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‘We need more than ever to read the luminous and emancipatory work of Ibn Warraq’

Aug 19, 2020 7:30 am By Robert Spencer

Ibn Warraq, the pioneering and courageous ex-Muslim and peerless scholar of Islam, has published a new edition of his seminal work, Why I Am Not A Muslim. You can order it here. This is one of the most important works to have appeared in the last thirty years about jihad violence and Sharia oppression. It made an extraordinary impression on me when I first read it, years before I had published anything on Islam. Ever since it first appeared it has been a source of inspiration for innumerable ex-Muslims and others who believe in universal human rights and thus oppose Sharia. If you haven’t read it, you need to. It is a monumental contribution to the defense of civilization against barbarism, and doubtless one of the few that will survive over the centuries, if free societies survive.

Why I Am Not A Muslim is a truly comprehensive overview of what is problematic about Islam in the contemporary world. It includes discussions of the Salman Rushdie death fatwa and the Islamic jihad against the freedom of speech, which has only grown more emboldened in the years since the first edition was written. Ibn Warraq also discusses the difficulties arising from the moral teachings of the Qur’an, the compatibility of Sharia with otherwise universally accepted principles of human rights, and a great deal more. The book appeared at a time when it was taken for granted that jihad violence was a subject for history books, and that the Islamic world was moving confidently in the direction of democracy and secularism. Ibn Warraq showed why that was always a false hope, and everything he says in Why I Am Not A Muslim has been borne out by the events of the subsequent quarter-century. That makes this book all the more urgent. Even after the passage of all this time, it remains the one book to give to an ill-informed and well-meaning individual who is afraid of appearing to be “Islamophobic” — and of course the hordes of such people are growing every day.

In her Foreword, Zineb el Rhazoui, a journalist who survived the Charlie Hebdo jihad massacre — she was in Morocco at the time — writes:

We need more than ever to read the luminous and emancipatory work of Ibn Warraq. If each young Muslim read only one of his books, the Qur’anic darkness would have far less hold on brains having experienced the relentless rigor of critical reason. Ibn Warraq’s precursor journey is a lesson in dignity and intellectual coherence. Or how a man undertakes the titanic work of demystifying a religion to which all the outstretched hands were cut, bequeathing to his peers a prolific mass of scholarly analyzes and historical or semantic discoveries which did not stop awakening the masses anesthetized by centuries of obligatory faith. At a time when Western societies are busy “deradicalizing” at great cost, inventing at the same time a neologism which sterilizes the debate where it should be said “to de-Islamize”, Ibn Warraq has undertaken to do it since his pen started to run on the pages. I am not afraid to say it, as long as one does not read Ibn Warraq more than one reads the Koran, Islam will continue to sow the seeds of mass crime, while draping itself in its divine aura.

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Filed Under: Apostasy, Featured Tagged With: Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not A Muslim


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Comments

  1. mortimer says

    Aug 19, 2020 at 9:44 am

    Ibn Warraq’s writing is so perfectly expressed and perfectly referenced that it is nearly impossible to find any fault whatever. His enemies fearfully avoid him, rather than try to refute him.

    ‘Relentless rigor’ is a fitting summary.

    • yiyoya says

      Aug 19, 2020 at 11:27 am

      I applaud Ibn Warraq’s book. I hope it proves to be a great influence. But truth be told when people want to believe a religion is true they will believe it no matter what.

      To this day Christians disparage and dismiss out of hand Thomas Paine’s “The Age of Reason” and Thomas Jefferson’s Bible. And both Christians and atheist socialists disparage and dismiss out of hand Ayn Rand’s atheistic philosophy of Objectivism.

      There seems to be, in the breast of man, a deep seated need for immortality and transcendence to another superior realm than the one in which we live in. The terror of death and dying ourselves and the terror of watching our loved ones die, our essential aloneness within ourselves, the humiliation and disillusionment that pain, suffering, bad luck, misfortune, the passing away of youth, and time the destroyer, all bring to every life, all but guarantee a search, an aching, sometimes tear filled, longing for transcendence.

      • revereridesagain says

        Aug 19, 2020 at 5:38 pm

        +1

        From a life-long Objectivist, and admirer of Paine!

      • gravenimage says

        Aug 20, 2020 at 1:35 am

        Actually, I know a lot of Christians who have read and appreciated “The Age of Reason”.

        • yiyoya says

          Aug 21, 2020 at 8:24 am

          And do they remain Christians? Doesn’t that prove my point?

          Muslims will read “Why I Am Not A Muslim” and remain Muslims.

        • gravenimage says

          Aug 21, 2020 at 11:29 pm

          The implication that Christians reject reason is mistaken.

        • yiyoya says

          Aug 22, 2020 at 5:57 am

          I didn’t say Christians or Muslims reject reason altogether, all the time.

          Christians compartmentalize and rationalize, just like the Muslims. They accept and use reason when they need to and reject it in when it upsets or contradicts their religious beliefs. Christians subordinate reason to faith, or reject it altogether in favor of faith, as they need to, and so do the Muslims, and that’s a crucial problem, isn’t it.

          You can’t live on faith across the board, all the time, on every issue, in every field, in every endeavor and survive on earth, you have to use reason at some point unless you wish to perish.

        • gravenimage says

          Aug 24, 2020 at 10:23 pm

          Pretending that Islam and Christianity are morally the same is actually anything but reasonable, I’m afraid.

        • yiyoya says

          Aug 26, 2020 at 10:58 am

          To ‘gravenimage”, you posted, “Pretending that Islam and Christianity are morally the same is actually anything but reasonable, I’m afraid.”

          Maybe others pretend, but I pretend no such thing. Today’s Christianity is more rational than the Christianity of the Dark Ages, the Christianity that was the cause of the Dark Ages. Thanks to the Renaissance. Renaissance means ‘rebirth”, the rebirth of what? The rebirth of reason. What caused this rebirth? The re-discovery, re-introduction, and application to Christian faith of Aristotelian reason and logic by Thomas Aquinas. Today’s more rational Christianity is more moral, because it is more rational, it was a slow, arduous, process that took many centuries of Aristotelian influence, beginning with Thomas Aquinas.

          It was NOT the rebirth of Christian faith that gave us the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, the American Revolution, American Constitution, American Bill of Rights, the rebirth of science, the rebirth of concern with the pursuit of happiness on earth and in this earthly life, and the Industrial Revolution. It was the rebirth of REASON and it’s eroding effect on Christian mysticism, superstition, and faith.

          Islam is more irrational and therefore more immoral and violent than today’s tempered and leashed Christianity (tempered and leashed by Aristotelian reason) having never been tempered, restrained, and modified by an Aristotelian Renaissance.

          Today’s Christian and Jewish faiths are piggybacking on Aristotle but impudently giving faith the credit owed to reason. It is literally like having one blind eye and one eye that can see, and saying, “Thank God I have one blind eye otherwise my seeing eye would be useless”.

        • gravenimage says

          Aug 26, 2020 at 4:40 pm

          yiyoya wrote:

          To ‘gravenimage”, you posted, “Pretending that Islam and Christianity are morally the same is actually anything but reasonable, I’m afraid.”

          Maybe others pretend, but I pretend no such thing.
          ………………………..

          Certainly, there are those who do.

          More:

          Today’s Christianity is more rational than the Christianity of the Dark Ages, the Christianity that was the cause of the Dark Ages.
          ………………………..

          No, Christianity was not the cause of the Dark Ages. It was more complex than this, but the major factors were the barbarian invasions, the fall of the Roman Empire, and the final blow being the conquests of Islam in the Levant and North Africa and subsequent Muslim piracy largely cutting Europe off from the Mediterranean Sea.

          Christianity actually helped to preserve learning during this dark period–especially the monasteries.

          More:

          Thanks to the Renaissance. Renaissance means ‘rebirth”, the rebirth of what? The rebirth of reason. What caused this rebirth? The re-discovery, re-introduction, and application to Christian faith of Aristotelian reason and logic by Thomas Aquinas. Today’s more rational Christianity is more moral, because it is more rational, it was a slow, arduous, process that took many centuries of Aristotelian influence, beginning with Thomas Aquinas.
          ………………………..

          I have actually said the same thing many times. Why would you assume I would think otherwise?

          More:

          It was NOT the rebirth of Christian faith that gave us the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, the American Revolution, American Constitution, American Bill of Rights, the rebirth of science, the rebirth of concern with the pursuit of happiness on earth and in this earthly life, and the Industrial Revolution. It was the rebirth of REASON and it’s eroding effect on Christian mysticism, superstition, and faith.
          ………………………..

          I don’t know of *anyone* who claims that the Renaissance was caused by the rebirth of Christianity–and this period has been my focus in studying history. Citations?

          But yes–Judaism and Christianity do not reject reason as Islam does, and Judeo-Christian values do indeed underpin many of the concepts in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

          I think I will leave our discussion here, if that’s all right with you. There are some points that we probably will not agree on.

          But we both agree on the horrors of Islam–Jihad and Shari’ah–and I stand with you there.

  2. Peter Buckley says

    Aug 19, 2020 at 10:24 am

    • gravenimage says

      Aug 20, 2020 at 1:36 am

      Thanks for that link, Peter.

  3. FYI says

    Aug 19, 2020 at 11:05 am

    islamic scholarship today is like Humpty Dumpty having his Great Fall.

    “All allah’s scholars
    and all allah’s men
    couldn’t put the quran
    back together again”

    That’s because of all the HOLES IN THE NARRATIVE and all the errors in allah’s ‘perfect’ book.
    Thanks to the internet and ’emancipatory works’ that expose many islamic scholars as charlatans.

  4. David Reid Ross says

    Aug 19, 2020 at 3:42 pm

    I second this. “Why I Am Not A Muslim”, and Ibn Warraq’s work generally, has been a foundational influence.

  5. tim gallagher says

    Aug 19, 2020 at 4:51 pm

    The people who woke up to Islam’s evil and spoke up about it early on interest me. Going further back, large numbers of wise people could see Islam for the foul ideology that it is, such as John Quincy Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville, Churchill and many others. Then there seemed to be a period of political correctness or just plain ignorance when there didn’t seem to be much criticism of Islam. From what I gather, Bat Y’eor, Oriana Fallaci. Conor Cruise O’Brien and Ibn Warraq were some of the early critics of Islam in this later period. When I was starting to try to work out why Muslims were always so much trouble, I came across Ibn Warraq’s book and also Ali Sina, the ex-Muslim on the internet (I think his website was Faith Freedom or something like that) and then Robert Spencer’s book, “Islam Unveiled”, which was the book I thought was the best (this was back in the early 2000’s). People like Ibn Warraq deserve enormous praise and I’m sure they have great courage because it is a certainty that the Muslim scum will go after them for telling the truth about Islam’s vile nature.

    • gravenimage says

      Aug 20, 2020 at 1:38 am

      +1

      • tim gallagher says

        Aug 20, 2020 at 5:49 pm

        Thanks for the +1, gravenimage. These people who woke early (that is in more recent times, not the many people who seemed to know how evil Islam was ages ago, like Adams, de Tocqueville, et al) do impress me. There seemed to be so many people who thought Islam was OK back when Bat Ye’or, Fallaci, O’Brien and Warraq started to tell the truth about islam’s barbarity. At least there are more people who have now woken up, though not nearly enough.

        • gravenimage says

          Aug 21, 2020 at 1:21 am

          Agree, Tim.

  6. gravenimage says

    Aug 20, 2020 at 1:34 am

    ‘We need more than ever to read the luminous and emancipatory work of Ibn Warraq’
    ……………….

    I have not read this yet–but I know it is an important work.

  7. The Awful Truth says

    Aug 20, 2020 at 8:56 am

    Look forwards to reading it. Islam is a scourge against people and animals.

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