen books and was the Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.