| Stephen Suleyman Schwartz | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 9, 1948 Columbus, Ohio, U.S. |
| Occupation | Journalist, writer |
| Religion | Sufi Muslim[1] |
Stephen Suleyman Schwartz (born September 9, 1948) is an American Muslim[1] journalist, columnist, and author. He has been published in a variety of media, including The Wall Street Journal.[2] He is the executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism. In August 2011 he was elected as member of Folks Magazine's Editorial Board.[3]
His background is on the traditional political left, and much of his journalism has focused on Marxism, Communism and anarchism, but Schwartz now describes himself as a libertarian.[4] He has been a student of Sufism since the late 1960s and an adherent of the Hanafi school of Islam since 1997.[1] He is a critic of Islamic Fundamentalism, especially the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam.
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Schwartz was born in Columbus, Ohio. His father, Horace Schwartz, was Jewish, and his mother was raised Protestant, though the family was not religious. His mother was a member of the Communist Party, and Schwartz described his father as a "fellow traveler". Schwartz was initially a Communist, and supporter of the Soviet Union; later he would call himself a "red diaper baby". His father was an independent bookseller, and his mother was a career social services employee.[5]
The family moved to San Francisco when he was young, where Horace Schwartz became a literary agent while Stephen attended Lowell High School.[6] While there, he made his first serious writing attempts, focusing initially on poetry. In college his views began to shift, favoring a Trotskyist view of Marxism over Stalinism.[5]
After college, Schwartz became involved in the labor movement, first in the Sailors' Union of the Pacific, and then the AFL-CIO. He, along with others, founded a small semi-Trotskyist group FOCUS.[7] As Schwartz focused increasingly on making a career as a writer, he returned to these roots to write Brotherhood of the Sea: A History of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific, commissioned by the S.U.P. as part of the commemoration of its 100th anniversary in 1985. By this time Schwartz identified as a member of the Social Democrats USA, following a path similar to other Trotskyists who shifted from left to right-wing politics.
In 1988, while a fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Studies in San Francisco, Schwartz wrote in the New York Times Book Review that a member of Freud's early circle, Dr. Max Eitingon, was a key figure in a group of Soviet agents who conducted assassinations in Europe and Mexico.[8] The essay drew a blistering, lengthy response from the historian Theodore Draper, who was acquainted with Eitingon's relatives in the United States, arguing in The New York Review of Books that Schwartz had defamed Max Eitingon by mistaking him as the brother of a Leonid Eitingon associated with the Soviet KGB.[9] Their continuing debate drew in historian Walter Laqueur, supporting Draper.[10]
In the 1990s, Schwartz spent a decade as a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He was also a member and local negotiator in the union at the Chronicle, a branch of the Newspaper Guild. Later he told of his dissatisfaction with the union’s national leadership, particularly its president, Linda Foley, for emphasizing political concerns such as ethnic diversity and concentration of media ownership, over traditional union issues of wages, job protection, and working conditions.[11]
In 1998, Schwartz turned his background in studying the labor and radical movements in California into his book From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind. This book was panned by critic Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, who called its title deceptive for a book "so narrow and so selective that one comes away with a warped caricature of California as a hotbed of radicals, bohemians and New Age eccentrics," and a "reductive and highly dogmatic book." She argued that it ignored the significant conservative side of California thought, as reflected in figures like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.[12] California state librarian Kevin Starr was more sympathetic, suggesting that the title and marketing were an awkward attempt by the publisher to give national significance to an otherwise legitimate history of the radical left in California. Starr praised the book’s account of the utopian ideals that spurred the early California left; the rest he saw as a personal quest to show how the Soviets corrupted these ideals.[13] Harold Meyerson also found it to be heavily focused on anti-Stalinism, fused with a hatred of Los Angeles, which Schwartz held responsible for transforming the utopian left into "elitist but mediocre left-liberalism". Meyerson felt this, and speculation about Stalinist conspiracies, undermined the value in the book’s account of the San Francisco Renaissance centered around poet Kenneth Rexroth, an associate of Schwartz’s father.[14]
In 1999, Schwartz left the Chronicle, and moved to Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, living and traveling in the Balkans for the next 18 months. He had previously visited the area in 1990 to do research, and maintained ties through an Albanian Catholic institute connected with the University of San Francisco.[15]
After his return, Schwartz gained some attention for a speculative theory that the Jewish Marxist intellectual Walter Benjamin might have been assassinated. Writing in The Weekly Standard, he proposed that Stalinist agents in Spain might be responsible, questioning evidence that Benjamin committed suicide to avoid being handed over to the Nazis. He had little evidence to support his speculation, and critics noted that unlike other assassination victims, Benjamin was never a Communist Party member. Schwartz defended the article as "just asking questions that should be asked."[16]
As he continued writing for various publications, Schwartz strongly supported the Iraq War, identifying with other former Trotskyists who supported the war, including Christopher Hitchens and Kanan Makiya. Schwartz found support for this, among other reasons, in Trotsky’s internationalist outlook.
Schwartz's exposure to Islam began with the study of Sufism during his early years, and he now describes himself as a disciple of Ibn Arabi. His biography at the Center for Islamic Pluralism adds that he's been "an adherent of the Hanafi school of Islam since 1997."[1] As his religious choice became publicly known, Schwartz complained that he was sometimes seen as "a Trojan horse for Islam," despite his support for American policies in the Middle East.[17]
Schwartz published a book on the subject called The Two Faces of Islam. The book blamed Islamic terrorism on the religious establishment fostered by the Saudi government, and also criticized Bush administration officials for their associations with Saudi Arabia. Shortly before it came out, Schwartz was dismissed from his position as a news writer for Voice of America. The stated reason was that his work was not competent, although his sympathizers claimed the real motive was his differences with the news director and official concern about his increasing criticism of Saudi Arabia. Schwartz's personality was also said to have alienated colleagues. He then became a senior policy analyst, and the director of the Islam and Democracy program at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a conservative think tank. Schwartz annually leads a protest at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington DC with notable Shiite Muslims such as Maulana Dr. Sakhawat Hussain Sandralvi, to denounce the destruction of Janaat-ul Baqi, a graveyard in Medina, by the Wahhabis in 1925.[18]
The Two Faces of Islam received mixed reviews. Paul Marshall, in the Claremont Review of Books, described it as an "otherwise good book...marred by Schwartz's almost Manichean approach wherein all bad things in the Muslim world are ascribed to the work of the Wahhabis."[19] New York Times book critic Richard Bernstein said the book demonstrated "a comprehensive mastery of history and historical connections, as well as a deep humanistic concern for those who have been oppressed by Wahhabi ruthlessness." However, he also questioned whether Schwartz had not overstated its significance compared to other extremist elements in Islam, such as the Iranian role in supporting terrorism.[20] Clifford Geertz described Schwartz as "a strange and outlandish figure" and concluded that the book was founded upon a "conflation of Wahhabism with Islamism generally".[21]
Schwartz followed this with a pamphlet, An Activist's Guide to Arab and Muslim Campus and Community Organizations in North America, written under the name Suleyman Ahmad al-Kosovi. This covered a number of organizations he identified as being part of the "Wahhabi lobby" in the United States, including the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Arab American Institute, the Muslim Student Association, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the American Muslim Council, and the Islamic Society of North America. According to Schwartz, these groups were "crafted in direct imitation of the leading American Jewish organizations." However, he contended that they lacked the diversity of the Jewish groups because they were all dependent on Saudi money, and their ideology made them see the Jewish groups as "all controlled and coordinated by a single, commanding power, i.e. the Israeli embassy."[22]
To counter this perceived influence and promote "moderate Islam", Schwartz launched the Center for Islamic Pluralism on March 25, 2005. The Center is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., with Schwartz as executive director.
Schwartz contends that Israel is "historic, sacred land of the Jews ... given to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob by the Almighty as their eternal home."[23] He bases his view on "the following unequivocal statements" from the Qur'an:[23]