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:
“We have been told over and over about the importance of bonding to our children. Rarely do we hear about the skill of letting go, or, as one parent said, “that we raise our children to leave us.” Early childhood, as our kids gain skills and eagerly want some distance from us, is a time to build a kind of adult-child balance which permits both of us room.”
—Joan Sheingold Ditzion (20th century)
“Seeing to it that a youngster grows up believing not just in the here and now but also in the grand maybes of life guarantees that some small yet crucial part of him remains forever a child.”
—Anne Cassidy (20th century)
“I am not describing a distant utopia, but the kind of education which must be the great urgent work of our time. By the end of this decade, unless the work is well along, our opportunity will have slipped by.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)