Ibn Warraq

From Philosopedia

Warraq, Ibn [pseudonym] (19 - )

Warraq is a pseudonym for a former Muslim thought at the end of the 20th century to have been “a lecturer in cultural studies at a Western university.”

In “Islamic Intolerance” (Free Inquiry, Summer 1993), he detailed why Muslims are intolerant of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Bahais, and Buddhists, concluding that “even Islam’s staunchest supporters will testify to the uneasy and precarious position of non-Muslims in the Muslim states of today—the Copts of Egypt, the Jews in Syria, the Christians, and Hindus in Pakistan.”

Why I Am Not A Muslim (1995) discusses the totalitarian nature of Islam and its law, Islamic colonialism, how Islam treats heretics and freethinkers, the status of women, the undemocratic pressures applied by Islamic immigrants in the West, and its taboos (wine, pork, and homosexuality). G. A. Wells, professor of German at the University of London, has praised the book not only for being “courageous” but also for scrutinizing the fundamental tenets of Islam so uncompromisingly. Religion, Warraq finds,

• is largely a reshuffling of ideas of a yesterday, and to this Islam is no exception. It has taken a great deal from both Jewish and Christian traditions, but I doubt whether many Christians are aware of in what strange guise Christianity figures in the Koran. According to Sura 4, Jesus was not crucified: the Jews ‘Killed him not, they did not crucify him, but it was made to appear that way to them.’ This strikes at the heart of what is now established as Christian doctrine. If there was no atoning death, there is no redemption, through such a death.

What is in the Qur’an about Christianity, Warraq claims and Wells notes, derives from heretical sects. Writes Warraq,

• The Qur’an looks more authentic than the Gospels, in that its author works no miracles and makes no claim to divinity. . . . Also, there are so many variant readings that it is misleading to speak of the Koran: The definitive text still had not been achieved as late as the ninth century.

Islam never really encouraged science, if by science is meant “disinterested inquiry,” according to Warraq. What Islam means by “knowledge” is religious knowledge, for all other knowledge is dangerous to the faith. Whatever real science occurred under Islam occurred despite, not because, the religion. Further, he holds, the Muslim world has been indebted from the beginning to the Greeks and is indebted now to science for understanding its own intellectual and cultural history. He concludes that he is

• convinced that despite all the shortcomings of Western liberal democracy, it is far preferable to the authoritarian, mind-numbing certitudes of Islamic theocracy.

Few other works have dared touch such subjects, and like Salmon Rushdie Warraq is afraid to reveal his exact whereabouts for fear of being assassinated. He did, however, participate in the 1996 Mexico City conference of humanists, and he is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists as well as the Bertrand Russell Society.

In Mexico, he said that fundamentalists fear the humanities and history more than science, for they relativize human outlooks. Many humanists are to be found of Muslim origin, but one should see himself or herself as, for example, an Egyptian, not as an Egyptian Moslem or an Egyptian humanist. He looked forward to the time when the humanist movement will be as well known as Amnesty International.

Warraq has written,

• My close family members identify themselves as Muslim: some more orthodox, others less. My earliest memories are of my circumcision and my first day at Koranic school—psychoanalysts may make what they wish of that. Even before I could read or write the national language I learned to read the Koran in Arabic without understanding a word of it—a common experience for thousands of Muslim children. As soon as I was able to think for myself, I discarded all the religious dogmas that had been foisted on me. I now consider myself a secular humanist who believes that all religions are sick men's dreams, false—demonstrably false—and pernicious.

The Origins of the Qur’an: Classic Essays in Islam’s Holy Book (1998) is a controversial work which undermines the traditional account of the origin of the Qur’an and of the role of the Prophet in its formation. Muslim history is a fantasy, Warraq wrote, and Muslim “revelation” is actually a human, not a divine, construction.

Warraq, a signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000 and one of the members of the IHEU’s Committee on Religious Extremism and Rational Inquiry, is Executive Director of the International Society for Islamic Secularization.

(See “Standing Up to Scrutinize Islam,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996.) {WAS, numerous conversations}