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EXCLUSIVE Interview: Koranic Scholar - The Judeo-Christian Sources of the Koran
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friends to like this.He is a man who rarely reads a book of less than 600 pages and who has easily written books of that length. Engage him in conversation and he will talk about the footnotes in a particular book—and the footnotes which should have been there but which are missing in action.I am talking about my dear friend, Ibn Warraq, the author or editor of 12 books, and the only man who has ever roundly defeated Tariq Ramadan in an Intelligence Squared debate in London.(YOUTUBE video) His final riposte ("I do not care to live in a society where you are stoned for adultery, I would rather live in country where you get stoned first and then commit adultery") brought down the house. Despite this witticism, Ibn Warraq is essentially a very shy, Old World, and exceedingly courtly man. Translated, his pen name means "the son of a paper maker." He does not use his real name because he is an apostate, which constitutes a capital crime in Islam. He is an ex-Muslim. He is also pro-Western, anti-terrorism, pro-Israel, and pro-human rights. In many quarters, such views are also considered "killing" offenses. Ibn Warraq is known for having dared to summarize the history of Islam as one of imperialism, colonialism, gender and religious apartheid, anti-black racism, and slavery—and for having dared to point out that, far from being odious, imperial, "Orientalists," that European scholars, not Muslim invaders, saved, recorded, painted, preserved, and restored the narratives, scholarship, sculpture, artifacts, languages, customs, and architecture of the Islamic, pre-Islamic, and Christian Middle East, and of Asia, and India. I can no longer remember exactly where or when we met but our work drew us together and has kept us close. By 2005, we were already familiar with each other's work and started working together at that time. We have both been involved in a number of honor killing asylum cases—he, for his consummate knowledge about apostasy. Although Ibn Warraq is more of a long-distance intellectual, he has not hesitated to participate in certain public forums. For example, in 2006, he traveled to the Hague to participate in a conference on Islam at the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference. Fortuyn was a publicly gay politician who opposed Holland's immigration policies. (His killer, sentenced to eighteen years, has just been released). Also in 2006, in the wake of the Mohammed Cartoon travesty/tragedy, Ibn Warraq joined ten other Muslim and ex-Muslim intellectuals, (including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasreen, and Salman Rushdie), in co-signing a MANIFESTO: "Together Facing the New Totalitarianism." The statement strongly opposed blasphemy laws and customs.
Related Topics: Islam
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