Early Life and Education
Warraq was born in India and his family migrated to the newly independent Pakistan in 1947. He never knew his mother, who died when he was an infant. He stated in an interview that he "studied Arabic and read the Qur'an as a young man in hope of becoming a follower of the Islamic faith." His father decided to send him to a boarding school in England partly to circumvent a grandmother's effort to push an exclusively religious education on his son at the local Madrasah. After his arrival in Britain, he only saw his father once more, when he was 14. His father died two years later. Warraq claims to have been "pathologically shy" for most of his youth.
By 19 he had moved to Scotland to pursue his education at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied philosophy and Arabic with Islamic studies scholar W. Montgomery Watt.
Read more about this topic: Ibn Warraq
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“One of the sad realities of being a parent is that the same stuff you know is exciting, educational, and enriching in your child’s life is often messy, smelly and exhausting to deal with.”
—Joyce Maynard (20th century)
“A woman might claim to retain some of the child’s faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)