Lulu Schwartz

In 2020, under the name Stephen (Lulu) Schwartz, Schwartz ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in District 3. She came in fourth, with 1,374 votes (4.82 percent of the vote). The winner was Aaron Peskin.

On March 25, 2005, Schwartz launched the Center for Islamic Pluralism. The center is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., with Schwartz as executive director.

She has been an adherent of the Hanafi school of Islam since 1997. She was a major intellectual figure in the neo-conservative movement that held considerable influence in the administration of George W. Bush. Her criticism of Islamic Fundamentalism, especially the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, has attracted controversy. Alongside fellow neo-conservative writer Daniel Pipes, Schwartz has been a major critic of Islamism; which she accuse of being the new ideological nemesis of the West after the fall of Nazi Germany and Soviet Union.

At the end of 1997, she converted to Islam. In 1999, Schwartz left the Chronicle, and moved to Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she lived for the next 18 months.

In the 1990s, Schwartz spent a decade as a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. She was a member of the local union at the Chronicle, a branch of the Newspaper Guild. During the NATO bombing of Serbia, Schwartz published a piece in the Chronicle accusing the Serbs of countless crimes while absolving the Albanians and the KLA of all responsibility and brushing all Serb arguments as mere propaganda. The article was criticized by journalist Robert W. Merry for being tendentiously biased and highly inaccurate.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian wrote of Schwartz in 1989: "As he himself readily admits, Schwartz has made a lot of enemies over the years as he performed a series of dizzying ideological leaps: from the Industrial Workers of the World to meeting with Oliver North and the Outreach Group on Central America in the basement of the White House, from minuscule Trotskyist sects meeting in North Beach cafes to serving as a U.S. press representative for a Contra leader.

After college, Schwartz became a member of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific. With others, she founded a small semi-Trotskyist group FOCUS. In 1985, the S.U.P. commissioned Schwartz to write Brotherhood of the Sea: A History of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific as part of its of 100th anniversary commemoration.

The family moved to San Francisco when she was young, where her father Horace became a literary agent. She attended Lowell High School and she became affiliated with Leninist communism until 1984.

Lulu Schwartz (born Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, September 9, 1948) is an American Sufi journalist, columnist, and author. She has been published in a variety of media, including The Wall Street Journal. She served as the director of the "Islam and Democracy Project" and as a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think-tank based in Washington, DC. She is the founder and executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Islamic Pluralism. In 2011–2012 she was a member of Folks Magazine's Editorial Board.