Key facts
- Born
- 1946 (age 79 – 80), Rajkot , Gujarat , British India
- Occupation
- Author
- Education
- University of Edinburgh
- Subject
- Criticism of Islam
- Years active
- 1995–present
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Gender
- male
- Citizenship
- India
- Place of birth
- Rajkot
- Occupation
- journalist
- Educated at
- University of Edinburgh
- Languages spoken
- English language
- Religion
- atheism
- Movement
- counter-jihad
- Image
- Ibn Warraq 2018.png
- Residence
- United States
Show 3 more facts
- date of birth
- 1946-01-01
- writing language
- English language
- Commons category
- Ibn Warraq
via Wikidata · CC0
~13 min read
Encyclopedic overview
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 (Arabic: 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 adopted the pseudonym in 1995 when he completed his first book, entitled Why I Am Not a Muslim.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Ibn Warraq” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.