Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy
Ibn Warraq
Thursday, March 22, 2012
6:00 – 7:30 p.m.
at The Westminster Institute
6731 Curran Street, McLean, VA 22101
“We, in the West in general, and the United States in particular, have witnessed over the last twenty years a slow erosion of our civilizational self-confidence. Under the influence of intellectuals and academics in Western universities, intellectuals such as Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Edward Said, and Noam Chomsky, and destructive intellectual fashions such as post-modernism, moral relativism, and multiculturalism, the West has lost all self-confidence in its own values, and seems incapable and unwilling to defend those values. By contrast, resurgent Islam, in all its forms, is supremely confident, and is able to exploit the West’s moral weakness and cultural confusion to demand ever more concessions from her…This book defines and defends Western values, strengths and freedoms often taken for granted. This book also tackles the taboo subjects of racism in Asian culture, Arab slavery, and Islamic Imperialism. It begins with a homage to New York City, as a metaphor for all we hold dear in Western culture- pluralism, individualism, freedom of expression and thought, the complete freedom to pursue life, liberty and happiness unhampered by totalitarian regimes, and theocratic doctrines.”
Ibn Warraq, Islamic scholar and a leading figure in Koranic analysis, the author of six books on Islam and Koranic analysis, including The Origins of the Koran, 1998, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, 2000, and What the Koran Really Says, 2002. Warraq’s op-ed pieces have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, and he has addressed distinguished governing bodies all over the world, including the United Nations in Geneva and Members of the Dutch Parliament at The Hague. In 2007 Mr. Warraq completed a critical study of the thought of Edward Said, entitled Defending the West, which Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism, described 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.”