The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology
(Ibn Warraq, November 29, 2017)
Transcript available below
About the speaker
Author Ibn Warraq‘s most recent book is The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology. In it, he takes the dogmas of jihadists seriously and critically examines the Islamic sources upon which they draw. Ibn Warraq is perhaps most famous for his best-selling work, Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995), an early warning to the West about the dangers of political Islam and multiculturalism. He has edited and contributed to several books of Koranic criticism and on the origins of Islam: The Origins of the Koran, 1998; The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, 2000; What the Koran Really Says, 2002; Which Koran? 2011; and Christmas in the Koran, 2014.
Bernard Lewis has written that, “Ibn Warraq exemplifies the rarely combined qualities of courage, integrity, and intelligence.” Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, 2007, was described by distinguished professor Paul Berman as “a glorious work of scholarship, and it is going to contribute mightily to modernizing the way we think about Western civilization and the rest of the world.” In Why the West is Best, 2011, Ibn Warraq addressed the need for Western civilization to regain its civilizational self-confidence. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has said that “Warraq’s books have defended Western civilization and have reminded us what we are fighting for.”
He is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Westminster Institute, a Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, and a contributing editor to The New English Review. He studied Arabic and Persian at the University of Edinburgh.