Zeyno Baran

Zeyno Baran (born January 31, 1972) is a Turkish American scholar on issues ranging from US-Turkey relations to Islamist ideology to energy security in Europe and Asia. She was the Director of the Center for Eurasian Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank based in Washington D.C.. From January 2003 until joining the Hudson Institute in April 2006, she worked as the Director of International Security and Energy Programs for the The Nixon Center. Baran also worked as the Director of the Caucasus Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies from 1999 until December 2002.

She is married to Matthew Bryza, former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan and has a daughter.

One of Baran's key areas of specialization is countering the spread of radical Turkish Islamist ideology in Europe and Eurasia. She has worked to foster the tolerant integration of Muslims into Western societies, arguing that the creation of "parallel societies" within a state's broader society will only encourage intolerance and extremism on both sides.

Baran has criticized European and American governments for working too closely with groups or individuals that she claims espouse an Islamist ideology. She argues that such engagement actually works against U.S. and European interests. Baran wrote an article for The Weekly Standard on this very subject. In it, she advocates a kind of "litmus test" for deciding who and what type of Muslim groups the U.S. government should engage with. Baran argues that "the deciding factor must be ideology: Is the group Islamist or not?"

She believes that the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbullah, and Hizb ut-Tahrir fail her test.

Baran's Hizb ut-Tahrir: Islam's Political Insurgency, published in 2004, asserted that Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international Islamist organization, is a "conveyor belt for radicalism and terrorism." She qualified her statement by saying, "While HT as an organization does not engage in terrorist activities, it has become the vanguard of the radical Islamist ideology that encourages its followers to commit terrorist acts."

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Wikipedia