Anwar Shaikh (1 June 1928 – 25 November 2006; popularly known as Anwar Shaikh) was a Pakistani-born British author residing in Cardiff, Wales.

Quotes

• “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.”
  • Quoted from Elst, Koenraad. The Problem with Secularism (2007)

• “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.”
  • Quoted from Elst, Koenraad. The Problem with Secularism (2007)

• “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”...
  • Quoted from Elst, Koenraad. The Problem with Secularism (2007)

• 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.
  • Anwar Shaikh (1998). Anwar Shaikh's Islam, the Arab imperialism. Cardiff: Principality Publishers.

• "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."
  • Anwar Shaikh, Islam, The Arab National Movement, 1995. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• "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".
  • Islam, The Arab National Movement. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• "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."
  • Anwar Shaikh, Islam, The Arab National Movement, p. 54. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

About Anwar Shaikh

• 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.
  • Abhas Chatterjee, in (1997). Time for stock taking, whither Sangh Parivar? Edited by Goel, S. R.

• 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.
  • Elst, Koenraad. The Problem with Secularism (2007)

• 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.
  • Quoted in Koenraad Elst: Afterword: The Rushdie Affair's Legacy, in Pipes, D., & Elst, K. (2004). The Rushdie affair: The novel, the Ayatollah, and the West. New Brunswick [u.a.: Transaction Publ.

External links