Quotes from Ibn Warraq

Being from a minority culture, I realised the importance of looking at non-Western cultures in a positive way.

Monotheism is in its turn doomed to subtract one more God and become atheism

We cannot hope to win the ideological battle against Islam without criticism of Islam, it is essential that we continue to criticize Islam.

Of course slavery and the Muslims were deeply implicated in the slave trade, Islam was an Imperialist religion which destroyed Christianity in the Near East, yet nobody mentions those facts.

While many Islamic countries pay lip service to the idea of freedom of religion, they don't put up with conversion from Islam to another religion.

I maintain that Western popular culture at its best is worthy of respect and should be cherished as much as the operas of Wagner.

I think forgiveness plays a very important part in Western society and it comes from the Judeo Christian heritage.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: this triptych succinctly defines the attractiveness and superiority of Western civilization.

Slavery had very little to do with the economic success of the West. Just look at the facts and figures and how much slavery actually contributed to development.

Each time you admire the façade of the New York Public Library, you are paying homage to Western civilization.

Discussions of Western civilization are too often confined to works of high art that reflect a relatively narrow element of public taste and experience.

The harsh truth that this is the only life we have should make us try and improve it for as many people as possible.

I wish more people would belabor the obvious, and more often.

Monotheism has also been recognized as inherently intolerant.

As Luxenberg's work has only recently been published we must await its scholarly assessment before we can pass any judgements. But if his analysis is correct then suicide bombers, or rather prospective martyrs, would do well to abandon their culture of death, and instead concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this world, unless of course they would really prefer chilled or white raisins, according to their taste, in the next.

One fact must be familiar to all those who have any experience of human nature—a sincerely religious man is often an exceedingly bad man. Winwood Reade (1872)

1. My contention is that "Surah" is an arabicized form of the Hebrew name 171'01 B' surah, that is, Gospel, given to the Christian Gospels during the early centuries of Christianity and adopted in the Qur'an for "revelation.

I do not wish to live in a society where you are stoned for adultery. I prefer to live in a society where we get stoned first, and then commit adultery.

Monotheism is in its turn doomed to subtract one more god and become atheism.

Reading the Koran on its own terms, trying to interpret it without resorting to commentaries, is a difficult and questionable exercise because of the nature of the text-its allusive and referential style and its grammatical and logical discontinuities, as well as our lack of sure information about its origins and the circumstances of its composition. Often such a reading seems arbitrary and necessarily inconclusive. G. R. Hawting