A MOSLEM APOSTATE DEFENDS THE WEST: IBN WARRAQ INTERVIEWED BY JERRY GORDON….SEE NOTE
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/103149/sec_id/103149
IBN WARRAQ IS THE REAL THING…AN INTELLECTUAL, A HUMANIST, A SCHOLAR AND A REALIST UNLIKE THE OTHER SO CALLED “MOSLEM MODERATES” WHO APPEAL TO WESTERN AUDIENCES AND BLATHER MUCH “DISINFORMATION” ON THE FAITH DRIVEN BASIS OF TERROR AND JIHAD….RSK
Ibn Warraq, a leading apostate from Islam, author of numerous critical works on the subject, is best described as a skeptic. Born a Muslim in India at the dawn of the partition of the British Raj into the modern nations of India and Pakistan, his family like millions of other Muslims, removed themselves to Pakistan. However, unlike others, his family saw fit to send both he and his elder brother to a boarding school in the English Midlands. For that prescient act, both Warraq and we are grateful. As a young student assisted by a welcoming environment, he nurtured a life-long appreciation of his new surroundings, culture and the cornerstone Judeo-Christian values that form the basis of the Western Enlightenment. Later at university, his curiosity about his cultural origins led him to begin a professional application of Western critical thinking to an historical examination of the origins of Islam, the Qur’an and Mohammed. That resulted in his rejection of Islam and its replacement with secularism.
He was not unaware of the perilous path he had chosen. That is reflected in the nom de plume he chose – that of an early Ninth Century Muslim free thinker, Muhammed Ibn al-Warraq, who was castigated as a heretic for scoffing at Islam in his writings as a “divine faith” revealed by the Prophet Mohammed. Not unlike the original Ibn Warraq, the contemporary Ibn Warraq was aroused by the example of fellow British Indian author Salman Rushdie, who suffered the deprivations of death fatwas from Iranian Ayatollahs for his contemporary heterdox beliefs. And like the original Ibn Warraq, our colleague has been unstinting in his criticism of Islam, despite fatwas by Muslim clerics issued against his life, and in emboldening fellow apostates to speak out against the totalitarian creed and oppression of human rights, freedom and liberty.
I first met Ibn Warraq in 2003 at a presentation he made at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts about “Apostasy and Apostates under Islam,” a reference to the book, Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, edited by him. During a visit with Dr. Andrew Bostom at the latter’s home in Rhode Island that weekend, I read and commented on an essay Warraq had written critiquing the work of the late Edward Said. Said had created a misleading post-colonial doctrine in his book, Orientalism, which maligned the West by falsely accusing it of imposing a racist view via imperialism on the Muslim Ummah. (As if the historical Islam didn’t have its grand sweep of imperialistic conquests. Conquests that left, death, slavery and dhimmitude for those unbelievers who lived in danger of extinction as subjugated minorities in Muslim realms.)
That essay eventuated in a later major work of Warraq’s, Defending the West, a theme furthered in his latest book, Why The West is Best. My next encounter with him occurred in St. Petersburg, Florida in 2007, where he had organized the Secular Islam Summit. There I also met and conferred with his fellow apostates from Islam, Nonie Darwish and Dr. Wafa Sultan. I was present when both he and Darwish launched Former Muslims United – a group devoted to advocating the human and civil rights for apostates – in a hearing room of the Rayburn office building in Washington, DC in 2009. The following June in 2010, we met again at a Symposium of the New English Review in Nashville. There, he excoriated Western Islamologists for not critically examining the historical origins of Islam and Qur’anic doctrine, out of fear of offending Muslim clerical authorities. In his paper “Historical Methodology and the Believer” delivered at the symposium he said:
Without criticism of Islam, Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. It will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.
Western intellectual Islamologists have totally failed in their duties as intellectuals. They have betrayed their calling by abandoning their critical faculties when it comes to Islam.
Watch this interview by the author with Ibn Warraq at the 2010 New English Review Symposium.
Given this background we reached out to Ibn Warraq for this interview.
Jerry Gordon: Ibn thank you consenting to this interview.
Ibn Warraq: Thank you Jerry for inviting me.
Gordon: Tell us about your family background in Pakistan and why you were sent to Boarding School in England.
Warraq: Yes, my family was Muslim; we were from an area of India which is still part of India, the Gujarat. In fact I was born in a town called Rajkot. It’s the town where Gandhi grew up although he was not born there. Gandhi’s father worked for the Maharajah of the state. I was born there in 1946, one year before partition. When Pakistan came into being in 1947 my family decided to move to the newly created Pakistan. We went to the city of Karachi which was the then capitol. My family were businessmen, dealing in export – import. My grandfather had told my father to go to Karachi buy some property and invest there though my grandfather himself was at that time in Mozambique which was then Portuguese East Africa. I grew up in Karachi until the age of nine when my father decided to send me to a boarding school in England with my brother who is a year older. The main reason was he had no faith in the future of Pakistan. He was a witness to coups d’état, social unrest, riots, the insecurity and the terrible educational system. He really saw no hope there and he was not a particularly religious person. He never forced religion down our throats. In fact he once told my grandmother that she was ruining us with her religious mumbo jumbo which really upset her a lot. However, he did bow down to public pressure in a country like Pakistan. There was an awful lot of conformity. Pressure to conform weighed so heavily on people like my father that he sent my brother and me to a Qur’anic school. One of my earliest memories is going to a Qur’anic school where we learned to recite the parts of the Qur’an by heart without understanding a word because it was in Arabic. At the age of nine I found myself in the rural setting of Worcestershire, England in the Midlands.
Gordon: How did that experience, going to a private school in England, transform your thinking about Western versus Islamic values?
Warraq: It did in a very indirect way. I was not conscious of big terms like Western values or Islamic values. What happened was, as I recount in my book called Virgins, What Virgins and Other Essays, I slowly started becoming English without realizing it. I was acquiring a taste for English folk songs, for the English countryside, for what the scholar Nikolaus Pevsner called the Englishness of English Art. I loved everything about the experience. It was a great period of discovery, awakening and intellectual curiosity. I always have this tendency to form very strong local attachments, so I was very keen to find out about this school I was going to, its history, and the countryside. I was acquiring a kind of English character if you like, Englishness about things and my attitudes.
Gordon: You attended the University of Edinburgh. What were some of the seminal intellectual influences there?
Warraq: I went up there to study the history of art, basically European art. Because of a certain cultural identity crisis, I decided I would study Arabic to find out something about the faith I was born into. I studied Arabic under a very well known Professor, W. Montgomery Watt – a highly revered man who died a few years ago at over 90 years of age. He wrote a very influential biography of Mohammed which was highly respected in the Islamic world. At the same time I was going through all of the classic texts that young people were reading. I remember reading authors like Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and the classic texts of the period: Sartre’s La Nausee, Camus’ L’Etranger, Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and so on. I was very confused and not very well focused. I found most of my fellow students very immature and I was glad to get out of there as soon as I could into the wider world.
Gordon: When did you decide to remain in the West and what career options did you contemplate?
Warraq: That decision was made for me because my mother died when I was one and my father died while I was at Edinburgh. Therefore, I no longer had any connections to Pakistan. I had an uncle in Mozambique but there was no question of my settling there. I had some very vague literary pretensions. Like many of my generation I also had a fascination, a passion for the cinema. I wanted to go to the National School in London but I never managed to get in. I was drifting around with a group of hippies at the end of the 1960’s and the early 1970’s. I decided that I just couldn’t lie around because most of my hippie friends were faking it. Most of them came from middle class families, whereas when I said I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from I really meant it. I had some rough times and I decided I had to get a job. I decided I would become a teacher and did another degree in teacher training and began teaching in London.
Gordon: How did the death fatwa issued by the late Ayatollah Khomeini against the life of British author Salman Rushdie influence your thinking and writings?
Warraq: Khomeini’s fatwa in 1989 had an enormous influence. In fact it worried me that people still refused to take seriously the dangers posed by this theocratic regime. They refused to acknowledge the powerful influence it was having on the resurgence of radical Islam in the entire Middle East. Many people from the subcontinent of India, like me, still revere Salman Rushdie because he was the first successful writer of Indian origin – he was highly feted and regarded. He won the Booker Prize. We really revered him. He was also a skeptic. Moreover, he wrote this scandalous book, The Satanic Verses that criticized Islam. The fatwa was a great shock to me. This event really pushed me to write my first book, Why I Am Not a Muslim. It was my wake up call to Western intellectuals. I was a little disappointed to see how many of the Western intellectuals reacted to the fatwa on Rushdie. They blamed him. They blamed the victim. Intellectuals like John Berger, historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper, not to mention John Le Carre, the novelist. They all blamed Rushdie. They didn’t take his side at all. That was a great shock to me and I felt that it was time I said something. I was given the opportunity so I was happy to do that.
Gordon: What aspects of doctrinal Islam were critical to your decision to leave Islam?
Warraq: There was not one aspect. The whole thing, the whole construct didn’t make any sense to me. It was a dense radical construct. It started with premises which I just couldn’t accept. For example that the Qur’an was the word of God, which was not obvious to me. Islam did not encourage free thought, free discussion; it did not encourage free inquiry. These things are very important to me. Islam tried to rule over every single aspect of your life. I really valued my freedoms which I had come to take for granted. It was the fatwa on Rushdie which woke me up, the fact that I had to do something about defending him. Thus the entire construct was so against all the things that I valued; freedom of thought, freedom of action, the equality of women which are denied under Islam.
Gordon: Could you explain the significance of your choice of Ibn Warraq as a nom de plume?
Warraq: Yes, it’s very simple actually. It was, again, forced on me. I wanted to take the nom de plume of Ibn al-Rawandi. Ibn al-Rawandi was a great free thinker, one of the few prominent free thinkers in Islam. However, his name had been taken by an Englishman who later became a good friend of mine. He died a few years ago. I took the name of Ibn al-Rawandi’s teacher who was called Ibn al-Warraq. He was also a free thinker and lived in late Ninth Century and died in early the 10th Century.
Gordon: What compelled you to go public about your apostasy in writing and publishing, Why I am not a Muslim?
Warraq: I think it was basically the Rushdie affair which pushed me into it. The way it happened was I was subscribing to a free thought magazine called, Free Inquiry. They had been running a series of articles by former Christians of various denominations with the title, “Why I am not a (blank),” and then you would fill in the blank with why I am not a Mormon, why I am not a Unitarian, etc. They couldn’t find anyone to write one on “Why I am not a Muslim” so they asked me and I jumped at the idea. I wrote an article first. That was in 1992. Since Free Inquiry was in fact edited by a man who also founded and ran a publishing house called Prometheus I asked him whether Prometheus would be interested in a book-length version of the article and he said “yes.” That is how the book came about.
Gordon: Your earliest published works focused on the origins of the Qur’an. Did that form the intellectual basis for your criticism of doctrinal Islam?
Warraq: Yes, my work was not a criticism of doctrinal aspects of Islam. Rather, I looked at the origins of Islam and what we knew about Islam which fascinated me. Anyone who is fascinated by history wants to know what really happened. History and a passion for history goes with a passion for truth; to find out what really happened. That is the path that I took as I really wanted to know what the origins of the Qur’an were. Of course I did not accept the traditional Muslim account which was totally ahistorical. All of my criticism of Islam was contained in my first book, Why I am not a Muslim. The next book was a scholarly criticism of various theories as to the origins of the Qur’an and the meaning of the Qur’an so they’re not quite the same thing. I’ll give you an example. Many of my Muslim apostate friends are quite happy to accept the traditional account of the life of Mohammed because it gives them plenty of ammunition to attack him as a pedophile and man with a sword in one hand and the Qur’an in the other. Someone who is intolerant and someone who is antisemitic. Now all that doesn’t interest me whatsoever. What interests me is what do we know about Mohammed, what do we know that is true? How do we know that Mohammed did X, Y and Z? Can we accept the Hadith which are accounts of the acts and sayings of Mohammed? My apostate friends sometimes don’t really understand what I’m getting at, they say well it’s all there, you know, in black and white. It’s there in the history books, it’s written by Arab Muslims themselves so it must be true. Whereas I am a skeptic and I have a deeper understanding of historical methodology and point out that no, this cannot have been the case. Thus, I have been engaged in a slightly different kind of intellectual activity. If you read the magnificent works of Jonathan Israel, the Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study, on the history of the Enlightenment, the European Enlightenment, you would realize that it all started with Spinoza and Spinoza’s critique of the Christian Bible. I believe this is my mission as well. My eventual goal is to bring about enlightenment, not just a reformation. I think it can only come about with a critique of the Qur’an in a similar fashion.
Gordon: You have taken up the cause of Defending the West in your book of the same title, from critics like Edward Said. Why do you consider that an important aspect of your work?
Warraq: We are at this moment in danger of losing freedoms won at great cost over the centuries. These are freedoms I value. Since the Second World War, Western intellectuals have been very reluctant to defend these freedoms, to defend the values of the West. One of the greatest critics of the West was Edward Said. I had to point out that while people were so enthralled with Edward Said’s arguments that they hadn’t examined them properly. He was no historian and he had no knowledge of Islam. He gave a very contentious account of what happened during the rise of the British Empire. My view was that we were in danger of losing sight of the positive aspects of Western Civilization because we were too afraid to defend the West. Even the notion of just defending the West was considered far too euro-centric and in fact racist and imperialist. People were just too ashamed to claim anything for Western civilization. Extraordinary post-Columbian feelings of guilt were partly responsible. People like Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and others were also responsible for this defensive attitude. I thought it was time to stand up and to show that Said was talking nonsense most of the time.
Gordon: Why do you believe that the prevailing liberal criticism of Western values is dangerous?
Warraq: First of all, it’s so biased, it’s so one-sided. There isn’t an equivalent criticism of Islam especially and secondly it’s historically unsound. Take for example their criticism of Western attitudes towards race, slavery and imperialism. If you take all three and compare them to racism or imperialism of the Islamic world, you will see that slavery has existed in every single civilization, in fact, the Arabs have been some of the greatest slave traders of all. Slavery continues to this day in the Islamic world although this is not admitted by them. I know that people like Dr. Charles Jacobs of the American Anti-Slavery Group had made videos of slave markets in Africa well into the 1990’s. While slavery has existed in every single civilization, it was the West which first took steps to abolish slavery. In fact, the kings of various African states were absolutely shocked that Britain had abolished slavery. They argued what were they going to live on? The British couldn’t do this. Their people relied on making money from slavery. These African leaders sent people to talk to Queen Victoria and said, you know, come off it. We have lived on slavery for all of these years. Abolitionism did not find positive response in Africa as it did in Western societies and cultures.
Gordon: You are intellectually a secularist. How has that affected your writings and your activism?
Warraq: I think it helps me to be a bit more objective. In my new book, Why the West is Best, I give full credit to various aspects of Judaism and Christianity in the making of the West which is something which many of my secularist friends wish to deny. They only want to empathize with the Greco-Roman heritage. Whereas I feel that this is historically not accurate and really unfair. I have always felt that many Christians, deeply sincere Christians, support the idea of separation of State and Church and the secularist in that sense as well. They believe that religion should be very much a private affair and should not be given special treatment. The State should not fund churches for example.
Gordon: You were one of the co-founders of Former Muslims United, launched in September 2009. How important is it that apostates from Islam speak out against violations of their civil and human rights in both the West and the Muslim Ummah?
Warraq: Apostates from Islam, in any Islamic country, would not last very long. They would be very lucky to escape with their lives. There have been a number of cases of apostates who have been murdered, been imprisoned. While many Islamic countries pay lip service to the idea of freedom of religion, they don’t put up with conversion from Islam to another religion. This is the case with terrible consequences in Iran. Hundreds of people have died. Western Intellectuals seem to keep quiet on these issues. However, it is very dangerous for an apostate in the Islamic world. Apostates from Islam, even in the West, remain rather terrified which I find very disturbing. I have met many apostates who have come to me and said, “your books have changed our lives but we cannot bring your books home. We cannot take them home. We have to read them, in secret, in libraries and so on.” I find that really appalling. There was a report a few years ago in the Washington Times, by the journalist Julia Duin, who wrote a marvelous account of the conversions of many Egyptians to Christianity from Islam. They had to have their meetings in secret as they were threatened. Even despite this, they must learn to speak fearlessly, otherwise their positions will have been in vain. I think if they were to hold their heads up high this would encourage apostates in the Islamic world. We should defend those apostates in the Islamic world as much as possible.
Gordon: Do you view the current campaign of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to impose Islamic Sharia blasphemy laws on the West injurious?
Warraq: Absolutely. They are trying to ban any kind of criticism of Islam. It is already labeled Islamophobia to criticize Islam, which is totally absurd. The OIC is trying to pass resolutions at the United Nations which would be legally binding and would make any criticism of Islam liable to legal punishment. That is terrible. Of course that is injurious to Western values. It attacks all values in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution, especially freedom of religion, freedom of expression. We cannot hope to win the ideological battle against Islam without criticism of Islam, it is essential that we continue to criticize Islam. These blasphemy laws are designed to silence the critics of Islam.
Gordon: This past year has witnessed declarations by political leaders in the UK, France and Germany about the failure of multi-culturalism. Do you believe that is a signal that Muslim immigrants in the West have failed to integrate with Western values?
Warraq: Yes, that has been the unintended consequence of the vigorously enforced programs of multi-culturalism. I know this first hand because I was teaching in London and I thought it was a great thing. There were some very sound reasons behind this notion of multi-culturalism. However, in fact it all went horribly wrong, because to even criticize values of another culture was considered unacceptable, politically incorrect. From positive attitudes to the cultures of the immigrants we went to denigration of the Western values and acceptance of some of the worst aspects of the cultures of the immigrants. You had de-facto acceptance of polygamy and female genital mutilation, the slow erosion of the rights of women from Muslim countries. It has been a complete disaster and Muslims are the only cultural group in the West who fail to integrate. They want to keep their own values. They want to keep their own marriage laws. They want to keep all their particular taboos and they have no wish to conform to the laws of the host nation. They feel it is the host nation which must change even though they are in the minority. They wish the majority to change. It’s quite extraordinarily arrogant. However, unfortunately that is the way it is.
Gordon: What are the principal themes in your latest work, Why The West is Best?
Warraq: It is a more focused work than Defending the West which critiqued the work of Edward Said. Why the West is Best is a more general defense of Western values. I go through the history of the origins of these values starting with the Greeks and the Romans, and highlighting the Judeo Christian heritage. For example, Christianity introduced the notion of forgiveness. I think forgiveness plays a very important part in Western society and it comes from the Judeo Christian heritage. I tried to show that some of the usual criticisms of the West, just don’t hold up. The idea that the West was economically successful because of slavery, it’s just nonsense. Slavery had very little to do with the economic success of the West. Just look at the facts and figures and how much slavery actually contributed to development. I tried to debunk some of the notions of the superiority of Eastern spirituality which usually are contrasted with decadent Western materialism which is complete nonsense. For example, the greatest number of drug addicts are to be found in Teheran and in Karachi, not in the West. Not in New York believe it or not. It’s the same with the roles of slavery, racism and imperialism in the world. These institutions were present in other cultures. However, it was Western civilization which did something about slavery, about racism and voluntarily dissolved its empires leaving behind a very positive legacy of institutions not to mention buildings and roadways. Then I discuss some of the Western values like accepting criticism and irony. Irony it seems is a bit incomprehensible to Islamic society. They don’t seem to understand irony. The fact that you can actually criticize some of the most basically held beliefs of one’s own culture and see the funny side of it, to see the humorous self-criticism or irony is one of the greatest strengths of the West. Then there is the whole notion of objectivity. That is the scientific method which is a gift of the West to the rest of the world which has not been properly appreciated. I end this latest book with some rallying cries as to how we can defend Western civilization.
Gordon: Ibn, thank you for this comprehensive discussion of your important views. If you hadn’t come to England and been exposed to those values that you articulate very well which are precious to the West, I don’t think you would have become the magisterial figure of a major critic of Islam.
Warraq: Thanks a lot. My thanks to people like you and Rebecca who give me a platform. We would be lost without you.
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