Why I Am Not a Muslim

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Cover of Why I Am Not a Muslim

Why I Am Not a Muslim, a book written by Ibn Warraq, is a critique of Islam and the Qur'an. It was first published by Prometheus Books in the USA in 1995.

1 Quote from the author
2 Contents
3 Methodology
4 Criticism
5 See also
6 Editions

[edit] Quote from the author

I wanted to point out that there were a large number of ex-Muslims, and I wanted to hold them up as examples to ex-Muslims to come out of the closet. I want people from Islamic countries to breathe a freer air because of the courage of the particular apostates. I wanted to open up the debate on Islam – and after all, freedom of conscience is a very basic human right which is denied many people in Islamic countries.

[edit] Contents

Chapter 1 The Rushdie Affair
Chapter 2 The Origins of Islam
Chapter 3 The Problem of Sources
Chapter 4 Muhammad and His Message
Chapter 5 The Koran
Chapter 6 The Totalitarian Nature of Islam
Chapter 7 Is Islam Compatible with Democracy and Human Rights?
Chapter 8 Arab Imperialism, Islamic Colonialism
Chapter 9 The Arab Conquests and the Position of Non-Muslim Subjects
Chapter 10 Heretics and Heterodoxy, Atheism and Freethought, Reason and Revelation
Chapter 11 Greek Philosophy and Science and Their Influence on Islam
Chapter 12 Sufism or Islamic Mysticism
Chapter 13 Al-Ma'arri
Chapter 14 Women and Islam
Chapter 15 Taboos: Wine, Pigs, and Homosexuality
Chapter 16 Final Assessment of Muhammad
Chapter 17 Islam in the West

[edit] Methodology

Warraq employs a wide range of tools in his assault on the intellectual edifice of Islam. The book is intended to be a survey of the flaws in Islam for a casual reader with at least a secondary education. As such, Warraq employs tools of philology, rationalist critique, archaeology and hermeneutics to make his arguments. Thus, in one paragraph, a reader will encounter an argument about the meaning of a word as translated from Arabic, a commentary about how this very notion makes no sense in light of a scientific world-view and perhaps some arguments about there is insufficient textual evidence to justify belief in the authenticity of the quote, in the first place.

[edit] Criticism

Jeremiah D. McAuliffe, a convert to Islam, has written a criticism of this book in his Trends and Flaws in Some Anti-Muslim Writing [1]. Fred Donner wrote about this book "Yet this book is itself a monument to duplicity. The compiler never has the honesty or courage to divulge his identity" and "Far more serious is the fact that this book is religious polemic attempting to masquerade as scholarship. It is a collection of basically sound articles, framed by a seriously flawed introduction, and put in the service of anti-Islamic polemic dedicated to the proposition that Islam is a sham and that honest scholarship on Islam requires gratuitous rudeness to Muslim sensibilities."[2]