Abu Issa Muhammad Ibn Harun al-Warraq was a 9th Century skeptical scholar and critic of Islam

Islam

Islam . The most common are and .   : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...

. He was a mentor

Mentor

In Greek mythology, Mentor was the son of Alcimus or Anchialus. In his old age Mentor was a friend of Odysseus who placed Mentor and Odysseus' foster-brother Eumaeus in charge of his son Telemachus, and of Odysseus' palace, when Odysseus left for the Trojan War.When Athena visited Telemachus she...

 and friend of scholar Ibn al-Rawandi

Ibn al-Rawandi

Abu al-Hasan Ahmad ibn Yahya ibn Ishaq al-Rawandi , commonly known as Ibn al-Rawandi , was an early skeptic of Islam and a critic of religion in general. In his early days he was a Mutazilite scholar, but after rejecting the Mutazilite doctrine he adhered to Shia Islam for a brief period of time...

 in whose work The Book of the Emerald he appears. Some Muslim

Muslim

A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...

 sources have described him as being a Muslim and others a Manichaean.

Views of Islam

Al-Warraq was skeptical of the existence of Allah because "He who orders his slave to do things that he knows him to be incapable of doing, then punishes him, is a fool." Warraq also doubted claims portraying Muhammad as a prophet:
Al-Warraq challenged the notion that Islam was a revealed religion. He argued that if humans are capable of figuring out that, for instance, it is good to be forgiving, then a prophet is unnecessary, and that we should not heed the claims of self-appointed prophets if what is claimed is found to be contrary to good sense and reason. Warraq admired the intellect not for its capacity to submit to a god, but rather for its inquisitiveness towards the wonders of science. He explained that people developed the science of astronomy by gazing at the sky, and that no prophet was necessary to show them how to gaze. He also said that no prophets were needed to show them how to make flutes, either, or how to play them.