
“The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.”
This was declared without citation to have been attributed to Avicenna in A Rationalist Encyclopaedia : A Book of Reference on Religion, Philosophy, Ethics, and Science (1950), by Joseph McCabe, p. 43; it was also later wrongly attributed to Averroes in The Atheist World (1991) by Madalyn Murray O'Hair, p. 46. It actually originates as a statement by the atheist Al-Maʿarri, earlier translated into English in A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern (1906) by John Mackinnon Robertson, Vol. I, Ch. VIII : Freethought under Islam, p. 269, in the form: "The world holds two classes of men ; intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence."
Misattributed