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.