Ibn Warraq

"After their spectacular conquests, the Arabs were unwilling to concede equality to the non-Arab converts to Islam, despite Islamic doctrine that expressively forbade discrimination. But for the Arabs there were the conquered and the conquerors ... The Arabs ruled as a sort of conquistador tribal aristocracy."

"This book is first and foremost an assertion of my right to criticize everything and anything in Islam - even to blaspheme, to make errors, to satirize, and mock."

"There are many reasons behind it. Bat Yeor describes one of them in her new book "Eurabia": not long after the Second World War, the Europeans and especially France created a European-Arab axis, to lessen the influence of the USA. There were bilateral agreements. The EU launched Arab exchange programmes and financed Arab NGOs, creating strong European-Arab networks. If they were now to criticise anything about Islam that would upset their allies in the axis. Another reason is multiculturalism."

"Islam makes the whole of humanity-Muslims and non-Muslims-suffer. Peaceful Muslims become victims of the oppressive psyche of Islam, which sucks all the life out of them, while non-Muslims are made to suffer at the hands of Islamic terrorists."

"The officer then said that my fathers life would be spared but that they would have to confiscate the shotgun. Then he started interrogating everyone on various matters, including our religion and political affiliation. My father became the spokesman. He answered what the army men wanted to hear: that we are all Muslims and we had no connection with the Awami League or any pro-freedom party, and so on."

"In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, we have the terror spread by the infamous Timur the Lame, otherwise known as Tamerlane or the "bloody and insatiate Tamburlaine" of Marlowes play... According to the "Zafer Nameh," our main source of information for Tamerlanes campaigns, written at the beginning of the fifteenth century, Tamerlane set forth to conquer India solely to make war on the enemies of the Muslim faith. He considered the Muslim rulers of northern India far too lenient toward pagans, that is to say, the Hindus. The "Zafer Nameh" tells us that "The Koran emphasizes that the highest dignity to which man may attain is to wage war in person upon the enemies of the Faith. This is why the great Tamerlane was always concerned to exterminate the infidels, as much to acquire merit as from love of glory." Under the pretext that the hundred thousand Hindu prisoners at Delhi presented a grave risk to his army, Tamerlane ordered their execution in cold blood. He killed thousands, and had victory pillars built from the severed heads. On his way out of India, he sacked Miraj , pulled down the monuments, and flayed the Hindu inhabitants alive, "an act by which he fulfilled his vow to wage the Holy War," This strange champion of Islam, as Grousset calls him, plundered and massacred "through blindness or closemindedness to a certain set of cultural values."

"Spring 1989 will always remain as a kind of watershed in intellectual and world history. In February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his infamous fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Immediately following in its wake came short interviews with or articles by Western intellectuals, Arabists, and Islamologists blaming Rushdie for bringing the barbarous sentence onto himself by writing the Satanic Verses. John Esposito, an American expert on Islam, claimed he knew "of no Western scholar of Islam who would not have predicted that [Rushdies] kind of statements would be explosive." That is sheer hypocrisy coming from a man who has published extracts from Sadiq al-Azms previously quoted book, that had also dared to criticize Islam."

"Muslims in general have a tendency to disarm any criticisms of Islam and in particular the Koran by asking if the critic has read the Koran in the original Arabic, as though all the difficulties of their sacred text will somehow disappear once the reader has mastered the holy language and has direct experience, aural and visual, of the very words of God, to which no translation can do justice."

"The Orientalists and their indefatigable intellectual curiosity, scholarship, and translations had incalculable consequences for the development of art, philosophy, and politics in Europe, an influence passionately chronicled by Raymond Schwab in The Oriental Renaissance. Orientalists changed forever the intellectual and spiritual landscape of Europe, and allowed artists, writers, and composers to enter imaginatively and sympathetically into civilizations hitherto unfamiliar to Westerners, to accord the Orient dignity and respect, and to people European works with Orientals, seen as equals. It was in this intellectual and spiritual milieu that Mozart created some of his most sublime music. Perhaps Die Zauberflote, Il Seraglio, and cantata K.619 can be seen as reflections in art of Orientalist research."