Richard Dawkins said he was hugely encouraged by people downloading his work in the Islamic world

Richard Dawkins is to make a number of his books available free of charge in the Islamic world after an Arabic translation of The God Delusion was downloaded illegally millions of times.

The evolutionary biologist and noted atheist said that he had recently learnt that 30 million copies of the book questioning the existence of a supernatural creator had been illegally downloaded with three million alone in Saudi Arabia.

“I derive huge encouragement from that,” he said yesterday adding that he had heard similar stories about the number of PDFs of the book that had been downloaded in Iran.

Dawkins said he had started a project to provide free downloadable PDFs of seven of his books, including The God Delusion, “in the language of