{"id":4648,"date":"2015-05-19T07:45:17","date_gmt":"2015-05-19T07:45:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/?p=4648"},"modified":"2015-05-19T07:45:17","modified_gmt":"2015-05-19T07:45:17","slug":"on-muslims-losing-their-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/2015\/05\/19\/on-muslims-losing-their-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"On Muslims Losing their Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apologies as I have been away for a break on the nearby Isle of Wight with my family. I’m back, and was reading an article from The Guardian online which I thought was well worth linking to here. This excerpt is the first half, though I advise reading the whole original article. It is particularly poignant as I recently edited and released an anthology of deconversion accounts which included three stories from ex-Muslims. Please check out Beyond An Absence Of Faith<\/em>. Here is The Guardian article<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"cover<\/a><\/p>\n

Losing their religion: the hidden crisis of faith among Britain\u2019s young Muslims<\/h3>\n

S<\/span><\/span>ulaiman Vali is a softly spoken 32-year-old computer engineer. A natural introvert not drawn to controversy or given to making bold statements, he\u2019s the kind of person who is happiest in the background. He lives alone in a modest house on a quiet street in a small town in East Northamptonshire. He doesn\u2019t want to be any more specific than that about the location. \u201cIf someone found out where I lived,\u201d he explains, \u201cthey could burn my house down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why should such an understated figure, someone who describes himself as a \u201cnobody\u201d, speak as if he\u2019s in a witness protection programme? The answer is that six years ago he decided to declare that he no longer accepted the fundamental tenets of Islam<\/a>. He stopped being a believing Muslim and became instead an apostate. It sounds quaintly anachronistic, but it\u2019s not a term to be lightly adopted.<\/p>\n

Last week the hacking to death in Bangladesh of the blogger Ananta Bijoy Das <\/a>was a brutal reminder of the risks atheists face in some Muslim-majority countries. And in an era in which British Islamic extremists travel thousands of miles to kill those they deem unbelievers, an apostate\u2019s concern for his or her security at home is perhaps understandable.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh yeah, I\u2019m scared,\u201d agrees Nasreen (not her real name) a feisty 29-year-old asset manager from east London who has been a semi-closeted apostate for nine years. \u201cI\u2019m not so worried about the loonies because it\u2019s almost normal now to get threats. What worries me is that they go back to my parents and damage them, because that\u2019s not unheard of.\u201d<\/p>\n

The danger is confirmed by Imtiaz Shams, an energetic 26-year-old who runs a group called Faith to Faithless<\/a>, which aims to help Muslim nonbelievers speak out about their difficult situations. Shams has a visible presence on YouTube and has organised several events at universities. \u201cI am at physical risk because I do videos,\u201d says Shams. \u201cI don\u2019t like putting myself in the firing line, but I had to because no one else is willing to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

As real as the potential for violence might be, it\u2019s not what keeps many doubting British Muslims from leaving their religion. As Simon Cottee, author of a new book The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam<\/em>, says: \u201cIn the western context, the biggest risk ex-Muslims face is not the baying mob, but the loneliness and isolation of ostracism from loved ones. It is stigma and rejection that causes so many ex-Muslims to conceal their apostasy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like the gay liberation movement of a previous generation, Muslim apostates have to fight for the right to be recognised while knowing that recognition brings shame, rejection, intimidation and, very often, family expulsion.<\/p>\n

Vali comes from a strictly religious Indian-heritage family. He was born in Kenya and moved with his parents and six siblings to England when he was 14. As outsiders, his family stayed close \u2013 \u201cI always knew if I wanted anything they\u2019d be there for me,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

His father is an imam who follows the puritanical Deobandi scholastic tradition of Islam that has influence over a third of Britain\u2019s mosques. All through his teenage years, when adolescents typically rebel, and even at university, Vali dutifully followed his father\u2019s faith. Occasionally some of what he calls the more \u201cbarbaric punishments\u201d found in sharia law troubled him, but he put his discomfort to one side. \u201cI would just think, if God wants it, fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was when he left his home in Leicester to work in Cambridge that he first encountered an intellectual challenge to his worldview. He found himself working alongside non-Muslims and atheists, and inevitably questions of faith arose.Initially he began researching criticism of Islam online and in the books of people such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as a means of defending his faith. But in the process the suspicion took root that his opponents had the stronger arguments.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, he kept his reservations to himself when he returned to live in Leicester, where an arranged marriage awaited him. \u201cShe was very religious from a religious family,\u201d he says, still pained by the memory. But he couldn\u2019t go through with it. \u201cI wasn\u2019t going to lie and carry on with a marriage knowing that I didn\u2019t believe in God.\u201d<\/p>\n

His decision went down very badly. His family would have forgiven him, though, as long as he remained a Muslim. That\u2019s all they really asked. And it was the one thing he couldn\u2019t do. He was perfectly happy to be a cultural Muslim, take part in celebrations and observe traditions, but he couldn\u2019t pretend a faith he didn\u2019t possess.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis idea of belief,\u201d he says, shaking his head. \u201cYou can\u2019t make yourself believe what you don\u2019t believe.\u201d<\/p>\n

So he confessed his atheism to his horrified family. One of his brothers reminded him that the penalty sharia law stipulates for apostasy is capital punishment.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think he would have any qualms about me being killed,\u201d says Vali, although he emphasises that he doesn\u2019t believe anyone from his family would seek to do him physical harm or encourage others to do so. Instead he was ousted from the family. He was disowned.<\/p>\n

There has been a great deal of public debate in recent years about what drives young Muslims towards radicalisation. It\u2019s an urgent subject of study in various disciplines of academia, has spawned a library of books, and is the focus of well-funded government programmes.<\/p>\n

What is much less known about, and far less discussed, is the plight of young Muslims going in the opposite direction \u2013 those who not only turn away from radicalisation but from Islam itself.<\/p>\n

\n

Continue reading the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apologies as I have been away for a break on the nearby Isle of Wight with my family. I’m back,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[787,256,184,251],"tags":[1020,1751,1753],"class_list":["post-4648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agnosticism-2","category-atheism-2","category-deconversion","category-islam","tag-beyond-an-absence-of-faith","tag-deconversion","tag-islam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}