Ibn Warraq, author of 14 books, including most recently Churchill’s Secular Creed: Empire, Zionism, and Islam’s Complicity in the Holocaust, spoke to an August 31 Middle East Forum podcast (video). Because he is a critic of Islam, he uses a pseudonym as protection. The following summarizes his comments:
In Pakistan, fabricated cases of blasphemy against Christians have been incentivizing Muslim mobs to lynch the accused.
Born a Muslim in 1946 in pre-partition India, Ibn Warraq attended a Quranic school in Pakistan as a child. However, when he was nine years old, his father, who had great respect for the West’s “rationalist approach to life and to education,” sent him to Great Britain to be schooled there. By the time he reached his teens, Ibn Warraq “was already skeptical” of organized religion and wrote his first book Why I Am Not A Muslim. His book was originally published in 1995 by the founder of both the Secular Humanists and a publishing house, Prometheus Books. Additional books critiquing Islam, Mohammed, and the Quran followed and gained traction post-9/11.
Enraged imams issued a fatwa calling for Ibn Warraq’s assassination but were forced to rescind their edict after a French journalist took the clerics to court. There is no concept of free speech in Islam, where criticism and rational critiques are considered blasphemy. Defensive claims that the Quran can only be understood in its original Arabic are of no help because it is written in pre-classical Arabic. “It’s [the Quran] a completely incoherent, jumbled mass of contradictions” that “makes absolutely no sense.” In Pakistan, fabricated cases of blasphemy against Christians have been incentivizing Muslim mobs to lynch the accused.
Warnings that mass Muslim migration to European countries is bringing Islam’s chilling effect to Western norms of free speech have gone largely unheeded. Although it is impossible in Islam, it is the principle of self-criticism on which Western civilization’s progress largely rests. However, “taken to its extreme in the West, it can lead to self-hatred.” The suicidal denial of historical facts is fodder for the likes of “ideologues like Edward Said” who further claim that “the West is the source of all evil.” Such theories are disseminated via social media, influencing those who lack the knowledge “to defend one’s own virtues, one’s own principles, one’s own history and culture.”
French president Emmanuel Macron’s assertion that there is no such thing as French culture is indicative of a mindset of a nation that enabled its institutions to be infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood. A recent classified report for the French government detailed the slow and subtle “municipal jihad” subversion being waged from the bottom up in France.
French president Emmanuel Macron’s assertion that there is no such thing as French culture is indicative of a mindset of a nation that enabled its institutions to be infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Across the English Channel, Great Britain is “overwhelmed” with Muslim migration, while in the U.S., a “slow Islamification” is underway via “stealth jihad” by several antisemitic and pro-Islamic apologists who are members of Congress. A recent hearing on the Muslim Brotherhood held by Senator Ted Cruz and Republican members of Congress was boycotted by the Democrats.
By inadvertently “muddying the waters,” moderate Muslims are shielding Islam from criticism and giving the religion a “free pass” on issues that should be critiqued. While there may be moderate Muslims, “Islam itself is not moderate.” Making a distinction between Islam and Islamism “has a detrimental effect” and is no longer helpful in countering Islam’s deleterious effects on the West.
Ibn Warraq’s “blueprint” comparing Islam to fascism is based on an article by Umberto Eco in the June 22, 1995, issue of the New York Review of Books. In it, he demarcated 14 essential conditions for fascism that are “applicable and present in Islam,” thereby rendering the religion incompatible with Western civilization. For example, whereas Islam claims “sovereignty belongs to God,” the American Constitution, a “magnificent creation” by humans, claims sovereignty belongs to the people. What’s more, the basis of human rights is outlined in the Bill of Rights, “which does not exist in Islam.”
