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, early, life and/or education:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)