We’ve been hearing all sorts of people since Paris. We’ve heard from difference religious factions (Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike), political factions (progressives, conservatives, Dems, Repubs, the center), and so on. But what about atheists and people who once were Muslim but are no longer? Here’s a good HuffPo piece about it:
Where are all the secular liberals in the Muslim world?
...In Muslim-majority countries, they are often being lashed and imprisoned for blogging, hacked to death in open daylight, or sentenced to death for writing poetry. Here in the West, they are often being disowned from their families, ostracized from their communities, and even murdered by their own families in "honor killings."...
Maryam Namazie's Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain started the #ExMuslimBecause campaign last week, encouraging dissidents from across the Muslim world to come out and say why they left Islam.
The response was tremendous. By early Friday morning, #ExMuslimBecause was the U.K.'s top trending hashtag. We heard from secret LGBT Saudis; women who had been forced into marriages; closeted atheists in Egypt and Pakistan tweeting under pseudonyms; young women disowned by their families in the U.S.; and more….
What you'll see below is the often unheard, third side to the international conversation we have been witnessing since the Paris attacks -- a conversation that represents an increasingly reverberating alternative narrative that is developing across the Muslim world, where atheism is on the rise. While some of it may seem shocking, it is important and should be read by everyone who wants to understand narratives from the Muslim world otherwise all too often silenced before reaching us.
A few points to keep in mind as you read further:
1. Being part of Muslim families and communities, ex-Muslims not only receive the same bigoted treatment as other Muslims, but are also persecuted (often severely) by Muslims who consider them heretics and apostates.
2. Ex-Muslims often find themselves caught between the anti-Muslim bigotry of the far right that demonizes all Muslims, and the apologism of the far left that conflates any legitimate criticism of Islam with "bigotry" or "Islamophobia" -- à la Ben Affleck's tantrum on Bill Maher's show last year. Criticizing Islam (an idea) and demonizing Muslims (a people) are very different things.
3. Many ex-Muslims feel betrayed by their liberal counterparts in the West. The fight against Islamic jihad should come from a position of moral strength, not xenophobic bigotry. This is a fight that liberals should take on themselves before it's hijacked by the far right.
Here are some of the tweets the author cites:
Spectacular article that unleashes light on a subject that has festered in the dark for too long! These are also allies we’ll need in the generational struggle against Radical Jihad. I defend no religion, only ethnicities, ethnoreligious groups (Jews, Yazidis, Druze, and the like) and races. Perhaps one of the events that needs to occur in the Muslim world is not any Kasich-like “Judeo-Christian values” agency, but a non-lethal option to abstain from religion. Not just freedom of religion, but freedom from religion. This in turn makes religion a choice, and thus These guys in the article are a symbol of that.