Anwar Shaikh

"I was not only born and bred as a Muslim but also fought grimly for the glory of Islam. Even today, my loved ones are Muslim. There is no way I can be anti-Muslim."

"I am a citizen of Great Britain, therefore I have a legal and moral obligation to live like other Britons and raise my children as British citizens, who are free to practise any religion they like."

"The Muslims in this country have not fully appreciated the hospitality that they have received. (…) It is no crime to be a Muslim in this country but it is a crime to be a terrorist because terrorism has demolished many of those civil liberties for which the West has worked for a long time and given tremendous sacrifices to gain them. Now, they have created such conditions that safety is becoming impossible without identity cards, emergency laws which authorise imprisonment without a trial..."

"India is yet another major victim of Islam. The day Muhammad bin Qasim, entered Sindh as a conqueror, must rank as the most ominous, odious and outrageous moment in the history of India, whose proud, pious and powerful traditions have been the torch-bearer of world civilisation. The Indians, used to enjoying the warmth of ahinsa, were stunned by the violence that the Arab raiders displayed in robbing the rich and seducing the indigenous damsels. Yet the irony was that they did all this in the name of the Most Compassionate and Just Allah, who counts these felonies as acts of fairness when they are committed to torture the unbelievers. Then, this land that had become indifferent to the vicissitudes of history owing to a very long period of prosperity and plentitude, was attracted by more Islamic predators, who rushed in through the Khaiber Pass to loot her wealth, dishonour her daughters and crush her ethos that had stood the test of time despite its proneness to physical comforts and spiritual mirages such as ahinsa."

"The prophet Muhammad divided humanity into two sections - the Arabs and the non-Arabs... The Arabs are the rulers and the non-Arabs are to be ruled... Islam is the means to realize this dream... Islam has caused more damage to the national dignity and honour of non-Arab Muslims than any other calamity ... Yet they believe that this faith is the ambassador of 1. Equality and 2. Human Love. This is a fiction."

"no place on earth bas ever exacted such a tribute of reverence from mankind as the Kaaba. Respect to the Kaaba means, respect to Mecca, respect to Mecca means respect to Arabia, and respect to Arabia means respect to Arabs, the dwellers of Arabia."

"The Arabs made a profession of robbing and murdering the non-Muslims in the name of Allah, but they called it jihad. Egypt and Iran were the early casualties. It was the pillaged wealth and abducted daughters and sisters of the foreign nations which lent the golden touch to this Arab era."

"The prophet Muhammad also divided humanity into two sections - the Arabs and non-Arabs... the non-Arabs are to be ruled through the yoke of the Arab Cultural Imperialism... one ought to remember that Islam is less a religion and more an Arab National movement."

"These non-Arab Muslims develop a special sense of contempt for their own cultures and motherlands under the pretence of believing in the Muslim nationhood."

"I regret to say that 1947 was the darkest period of my life. We were told that murdering the non-Muslims, seducing their wives, and burning their properties, was an act of jihad, that is, holy war. And jihad is the most sacred duty of a Muslim because it guarantees him a safe passage to paradise where no fewer than seventy-two houris, that is the most beautiful virgins, and pearl-like boys wait for him. Such a reward is a great temptation!"

"It was during the first week of August 1947, when I was an accounts clerk in the railway office in Lahore, that I saw a train pull in from East Punjab. It was full of mutilated bodies of Muslims: men, women, and children. It had a terrific, horrendous effect on me. When I went home I prayed to the Lord asking him not to forget my share of houris and boys. Now this is true. I actually prayed and then I took up a club and a long knife, and I went out in search of non-Muslims. Those days were remembered for the curfew orders and everybody seemed terrified of everybody else. I found two men, Sikhs, a father and son. The father was perhaps not more than fifty, perhaps younger, and his young son. I killed both of them. Next day I did not go to work. I felt nauseated, but I wanted to kill some more non-Muslims. I encountered another Sikh at Darabi Road and I killed him too. Often memories of those terrible days haunt my mind; I feel ashamed and many times have I shed tears of remorse. If it had not been for my fanaticism, engendered by the Islamic traditions, those people might have been alive even today. And I might not have felt the guilt, which I still do."

"I am a liberal humanist. I believe in the unity and dignity of people, who have the right to believe what they like. No one has the right to impose his beliefs on others. Faith must be a strictly personal affair. Believing in God or no god is immaterial, what matters is human dignity, human freedom, and human welfare. A human-loving atheist is a thousand times better human than a theist who hates his fellow beings on the grounds of religious bigotry. A true humanist is free from the restraints of race, color, and creed; he believes in human rights, civil liberties, and democratic principles."

"Anwar Sheikh, for example, was a typical Muslim in 1947. He even killed three (Sikh) Hindus in the back-streets of Lahore during the post-partition riots and felt proud of performing a jihadic act. But once he saw through Muhammad, his creed, his book and his god (Allah), Sheikh not only discarded Islam with contempt but is now a committed scholar producing powerful literature and defiantly fighting the Islamic thought-police."

"Anwar Shaikh was born in 1928 in Gujrat, now in Pakistan, in a Muslim family that vaguely remembered its pre-conversion Hindu origin as Kashmiri Pandits. In an age of mounting religious tensions, however, he grew up to be a committed Muslim. Come 1947 and the Partition of India, he was living in Lahore, a Hindu/Sikh-majority city expected to remain with India yet allotted to Pakistan because it was the metropolis of Muslim-majority West Panjab. Consequently, the city became the flashpoint of the worst interreligious violence, ending in its complete cleansing of non-Muslims. The young Anwar Shaikh took part in the Partition violence against Sikhs and Hindus, killing three Sikhs with his own hands."

"Non-governmental Islamist forces are also becoming more circumspect. In Great Britain, after thousands of Muslims openly shouted "We will kill Satan Rushdie," the next death edict, against Pakistani-born Anwar Sheikh in 1995, was much more restrained. Unlike the novelist Rushdie with his oblique and ironical challenge to Islam, Sheikh very formally renounced and criticized Islam in a bilingual English/Urdu quarterly, Liberty, and in a series of erudite books. When news of his critique reached his homeland Pakistan, at least fourteen clerics there issued death sentences against him. A Pakistani daily reported: All Pakistani clergy demand extradition of the accursed renegade Anwar Shaikh from Britain to hang him publicly. A renegade must be murdered—this is a fundamental rule of the Islamic Law. — Anwar Shaikh must be called back, some lover of the Prophet is bound to kill him. If he is not eliminated, more Rushdies will appear. He is an apostate for denying heaven, hell, revelation, Koran, Prophet and angels. The Muslims of the world are ready to behead the accursed renegade to defend the magnificence of their Prophet."

"Shaikh was a warm and friendly character with a great sense of humor and hospitality."

"His prose is repetitive and, on occasion, an incoherence seeps into his argument, but this can be effective if written for an audience used to reli- gious texts and sermons that are always repetitive and incoherent. His books and pamphlets circulate throughout the Muslim communities in Western Europe and Pakistan like sanuzdats in the former Soviet Union or Aaron MacGruder's cartoons in the post-September United States. They are read, copied, passed on, endlessly discussed. It is this that makes Shaikh a danger�ous opponent of orthodoxy. He is the enemy within. When I finally met up with him, I was taken aback by his self-confidence: They will never succeed in gagging my mouth, because I speak for millions of silent Muslims.'"

"Mufti Mohammed Saeed Ahmad Saeed, president of World Muslim Unity, after declaring Shaikh a renegade, an apostate and an infidel, went on to declare: Anwar Shaikh has claimed he believes in God, but not the Prophet. This is like someone who says I acknowledge my mother, but not my father. Such a person is commonly known as a bastard."