These are stories from a different age, but they’re not, For Muslim apostates, giving up their faith can be terrifying, alienating and dangerous:
Halima is an 18-year-old biology student from a strict Muslim family in Ontario.
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“They think I’m a bad Muslim,” she says of her family, “but I doubt if they’d ever think I’m an ex-Muslim.”
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She remembers one incident in particular.
“There was a tear in a page and my father assumed I’d ripped it,” she says. “He got my hand — and put it on the stove.”
After a teacher noticed the burn, the Children’s Aid Society interviewed her parents, who said it was an accident. CAS didn’t pursue the matter, but this did little to placate her father, who castigated her for bringing “kaffirs” (unbelievers) into the house.
Islam and Christianity in the West are different. Only the most extreme fundamentalist Christians engage in such ham-handed coercion. Unfortunately it’s much easier for me to imagine immigrants to the West from Islamic countries behaving in such a fashion. In the societies from which they come often apostasy is not an option. One may be a “bad Muslim,” but one can not be an ex-Muslim. It is perhaps important to note than in dominant traditions in customary Islamic law (shariah) there is the death penalty for apostasy, to varying degrees (the treatment differs by sex, for example). But to my knowledge the issue is less about blasphemy, that is, incorrect belief, and more about apostasy as being a violation of of public norms and order. That is, it is treason against the nation. This I think puts into better frame the sort of reactions from extended kinship networks that these people fear. Though apostasy was against the law, and is, it was not usually enforced because it only became an issue if one was public about it. And even in this cases in pre-modern Islamic civilization the elites shielded often intellectuals from the letter of this law (e.g., the medieval poet Al-Ma’arri would be termed a militant atheist today).
Technically I fall under the category of ex-Muslim. I say technically because I come from a Muslim family. My paternal grandfather was an ulam. My maternal grandmother was the daughter of a man from a lineage of pirs. Though I had an inchoate Muslim identity before adolescence, I was never too interested in or reflective of religious beliefs, and around the age of eight realized I was what is called an atheist. This has been somewhat stressful for my family, but they’ve adjusted fine enough. Curiously I have cousins in Bangladesh who see that I’ve listed “atheist” as my religion on Facebook, and though that surprises them a bit, they don’t seem exceedingly perturbed.
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