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:
“I do not know that I meet, in any of my Walks, Objects which move both my Spleen and Laughter so effectually, as those Young Fellows ... who rise early for no other Purpose but to publish their Laziness.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day’s demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)