Ibn Warraq

In a 2012 review of Ibn Warraq's book, Virgins? What Virgins, Rice University historian of Islam David Cook wrote: "As a scholar of Islam myself, I find Ibn Warraq's attitude to be very refreshing, and his scholarship for the most part to be accurate and devastating in pinpointing the weaknesses in Muslim orthodoxy." The book's third essay, Cook continues, "could almost serve as a history of our field, and of its systematic failure to critique the foundational texts of Islam as those of other faiths have been critiqued."

In a 2008 review of Ibn Warraq's book, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, political scientist Peter Berkowitz described Warraq as a "worthy critic" for Edward Said. Berkowitz said that "with a rare combination of polemical zest and prodigious learning, it [Defending the West] is the first [book-length critique] to address and refute Said's arguments 'against the background of a more general presentation of salient aspects of Western civilization.'" In a 2009 review of Defending the West A. J. Caschetta concluded that "Ibn Warraq's critique of Said's thought and work is thorough and convincing, indeed devastating to anyone depending on Saidism. It should do to Orientalism what Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa did to Martin Bernal's Black Athena." Pryce-Jones said that it "demolishes in close detail the Saidian 'narrative.'"

In October 2007, Warraq participated in an Intelligence Squared debate, "We Should Not Be Reluctant to Assert the Superiority of Western Values," in London. He argued in favor of the motion; arguing on the same side as him were Douglas Murray and David Aaronovitch, while their opponents were Tariq Ramadan, William Dalrymple, and Charles Glass. Although he does not subscribe to any particular religion, he has a higher opinion of humanism than of Islam and has described himself as an atheist. He is the founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society (ISIS). He has also participated in counter-jihad-affiliated events.

In 2007, Douglas Murray described Ibn Warraq as: .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}

Warraq claims to have been induced into writing against Islam due to the inclination of Western intellectuals in blaming Rushdie during The Satanic Verses controversy. He noticed a lack of anti-Islam tracts in Free Inquiry Magazine, the American secular humanist publication, and wrote on topics such as "Why I am not Muslim." Warraq claims to have been hosted by David Frum, speech-writer of George W. Bush at the White House shortly after the 9/11; Frum maintains silence. In March 2006, he had co-signed a manifesto in response to violent protests in the Islamic world surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, declaring Islam as a totalitarian regime.

Ibn Warraq continued writing with several works examining the historiography of the Qur'an and Muhammad. Other books treated the topic of secular humanist values among Muslims. In The Origins of The Koran: Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book, Ibn Warraq includes some of Theodor Nöldeke's studies. In 2005, Warraq spent several months working with Christoph Luxenberg, who wrote about Syriac vs. Arabic interpretation of Quranic verse.

In reviewing Ibn Warraq's essay in his Quest for the Historical Muhammad (2001) Fred Donner, a professor in Near Eastern studies, notes his lack of specialist training in Arabic studies, citing "inconsistent handling of Arabic materials," and unoriginal arguments, and "heavy-handed favoritism" towards revisionist theories and "the compiler's [i.e. Ibn Warraq's] agenda, which is not scholarship, but anti-Islamic polemic." Anthropologist and historian Daniel Martin Varisco has criticized Ibn Warraq's book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, writing that "This modern son of a bookseller imprints a polemical farce not worth the 500-plus pages of paper it wastes."

He is the author of nine books, including The Origins of the Koran (1998), The Quest for the Historical Muhammad (2000), What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text and Commentary (2002), Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism (2007), Which Koran?: Variants, Manuscripts, and the Influence of Pre-Islamic Poetry (2008), Why the West Is Best: A Muslim Apostate's Defense of Liberal Democracy (2011) and Sir Walter Scott's Crusades & Other Fantasies (2013).

In a 1996 review of Why I Am Not a Muslim, Daniel Pipes wrote that "With few exceptions, he [Warraq] relies almost entirely on the Western tradition of Islamic studies" but concluded that "Despite his anger, 'Ibn Warraq' has written a serious and thought-provoking book" calling for "an equally compelling response from a believing Muslim." Pipes also described Why I am not a Muslim (1995) as "well-researched and quite brilliant." David Pryce-Jones said that it was "a scrupulously documented examination of the life and teaching of the Prophet Muhammad, of the Qur'an and its sources, and the resulting culture." Christopher Hitchens described Why I Am Not a Muslim as his "favorite book on Islam."

Warraq has written historiographies of the early centuries of the Islamic timeline and has published works which question mainstream conceptions of the period. The pen name Ibn Warraq (Arabic: ابن وراق, most literally "son of a papermaker") is used due to his concerns for his personal safety; Warraq stated, "I was afraid of becoming the second Salman Rushdie." It is a name that has been adopted by dissident authors throughout the history of Islam. The name refers to the 9th-century skeptical scholar Abu Isa al-Warraq. Warraq adopted the pseudonym in 1995 when he completed his first book, entitled Why I Am Not a Muslim.

After graduating, Warraq was a primary school teacher in London for five years and moved to France with his wife in 1982, opening an Indian restaurant. He also worked as a courier for a travel agent. Warraq claims to have been "shy" for most of his youth.

Warraq claims to have been born in Rajkot, Gujarat in British India and his family migrated to the newly independent Pakistan in 1947. His family were of Kutchi origin. His mother died when he was an infant. He stated in an interview that he "studied Arabic and read the Qur'an as a young man in hopes of becoming a follower of the Islamic faith." His father decided to send him to a boarding school in England, which in Warraq's opinion, was partly to circumvent a grandmother's effort to push an exclusively religious education on his son at the local madrasa. After his arrival in Britain, he only saw his father once more, when he was 14; his father died two years later. 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.

A pattern in Warraq's work is paying homage to earlier scholarly works on Christianity by borrowing their titles and applying them to Islam: Why I Am Not a Muslim is taken from Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), The Quest for the Historical Muhammad is taken from Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910), and What the Koran Really Says is taken from German author Manfred Barthel's Was wirklich in der Bibel steht ("What the Bible Really Says", 1980).