Middle East Quarterly


Middle East Quarterly is a quarterly journal, a publication of the think tank Middle East Forum founded by Daniel Pipes in 1994. It is devoted to subjects relating to the Middle East and Islam, and analyzes the region "explicitly from the viewpoint of American interests". From its inception, content in MEQ was not peer-reviewed because its editors felt that most experts in the field were insufficiently devoted to advancing American interests. In 2009, the editors of MEQ stated that it would institute peer review, utilizing expert reviewers whom the editors deemed "not hostile to the United States and its allies".

Overview

Middle East Quarterlys publisher, the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, is a think tank founded in 1990 by historian and columnist Daniel Pipes, who also serves as its director. The Forum founded Middle East Quarterly in 1994.
According to the Middle East Forum, Middle East Quarterly deals with "Middle Eastern affairs". It states that:
"olicy-makers, opinion-makers, academics, and journalists" consult it "for in-depth analysis of the rapidly-changing landscape of the world's most volatile region" and that it publishes "groundbreaking studies, exclusive interviews, insightful commentary, and hard-hitting reviews that tackle the entire range of contemporary concerns – from politics to economics to culture, across a region that stretches from Morocco to Afghanistan."

One of its goals was also to provide a voice to academics who felt that the mainstream academic press was not giving voice to their views on Islam. Until 2009, it did no peer review, leaving nearly all publishing decisions with its editors. The MEQ website explained then that "The Quarterly has become an outlet of choice for policy practitioners and senior scholars secure in their tenure and displeased with the ideological rigidity of the peer-reviewed journals." According to its founder Daniel Pipes, "In the halls of academe, the Quarterly delivers a welcome balance to the many materials that relentlessly attack the United States and Israel."
Edited by Efraim Karsh, it is published in print, and all but the current issue are also available as full texts from the website of the Middle East Forum, which does provide links to full texts of some selected current articles. In 2009, MEQ introduced peer review both to improve the quality of articles and "to give junior faculty an opportunity, while building their careers, to express their views freely."

Reception

, professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, accused MEQ of making "scurrilous attacks on people".
Christopher A. Bail, professor of sociology, public policy and data science at Duke University, describes MEQ as a "pseudo-academic" journal with editorial board members who share an ideological outlook, adding that while it appears to present legitimate academic research, it is regularly criticized "as a channel for anti-Muslim polemics".