British ex-Muslims, already unfree, face perils of worsening censorship

Posted: Wed, 21st Aug 2024 by Benjamin Jones

To mark International Apostasy Day on 22 August, Dr Ben Jones reflects on his recent research into the experiences of ex-Muslims and their increasingly precarious position in Britain. His research was partly funded by the National Secular Society.

Ifrah Akhter, Unsplash

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, dehumanizing, demonizing, 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.

Dr Ben Jones will be speaking about his research into ex-Muslims at our Members' Day, on November 30th. Find out more.

Tags: Extremism, FoRB, Free speech, LGBT, Women