Ibn Warraq Quotes

Hadiths were liable to be fabricated even for the most trivial ritualistic details. Tendentiousness included the suppression of existing utterances friendly to the rival party or dynasty.

What lessons have the Bengalis learned from this genocide? The answer is really pathetic: We pretend as if nothing happened in Bangladesh in 1971. We pretend that Islam had nothing to do with that genocide. Somehow or other we try to find other scapegoats, whoever that may be, except Islam. We pretend as if everything is fine and dandy with Islam. This is the biggest lie and the greatest cruelty: pretending that Islam had nothing to do with one of the most horrific genocides in human history. It pains people like me and many others who have seen and experienced the true color of Islam with their own eyes.

After their spectacular conquests, the Arabs were unwilling to concede equality to the non-Arab converts to Islam, despite Islamic doctrine that expressively forbade discrimination. But for the Arabs there were the conquered and the conquerors ... The Arabs ruled as a sort of conquistador tribal aristocracy.

After I finished learning the basic Arabic language, in about six to nine months' time, I was introduced to the Koran. I was forced to wake up every early morning and read the Koran with my older sister, who was quite good at it. My father and older sister used to guide me and correct my pronunciations. It was an unbearable tyranny to me. I dreaded waking up each morning and facing the Koran. Once in a while I used to pretend to be sick just to avoid the daily morning chore. I was beaten by my father on many occasions for this trick. I was also admonished severely for not being able to pronounce Koranic verses in the correct way. This was really a torture to me. Many a time I used to ask my sister and father about the meanings of the verses. They had no idea. They only read the Koran without understanding a single verse. I was told to memorize the verses and never ask any questions on the Koran. Allah would surely punish me if I ask any questions on the Koran or any other matter about Islam.

As I wrote this recount, I learned that one hunded new killing fields have been discovered all around Bangladesh. Was I surprised? No, not at all! However, I wondered, Why did it take so long? Why did we have to wait almost thirty years to know that innocent folks were butchered just as cattle? Rest assured that many more killing fields will be found. The killing fields of Cambodia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the like, will be nothing when compared to the killing fields in Bangladesh. These are the Islamic killing fields. Let us not forget these Islamic killing fields. Let us not forget the sacrifice of 3 million people who shed enough blood to change the verdure of the monsoon-drenched land of Bengal. They certainly gave their lives so that we can enjoy the fruits of freedom from the tyranny of Punjabi masters and Pakistani Islamic oligarchy. I would ask every Bengalis not to forget the Islamic butchers of those nights and days when we remember the fallen angels of our land. The crime should never go unpunished.

Ibn Warraq's book will either be ignored with deadly thoroughness or cause an enormous riot.

There is no such thing as the Koran.

This is my very personal recount of the nights and days on and immediately after March 25, 1971. I went to bed a bit early, around 9:00 Pmt. I had been quite tired all day and I quickly fell asleep. Suddenly, at around 11:00 P.M., my deep slumber was disturbed by the noise of constant barrage of gunfire. At first I thought that it must be firecrackers by Bengalis to celebrate their victory. But soon I realized my mistake. I opened the window. It was very dark. Not even the dim streetlights were burning. But I could barely see numerous military vehicles moving around, carrying soldiers with their automatic rifles. Occasionally, I could see very bright searchlights mounted on some of the military trucks and Jeeps. Many soldiers were running and shooting in the street. I saw that a large convoy of military vehicles had surrounded the whole of the EPUET area. As far as my eyes could go, I could see military men all around the campus.

While it is commendable and understandable to wish to protect, for example, the personnel of a publishing house, if the decision of a publisher to publish material considered blasphemous by Muslims leads to widespread violence, this violence cannot possibly be considered morally or legally the responsibility of the said publisher. The publisher, writer, comedian, cartoonist is exercising his or her constitutional right, and if threatened, the state should give, unbegrudgingly, every protection possible. Publishers must stand by their writers, newspapers with their cartoonists, Comedy Central with South Park artists, and intellectuals with their fellow intellectuals. But where was Hollywood when fellow filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh, was killed? The “Draw Mohammed Day” initiative by a Seattle cartoonist, far from being frivolous was a magnificent show of solidarity, exactly in the manner of public readings of The Satanic Verses, already mentioned. Unless we show greater solidarity, massive, public, noisy solidarity and show that we care for our freedoms, we risk losing all to Islamist thuggery.

Why I am Not a Muslim does have a mocking quality, to be sure, but it is also a serious and thought-provoking book. It calls not for a wall of silence, much less a Rushdie-like fatwa on the author's life, but for an equally compelling response from a believing Muslim.

A few weeks later, an opportunity came for me to ask one of these Islamists as to what would happen to them since they had committed the sin of Zina (illicit sex/adultery). He was very surprised at me for this impertinence. He told me that they had committed no sin. What? No sin! My brain must have failed to work! I simply could not hold my breath any longer to listen to what he had to say. He told me that Thais were not Muslims, so having fun with their girls was all right. In fact, he told me that that had been the practice in Islam for centuries. Whenever the Muslims defeated the non-Muslims, they could do whatever they wanted with non-Muslims. The Muslims could use the non-Muslim women as sex slaves and please themselves as they wished. A Muslim even had the right to kill the women if he wished. In simple language, the non-Muslims were not really human beings. They were inferior even to cattle and animals. Moreover, the Pakistani told me that the Prophet had allowed sex if a man was living overseas. I could not believe what I was hearing! He then quoted from memory many verses from the Koran and Hadith to support his views.

Islam makes the whole of humanity-Muslims and non-Muslims-suffer. Peaceful Muslims become victims of the oppressive psyche of Islam, which sucks all the life out of them, while non-Muslims are made to suffer at the hands of Islamic terrorists.

The Orientalists and their indefatigable intellectual curiosity, scholarship, and translations had incalculable consequences for the development of art, philosophy, and politics in Europe, an influence passionately chronicled by Raymond Schwab in The Oriental Renaissance. Orientalists changed forever the intellectual and spiritual landscape of Europe, and allowed artists, writers, and composers to enter imaginatively and sympathetically into civilizations hitherto unfamiliar to Westerners, to accord the Orient dignity and respect, and to people European works with Orientals, seen as equals. It was in this intellectual and spiritual milieu that Mozart created some of his most sublime music. Perhaps Die Zauberflote, Il Seraglio, and cantata K.619 can be seen as reflections in art of Orientalist research.

David Margoliouth warned us not to be too credulous about the authenticity of so-called pre-Islamic poetry. Two of his principal arguments were the probity, or rather the lack of probity, of the earliest compilers and editors of pre-Islamic poetry, and the fact that many putative pre-Islamic poems contained words, phrases, and religious concepts derived from the Koran, even though the authors had died long before the Koran can have been said to exist.

Muslims in general have a tendency to disarm any criticisms of Islam and in particular the Koran by asking if the critic has read the Koran in the original Arabic, as though all the difficulties of their sacred text will somehow disappear once the reader has mastered the holy language and has direct experience, aural and visual, of the very words of God, to which no translation can do justice.