The Orientalists and their indefatigable intellectual curiosity, scholarship, and translations had incalculable consequences for the development of a… - Ibn Warraq

There are many reasons behind it. Bat Ye'or describes one of them in her new book "Eurabia": not long after the Second World War, the Europeans and especially France created a European-Arab axis, to lessen the influence of the USA. There were bilateral agreements. The EU launched Arab exchange programmes and financed Arab NGOs, creating strong European-Arab networks. If they were now to criticise anything about Islam that would upset their allies in the axis. Another reason is multiculturalism.

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.

Then came the topic of creation of Bangladesh. Naturally, they sided with the Pakistani Islamic army, although they expressed sorrow for the lives lost. When they heard that 3 million people were massacred and that the action of the Pakistani Islamic army could not be dismissed simply as an act of restoration of peace and order, they simply laughed. The reason was that they did not believe what had happened to our people in the occupied Bangladesh. When we asked them how many Bengalis were killed, they quoted a figure of three thousand. They also insisted that those killed were mostly Hindus, so we should not bother too much about the massacre. That was to say that the killing of Hindus was all right. We pointed out that the figure of 3 million was not invented by the government of Bangladesh but the figure was from reliable foreign sources such as the Agence France Presse, Reuters, and Time magazine. We also told them that a Pakistani journalist by the name of Anthony Mascarenhas has written a book titled The Rape of Bangladesh,' where he had quoted a similar figure. The Pakistanis simply dismissed those facts and said that the foreign journalists were bribed by India to write these figures. When we asked them how did they get the figure of three thousand, they said that that figure was released by the military authorities. And what about the two hundred thousand rape cases? They were adamant that not a single woman was raped. Such is the power of Pakistani Islamic oligarchy and Pakistani Islamic military to condition peoples' minds...