Richard Dawkins — atheist, evolutionary biologist, vocal critic of all religions and author of more than a dozen books, including The God Delusion — is intending to make his works available for free for Muslim readers.

Responding to what he calls the “stirring towards atheism”, the author says he was “greatly encouraged” to learn that an unofficial Arabic-language PDF of The God Delusion had been downloaded 13 million times — far more than the 3.3 million copies that have been sold legally in the past 12 years.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science recently merged with the Washington DC-based Centre for Inquiry (CFI). According to its website, the CFI’s mission is “to foster a secular society based on reason, science, freedom of inquiry and humanist values.” Dawkins has stated that the CFI intends to pursue “a more systematic programme” of translating his books following “stirrings toward atheism in Iran and other Islamic countries.” Consequently, Dawkins’s works will now be made available in Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and other languages of Islamic countries.

The first to be translated will be Dawkins’s 1995 book on evolution, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. The CFI hopes to make the translations available on its website by the end of this year.

“We are choosing languages, not countries,” says Dawkins. “The PDFs may, of course, be downloaded by anybody in any country, but we imagine most Urdu downloads will be in Pakistan, most Indonesian downloads in Indonesia and Malaysia, and most Farsi downloads in Iran.”

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 25th, 2018