Sceptics of Islam

In 1880s Britain, Charles Bradlaugh was repeatedly excluded from taking his seat as an elected MP and temporarily imprisoned for proclaiming his atheism. Not all societies allow their intellectuals to write freely, of course, or the space to embrace the title of atheist, a designation, as the editor points out, by no means all of the authors in his book laid claim to. On the other hand, the medieval Arab world did not uniformly condemn religious dissidents – as seen in the case of poet Abu al-A[la al-Ma[arri of the fourth century A.H., whose name is invoked by Shibli Shumayyil (d. 1917) and whose English translator Amin alRihani (d. 1940) also appears in this volume. Neither of these Syro-Lebanese literati was Muslim, so why include them in a book entitled Sceptics of Islam?