Ibn Warraq - Early Life and Education

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:

    If you are willing to inconvenience yourself in the name of discipline, the battle is half over. Leave Grandma’s early if the children are acting impossible. Depart the ballpark in the sixth inning if you’ve warned the kids and their behavior is still poor. If we do something like this once, our kids will remember it for a long time.
    Fred G. Gosman (20th century)

    To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
    Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962)

    As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.
    —E.M. (Edward Morgan)