Middlebury, Vt. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Abdullah Schleifer, prominent Arab journalist and Professor Emeritus at the American University in Cairo, died last week at the age of ninety. The grandchild of European Jews who fled Europe and immigrated to the U.S. in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Schleifer converted to Islam in his early thirties. His childhood experience of religion was limited to occasional attendance at the suburban Conservative synagogue where his parents were members. In his seventies, Schleifer recalled how these synagogue visits gave him little sense of the sacred. “Conservative Judaism,” he said, “is very much like the Protestant church without the Cross. At best, for me it was a bore.” Of his parents, who thought of themselves as ‘secular Jews,’ Schleifer wrote, “they were very good people, very kind, very compassionate, very decent . . . I think they were, like many people whose parents were very religious, living on the spiritual and ethical capital they had inherited.” His search for what he dubbed “spiritual and ethical capital” would lead Schleifer to a surprising set of religious and political choices; first, the Episcopal Church, then to Marxism, and eventually to conversion to Islam in the early 1960s.
In his early teens, Marc spent a summer with his paternal grandfather, an Orthodox Jew who had immigrated to the U.S. from Hungary. “My grandfather on my father’s side was deeply religious,” Schleifer wrote. “He would go every morning to the synagogue and I would accompany him. I was very impressed by his personal piety . . . I remember coming home that summer and saying to my mother, I think when I grow up I want to be a rabbi.” Schleifer’s mother artfully quashed that idea when she told him that as a rabbi he wouldn’t be able to eat his favorite meal: a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. “I said, ‘really?’ ‘She said yes!’ I said, ‘Oh well, forget that!’”
After college Schleifer went to work advertising, in an industry with which he soon became disillusioned. He started writing for The Village Voice and other emerging newspapers of the counterculture. And it was in providing coverage of the counterculture of the late ’50s and early ’60s that he found his métier. Within a few years he became the skillful journalist and editor. In 1957 Schleifer interviewed poet Allen Ginsberg; it was Ginsberg’s first published interview. Ginsberg had just come back from a pilgrimage to India. “He was the mentor – Guru type,” Schleifer said. “Because of Allen Ginsberg I quit advertising, I became a ‘beatnik.’ In Ginsberg’s person I saw God consciousness.” From then on Schleifer, now earning a living as a freelance journalist, saw himself as a seeker, a ‘wandering Jew,’ in his words. In the fifties and early sixties, he sought a mooring in radical politics, not in spiritual disciplines. Schleifer’s fascination with Christianity, and with religion in general, had faded. His considerable journalistic energies were now focused on Marxism, and in an activist way, not merely a theoretical one. Within a few years he would forsake Marxism for Islam. But the break with Marxism was never complete. For Schleifer these seemingly incompatible ideologies, Islam and Marxism, could co-exist in his life in fruitful ways.
A Marxist Period
As his commitment to Marxism and revolutionary politics grew, Schleifer traveled to Cuba where he accompanied Fidel Castro’s guerilla army and wrote sympathetic articles about Castro for American Leftist publications. Schleifer’s main outlet for these reports was The Monthly Review, which described itself as an “independent Socialist magazine.” The editors of The Monthly Review, Marxist scholars Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman, were quite taken with Schleifer’s youthful energy and enthusiasm, and with his fluid prose. They praised Marc Schleifer’s “Cuban Notebook,” which appeared in the July-August 1961 issue of their journal. “Mr. Schleifer is a sensitive young American poet who went to Cuba last winter with few preconceptions and no political commitments. The powerful impact on him of what he saw and heard forms the central theme of these notes. We believe that many, many other young Americans would be similarly affected if they could visit Cuba as Mr. Schleifer did, though probably few could convey their thoughts and feelings as successfully. As you read ‘Cuban Notebook,’ you will come to understand better why Washington is so anxious to keep Americans from going to Cuba to see for themselves what is happening there.”
In “A Socialist Plea for Black Nationalism,” published in The Monthly Review of September 1963, Schleifer, writing of the civil rights struggle in the U.S., criticizes those who call for ‘integration’ in the current capitalist system. “If integration means a functioning, egalitarian, multi-racial society, there is no real integration in America, anywhere,” Schleifer claims. “I submit that real integration can only occur in America if there is a socialist revolution.”
In the same essay, Schleifer opens with an attack from the Left on the legacy of the New Deal. “Most of the time America is an ugly place to live in. All the ‘reforms’ only seem to have made it uglier. And more sophisticated in its evil . . . In the long run, what did the New Deal do? Besides the Smith Act? . . . The more I came to think of it the more I come to hate my brainwashed childhood’s beloved memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Everybody’s liberal Jewish middle-class parents will cry, like mine, if they ever read this. (“After all, didn’t he save the Jews and take us out of the Depression?”) Because I am a socialist and not a liberal, I know the answer.” Schleifer’s hostility to liberalism in general, and to “the Jewish middle class” was far from unique at the time. It was a hostility expressed by many young Jews who affiliated with the emerging New Left of the nineteen sixties.
Magazine Editor, Polemicist, Organizer
Schleifer was the founding editor of Kulchur. The title was in homage to Ezra Pound’s 1938 Guide to Kulchur, an anthology of essays on politics and the arts. Republished in 1952, the anthology influenced many writers and artists of Schleifer’s generation. The first issue of Kulchur was published in 1961. He edited the first three issues, and successfully solicited contributions from first-rank authors, Paul Bowles and William Burroughs among them. To elicit their literary contributions to his new journal Schleifer traveled to Tangiers, then a center of the Beat literary scene.
In all of his journalistic endeavors—starting with his Village Voice articles, through his editorship of Kulchur, and then in his decades as a Middle Eastern journalist writing in both English and Arabic—Schleifer maintained a skeptical, critical, and edgy tone. He was harshly critical of U.S. foreign policy in Cuba and Vietnam. With his conversion to Islam, his allegiances shifted, but not his critical tone. In the 1990s with the emergence of violent extremism in Islamist movements, Schleifer emerged as a vocal, potent, and influential critic of jihadi trend.
In his early 1960s essays in The Monthly Review, Schleifer praised Castro: “The man is great—Fidel, the ‘romantic’ hero, not only for his courage, humor, and stance, but also for the dynamic, the forces, and the series of human possibilities he has set into motion.” Of American critics of Castro, Schleifer wrote: “We know that 700 or so Cubans have been shot since the Revolution—our evening paper reminds us every other day—but how many know about the twenty thousand Cubans killed by Batista, and how many upon reading this will ask why they know about the seven hundred and don’t know about the twenty thousand?”
But by the mid-1960s Schleifer had become disillusioned with Castro and the Cuban revolutionary government. Cuba had been drawn into the Communist sphere and its revolution was Sovietized. In the 1990s, speaking of his Marxist past, one he rejected when he adopted Islam, Schleifer spoke of “the Stalinization of the quest for utopia. Be assured that when a leader promises you utopia on a Monday, he will be sure to open a concentration camp on that Friday.”
At the end of the 1960s, Schleifer was no longer Marc, but Abdallah, and no longer Jewish, but Muslim. And he was no longer writing for The Village Voice, but for European alternative media outlets. And unlike the news outlets in the U.S., whose enthusiasm for the Israeli military victory of 1967 seemed boundless, Schleifer, writing for Agence Presse France, was harshly critical of Israeli actions and policies. I avidly read his reporting, and the reporting of his European colleagues. Within Israel, there was little to no dissent in the mainstream press; the European alternative press was where you would find dissenting opinions. Not that evidence against Israel policies was lacking; rather it was glaringly apparent. But support from the outside was encouraging to those of us protesting against the government.
Schleifer in Tangiers
In the early 1960s Schleifer travelled to Morocco, where he had friends among the Beat poets and other American expatriates then flocking to Tangiers. Schleifer turned to Islam after an extended visit to those friends. But conversion was not part of his initial travel plan. He told an interviewer, “I decided to travel to Tangiers to visit my Beat compatriots . . . I wasn’t going out of an interest in Arabs or Islam.” But when his boat landed at Tangiers and he saw a large group of Muslims at prayer on the docks, Schleifer was struck by the fervor and intensity of their devotions. He associated this intensity with the only other traditional prayer he had witnessed, that of an Orthodox Jewish cantor prostrating himself on the ground during the Yom Kippur prayers. Schleifer told an interviewer that “In the early ’60s – in the Lower East Side, I passed by Synagogue – and it was Yom Kippur – they barely had a minyan. I saw the cantor fall in full prostration before the ark. I was stunned – he was putting himself in submission to God.” It was this sense of submission to God that Schleifer sought and found in Islam. “Reflecting on the Christian religious rituals he was exposed to before he converted to Islam, Schleifer said, “I still find the Christian Mass extraordinary, but I feel that truth was revealed to me in its Muslim form.”
Concerning his conversion, Schleifer said, “I was fleeing radical Leftism; in Casablanca I heard the call to prayer. The stevedores left their work lined up and started to pray. I was stunned. It took me back to the synagogue; that was a very important movement.” “This might offend Muslims,” Schleifer continued, “But I’m saying to myself, ‘These guys are more Jewish than the Jews.’ In fact, this would happen over and over again. I would see the traditional dress. It was Biblical dress. The Jews had abandoned this, but the Muslims had retained it. It was very beautiful.” Schleifer, a secular Jew whose childhood and education was devoid of Jewish religious content, viewed American Jewish life through a secular lens. For him, Jews were no longer a religious people. Muslims, in contrast, were. And in keeping what that conclusion, Schleifer wrote of the Bedouin, that they were “prototypes of those tribes of desert raiders, known as Hebrews, who drifted, like so many other Arabians who came to Palestine, from the wastelands near what is now Kuwait into the land of Canaan.”
One is reminded of Leopold Weiss-Muhammad Asad’s 1922 visit to Egypt, in which the sight of the Bedouin evoked for him the Biblical Israelites. For Schleifer, as for Weiss-Asad forty years earlier, the Muslim Arabs, and not the Jewish Zionists, were the living heirs and exemplars of Biblical tradition. Muslims followed their religion, Islam. The Jewish Zionists that Weiss-Asad and Marc Schleifer knew did not follow their religion, or any other religion. They were assertively secularist. For both Weiss-Asad and Schleifer, each of whom turned to Islam after sojourns in the Arab world, Muslims were the authentic heirs of the deep past, that of the Ancient Near East and Biblical Israel. Their own Jewish parents had abandoned the worship of God; these converts would return to that worship in the form of Islam.
Of this period in Tangiers Schleifer wrote, “I was in a spiritual crisis, aware that seeking truth through experiences has an element of self-destruction. For example, drugs. We were living in the Medina,” he wrote, “it was extraordinarily beautiful. What struck me was that people were doing what God wanted them to do.”
In Tangiers, Schleifer and friends had access to an unregulated supply of hashish. “People ask me where I learned about Islam and I have to say it was through my hash dealer . . . He was a Muslim. He was a believer and he would always amaze me.” It was through this drug dealer that Schleifer was introduced to daily life in an Islamic city. “I was deeply moved by the beauty of it all,” he wrote, “by the organic composition of the traditional city and the beauty of Islamic architecture and traditional costume.”
Schleifer continued:
- “In Tangiers, I wanted to see Paul Bowles and have him contribute to Kulchur. The Beats were then living in this medina—and we rented these beautiful houses and turned them into Beat pads.
“I was living in a religious community, how incredible! I had never experienced it. This is totally deft, it’s out of time. There is a truth especially coming out of Marxism and its relativity—I sensed that it’s that these people believed in God. This sent me into a nervous breakdown, a visionary journey to hell. God finds you where He will. I knew that hell was real. Coming out of that breakdown I finally got back to America.
After that horrible bus trip, I picked up my copy of the Qur’an. I was getting nowhere with the text. But then I treated the Qur’an like I Ching. ‘God, if you are there give me a sign.’ The text that my fingers found was ‘Know that you cannot comprehend God, but God comprehends us all.’ That’s how I became a Muslim.”
Asked a few years after his conversion why he had become a Muslim, Schleifer said that “years ago, then an atheist and beyond thought of faith, I became obsessed with roots, with the grace and mysteries of the Semite, and held on to this for some sort of sustenance. . . . I had visited North Africa and discovered in Arabic – Islamic thought and gesture the quintessence of the Semitic.”
When he was initiated into a Sufi order, Schleifer’s Shaykh told him that there were three approaches to God: the devotional, the metaphysical, and the aesthetic. When he first became a Muslim the first two approaches seemed alien, inaccessible, unattainable. But as a lover of art and architecture, the aesthetic path was the closest to his heart. And just as Schleifer was moved by the beauty he saw in a traditional Islamic city, he was repelled by what he saw when he returned from Morocco to the U.S. “The first day I’m back in New York,” he wrote, “I get on a crowded bus. Everyone’s squashed together. Nobody is talking to each other. Nobody looks at one another. Everyone is completely alone in the crowd. It’s very depressing. It’s just the opposite of Morocco. . . . It was grim, lonely, and miserable. There was no beauty in the way people were living.” In 1962 soon after his return to New York, Schleifer converted to Islam at a mosque in Brooklyn. On conversion he took the name Sulayman Abdallah Sharif Schleifer. A year later he took a journalism job in Jordanian Jerusalem as editor of the Jerusalem Star.
In Jerusalem, 1965-1968
From Jews to Muslims: Twentieth-Century Converts to Islam by Shalom Goldman. Click here to buy.
Soon after Schleifer’s conversion to Islam, he attached himself to a Sufi Shaykh, and in 1965 moved to Jordanian Jerusalem to study with him. Sufism’s mystical teachings had a profound influence on him. In Jerusalem he served as the editor of “The Jerusalem Star,” the city’s English-language newspaper. He lived within the walls of Old City, in an apartment overlooking the Noble Sanctuary, the Haram-al-Sharif. In his 1972 book The Fall of Jerusalem, Schleifer vividly evoked this setting. “The soul of this city rests in Haram-al-Sharif—the ‘Noble Sanctuary’ where history and traditions posit the presence of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Jesus, Mary, and Muhammad. … Thirty-four acres, leveled and tiered . . . the Haram is guarded by high walls and massive gates through which passage has always been a sacramental or at least a solemn occasion.”
Schleifer’s residence was in a Mamluk era building next to Bab al-Silsileh, one of the gates to the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. In the early 1930s, that building was the residence of Haj Amin al Husseini, the Palestinian leader who later fled to Berlin and collaborated with the Nazis. In his account of the 1967 battle for Jerusalem, Schleifer wrote that while living in this building he often thought of Husseini. “It was in these very rooms where I now live and work that he lived, as Mufti of Jerusalem, in those turbulent thirties. And it was from the hidden stairwell in my garden that he took flight from the British, spurred on by the moral flaw that was to lead him to Berlin, to those architects of terrible crimes for which a guilty West would yet make innocent Palestine pay.”
Schleifer was in Jerusalem when the Israelis conquered the eastern part of the city in the 1967 War. In The Fall of Jerusalem Schleifer describes the battle for control of the city in vivid, gripping detail. “Serious hand-to-hand combat” was the order of the day, he wrote. As to the conduct of the battle for the Old City, Schleifer wrote that “the Israeli’s combat style and manner of movement were reminiscent of the American Army. The Israelis are shrewd, but it is the wisdom of Harvard Law School, not of Solomon. For all the biblical publicity puffs, they had fought here in Jerusalem, as elsewhere, with all the cautious, long-range planning, and technology of any modern industrial state.”
Schleifer reported on the post-war looting by Israelis of shops and homes in East Jerusalem. Though looting was limited, intrusive “sightseeing” by Israeli soldiers and civilians was not. Schleifer’s apartment in the Haram complex was continually ‘visited’ by Israelis, unannounced. “It was as if,” Schleifer wrote, “the Arabs (and presumably people like ourselves who lived among them) were but phantom caretakers of a vast Israeli Museum of the Imagination. The rights of the Arabs to their homes was unacknowledged by the Israelis at an emotional level that, at best, inferred provisional tolerance for the physical presence of the caretakers.”
Especially disturbing to Schleifer was the Israeli destruction of Bab al-Magharaba, the neighborhood adjacent to the Western Wall. As Schleifer remembered it, “Bab al-Magharaba had been a pleasant and architecturally distinctive quarter of freshly whitewashed roof terraces, gardens, and neat unattached houses built in North African-style several hundred years ago to house Moroccan soldiers garrisoning Jerusalem for the Ottomans. There were more than 130 buildings in the Quarter, including two mosques, in an area equivalent to three square city blocks. The day the bulldozing began, the Quarter was described in the Jerusalem Post as a slum; two days later it was reported as having been by and large abandoned during the siege. I expect in time that its existence will vanish altogether from the pages of developing Zionist history.”
For Israel and its supporters throughout the Western world, Jerusalem was now “unified.” For the Arab residents of the city, and for their supporters throughout the Arab and wider Muslim world, Jerusalem and its inhabitants were conquered and occupied. Schleifer pointed out that the Israeli conquest resulted in the exile of many Palestinians, the majority of whom were now thrown into exile a second time. First in 1948, they had fled to refugee camps in the West Bank. In 1967, tens of thousands of these same refugees, and their children, fled from East Jerusalem and the West Bank to camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
While reporting from Jerusalem in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 War, Schleifer encountered some ardent American supporters of Israel and wrote scathingly about them. Of the Israeli victory of 1967 and of Zionism in general, Schleifer was very critical. He wrote that “The Fall of Jerusalem on June 7, 1967—859 years to the day since the Crusader armies first appeared before the walls of the Holy City—and the occupation that has followed, are a microcosm of the fate of all Palestine and of the entire Arab-Israeli conflict.” For Schleifer, as for Muhammad Asad, Maxime Rodinson, and many other European intellectuals, the 1967 Israeli victory was a continuation of the Crusades, and of the Crusader Kingdoms established in their aftermath. Zionism, the political movement whose aim was the establishment of a Jewish state, was for Israel’s critics both a return of the Crusader ethos and an extension of European colonialism in the Middle East. Schleifer wrote that “Like the Crusader Kingdoms, Israel (and before it, the Zionist movement) pursues its own policies but always remains dependent on the Western powers of the time for financial, political, and occasional military support.” And of Israel’s political and military success, Schleifer wrote, “The idea that Europeans, by nature of any number of superior spiritual, historic, or cultural rights, were justified to directly colonize the rest of the world . . . has not been fashionable since the end of the World War II.”
Unlike other journalists reporting from the Arab world, Schleifer followed closely the debates within Israel about the conduct of the 1967 War and the imposition of the occupation on the residents of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. At this point in Israeli history dissenting Jewish opinions were most often expressed in private communications between Israelis and in occasional journalistic pieces. Through a group of Israeli expatriates in London, Schleifer acquired a copy of a letter by Amos Kenan, a prominent Israeli journalist, novelist, and graphic artist. His weekly column in the prominent daily newspaper, Yediot Aharanot was immensely popular. As a soldier in a unit fighting the Jordanian army in the West Bank, Kenan witnessed the demolition of Beit Nuba, a conquered Palestinian village. In a letter to Israeli newspaper editors and politicians, Kenan wrote of the brutality of the army’s treatment of the villagers and the total destruction of their homes. “The fields,” Kenan stated, “were turned into wasteland in front of our eyes. The children who went crying on the road will be fedayeen (guerilla fighters) in nineteen years, in the next round. Thus we have lost the victory.”
Schleifer’s 1972 book The Fall of Jerusalem elicited impassioned responses. Kirkus Reviews called it “one of the most impressive books to date on the June War of 1967. It is exceptional for its subtlety and historical grasp, going well beyond the rhetoric of Leftist sympathizers with Arab nationalism and pseudo-revolutionary Third World regimes.” And The Library Journal noted that “Schleifer’s account is infused with rare insight and a very well-written, in depth analysis of the Arab perspective on Palestine and Israel. This book is a worthwhile contribution to a balanced survey of the Region’s politics.”
In a 1973 review, John K. Cooley, Middle East correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, noted that six years had passed since the 1967 War, and “it is good at last to have an account of that war from a Western-trained writer and journalist … one who lived through it. His book is well-researched and documented, as well as written with vision, style, and grace.” Cooley noted that while most of Schleifer’s criticism in The Fall of Jerusalem was directed at the Israelis, he does not spare the Arab states and combatants. In Schleifer’s view, their efforts on behalf of the Palestinians were half-hearted at best, and the military assistance they offered in the battle for Jerusalem was incompetent. This is to say that in his book on the war Schleifer’s customary critical edge and tone were applied to both the Israelis and the Arab states, though not in equal measure. And it was this critical edge that led to the Arabic translation of Schleifer’s book being banned in the Kingdom of Jordan.
Schleifer attributed the failure of the Arab regimes to provide strong support for the Palestinians of Jerusalem and the West Bank to “an indifference and cynicism bred by the corruption of ruling elites, coupled with underdevelopment, susceptibility to Western pressure, and the difficulty of sustaining ‘Arab nation’ unity.”
To Amman, Beirut, and Cairo
After the Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Schleifer spent one more year in Jerusalem, writing for the New York Times and other newspapers. He then moved to Amman, Jordan, and from there to Beirut, Lebanon. During those years, from 1968 to 1972, he covered the Middle East for Jeune Afrique and other European journals. In 1975 NBC television asked him to head the network’s Middle East staff. And for professional purposes, they asked him to write as Marc Schleifer, not Abdallah; a request to which Schleifer assented. Schleifer relocated from Beirut to set up NBC’s Middle East New Bureau in Cairo. He held that job until 1983, then joined the journalism faculty of the American University in Cairo, where he established the Kamal Adham Center for Television Journalism. His talents as an editor, organizer, and coordinator were now given full expression. During his time in Cairo Schleifer was described in this way by a visiting Western journalist: “He is a gangly, wiry-haired man, six feet five inches tall, sporting a goatee that harked back to his beatnik period in the 1950s. Schleifer bore a striking resemblance to the poet Ezra Pound.”
In addition to journalism, Schleifer, in this period, wrote a number of scholarly articles. In The Islamic Quarterly of January 1979, he published an essay on Palestinian resistance figure Izz-id-Din al-Qassam (1882-1947), in which he described the political context for the emergence of al-Qassam’s anti-British and anti-Zionist activism. Schleifer notes that in the 1930s Qassam moved to Haifa to organize the Arab port and factory workers. Qassam’s supporters were particularly harsh towards Palestinians who sold land to Jews. These purchases would most often take place through a system of Arab agents who purchased land in their own names, then resold it to Jewish buyers. Qassam’s followers would threaten the buyers and agents, telling them that if they didn’t leave Palestine, they would be executed. “In Haifa,” Schleifer wrote, “all the effects of sudden development and the peculiar characteristics of the settler-colonization of Palestine were compounded . . . The same transformation of Palestine by British colonial rule that was creating a new Palestinian Muslim working class was also preparing the country for the establishment of a Zionist settler society and state. The traditional Palestinian elites were incapable of responding to either phenomenon.” For Schleifer this was the essence of “the political history of the Palestinian struggle against Zionism, and in particular the inability of the traditional leadership to lead that struggle with dedication, perseverance, and intelligence.”
Responses to Islamic Extremism
In the 1980s and ’90s Schleifer condemned both the extremism of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the emergence of terrorism as a political weapon against Western and Muslim targets. Like Muhammad Asad before him, Schleifer refuted the claims of Islamist extremists that they had religious authority. Unlike most pundits who wrote about the al-Qaeda leadership without having ever met them, Schleifer actually knew these leaders and had interviewed them in Egypt the 1980s before they came to world prominence in the nineteen nineties. As NBC Middle East bureau chief in Cairo, Schleifer had interviewed Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who would later serve as Osama bin Laden’s second in command, and after Bin Laden’s death as head of the organization. Following their initial meeting, Schleifer had the unique opportunity to interview Ayman Al-Zawahiri a number of times over a twenty-year period—from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Thus as al-Qaeda dominated the news he was among the best-informed Arab journalists concerning that group.
In the mid-1970s, the Islamist movement grew among student activists in Cairo and other Egyptian cities. The radicalization of these university students alarmed Egypt’s Western-oriented political and cultural elites. As Lawrence Wright noted in The Looming Tower, Schleifer, then the bureau chief for NBC news, “quickly sensed the shift in the student movement in Egypt. Young Islamic activists were appearing in the campuses—within a mere four years, the Islamic group completely dominated the campuses, and for the first time in the living memory of most Egyptians, male students stopped trimming their beards and female students donned the veil.”
It was through a mutual friend that Schleifer met Ayman al-Zawahari, who became Schleifer’s guide to the Islamist transformation of many of Egypt’s students. Zawahari, then a medical student, boasted to Schleifer that the medical and engineering departments were the places where the Islamists had their most successful recruiting. Thus began a twenty-year association between the American Jewish convert to Islam and the radicalized Muslim medical student who would eventually become Osama bin-Laden’s second in command—and after bin-Laden’s death—the commander of Al-Qaeda. Schleifer remembered al-Zawahari remarking that their differences were rooted in the differences between a Sufi and a fundamentalist. Schleifer as a Sufi objected to violence; al-Zawahari endorsed and glorified the armed struggle.
When a senior Al-Jazeera journalist referred to Osama bin Laden’s “religious knowledge,” Schleifer pointed out that the scholars at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University vigorously contested that description. “From an Orthodox, Azhari perspective,” Schleifer said, “all of those fatwas that Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri issued . . . were totally off the wall and were thoroughly condemned.”
The reader will recall Abdallah Schleifer’s initial reaction to the natural beauty of Tangiers and its traditional Islamic architecture—and to the physical beauty of the Moroccans and their traditional dress. We recall his description of the Haram al-Sharif: “the Haram is guarded by high walls and massive gates through which passage has always been a sacramental or at least a solemn occasion.” In keeping with these aesthetic preferences Schleifer planned his own traditional home. The house that Schleifer built in Egypt’s Fayoum Oasis (some eighty miles from Cairo) reflects that spiritual aesthetic. Built in 1992 in a style that Schleifer describes as “Zen Sufi,” the house combines Middle Eastern and Far Eastern design. Of his house, Schleifer said, “I am interested in all the traditional architectures and feel at home in them because they are joined by a beauty oriented towards the spiritual. They all share the idea of containing a divine presence, which is why there is a sense of the divine in here.”
Journalism in the 2000s
In 2006-7 Schleifer served as the Washington Bureau Chief for the Dubai-based, Saudi-owned news channel, Al-Arabiya. And during the Tahrir uprising in Cairo in 2011 Schleifer reported for Al Jazeera. His years of reporting, and of mentoring a generation of Arab journalists, enabled him, to write a series of informed essays on trends in the Arab press, especially as related to Israel.
In his 2007 Templeton Lecture, “Media and Religion in the Arab-Islamic World,” Schleifer presented his analysis of how the Arab-Israeli conflict had been transformed over the decades from a political-military conflict to a religious conflict.
The transformation of a clash that, however much religion may get involved or exploited, is nevertheless between two rival nationalisms, Arab and Israeli (or Palestinian and Israeli) into a total confrontation between two religions, Judaism and Islam, a perspective that has been popularized not just in Palestine but throughout the Arab and Muslim world. As always happens with extremist perspectives, this is absolutely mirrored by the ultra rightwing religious nationalist forces in Israel and their supporters in America.
Schleifer retired from the directorship of the Kamal Adham Center in 2005, and continued to report on Middle Eastern affairs as an independent journalist. He is a member of The Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), and a Senior Fellow at Royal Institute for Islamic Thought in Jordan.
Just as he questioned the religious authority of al-Qaeda in the 1990s, he questioned the authority of ISIS in the 2000s. In response to the 2014 beheading of journalist James Foley by ISIS fighters, Schleifer, wrote an impassioned condemnation of ISIS’ actions and of their leadership’s claim to religious authority:
- As an American Muslim and as a journalist, I am more than appalled by the murder of James Foley and the murder video. If I were king of whatever/wherever, I would go to war to wipe out these Islamic State perverts—perverters not just of Islam, but of all the decencies known to all men and women of all the traditional faiths and to all men and women of just simple decent feelings. And not just for James Foley, brave soul that he was. But for all the victims of this atrocity that is called the “Islamic State.” The grand muftis of Saudi Arabia and Egypt know these killers by their proper name: heretics, defilers of Islam. In the words of Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh of Saudi Arabia, both ISIS and al-Qaeda are ‘enemy number one of Islam.’
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