Ibn Warraq is an India-born writer and Islamic scholar, who worked variously as a primary school teacher, a tour guide, and a restaurateur before becoming a writer. He is known only by a chosen pseudonym, which means "son of a copyist" in Arabic. He doesn't use his real name because he is an apostate, which constitutes a capital crime.
Background
Ibn Warraq was born in 1946, in Rajkot, Gujarat, India. After the family moved to Pakistan following Partition, their father, a sometime film critic with connections to Bombay intellectual circles, reluctantly sent his sons to Koranic schools, where they learned to recite the Holy Book "without understanding a word,'' Warraq recalled. Warraq's family belongs to a distinct group of Indian Muslims known as Khatris who first appear as a Hindu subcaste in the 15th century. This caste of dyers of cloth converted to Islam in the 16th century and eventually settled in the Rann of Kutch and the Sind, slowly becoming merchants and traders. His mother tongue is Kutchi, a dialect linguistically related to Sindhi. His real family name is Valera.
Education
When he was ten, Ibn Warraq left central Asia for a Christian boarding school in England. Living in Worcestershire, he acquired a love of things peculiarly English, the English countryside, especially its bird-life - his early heroes being bird artist, Charles Frederick Tunnicliffe, and bird photographer, Eric Hoskins, the descriptions of the natural history and village life in Northamptonshire in the writings of Denys Watkins-Pitchford.
As a boy, vacationing with an English family in Norfolk inevitably led to a passion for English watercolors, landscapes, and architecture. The uniqueness of London's architectural history, hence his anguish when the University of London destroyed some parts of Georgian squares in and around Gordon Square, but he was also acquiring Englishness of manner, and feeling, the same awkwardness about sex, money, and clothes.
In 1966-1969, Ibn Warraq studied Arabic and Persian at the University of Edinburgh under Professors Montgomery Watt and L.P. Elwell-Sutton respectively. He earned a Master of Arts in Arabic, Persian, and Art History from the University of Edinburgh. In 1973-1974, he studied at the University of London and earned a Graduate Certificate in Education with Distinction. In 1974-1978, he studied at the same university and earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy with honors. As a result of his education in the United Kingdom, Ibn Warraq renounced his Islamic faith, as well as all other religions, becoming a secular humanist and freethinker.
Career
At the beginning of his career, Ibn Warraq taught primary school in the United Kingdom: in 1974-1977, he was a teacher at Marlborough School; in 1979-1981, he was an English Language Specialist at Monega Junior School. He opened an Indian restaurant in France and worked there in 1982-1985. He then worked as a courier for a travel agent, which sent him mainly to the Far East and North Africa. In 1986-1989, he worked at Fram Voyages and was a French Speaking Travel Guide to India.
In 1989-1999, Warraq was a lecturer at the University of Toulouse Department of English in France. His thinking crystallized around the time of the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, another Muslim-born freethinker educated in the West. "I clearly identified myself with Rushdie,'' said Warraq, who was dismayed by the reluctance of many Western liberals to defend the embattled writer. In 1992, he published an article in the magazine Free Thought that became the seed for "Why I Am Not a Muslim.''
In Why l Am Not a Muslim, Warraq describes his experiences and the reasons he left Islam. Noting that his work was inspired by Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian, Warraq examines the strict faith of his childhood and the culture in which he lived, discusses inconsistencies in the Muslim holy book, the Koran, and the errors and evils that have been committed under the name of Islam through history. He also presents arguments against Christianity and the idea of God and established religions in general. Kenneth C. W. Leiter wrote in Middle East Quarterly that despite the book's "anger," it is "serious and thought-provoking" and "calls...for an equally compelling response from a believing Muslim."
In his other book, In The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, Warraq presents studies taken from academic journals from the past 150 years in order to reconstruct the life of Muhammad, the founder of Islam. Most of the essays consider the question of whether it is possible to reconstruct Muhammad's life, given the small amount of source material about it, and most of the authors represented in the book believe that it is an impossible undertaking.
In 2005-2009, Ibn Warraq was a Research Fellow on Islam at the Council for Secular Humanism, United States. In 2010-2011, he was a Research Fellow at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, United States. In 2011, he became a Senior Fellow at Westminster Institute in Virginia. He is a Vice President of The New English Review and the New English Review Press, which are an internet based magazine and publishing house, dedicated to the return of the spirit of public debate that began when the Greek philosophers and Hebrew prophets first walked the streets of Athens and Jerusalem.
Ibn Warraq is known for having dared to summarize the history of Islam as one of imperialism, colonialism, gender, and religious apartheid, anti-black racism, and slavery - and for having dared to point out that, far from being odious, imperial, "Orientalists," European scholars, not Muslim invaders, saved, recorded, painted, preserved, and restored the narratives, scholarship, sculpture, artifacts, languages, customs, and architecture of the Islamic, pre-Islamic, and Christian Middle East, and of Asia, and India.
Warraq has not hesitated to participate in certain public forums. In 2006, he traveled to the Hague to participate in a conference on Islam at the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference. Also in 2006, in the wake of the Mohammed Cartoon travesty/tragedy, Ibn Warraq joined ten other Muslim and ex-Muslim intellectuals, (including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasreen, and Salman Rushdie), in co-signing a MANIFESTO: "Together Facing the New Totalitarianism." The statement strongly opposed blasphemy laws and customs.
In 2007, as one of several conference organizers, Warraq with his friend Phyllis Chesler chaired the opening panel of the first Secular Islam Summit in St. Petersburg, Florida. This conference gathered a number of illustrious Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents and feminists. The conference published a declaration that urged world governments to reject Sharia law, fatwa courts, state-sanctioned religion, to oppose the penalties for apostasy and blasphemy as a violation of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In 2007, Warraq also completed a critical study of the thought of Edward Said, Defending the West. Paul Berman, the author of Terror and Liberalism, described the book as "a glorious work of scholarship, and it is going to contribute mightily to modernizing the way we think about Western civilization and the rest of the world." Although he is a very private man, Ibn Warraq writes about himself in a collection of essays: Virgins? What Virgins?: And Other Essays, published in 2010.
Religion
Ibn Warraq is an ex-Muslim. He can be considerer agnostic or atheist. Warraq is clearly angered by the privileged position that Islam occupies in academia and the mainstream media. He exposes this fact through an insistent emphasis on precisely those elements of Islam that are most assiduously avoided by contemporary scholars (though generally not by older scholars) in the name of political correctness, for which he has unbridled contempt. These controversial elements include the more outlandish features of the Quran; the life of Muhammad; the disgusting, misogynistic, ahistorical, or intolerant elements of the hadith (tradition) literature; the numerous examples of intolerance toward women, non-Muslims, and others to be found in the legal literature (the basis for the sharia); and other taboo subjects.
Politics
Ibn Warraq contends that because of the work of Edward Said and other theorists, the American left has "been scared of being called colonialists and imperialists" and so has adopted a guilt-ridden shyness about Islam. Yet liberals in other Western countries have been more open to his views.
Ibn Warraq visited the United States after September 11, one of his first stops was the White House. There, he enjoyed an hour-and-a-half lunch with President Bush's chief economic speechwriter, David Frum. Though Warraq confirmed the meeting and had told supporters about it, Frum refused to discuss it "in any way," perhaps because it suggested that some in the administration just didn't buy the president's claim Islam to be a "peaceful" religion.
Views
Ibd Warraq believes that the great Islamic civilizations 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. He is also pro-Western, anti-terrorism, and pro-human rights.
Quotations:
"Muslims have a horror of putting the Koran to critical scrutiny as a human document. The layman is not permitted to question the Koran. This is why there's no progress in Islamic society."
"We are witnessing monumental changes in the beliefs of peoples of Islamic lands, changes whose implications and consequences have not yet sunk in. They have not sunk in partly because the general public both in the West, and in the Middle East is totally unaware of this modern astonishing turn of events of literally thousands of young men and women from Islamic societies leaving Islam, and embracing atheism. Their presence can be felt on the internet and the social media, on Facebook, above all."
Personality
Ibn Warraq is very shy, Old World, and exceedingly courtly man. He is a life-long lover of British and European novels, paintings, poems, philosophical tracts, history, nature, and both European and North American street life.
Quotes from others about the person
Douglas Murray, an author and political commentator, 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 Quran. In Islamic states this constitutes apostasy."
