In 1984, a sixteen-year-old boy walked into a firefight in Tripoli, Lebanon. Bernard Haykel (b. 1968) survived by luck. His parents, a French-Lebanese surgeon raised in Guadeloupe and an American mother of Polish descent, had come to Lebanon on their honeymoon in 1967 and stayed. Nine years of civil war had taught the family what a confessional map looks like when it turns into a military one. The near miss settled the question. They sent their son to the United States to finish high school.
Haykel’s father spent the war in operating rooms, repairing what militias did to bodies. His son watched Sunni Islamist militants take over Tripoli’s streets and, at a distance, watched clerics take over a state in Iran in 1979. Most Western social science of that era treated religion as a dependent variable, a costume worn by class interest or anti-colonial grievance. A boy in Tripoli could see it functioning as an independent one. Theology decided which checkpoint you could pass, which militia held your neighborhood, which government claimed your obedience. Haykel later built a scholarly method on the premise that ideas of God organize armies, and that anyone who dismisses this is describing a different planet.
He grew up a polyglot among identities: Arabic, French, and English; Christian, Muslim, and Jewish milieus; Lebanese streets and American schools. He has said this formation left him permanently unsettled, and that he prefers it that way. Decades later, , he put the method in one line: “I think confusion is underrated.”
At Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service he studied international politics and considered diplomacy. At Oxford the plan dissolved. He took an M.A., an M.Phil., and a D.Phil. in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, finishing the doctorate in 1998. Two teachers marked him. Wilferd Madelung (1930-2023), the great historian of early Islamic sects, drilled into him the discipline of the original text: read the Arabic, reconstruct the argument, place it in its century. The anthropologist Paul Dresch, who had lived among Yemeni tribes, taught the opposite discipline: a text means nothing until you know who reads it, who pays the reader, and whose cousin holds the rifle outside the mosque. Haykel fused the two. Texts without society produce fantasy. Society without texts produces a Middle East where nobody believes anything, which is a fantasy of another kind.
A Fulbright took him to Yemen in 1992 and 1993, and Yemen made him. Sanaa in those years still ran on manuscripts, tribal mediation, and scholars who traced their learning through chains of teachers going back centuries. Haykel worked in that world with the languages to read it and the patience to sit in it. His dissertation, published by Cambridge in 2003 as Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkani, centered on the Yemeni jurist Muhammad al-Shawkani (1759-1834).
Al-Shawkani came out of Zaydi Shiism, the school that had ruled highland Yemen through an imamate for a thousand years, and turned on its scholarly establishment. He championed ijtihad, the right of a qualified scholar to reason from Quran and hadith, and attacked taqlid, deference to the accumulated rulings of the legal schools. Haykel’s insight was to read this as a fight over power, without reducing it to one. A scholar who bypasses the school bypasses the men who run the school. Al-Shawkani’s method stripped authority from hereditary Zaydi elites and pushed Yemeni religious culture toward a Sunni, scripturalist orientation. Legal method redistributed social position. The book also broke the standard genealogy that traced Islamic revival to central Arabia or nineteenth-century Cairo. Yemen had its own revival, running on its own arguments.
The larger point traveled well beyond Yemen. Once a tradition licenses the individual reader to judge the inherited authorities, the license goes wherever readers go. It can produce a quietist purist, a parliamentary Islamist, or a man with a suicide belt. The method does not choose. Circumstances choose.
Haykel joined New York University in 1998 and earned tenure there. Princeton recruited him as full professor in 2007, into a department that Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) had helped make famous and that still prized philology, medieval sources, and command of languages. Haykel fit the tradition and cut against it. Like the old school, he insists that classical texts exert independent force on history. Against the grand civilizational narrative, he starts small: this community, this legal text, this prince, this tribe. He directed Princeton’s Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia from 2007 to 2023, ran its Near Eastern Studies program and its oil and energy project, and taught courses that moved from eighth-century jurisprudence to spot prices for crude.
His central subject became Salafism, the movement claiming to recover the practice of Islam’s first generations, the salaf. Haykel mapped its internal geography with a care that most journalism never manages. Quietist Salafis concentrate on creed and ritual and often preach obedience to rulers as a lesser evil than civil war. Activist Salafis contest elections. Jihadi-Salafis wage war on governments they deem apostate. Saudi Wahhabi clerics, who share much of the Salafi vocabulary, have spent decades condemning al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda has returned the compliment by marking them as court scholars of an infidel state. Keeping these distinctions straight protected Haykel from the two standard errors: treating every bearded literalist as a bomb in waiting, and treating jihadist theology as an invention with no roots in Islamic law. Militants select, simplify, and radicalize materials that the tradition contains. Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328) wrote with far more qualification than the men who wave his fatwas, and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) founded a movement whose Saudi heirs mostly defend the throne. The genealogy runs through selection, never through simple descent.
Haykel also declined the comfortable explanation that Saudi money built global Salafism. Money spread the books and built the mosques. Money cannot explain why a Birmingham engineer or a Cairo student finds certainty in them, or why so many Salafi militants turned their guns on Riyadh. He points instead to mass literacy, urbanization, collapsed scholarly hierarchies, and the modern conviction that a man can open the sources and judge for himself. Salafism claims the seventh century and depends on the twentieth: print, cassette, satellite, broadband.
After September 11, 2001, this expertise acquired a market. Haykel studied al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula through its sermons, legal rulings, and online magazines, and through the tribal politics that sheltered it. In a 2010 federal court declaration he stated that he regularly advised the CIA, the State Department, and branches of the armed forces. His standing counsel ran against the bureaucratic instinct to treat “al-Qaeda” as a corporation with a headquarters. In Yemen the label often covered marriage alliances, tribal protection rackets, local feuds, and the occasional manipulation by government officials who find jihadists useful. Doctrine mattered, and doctrine acted through kinship, patronage, and state failure.
Then came February 2015, and the scene that made him a public name. Graeme Wood (b. 1979) published “What ISIS Really Wants” in The Atlantic, and built the article’s spine from Haykel’s analysis. Wood reported that every academic he asked about the Islamic State’s ideology sent him to the same office in Princeton. Haykel told him that Muslims who declared the group un-Islamic held “a cotton-candy view of their own religion,” one that skipped what the tradition had historically and legally required. The Islamic State, he argued, read seventh-century norms of war with obsessive seriousness and carried medieval legal materials into the present.
The article detonated. Muslim scholars, pundits, and academics accused Haykel of handing the Islamic State the religious legitimacy it craved. Fred Clark, a progressive Christian blogger, wrote that Haykel’s language matched the script fundamentalists always use against non-fundamentalists. Within days Haykel gave an interview to ThinkProgress to draw his own lines. Asked whether Islamic texts necessitate a group like ISIS, he answered: “There is nothing predetermined in Islam that would lead to ISIS.” Muslims who condemned the group stood fully inside the tradition, he said, and calling them lesser Muslims was absurd. He also noted what Wood’s article had left in shadow: the Islamic State’s reading was ahistorical, a pretense that a millennium of Islamic legal development never happened.
His position, stated in full, satisfied nobody, which suggests he had described something real. The Islamic State argued from Islamic revelation, law, and history; a scholar who declared those arguments irrelevant because they were repellent had quit the scholarly enterprise. At the same time, the movement grew from the American invasion of Iraq, Sunni exclusion, the Syrian collapse, sectarian rule, and a generation of jobless young men. In January 2016 he carried both halves into a Senate hearing room and testified that the Islamic State pursued an “austere, intolerant, and muscular vision of Islam,” and that ignoring either its ideas or its circumstances failed the analysis. He added that the caliphate’s female morality police, demolition videos, and slick online propaganda had no precedent in the Prophet’s Arabia. The restoration of the past was itself a modern product.
With the literary scholar Robyn Creswell, Haykel opened a stranger door into the same house. Their 2015 New Yorker essay “Battle Lines” examined the verse that militants write in classical Arabic meters: elegies for dead fighters, odes to leaders, laments for prisoners, poems that began as tweets. They introduced readers to Ahlam al-Nasr, the young woman celebrated as the Poetess of the Islamic State. Analysts had ignored this material as decoration. Creswell and Haykel argued the opposite: the beheading videos address foreigners, while poetry offers a window onto the movement talking to itself. In verse, the militant acquires ancestors, brothers, a code of honor, and a death that means something. Doctrine recruits the mind. Poetry recruits the rest.
Saudi Arabia had been in his file since the 1990s, and it slowly moved to the center. He co-edited Saudi Arabia in Transition (2015) with Thomas Hegghammer and Stéphane Lacroix, a volume that broke the kingdom into its parts: rival princes, clerical factions, merchant networks, restless women, tribes, technocrats, and a young population raised on satellite television and expecting more than the old bargain offered. The old bargain itself he described with clarity. The House of Saud held the sword. The heirs of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab held the pulpit, the courts, and the schools, and preached obedience to the dynasty in exchange. Unequal from the start, the arrangement still gave clerics real power over daily life. Oil paid for all of it and shaped the citizen’s relation to the state: subjects of patronage rather than taxpayers with claims.
Then Mohammed bin Salman (b. 1985) broke the bargain, and Haykel found himself closer to a subject than scholars usually get. He met the crown prince repeatedly and exchanged messages with him in Arabic over WhatsApp. He denies the title of adviser and says he offered blunt views when asked, including a detailed warning that Saudi Arabia could not defeat the Houthis by force. He supported major elements of the program: caging the religious police, moving women into public life and employment, cutting clerical power, diversifying an oil economy. He read the project itself with a colder eye than either its promoters or its critics. Mohammed bin Salman has not secularized the state. He has nationalized religious authority, placing the clerics inside boundaries the ruler draws. Saudi nationalism, entertainment, technology, and loyalty to the dynasty now compete with piety as sources of legitimacy. This explains a paradox that confuses outsiders: women drive and concerts play while clerics, feminists, princes, and businessmen sit in prison. The state relaxes social rules because it alone now decides which rules exist.
The murder of Jamal Khashoggi (1958-2018) in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 turned Haykel’s access into his liability. Critics asked what a Princeton professor was doing on the crown prince’s phone. In an April 2019 interview with Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, Haykel condemned the killing, called the imprisonment and alleged torture of women activists inexcusable, said political prisoners should be charged or released, and defended his engagement, disclosing his contacts and his business interests in the region under questioning that was designed to draw blood. He kept one warning constant: destroying or destabilizing the Saudi state might repeat, at larger scale, the catastrophes he had studied in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and the one he had survived in Lebanon. His realism gives heavy weight to order and to the horror of collapse. His critics answer that such realism shades into apology for a man who dismembers journalists. The tension sits unresolved in his public record, and he seems to accept living with it.
On Yemen he never wavered. He called the Saudi war unwinnable from early on. The Houthis, in his account, grew from Zaydi history, tribal politics, and state failure; Iranian and Hezbollah support strengthened a movement that Yemen itself produced. Riyadh might have done better with its traditional tools, patronage and bargaining among tribes and notables, than with air power. He considers the Houthis authoritarian and radical, and he considers the conspiracy theory of their existence a recipe for bad strategy. Dresch’s training shows here. Firepower does not govern a society embedded in its own loyalties.
Honors accumulated: a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010, a board seat at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington until December 2025, a senior fellowship at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Nelson Mandela Chair in Afro-Asian Studies at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala in 2023, Luce Foundation support for research on Muslims in India, election to the American Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2024. As of 2026 he is completing The Realm: MBS and the Transformation of Saudi Arabia for Penguin Press, the book toward which thirty years of Arabian research has been converging: the story of a religiously legitimated oil monarchy remade into a nationalist, centralizing, socially liberalizing autocracy.
He is married to Navina Najat Haidar, curator of Islamic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and daughter of a former Indian foreign secretary. They met at Oxford. The marriage joins two approaches to the same civilization: he reads it through law, theology, and power; she reads it through miniature painting, architecture, and the museum case.
The through-line of Haykel’s work is a refusal that costs him something in every camp. He refuses to reduce jihadism to poverty or blowback, which angers those who want Islam held harmless. He refuses to read texts as machines that manufacture behavior, which angers those who want Islam indicted. He refuses to treat Saudi repression as disqualifying his engagement with Saudi power, which angers human-rights advocates, and he refuses to soften his judgment of the Yemen war, which cannot please Riyadh. The boy from Tripoli learned early that theology moves men and that states, when they fail, fail onto the bodies of surgeons’ patients. His scholarship holds both lessons at once and declines to let either one win.
Notes
Childhood, firefight, parents’ honeymoon, Madelung, and the “confusion is underrated” quote: Phil Zabriskie, “The Arab Spring, a Season Later,” Princeton Alumni Weekly.
Wood article, “cotton-candy view,” goatee description, Wood describes Haykel talking through a “Mephistophelian goatee,” a status detail you may want, “smack in the middle of the medieval tradition”: Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” The Atlantic, March 2015.
Haykel’s pushback, “nothing predetermined in Islam,” ahistorical reading, defense of Muslim critics of ISIS: Jack Jenkins, “What The Atlantic Left Out About ISIS According To Their Own Expert,” ThinkProgress, February 20, 2015.
Fred Clark‘s criticism, the fundamentalist-script charge: “Scholar Clarifies, Walks Back His Comments in Atlantic ISIS Essay,” Slacktivist, February 21, 2015.
Senate testimony, January 20, 2016, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, source of “austere, intolerant, and muscular” and the two-sided failure warning: Bernard Haykel testimony.
Jihadi poetry, Ahlam al-Nasr, poetry as the movement talking to itself: Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel, “Battle Lines,” The New Yorker, June 8, 2015.
Chotiner interview covering WhatsApp contact, denial of adviser role, Khashoggi, business interests, women activists: Isaac Chotiner, “A Middle Eastern Studies Professor Interprets Mohammed bin Salman,” The New Yorker, April 2019.
Career dates, institute directorship 2007-2023, Mandela Chair, Academy election, AGSIW board through December 2025: Wikipedia, Bernard Haykel.
FDD fellowship and The Realm (Penguin Press): Foundation for Defense of Democracies profile.
Recent Haykel commentary with Lebanon reflections, tennis beside the bombing image, his description of the Lebanese as resilient: Bloomberg weekend interview with Mishal Husain, 2026.
Extrapolations made without a link, which I judge self-evident: the surgeon father treating war wounded as a daily reality of Tripoli in the civil war; Sanaa in 1992-1993 as a manuscript and tribal-mediation culture, well documented generally, and consistent with Dresch‘s ethnography; the description of Oxford training and Princeton’s departmental character; the WhatsApp detail is sourced to the Chotiner interview.
