We’re publishing this article by Dr. Benjamin Jones, the Free Speech Union’s Case Management Director, to mark International Apostasy Day. Dr. Jones recently completed a PhD on the experiences of ex-Muslims and their increasingly precarious position in Britain. It was first published by the National Secular Society, which part-funded Dr. Jones’s research. You can join the National Secular Society here.
By the time I spoke to her, Zainab was safe, for the most part. But it had been a close-run thing. And she was still far from ‘free’.
Zainab, aged 19, had been in a lesbian relationship. When her parents found out, they beat her. Then they seized her phone and tried to cut off her every connection with the outside world. “I couldn’t contact any of my friends and I couldn’t talk to my girlfriend,” she said. They even took her laptop, depriving her of the material she needed to study for her exams. “I had to pretend that I turned straight,” she told me of these long, oppressive months.
But when her sister betrayed her and revealed that she was still in a covert same-sex relationship, the situation escalated rapidly. Zainab managed to alert a friend who contacted the police, but despite numerous police visits and the involvement of the Crown Prosecution Service, she remained in her parents’ house.
She had no choice but to begin planning her escape. Her parents monitored and shut down her internet access, inspected her room, and would regularly burst in to see what she was doing. She had no privacy at all. But carefully, covertly, she began to hide packed bags, hoping that her parents would not find them or realise what she was doing. Despite the restrictions on her, Zainab had managed to make a plan with a friend: when she made a run for it, her friend would have a taxi waiting to collect her. She did make a run for it, but her parents realised what was happening and tried to stop her. The police returned, just in time, and finally they took Zainab to the relative safety of a women’s refuge, where she would remain for the duration of the summer before she planned to start university.
Zainab was far from alone in going through an experience like this, and she knew other gay or lesbian former Muslims were in virtually identical situations: living a doubly closeted life, unable to be open about either her relationship, or the fact she no longer believed in Islam. Her thoughts quickly turned to speaking out about what had happened. She spoke to the police officer who was with her about her concerns: “I feel like if I speak up about this then the Muslim community will attack me.”
The police had arrived in time to rescue Zainab, but very quickly the state reached the limit of what it would do for her: “You should just consider not speaking about it at all,” the police officer replied.
Zainab eventually made it to university. She notified her institution about the situation she was in and was reassured by the security available on campus and in the halls of residence where she lived at the time I spoke to her. But even after escaping a hellishly controlling childhood and parental abuse, she was still not free. Not really.
I asked if she could be open about being an ex-Muslim. She replied: “Absolutely not, because half my year group, which is 87 people, are Muslims so it would just not be a good idea for me to be out at all. Because even if they’re not going to like attack me… it would still just spread gossip and rumours and drama and I just don’t want to be involved in something like that; I’m already under too much stress as it is.”
Zainab was one of 25 ex-Muslims living in Britain I interviewed as part of a three year research project. I wanted to explore how they were beginning to doubt Islam, escaping, organising to try and tell their stories, and campaigning for acceptance, protection and better lives for other ex-Muslims.
Taking part in my study was the only way Zainab could speak openly about what had happened to her. Indeed, as above, the police had advised her not to speak about it.
That former Muslims face persecution across the world, including in Britain, will not be news to anyone who has followed the work of the National Secular Society or the Council of ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB), or read the books of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But the extent of the persecution they face in Britain is poorly understood, as is the extent of apostasy from Islam: I lost count of the number of times I explained what my research was about, to a reaction of incredulity than anybody left, or was able to leave, Islam.
Yet research suggests that as many as 7% of children raised in the United Kingdom as Muslims will leave the religion by adulthood. This is a small figure compared with other religions, which shed followers at devastating rates: Islam and atheism are uniquely successful at transmitting belief and values from parent to child. But that 7% is equivalent to hundreds of thousands of former Muslims living in Britain today.
Of that number, some have become high profile public activists, some for secular atheism like the CEMB, or for Christianity. The latter include street preacher Hatun Tash, who was lucky to escape with her life after a knife attack and a separate plot to buy a gun to murder her. In in a dark irony, her would-be assassin Edward Little was a convert to Islam.
But many more ex-Muslims are like Zainab or the other young men and women I spoke to, living secret double lives.
Farah, also 19, compared her situation as a secret apostate to that of Winston Smith in 1984:
I live in a very Muslim area and it’s impossible to detect other ex-Muslims since you can’t just go up to people and ask them if they’re ex-Muslim.
The process of finding other apostates in real life parallels 1984. It’s like when Winston observes other characters looking for signs of ‘unorthodoxy’ that would prove that they’re against the party. Maybe, that hijabi who is too passionate about women’s rights is an apostate or that guy who attends every Friday prayer, you don’t really know.
And the consequences of getting it wrong, and outing yourself to the wrong person, could be disastrous.
Despite this, ex-Muslims have built up a vast network of support. Sometimes this takes the form of organised groups like CEMB or Faith to Faithless, or sometimes it is organised around informal social groups that gather to trade stories and compare notes. Organisers of the latter groups told me how dangerous that could be, and about the precautions needed to vet people and ensure the groups were not infiltrated.
It is a safe assumption that the vast majority of ex-Muslims in Britain are not able to meet openly with other ex-Muslims. Social media therefore plays a substantial part of course, and by far the biggest and most important node in this network is the Reddit forum r/exmuslim. Here, ex-Muslims from across the world anonymously share memes and in-jokes, discuss scripture, talk about their life experiences, disparage Islam and Muhammad, and speak with complete candour about the religion they have left, and why they left it.
All these forums, in person or online, provide a rare lifeline for people trapped in stifling conditions, oppressed by their parents, forced to pretend to believe, and fasting during Ramadan so they are not suspected as apostates. The exact number of people living like this in Britain is unknowable, and in many cases these people will be unreachable. What’s more, it might not have occurred to them to look for others like themselves. In many cases interviewees told me the same thing: “I thought I was the only one on the planet [to ever leave Islam],” in the words of Eira, 40.
This expansive, rapidly growing network of moral support and activism allows people like Farah, Eira or Zainab to have some precious contact with the world beyond their own communities – communities that are so isolated from mainstream Britain that some Muslim pupils were found to believe that Britain’s population is 90% Asian, such is their experience of life.
But increasingly this network is under attack, and ex-Muslims’ precarious access to the rights of freedom of speech, belief and association, tentative at best, are imperilled even further.
The threats are myriad. They include the proliferation of loosely drafted hate speech laws in western countries. They include the bizarre calls to end online anonymity which emerged following the very much offline murder, by a jihadist, of Sir David Amess MP. They include increasingly heavy-handed internet regulation by governments, coupled with the ruthless, unthinking algorithmic censorship of social media platforms. All of this risks combining to form a perfect storm for ex-Muslims.
But by far the most dangerous threat on the horizon for ex-Muslims (and many other people besides) is the definition of ‘Islamophobia’ being advanced by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims. This definition, among other things, brands as Islamophobic anyone who makes “mendacious, dehumanising, demonising, or stereotypical allegations about Muslims”.
How does that leave the ex-Muslim who draws a link between the treatment they suffered and the treatment suffered by tens of thousands of others? Would drawing an adverse inference about the entire religion from this overwhelming data be branded as Islamophobic on the basis of stereotyping? If translated into law, as seems possible under a new government, ex-Muslims’ strident criticisms of Islam and elements of the Muslim communities they grew up in could well be criminalised as hate crimes.
The definition would also prohibit “claims of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword”. Which again, if translated into law, could easily criminalise Iranian dissidents who celebrate and mourn pre-Islamic Persia, or mainstream historians like Tom Holland who have written about the early Islamic conquests and the wars of Muhammad’s followers against the Eastern Roman Empire. Indeed, the definition is so inimical to freedom of speech that it has united no two more disparate figures in opposition than one of religion’s staunchest critics, Richard Dawkins, and Tim Dieppe of Christian Concern.
Ex-Muslims are in the unenviable position of being canaries in the coal mine for the rest of us: if ex-Muslims cannot speak freely then none of us can. If they cannot criticise or satirise religion, nobody else is safe to. Their warnings should be heeded most urgently.
Yet the encroachment of hate crime laws, internet and social media censorship, and now the APPG definition of Islamophobia risk creating a situation where women like Zainab are treated not as victims, but as hate-mongers, merely for speaking out about their own traumatic past and their experiences of abuse.
All names of ex-Muslims referred to in this article have been changed in order to protect their safety.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Islamic scholar, writer and Muslim apostate Ibn Warraq makes basically this point in his recent interview with Winston Marshall.
He uses a pseudonym to protect both himself AND his family from what he says is likely retribution if he revealed his real name.
Islam is a religion which uses violence and the threat of violence to maintain power. It appears that Keir Stalin approves of that. Can’t think why …. except it’s also the method used by secular Communists and Fascists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psHAiQyAeIw&t=3s
Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free enquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.
The above is a quote from Christopher Hitchens’ book, “god is not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything”.
One can perhaps argue that Christianity in the western world has been coerced to align itself more to modern values, but the basis is still there is only one God and it is better not to take the more violent passages in the bible too seriously. And the Muslims believe there is only one Allah and the Buddhists believe there is only one Buddha. Essentially, they are all the same.
FALSE! “Allah” is not Arabic, but a Sanskrit word for Kali-Allah.
Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus & Buddhists all worship KALI-ALLAH, “THE MOTHER GODDESS OF ALL INDIA”, the Moon Spider Goddess of Death, whose Toyboy is Shiva=Satan the Moon god of Destruction, whose symbol is the CRESCENT MOON & STAR featured on the flags of most Islamic countries.
Our Heavenly Father, Almighty God, Creator of Heaven & Earth, has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE DEPRAVED MOON SPIDER KALI-ALLAH, who is worshipped by millions pointing their backsides to Heaven as they bow down to her & Satan in Hell.
The Black Cube of Mecca is built directly over a Hindu temple to Kali-Allah, the apsidal wall foundation of which can still be seen projecting from one side of the Kaaba at ground level. Have a look yourselves.
Get it through your heads, people.
“The Unholy Muslim-Marxist Alliance” has been described for many years. It has also been called “The Red-Green Alliance”.
So many ex-Muslims on Twitter, which really underscores the importance of keeping this platform as a haven for free speech, despite the amount of trolls, bots and general haters who infest the place. It’s the ex-Muslims who are the biggest, most scathing critics of Islam because they’ve lived it and can speak from personal experience, their stories often harrowing.
One of many that I hugely respect for their courage and determination is Yasmine Mohammed, who was forcibly married off to an Al-Qaeda terrorist at a young age, endured years of abuse and subsequently had a daughter with him. She didn’t want the same life for her daughter so she eventually escaped abroad and is living under a false name and is now helping others in a similar predicament. You can find out more in this 10min vid;
https://x.com/YasMohammedxx/status/1787845226049974630
This article omits an important, if rather inconvenient, fact. In classical Islam (the kind we’re now sadly familiar with), the ultimate penalty for leaving is death.
From personal experience,I have a friend who converted to Christianity over 40 years ago. A relative pronounced a fatwa for apostasy.
He escaped and has managed to live an extremely productive life.
His story started me on my long journey of ‘Islamophobia’. Being on a Tube train on 7/7 and stuck in a tunnel with my wife thinking I had been killed strengthened that conviction. Having a friend murdered by an Islamic terrorist added to it.
Islam is the most utterly hateful theology in the world and I will never bow to our thought Police over this.
Or for not being a muslim.
Infidels are put to the sword.
It was how Europe was conquered by the Moors.
At that time ~711 AD Europe included North Africa but not now after the Moors over ran it and conquered Sicily and most of Spain to establish a Caliphate which lasted 700 years into the 15th Century with some incursions into France.
It also means Palestine was not in Muslim hands until over 700 years after the birth of Christ and so means Jewish peoples have the better claim.
Is there anything that anyone can type here that would not be classed as “Hate Speech” by Oberst Starmerbanfuhrer? It is better though when it comes from Muslims themselves because then the left have no race card to play, and no equality and diversity to chuck at us for pointing out the bleedin obvious.
Ranks with Sturm in the title:
Commissioned Officer Ranks
SS-Ober Sturm Bann Führer = Lieutenant Colonel
SS-Sturm Bann Führer = Major
SS-Haupt Sturm Führer = Captain
SS-Ober Sturm Führer = Lieutenant
SS-Unter Sturm Führer = 2nd Lieutenant
NCOs
SS-Sturm Schar Führer = Sergeant- Major
https://www.oradour.info/appendix/ssrank01.htm
___________________________
Sturmführer ([ˈʃtʊʁm.fyːʀɐ], “storm leader”) was a paramilitary rank of the Nazi Party which began as a title used by the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1925 and became an actual SA rank in 1928. Translated as “storm leader or assault leader”, the origins of the rank dated to the First World War when the title of Sturmführer was used by leaders of German shock troops and special action companies.[1]
By 1930, Sturmführer had become the lowest commissioned officer (CO) rank of several Nazi Party paramilitary organizations, including the SA.[2] The title was also used as an SS rank until 1934 when, after the Night of the Long Knives, the SS renamed the rank Untersturmführer,[3] equivalent to a junior or second lieutenant (OF-1b) in the army. Other variations of Sturmführer included Obersturmführer and Hauptsturmführer, ranks paralleling an army first lieutenant and captain respectively.
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Sturmf%C3%BChrer
Possibly the most baleful legacy of the civil madness, is that it’s become acceptable to criminalise speaking the truth.
Sorry, covid madness.
In my 1st year at university we had a muslim lad from Leicester who’d become a Jehova’s Witness. It was pretty grim, cousins kept driving up from Leicester to try & drag him back. He wandered around petrified. A big price to pay to join another weird religion, though i think all religions are weird.
He didn’t return after for the 2nd term, I’ve no idea what happened to him but the whole episode was very distressing.
So who’s paying for her to go to university?
Lucky she can be sure she will never be thrown into prison for putting online photos of illegal immigrant Muslim men landing on English beaches, even though they do this every day.
I look forward to research projects interviewing Working Class English Men & Boys, giving their honest views about Mass Third World Immigration.
Speaking of which, news of yet another appalling betrayal of them today: this time an English pensioner, whose one-man, years-long peaceful protest against Third World immigration at a local cenotaph attracted the attention of a Third World Millionaire with political ambitions and a grudge against Farage. The Millionaire reportedly “encouraged” an Englishman to befriend the pensioner and persuade him to go on hunger-strike. Said Millionaire then offered to bring the frail, weakened pensioner to London to meet him, and arranged a tv news interview, in which the pensioner thanked the Millionaire, and vowed to continue his hunger strike even unto death, in defence of British women and children who had suffered so many attacks and sexual harassment from illegal aliens over the years.
Well. I guess in Labour’s rule book a few thousand ex-Muslims living in fear, being intimidated or threatened is a price well worth paying for such a generally useful and immensely versatile tool for controlling and censoring the population as the idea of islamophobia.
Wait a minute— is the author actually assuming that everyone reading his research article will approve and sympathise with the Muslim Sodomite woman, calling her parents “abusive” for feeling a natural revulsion for Sodomy, and trying to stop her from engaging in Sodomy with other women???
Notice that her parents never threatened to throw her off any high buildings, a punishment reserved for only the VICTIMS of Sodomite rape.
The Bible is very clear about Sodomy, a very useful English word covering all the categories of LGBTwhatever, except for Paedophilia.
Sodomy means unnatural sexual relations between Males with Males, Females with Females, and Humans with Animals. And that is why God destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament.
This is crystal clear for all Christians of any denomination, and for all Jews who adhere to the Torah, which includes the first five books of the Old Testament, and the Talmud.
And yet, strangely, the very first Sodomite Marriage ceremonies in Britain were held in Jewish synagogues, by Jewish rabbis.
People need to understand that Sodomy is just another SOUL TRAP.
Our government is in the hands of the UKs national socialist party.
It is the Left and Far Left vs the White and Far White.
Good article. Except Atheism is not a religion. It is an absence of religious beliefs.
That is agnosticism.
Atheists believe there is/are no God(s).
Agnostics don’t give a shit either way.
I can’t resist a quotation from Winston Churchill, in his 1899 book The River War:
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism places on its votaries ! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful, fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensuality deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith. It has already spread through Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”
Awesome.