Dissident Spotlight: Ibn al-Rawandi
Ibn al-Rawandi was a medieval freethinker in Islamic Central Asia. Parts of his dialogue challenging religious prophecy survives through his worst enemies.

Ibn al-Rawandi was a Muslim freethinker in medeival Persia. He was born around 815 and died either around 860 or 912. His life spanned the early years of Central Asia’s Enlightenment, and some of the ideas he was allowed to explore were shocking both by today’s standards and the standards of the time.
They included religious criticism that came as close to atheism as may have been possible during that time. Ibn al-Rawandi considered the human intellect to be good enough to secure knowledge or exercise moral reasoning. It was a devastating criticism for a society grappling with the role reason should play in interpreting religious writings.
After he died, writers often referenced one particular book that al-Rawandi wrote: the Kitab al-Zumurrud — The Book of the Emerald. It was a Socratic-style dialogue between al-Rawandi and a friend and mentor of his, Ibn al-Warraq. The dialogue criticized the credibility of prophecy and religious belief more broadly.
No copy of this work exists. Instead, we have fragments of the texts that were quoted by furious writers quoting the text to refute it. Sarah Stroumsa’s book Freethinkers of Medieval Islam dedicated a chapter to al-Rawandi and The Book of the Emerald alone.
The Book of the Emerald is striking for two reasons: it’s bold religious criticism shortly after Islam’s founding and that his enemies passed his work down through 1,000 years of history.
A Warning to the World’s Despots
Stroumsa’s book Freethinkers of Medieval Islam found that throughout his life, al-Rawandi would write a book with one position, then write a book with the opposite point of view seemingly to challenge himself intellectually.
Ibn al-Rawandi could make competing arguments about controversial topics, because the Golden Age of Islam tolerated scientific and philosophical inquiry. That age of intellectual exploration would end as the conservative clerical class gained power, but that wouldn’t happen until hundreds of years after al-Rawandi’s death.
His life is a heartening lesson for the world’s political dissidents. Alexei Navalny’s public profile and his posthumous memoir made it onto more peoples’ radars in part because Putin’s repeated attempts to kill him.
Salman Rushdie is still known for the fatwa to have him killed in 1989, and his public profile rose again after the knife attack that almost killed him in 2022.
Suppressing thinkers by intimidating, censoring, or killing them is wrong. Attempts to silence them often shows how enduring the questions they ask are.
Ibn al-Rawandi was passed down through history through his worst enemies, many who only knew him by the writings he left after his death. It’s a striking message of hope during a time when autocracy is on the rise around the world and the best ideas are being lost in the noise that social media algorithms create.
Even if the best ideas aren’t put into practice, they will endure longer than the people suppressing or overruling them.