I am forced to address a problem that I have ignored for many years. There are many unscrupulous people on the Internet — on chat rooms, Twitter, and, above all, Facebook — pretending to be Ibn Warraq, speaking as Ibn Warraq, making comments and analyses in the name of Ibn Warraq. May I take this opportunity to state clearly that I, Ibn Warraq, author and editor of Why I am not a Muslim, Defending the West, Why the West is Best, and seven other books, do not have any Facebook or Twitter account, that I have never particpated in any discussions in “chat-rooms”. I do not have an “official Ibn Warraq Website” either. If you need to know the opinions of Ibn Warraq, read his books, and his occasional articles in the press (Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Die Welt, Der Spiegel, and so on) and even rarer articles on the Internet at New English Review, National Review Online, and Jihad Watch.
The entry on Ibn Warraq on Wikipedia poses problems of another kind: partial quotes, and general tendentiousness. We have all used the Wikipedia at one time or another — it is a useful tool for quick reference. But it is to be used with discretion, and cannot be considered a source for serious works of scholarship, at least not without cross-references, and not without recourse to original or more reputable sources. Unfortunately, far too many people take Wikipedia as a scholarly source of information, when, in fact, its various entries, manned by ill-informed and vindictive zealots, are of uneven quality, and many are inaccurate and biased. I hope eventually the public will gain maturity and realise that it cannot believe or rely on everything they read on Wikipedia. At any rate, to counter its hostility I assembled, a few years ago, a number of positive reviews of my books form emiment scholars, and they can now be viewed in my book Virgins? What Virgins? And Other Essays in the chapter entitled “Apologia Pro Vita Sua”. My works have drawn the approval of such intellectuals and scholars as Christopher Hitchens, Roger Scruton, Douglas Murray, Bernard Lewis, Christoph Luxenberg, Chase Robinson, Claude Gilliot, Pierre Larcher, and many others. I shall close with quotes from Paul Berman, Fouad Ajami, and Dr. David Cook of Rice University.
PAUL BERMAN, author of Terror and Liberalism :
“First, let me mention Ibn Warraq’s book Defending the West. Fred Siegel said that the book has been described as a “glorious work of scholarship”; I may be remembering incorrectly, but I think that is my own blurb on the back of the book. If it isn’t, I wish I had written it.
“Ibn Warraq is a major world figure among intellectuals. If you go through his books, you”ll be astounded at his erudition. The depth of knowledge that he brings to questions of Islam and Islamic culture in various languages: there is no relation to the depth that Edward Said brought to these topics. Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West is, in effect, one of the most devastating demolitions of an intellectual giant that I”ve ever seen. I don’t think that the book has so far been fully appreciated; it’s a book that will take some time to sink in. But I do think that Ibn Warraq has written a book that will turn out to be of historic importance in demolishing the ideological system that Said created.”
FOUAD AJAMI, Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced Internal Â
Studies and author of The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq:
“Ibn Warraq has written a brilliant and luminous book [Defending the West] of cultural analysis and intellectual history. He reminds us of so many precious things in the West-and of it- that are worth upholding in the face of critics who enjoy Western liberties and denigrate them at the same time. This is more than a demolition of Edward Said’s Orientalism: In its own right, it is an exquisite inquiry into the great ideas at play in our world.”
DR. DAVID COOK, Professor in Religious Studies at Rice University, Texas:
“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 weaknesses in Muslim orthodoxy. His third essay, “Some Aspects of the History of Koran Criticism, 700 CE to 2005 CE,” 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.[1] It is an embarrassment for Islamic Studies that no critical text of the Qur’an has been produced.[2] However, even were this basic, elemental work done, there would be still a great more to be done in order to counter one of the most fundamental Muslim presuppositions””namely, that the text of the Qur’an has remained absolutely unaltered since the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century of the Common Era. Ibn Warraq counters this nonsense, which one hears on a regular basis even from educated Muslims who should know better, by demonstrating the prevalence of variant readings of the Qur’anic text.[3] That the existence of these variants, known as qira”at, demonstrates the falsity of the orthodox Muslim position vis-Ã -vis the Qur’an is obvious, and yet bizarrely rejected even by mainstream scholars.[4]”
[1] David Cook’s footnote: “See for a discussion of this failure, F. E. Peters, “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 23 (1991), pp. 291-315″.
[2] David Cook’s footnote: “Such work was begun in 1980, but stalled in 1989 due to lack of funding; see “Codex San”a I: A Qur’anic Manuscript from Mid-1st Century Hijra,” accessed online at: http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Text/Mss/soth.html.”
[3] David Cook’s footnote: “It is further ironic that the existence of either seven or fourteen canonical “readings” of the Qur’an is accepted in Islam, and yet the implications of this fact for the “unaltered” nature of the text are not. ”
[4] David Cook’s footnote: “See Hamza Andreas Tzortis, “Luxenberg & Puin: Origins & Revisions: Responding to Dispatches,” accessed online at: http://www.theinimitablequran.com/respondingtodispacthes.pdf.”
Ibn Warraq is the author of Why I Am Not A Muslim, Defending the West, and many other books. His latest is Sir Walter Scott’s Crusades and Other Fantasies, which was partially serialized at Jihad Watch.