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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 and founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society and a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry focusing on Qur'anic criticism.
Warraq gathered world notice through his controversial 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), and Quest for the Historical Muhammad, (2000).
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Ibn Warraq (born 1946) is the pen name of a secularist author of Pakistani origin and founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society and a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry focusing on Qur'anic criticism.
Warraq gathered world notice through his controversial 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), and Quest for the Historical Muhammad, (2000). 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, India, to Muslim parents who migrated to Pakistan after the partitioning of India in 1947. He started his schooling at a local Madrasah in Pakistan where he learned to recite the Qur'an by heart. 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. He never knew his mother. After having arrived in Britain, he only saw his father once more, when he was 14; his father died when he was 16. 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 leaving college, Warraq taught primary school for five years in London, and moved to France with his wife in 1982 where he opened an Indian restaurant and then worked as a courier for a travel agent, until the Rushdie affair took place. Warraq, being greatly taken by these events, began to write for the American secular humanist Free Inquiry Magazine on topics along the lines of "why I am not Muslim."
Ibn Warraq continued his 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 Qu'ranic philologist Christoph Luxenberg
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; oppose all penalties for blasphemy and apostasy, which they believe to be in accordance with 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 Oct 2007 Warraq participated in the IQ2 debates in London with Douglas Murray, David Aaronovitch, Tariq Ramadan, William Dalrymple, and Charles Glass
Decision to be seen in public
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 S.I.S.S. websites. 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 (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
Daniel Pipes has described Ibn Warraq's work as "well-researched and quite brilliant". Conversely, religious studies professor Herbert Berg has labelled him as polemical and inconsistent in his writing. Fred Donner, a professor in Near Eastern studies, notes Ibn Warraq's lack of specialist training in Arabic studies, citing "inconsistent handling of Arabic materials," and unoriginal arguments. Donner criticizes Ibn Warraq's book on Muhammad for what he describes as "heavy-handed favoritism" towards revisionist theories and "the compiler’s [Ibn Warraq] agenda, which is not scholarship, but anti-Islamic polemic."
Bibliography
- Why I Am Not a Muslim, Ibn Warraq, foreword by R. Joseph Hoffmann, Prometheus Books, 1995, hardcover, 428 pages, ISBN 0-87975-984-4
- Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, edited by Ibn Warraq, Prometheus Books, 2003, hardcover, 320 pages, ISBN 1-59102-068-9
- What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text, and Commentary, edited and translated by Ibn Warraq, Prometheus Books, 2002, 600 pages, ISBN 1-57392-945-X
- Quest for the Historical Muhammad, edited and translated by Ibn Warraq, Prometheus Books, 2000, hardcover, 554 pages, ISBN 1-57392-787-2
- Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book, edited by Ibn Warraq, Prometheus Books, 1998, hardcover, 420 pages, ISBN 1-57392-198-X
- Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism. Prometheus Books 2007 hardcover,: 300 pages ISBN 1591024846
- Which Koran?: Variants, Manuscripts, and the Influence of Pre-Islamic Poetry . Prometheus Books 1 May 2007 : 450 pages, ISBN-10: 1591024293, ISBN-13: 978-1591024293
See also
External links
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