Which Koran?: Variants, Manuscripts, Lingusitics

by Ibn Warraq (Editor)

Compiles and explains the significance of the thirty-two Koranic variants found in Korans available in the Islamic world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Religion

631 pages, Hardcover

First published November 24, 2009

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

[Darnell]

Another Ibn Warraq collection just a little past my level of technical interest.

[Terence]

There are a few essays of interest to the general reader but this history of the various versions of the Koran is too academically focused to be of much use to someone whose Arabic is nonexistent.