Ibn Warraq

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).

Ibn Warraq (born 1946) is the pen name of an anonymous author critical of Islam.

He is the founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society and used to be a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry, focusing on Quranic criticism.

Warraq is the vice-president of the World Encounter Institute.

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 (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 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.

Although born in India, he held a Pakistani passport.

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.

At 18, he took part in the Bridge in Britain exchange in Israel, working on a kibbutz for six months.

He had no idea that Pakistan had no relations with Israel and the scholarship embarrassed his father.

He enjoyed the experience greatly.

It also made him more aware of being from a Muslim background, as he met people of different religions in Israel.

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.

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 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, an 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.

Warraq adopted the pseudonym in 1995 when he completed his first book, entitled Why I Am Not a Muslim.

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."

He is the author of several books, also including The Origins of the Koran (1998), The Quest for the Historical Muhammad (2000), What the Koran Really Says (2002) and Leaving Islam (2003).

Warraq's commentary on Islam has been criticized by academic specialists in Islamic history as polemical, overly revisionist and lacking in expertise, while others praised it as refreshing, well-researched, and mostly accurate.

In 2005, Warraq spent several months working with Christoph Luxenberg, who wrote about Syriac vs. Arabic interpretation of Quranic verse.

In March 2006, he 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.

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 been on the advisory board of the International Free Press Society, and been associated with the counter-jihad movement.

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.