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Ibn Warraq

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Ibn Warraq (born 1946) is the pen name of a secularist author of Pakistani origin who founded the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society (ISIS). He is a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry focusing on Qur'anic criticism.

Warraq gathered world notice through his historiographies of the early centuries of the Islamic timeline and has published works which question mainstream conceptions of the period. He is the author of seven books, including Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995), The Origins of the Koran (1998), The Quest for the Historical Muhammad (2000), What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text and Commentary (2002) and Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism (2007). He has also spoken at the United Nations "Victims of Jihad" conference organized by the International Humanist and Ethical Union alongside speakers such as Bat Ye'or, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Simon Deng.

Life

Warraq was born in 1946 in Rajkot, British India, to Muslim parents who migrated to Pakistan after the partitioning of British Indian Empire the following year. He began his education at the local Madrasah, where he learned to recite the Qur'an by heart. However, he stated in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2007 that "He was taught by British scholars so that he has not been indoctrinated by religion but should rather steer people away from religion in order to replace their beliefs with Humanism." His father eventually 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 Madrasah. Warraq never knew his mother, who died when he was an infant. 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 "pathologically 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.

After graduating, Warraq taught primary school 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. Because of this event, Warraq began to write for the American secular humanist Free Inquiry Magazine on topics such as "Why I am not Muslim."

Ibn Warraq continued writing with several works examining the historiography of the Qur'an and Muhammad, raising a great deal of controversy and creating a debacle in the Islamic community in the process. Other books treated secular humanist values among Muslims.

In 2005, Warraq spent several months working with Christoph Luxenberg

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

Warraq's new book, titled Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, was published by Prometheus Books in August 2007.

Although not a member of any religion, he has a higher opinion of polytheism than of monotheism. He is the founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society. Despite his criticisms of Islam, he does not take the view that it cannot be reformed; he has a high opinion of Sufism and he works with liberal Muslims in his group. Though he has been said to advocate "outright atheism," he identifies himself as an agnostic.

In 2007, he participated in St Petersburg Secular Islam Summit along with other thinkers and 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. However, his presence normally requires extensive policing.

Pen name

The pen name Ibn Warraq (Template:Lang-ar, most literally "son of a papermaker") is used due to his concerns for his personal safety and one that has been adopted by dissident authors throughout the history of Islam. The name refers to 9th century skeptical scholar Muhammad al Warraq. Warraq adopted the pseudonym in 1995 when he completed his first book, entitled "Why I Am Not a Muslim".

Peer reception

Praise

In 1996, Daniel Pipes described Ibn Warraq's book Why I am not a Muslim (1995) as "well-researched and quite brilliant." Similarly, Warraq himself and his book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism has been praised by Efraim Karsh as "eminent intellectual Ibn Warraq exposes with razor sharp precision the hypocrisy of Said’s writings as well as the perverted academic culture that has made his great success possible" and Fouad Ajami as "a brilliant and luminous book of cultural analysis and intellectual history."

Criticism

Conversely, 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. 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 agenda, which is not scholarship, but anti-Islamic polemic."

Works

See also

References

  1. The Spectator 3 October 2007 "The great Islamic scholar, Ibn Warraq, 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’."
  2. The spectator Oct 2007
  3. Stephen Crittenden L The Religion Report Ibn Warraq: Why I am not a Muslim October 10, 2001 Secularist Muslim intellectual Ibn Warraq - not his real name - was born on the Indian subcontinent and educated in the West. He believes that the great Islamic civilisations of the past were established in spite of the Koran, not because of it, and that only a secularised Islam can deliver Muslim states from fundamentalist madness.
  4. The spectator October 2007 IQ2 debates on the topic "We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values" Ibn Warraq An independent researcher at the humanist Centre for Enquiry in the USA. Author of ‘Why I am Not a Muslim’ (1995) and editor of anthologies of Koranic criticism and an anthology of testimonies of ex-Muslims ‘Leaving Islam’ (2003). A contributor to the Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, and has addressed distinguished governing bodies all over the world, including the United Nations in Geneva on the subject of apostasy. Current projects include a critical study, entitled ‘Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s “Orientalism” ’ to be released 2007.
  5. http://Center for Enquiry Religion, Ethics, and Society - Experts and Scholars"Ibn Warraq, Islamic scholar and a leading figure in Koranic criticism, is a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry"
  6. Ibn Warraq 61st session of the UN Commission on Human Rights
  7. Der Spiegel:Islamkirtiker Ibn Warraq "Dieser Kalte Krieg kann 100 Jahre dauern", accessed on June 6, 2009. The quote in German as printed in Der Spiegel is:"Ich bin nicht mit Religion indoktriniert worden"
  8. The preceding three sentences all mentioned in http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:rtj7aXNI4_8J:www.worldmag.com/articles/13052+Fixing+islam&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us
  9. ^ World Magazine "Dissident Voices" June 16, 2007
  10. Boston Globe August 2003 Lee Smith Losing his religion
  11. Center for Inquiry Volume 9 Issue 5, July 2005. Qu'ranic scholar Christoph Luxenberg has tried to demonstrate that many of the obscurities of the Qu'ran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic. This would include, for example, reinterpreting the promise of virgins in the afterlife as a promise for chilled drinks and good food. Luxenberg’s work has been well received among Islamic scholars, and the esteemed critic Ibn Warraq regards it as the most important book ever written on the Qu'ran. In a series of three lectures, Warraq, who has spent several months working with Luxenberg, will give a summary of Luxemberg’s research.
  12. Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Islam in The Hague on Militant Islam Monitor.
  13. Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Islam in The Hague on The Brussels Journal.
  14. Ibn Warraq to release new book, Defending the West.
  15. Why I am not a Muslim, p.116-123
  16. Why I am not a Muslim, p.276
  17. "Warraq's book Why I Am Not a Muslim presents a strident historical, moral, and philosophical indictment of Islam and advocates not just a firm separation of mosque and state but outright atheism." Holy War, by Chris Mooney at The American Prospect online (Archived version accessed 8 December 2007).
  18. "Warraq, 60, describes himself now as an agnostic..." Dissident voices, World Magazine, June 16, 2007, Vol. 22, No. 22.
  19. The St. Petersburg Declaration
  20. "Virgins? What virgins?". The Guardian. London. 12 January 2002. Retrieved 4 May 2010.
  21. THe Campus enquirer Volume 10, Issue 2 March 2006.
  22. The british webpage of IQ2 i.e. Intelligence² i.e. IntelligenceSquared.
  23. Ibn Warraq at the IQ2 debates with Douglas Murray, David Aaronovitch, Tariq Ramadan, William Dalrymple and Charles Glass.
  24. AUDIO Podcast of the IQ2 Debates in London with Ibn Warraq.
  25. Secular Islam Summit :: General :: Speakers
  26. Mentioned at the start of this interview.
  27. Facts cited from introduction to interview with Warraq. "Ibn Warraq: Why I Am Not A Muslim". ABC Radio National. 2001-10-10. Retrieved 2007-04-01.
  28. Doubt: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson By Jennifer Michael Hecht HarperOne 2004
  29. Der Spiegel August 2007 Interview with Ibn Warraq There were several reasons, which are still valid. I had begun 1993 to write my book “why I am not Muslim ” when it appeared 1995, was I professor for British and American culture at the University of Toulouse. I had fear to become the second Salman Rushdie I did not want not to die and I had my family to protect. My brother and its family do not know until today that I wrote the book. I do not want that they must suffer on my account.
  30. Daniel Pipes Weekly Standard January 1996 pg1 "Ibn Warraq brings a scholarly sledge-hammer to the task of demolishing Islam. Writing a polemic against Islam, especially for an author of Muslim birth, is an act so incendiary that the author must write under a pseudonym; not to do so would be an act of suicide. And what does Ibn Warraq have to show for this act of unheard-of defiance? A well-researched and quite brilliant, if somewhat disorganized, indictment of one of the world's great religions. While the author disclaims any pretence to originality, he has read widely enough to write an essay that offers a startlingly novel rendering of the faith he left."
  31. Why Are Western Intellectuals so fearful of critisizing Islam? National Review Book Services (NRBS)
  33. Berg, Herbert (1999). "Ibn Warraq (ed): The Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 62 (3): 558. Retrieved 2006-07-20.
  34. Donner, Fred. (2001) Review: The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, University of Chicago.

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