Top 15 Ibn Warraq Quotes

Why I am Not A Muslim is not a book of fantasy - or of veiled attack - like Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. It is a deeply felt intellectual tour de force by a great Muslim scholar whose heart bleeds for the fate of his fellow Muslims, and whose thirst for knowledge has led him on a path of incomparable research and study. Because of the well-known (and widely feared) Muslim proclivity to violence the book had to be brought out by an American humanist publisher rather than any of the major publishing houses. It is doubtful that there exists another work on the subject as scholarly, as detailed or as comprehensive, not to say as courageous. Looking at the scene in India, the writings of Hamid Dalwai and A.B. Shah have set many people thinking about the nature of Islam. If Ibn Warraq's book were to be made widely available in India, it may serve to open the eyes of the people further.

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

Ibn Warraq is the pen-name of the author whose parents emigrated from India to Pakistan as a result of the Partition. He was brought up in Pakistan, which was supposed to be an Islamic Republic. His experience revealed to him that the Muslims of India had been cheated in the name of Islam and its projected principles of equality, free will and democracy. As he grew up, he noticed that Islam had become an effective tool of convenient morality and achieving political goals; a religious or secular leader could prove anything from the Koran and Hadith to suit his purpose, yet every faithful believes that there is no contradiction in the verses of the Koran!

Ibn Warraq's book is so inspiring and so full of brilliant ideas and hard facts as well, that the reviewer never stops wanting to mention further chapters.

His work will one day be seen as the moral and intellectual breakthrough that led to the Islamic Aufklarung.

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.

When Warraq speaks of science, he allows that it is in this domain that "we come at last to the true greatness of Islamic civilization" ... But Warraq argues that it was despite Islam that Islamic science developed.

Perhaps the writer who has best identified the problems within the Muslim world is the philosopher Ibn Warraq, of Pakistani origin, author of Why I Am Not a Muslim. That this courageous man writes under a pseudonym shows that even in the West he does not feel safe.

As early as the thirteenth century, thinkers like Nur-ud Din Mubarak Ghaznavi, working at the court of Sultan Iltutmish [ruled 1211-1236] set the aggressive tone of Islamic presence in India. Nur-ud Din elaborated the doctrine of Din Panahi [protection of religion], by which Islam had to be defended from the defiling Hindus who were idolaters who must be kept in their place, and insulted, disgraced, dishonoured and defamed. Ziauddin Barani [Diyā al-Dīn Baranī: 1285-1357] who was an Indian jurist, historian, political thinker, writer, and a companion of Sultan Muhammad b. Tughluq [1309 –1388], wrote a Fürstenspiegel, a Mirror of Princes, akin to Machiavelli’s The Prince, the Fatāwā-yi Djahāndārī, in order to educate the de facto rulers of the day, the sultans, in their duty towards Islam in an age of corruption. Barani advises sultans to enforce the sharī‘a, to curb unorthodoxy ( especially speculative philosophy, falsafa), to degrade the infidel, who must be treated harshly. The Sultans must fight like the Prophet until all people affirm that “there is no God but Allah.” It is the duty of Muslim rulers to overthrow infidelity, uproot it completely, and apply the Holy Law, the Sharia on all. Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309 – 1388), the Turkic Muslim who reigned over the Sultanate of Delhi (1351-1388) carried on the intolerant tradition of the early invaders, and believed that by extirpating Hinduism wherever possible he served God.

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.

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.

Indeed, the divide between East and West is not unbridgeable, as the case of India demonstrates.

There is no such thing as the Koran.

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.

All the atrocities commited by the Pakistani army clearly shows that it was nothing but a religious war. When I read the Koran and compare the actions of the Pakistani army I find an absolute link between the killings and the provisions in the Koran. To the Pakistani military, the Bengalis were not true followers of Islam, but hypocrites. So they wanted to get rid of these nonbelievers (the Bengalis) as per the provision in the Koran and hadith. The whole world knows the truth. The truth is that the genocide in Bangladesh was conducted by the Islmic army of Pakistan to save Islam and to completely annihilate the unbelievers.