Koranic Sources: Pre-Islamic, Christian, and Qumranian Influences

by Ibn Warraq

The influence of the Jewish Torah and Christian Gospels is obvious from the stories in the Koran about Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other figures from the Old and New Testaments. This title delves into similarities between various Muslim doctrines and ideas found in the writings of 3rd century Jewish Christian sects.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Religion, Theology, Islam

432 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2011

About the author

Ibn Warraq is the pen name of an anonymous author critical of Islam. He is the founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society and used to be a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry, focusing on Quranic criticism. Warraq is the vice-president of the World Encounter Institute.
Warraq has written historiographies of the early centuries of the Islamic timeline and has published works which question mainstream conceptions of the period. The pen name Ibn Warraq (Arabic: ابن وراق, most literally "son of a papermaker") is used due to his concerns for his personal safety; Warraq stated, "I was afraid of becoming the second Salman Rushdie." It is a name that has been adopted by dissident authors throughout the history of Islam. The name refers to the 9th-century skeptical scholar Abu Isa al-Warraq. Warraq adopted the pseudonym in 1995 when he completed his first book, entitled Why I Am Not a Muslim.
He is the editor of several books, also including The Origins of the Koran (1998), The Quest for the Historical Muhammad (2000), What the Koran Really Says (2002) and the writer/editor Leaving Islam (2003). He is a controverisal figure among his contemporaries as many academic specialists in Islamic history consider him to be polemical, overly revisionist and lacking in expertise.

Reviews

[Gonzalo Corvera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy interesante, me resolvió varias dudas sobre los orígenes del islam, pero es una compilación de varios autores y algunos capítulos no son muy útiles para un análisis no religioso.

[Muhammad Abdullah]

want to read it