Among the many essential works of Ibn Warraq, the renowned ex-Muslim historian and scholar of Islam, is an unjustly overlooked book entitled Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, in which he gives a voice to a group of people who are all too often threatened, marginalized, or simply ignored for being too inconvenient for all parties concerned. Now, in the unique and extraordinary Leaving the Allah Delusion Behind: Atheism and Freethought in Islam, Ibn Warraq has provided an extraordinary complement to his earlier volume: a comprehensive survey of atheism in the Islamic world from the earliest days of Islam up to today.
The very existence of this voluminous study might seem anomalous to some, as many assume that atheism is an Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment phenomenon limited to the West and unknown in other cultures and parts of the world. Islam, we are told, is all-encompassing, such that atheism has never gained any widespread foothold in Muslim-majority countries – an argument that contradicts the consigning of every noxious practice (such as, but not limited to, female genital mutilation) in those countries to the pre-Islamic cultural practices that have somehow survived fourteen centuries in an otherwise thoroughly Islamic milieu, but that’s a question for another day.
In reality, atheism in the Islamic world is as old – indeed, older – than Islam itself. As Ibn Warraq points out, “We know from the Koran itself that there were Arab skeptics in Mecca who did not accept the ‘fables’ recounted by Muhammad – they scoffed at the notion of the resurrection of the body, they doubted the divine origins of his “revelation,” and even accused him of plagiarizing the pagan Arab poets; certain verses of the Koran are even now attributed to the pre-Islamic poet al-Qays.”
According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad had some of those skeptics brutally murdered; those who survived did not succeed in discrediting the new self-proclaimed prophet. But Leaving the Allah Delusion Behind demonstrates that, however compelling some may have found Muhammad’s revelations, rejection of Islam and even outright atheism was never entirely stamped out. From Dahris and Zindiqs in the earliest days of Islam to modern-day ex-Muslims active on social media, Ibn Warraq shows that, despite laboring under the ever-present threat of death, atheists and freethinkers have always been part of the intellectual welter of the Islamic world, and at times have wielded considerable influence.
Just as Muhammad was opposed – and considerably enraged – by poets who mocked his prophetic pretensions, so many of the foremost atheists in the Islamic world have been poets, including the celebrated Omar Khayyam of the Rubaiyyat, whom Ibn Warraq reveals as not just a poet of the pleasures of this world, but a polymath, a mathematician and philosopher of considerable depth, and a skeptic who wrote: “Houris and palaces and Heaven and Hell/These are but fairy-tales, forget them all.”
Ibn Warraq also shows that the skepticism of a man who is more often identified as a philosopher, Averroes, had considerable influence in the development of European thought leading to the Enlightenment. We hear a great deal today about how various innovations and philosophical innovations made their way West into Christendom from Islamic domains, to the extent that the West owes its very intellectual life to Islam. These claims are largely apologetic nonsense devised and propagated in order to manipulate people into adopting certain political positions today. Ibn Warraq demonstrates that a much stronger case can be made that modern atheism and religious skepticism in the West has at least some of its intellectual forbears in the Islamic world, but that is not an achievement that is going to show up in anyone’s list of the philosophical achievements of the Islamic world.
Bringing his survey up to atheism and freethought in the Islamic world in this century and the last two, Ibn Warraq finds that oft-reported numbers of converts to Islam in the West have been wildly inflated and uncritically repeated, while the number of Muslims who have left Islam is much higher than is generally assumed, as is to be expected in light of the threats they receive from the pious and devout. Profiling a number of contemporary ex-Muslims, he argues that they may present a way forward out of our present international impasse. “Communism,” he declares, “has been defeated, at least for the moment; Islamism has not, and unless a reformed, tolerant, liberal kind of Islam emerges soon, perhaps the final battle will be between Islam and Western democracy. And these former Muslims…on the side of Western democracy are the only ones who know what it’s all about, and we would do well to listen to their Cassandra cries.”
We would indeed, but at this point the Western intelligentsia has decided that it is much preferable to pretend that Islam, Sharia, and jihad are not what they are, and that consequently these ex-Muslims have nothing to tell us. These influencers and thought leaders will likely awaken to their error at some point; we can only hope that when that happens, it isn’t already too late. If Ibn Warraq, the Cassandra who wrote Leaving the Allah Delusion Behind: Atheism and Freethought in Islam, were heeded today, a great deal of pain, bloodshed, and human loss could be prevented.