Ibn Warraq

Early life and education

Warraq was born in India and his family migrated to the newly independent Pakistan in 1947. His mother died when he was an infant. He stated in an interview that he "studied Arabic and read the Qur'an as a young man in hope of becoming a follower of the Islamic faith." His father decided to send him to a boarding school in England partly to circumvent a grandmother's effort to push an exclusively religious education on his son at the local Madrasa. After his arrival in Britain, he only saw his father once more, when he was 14. His father died two years later. Warraq claims to have been "shy" for most of his youth.

By 19 he had moved to Scotland to pursue his education at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied philosophy and Arabic with Islamic studies scholar W. Montgomery Watt.

Writing and works

After graduating, Warraq was a primary school teacher in London for five years and moved to France with his wife in 1982, opening an Indian restaurant. He worked as a courier for a travel agent until the Rushdie affair took place. It was during this time he noticed there were frequent critical attacks on Christianity and Judaism, but never on Islamic teachings which, according to Warraq, try to control every single aspect of an individual's life, giving "no scope for independent thinking." He expected various intellectuals in the West to defend Rushdie and values like freedom of expression, but "instead of defending Rushdie and his right to freedom of expression, they condemned him; they were blaming the victim." Because of this, Warraq began to write for Free Inquiry Magazine, the American secular humanist publication, on topics such as "Why I am not Muslim." "The sovereignty in Islam," said Warraq in a 2006 interview, "lies with God, whereas in human rights, in democracy, for example, the sovereignty lies with people. And, the human rights, the universal declaration of human rights, on several occasions, clashes with various aspects of Islamic law, especially in the treatment of women and non-Muslims." In addition, Warraq expressed concerns about freedom of religion: "In Islam, you don't have the right to leave your religion. You're born a Muslim and that's it. An apostasy, that is to say, leaving your religion in Islam, is punishable by death."

Ibn Warraq continued writing with several works examining the historiography of the Qur'an and Muhammad. Other books treated the topic of secular humanist values among Muslims. In The Origins of The Koran: Classic Essays on Islam’s Holy Book, Ibn Warraq includes some of Theodor Nöldeke's studies.

In 2005, Warraq spent several months working with Christoph Luxenberg, who wrote about Syriac vs. Arabic interpretation of Koranic verse.

In February 2006, he participated with several other specialists at the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Islam in The Hague (17–19 February 2006).

In March 2006, a letter he co-signed entitled MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism with eleven other individuals (most notably Salman Rushdie) was published in response to violent and deadly protests in the Islamic world surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.

Although not a member of any religion, he has a higher opinion of humanism than of Islam. He is the founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society (ISIS). Despite his criticisms of Islam, he does not take the view that it cannot be reformed; and he works with liberal Muslims in his group. He has described himself as an atheist or an agnostic.

In 2007, he participated in St Petersburg Secular Islam Summit along with other thinkers and self-proclaimed "reformers of Islam" such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, and Irshad Manji. The group released the St Petersburg Declaration, which urges world governments to, among other things, reject Sharia law, fatwa courts, clerical rule, and state-sanctioned religion in all their forms; and to oppose all penalties for blasphemy and apostasy, which they believe to be in violation of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Warraq's op-ed pieces have appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian in London, and he has addressed governmental bodies all over the world, including the United Nations in Geneva.

In October 2007, Warraq participated in the IQ2 debates in London with Douglas Murray, David Aaronovitch, Tariq Ramadan, William Dalrymple, and Charles Glass.

Seclusion

Prior to 2007, Ibn Warraq refused to show his face in public. This was due to fears for his personal safety and also due to his desire to travel to see his family in Pakistan without being denied access to Muslim countries. His face was blacked out on the ISIS website. More recently, he has decided to show his face openly and take part in public debates.

Praise

In a 1996 review of Why I Am Not a Muslim, Daniel Pipes notes that "[w]ith few exceptions, he [Warraq] relies almost entirely on the Western tradition of Islamic studies" but concludes that "[d]espite his anger, 'Ibn Warraq' has written a serious and thought-provoking book" calling for "an equally compelling response from a believing Muslim." Pipes also described Why I am not a Muslim (1995) as "well-researched and quite brilliant." David Pryce-Jones said that it was "a scrupulously documented examination of the life and teaching of the Prophet Muhammad, of the Qur’an and its sources, and the resulting culture." Christopher Hitchens described Why I Am Not a Muslim as "[m]y favorite book on Islam."

In 2007, Douglas Murray described Ibn Warraq as "the great Islamic scholar ... one of the great heroes of our time. Personally endangered, yet unremittingly vocal, Ibn Warraq leads a trend. Like a growing number of people, he refuses to accept the idea that all cultures are equal. Were Ibn Warraq to live in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, he would not be able to write. Or if he did, he would not be allowed to live. Among his work is criticism of the sources of the Qur'an. In Islamic states this constitutes apostasy. It is people like him, who know how things could be, who understand why Western values are not just another way to live, but the only way to live—the only system in human history in which the individual is genuinely free (in the immortal words of Thomas Jefferson) to ‘pursue happiness’."

In a 2008 review of Ibn Warraq's book, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, political scientist Peter Berkowitz describes Warraq as a "worthy critic" for Edward Said. Berkowitz says that "with a rare combination of polemical zest and prodigious learning, it [Defending the West] is the first [book-length critique] to address and refute Said’s arguments 'against the background of a more general presentation of salient aspects of Western civilization.'" In a 2009 review of Defending the West A. J. Caschetta concluded that "Ibn Warraq's critique of Said's thought and work is thorough and convincing, indeed devastating to anyone depending on Saidism. It should do to Orientalism what Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa did to Martin Bernal's Black Athena." Pryce-Jones says that it "demolishes in close detail the Saidian 'narrative.'"

In a 2012 review of Ibn Warraq's book, Virgins? What Virgins, Rice University historian of Islam David Cook writes: "As a scholar of Islam myself, I find Ibn Warraq's attitude to be very refreshing, and his scholarship for the most part to be accurate and devastating in pinpointing the weaknesses in Muslim orthodoxy." The book's third essay, Cook continues, "could almost serve as a history of our field, and of its systematic failure to critique the foundational texts of Islam as those of other faiths have been critiqued."

Criticism

In reviewing Ibn Warraq's compilation The Origins of the Koran, religious studies professor Herbert Berg has labelled him as "polemical and inconsistent" in his writing. Berg lauded the inclusion of the essay by Theodor Nöldeke, but panned the inclusion of William St. Clair Tisdall's as "not a particularly scholarly essay". He concluded "[i]t seems that Ibn Warraq has included some of the essays not on the basis of their scholarly value or their status as 'classics', but rather on the basis of their hostility to Islam. This does not necessarily diminish the value of the collection, but the reader should be aware that this collection does not fully represent classic scholarship on the Quran."

In reviewing Ibn Warraq's essay in his Quest for the Historical Muhammad (2001) Fred Donner, a professor in Near Eastern studies, notes his lack of specialist training in Arabic studies, citing "inconsistent handling of Arabic materials," and unoriginal arguments, and "heavy-handed favoritism" towards revisionist theories and "the compiler’s [i.e. Ibn Warraq's] agenda, which is not scholarship, but anti-Islamic polemic." Anthropologist and historian Daniel Martin Varisco has criticized Ibn Warraq's book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, writing that "This modern son of a bookseller imprints a polemical farce not worth the 500-plus pages of paper it wastes."

His work, "The Origins of the Koran," is itself based on a polemic by St. Clair Tisdall "The original sources of the Qur'an" which was described by François de Blois as a "decidedly shoddy piece of missionary propaganda".

François de Blois in reviewing The origins of the Koran, states that "it is surprising that the editor, who in his Why I am not a Muslim took a very high posture as a critical rationalist and opponent of all forms of obscurantism, now relies so heavily on writings by Christian polemicists from the nineteenth century". Asma Afsaruddin states that "Ibn Warraq is not interested in debate; he wants nothing less than wholesale conversion to his point of view within the community of scholars of Islam" and added that his work, The Origins of The Koran, "needlessly poisons the atmosphere and stymies efforts to engage in honest scholarly discussion".

Political influence

Shortly after the 9/11, George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, known for coining the term Axis of Evil, hosted Ibn Warraq at an hour-and-a-half lunch at the White House.

Works