80.Inside the Ex-Muslim Movement - Muhammad Syed on why leaving Islam Can Be Liberating, and Dangerous

 "One of the things I heard again and again was: I thought I was the only one." — Muhammad Syed 

Leaving religion can be one of the most liberating decisions of a person's life. For those leaving Islam, it can also be one of the most dangerous. This episode looks at why so many ex-Muslims stay hidden, how community breaks that isolation, and what the data really tells us about people leaving the faith worldwide.

Our guest is Muhammad Syed, human rights activist, writer, and co-founder and president of Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA), the first ex-Muslim advocacy and community organisation in North America.

In this conversation we cover:

• Why so many ex-Muslims believe they are "the only one", and how visibility and community change that
• What scripture, interpretation and culture each contribute to the risks ex-Muslims face, from loss of family to threats of violence
• The numbers behind a global trend, and how both the political left and right get the conversation wrong

Links for support:

• Ex-Muslims of North America: https://exmuslims.org
• Faith to Faithless (UK support): https://www.humanists.uk/our-work/faith-to-faithless/
• r/exmuslim global reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/

References:

• Pakistan college student lynched after discussing Adam and Eve/incest
• Nigeria college girl lynched over a WhatsApp class chat
• Ayan Hirsi Ali threatened, lost security/neighborhood in Netherlands, moved to U.S.
• Somali gay atheist kidnapped/taken to Kenya for “re-education”
• Canadian mother whose children were taken to Africa; hasn’t seen them in over a decade
• Ex-Muslim husband/wife/siblings chain deconversion story
• IIraq lowering age of consent/marriage age to nine
• 
  
• -Pew: one in four U.S. Muslims raised Muslim have left Islam
• -Pew: among U.S. ex-Muslims, ~55% became nonbelievers and ~23% became Christian
• -Arab Barometer: younger people in parts of North Africa around 18% nonreligious/nonbelieving
• -Turkey survey showing rising nonbelief
• -Iran survey showing roughly 40% nonbelief 
• -Saudi Arabia survey showing ~4–5% confirmed atheists, higher broader nonbelief
• -Pakistan poll: ~60–70% support killing apostates
• -EXMNA data/reporting: ~60% lost friends/social circle; similar share verbal abuse; high 40s/around 50% lost family; one in three experienced threats of violence

Transcript

Meet Muhammad Syed Founder of Ex-Muslims Of North America

James Hodgson 0:03

Welcome to Humanism Now, the podcast about secular ethics, curiosity, and compassion. I'm your host, James Hodgson. Leaving religion is, for many people, one of the most significant decisions of their lives. But for some, it's also one of the most dangerous. Our guest today is Mohammed Saeed, human rights activist, writer, and founder and president of Ex-Muslims of North America, the first ex-Muslim advocacy and community-building organization in North America, founded in 2013 to normalize religious descent and fight for the freedom to leave Islam without fear. Today we'll be discussing the unique challenges of ex-Muslims, how the community has grown, and what it really means to leave Islam in the modern world. Mohammed Saeed, welcome to Humanism Now. Thank you for having me. So, as mentioned, you are the founding president of ex-Muslims of North

Why found and build Ex-Muslims Of North America

James Hodgson 0:45

America. So why did you found this organization 13 years ago?

Muhammad Syed 0:48

So it's like uh with all other religions, people leave Islam. I left it. Very few people come out about it. My experience was slightly atypical. My family is very liberal compared to the average Muslim. And while I face pushback, it wasn't that severe, so I was open about being an atheist. So time and again I had people come up to me and talk about the fact that they too did not believe and were closeted. And that led me to the broader point that why are so many people closeted and what's the larger phenomena and what can I do as somebody that's somewhat privileged compared to other people, do to help about it. And from there, the idea of maybe providing support to people so that they can live more authentically, not feel alone. So one of the things I heard again and again was I thought I was the only one. Because of the fact that I was open, I was in social settings, people came up to me and said, I didn't think anybody else had left at all. And in the modern world, where what you have, we have like two billion Muslims, to presume that you're the only one that has left shows you how isolating it can be. So we started off based on that. We started community groups. I'm based in Washington, DC. So we started in Washington, DC, and then expanded around the country, even in Canada. And the idea was to connect people that have gone through that experience. For some people that they were like me, they were privileged. I had sort of more of an American experience in the sense that my family was upset about it, they were unhappy about it, but there was no real danger or fear or acceptance happened over time. But for a lot of people, that isn't the case. Like I know people who based in the US who were kidnapped, who were beaten, who were threatened, one person's dad pulled a gun on him, his mom intervened, and yet he ran away and did not see his family after that. So again, this is in North America. Compared that to other countries where you can be straight up killed, uh, the government can intervene, it's illegal to do so. Um, it's illegal to leave the faith. Like in many countries, you don't even have a a legal option of changing your faith out of Islam. And then you have sanctions of speaking up against it. If you say that I left Islam because I don't believe in X, Y, or Z part of it, this does not make sense to me, that is blasphemy, and you will straight up be killed. Um, there was a case in Pakistan where a college kid was on campus. Um, so the same as Christianity, Adam and Eve, where did the rest of the people come from? Like Adam and Eve had kids and there was incest, obviously, if you believe that narrative. So he was talking about that on his college campus, like that this seems weird. And he was lynched. Literally, thousands of people on campus came together and lynched this like teenage kid for airing that. And this wasn't even government like uh execution or anything like that. It was just people got so enraged. There was another case in Nigeria where a girl, also a teenager in college, had a WhatsApp chat where they talk about uh classwork and some guy kept preaching in it, and she was basically this is for studying, not for preaching. And she was lynched for saying that. She didn't even blaspheme, she didn't do anything. So sensitivities tend to run very high in many Muslim communities and it doesn't take much to trigger it. So on the one hand, I wanted to change things over here in the West, and then the idea was that if that improves, that can be leveraged to change things in other parts of the world as well.

James Hodgson 3:46

Aaron Powell So when people say,

Isolation and the cost of speaking out

James Hodgson 3:47

and I don't know if they still say this, that they thought they were the only one, is it is it that they genuinely didn't know that there were other people who had doubts, or that because the punishment for expressing those doubts can be so severe that they perhaps know that other people were public about it.

Muhammad Syed 4:00

Aaron Powell You're so isolated, you don't think that anybody else could have these thoughts. You don't voice them so you can't run into other people that have voiced them. And especially in uh that context, you don't want to voice them. You're you yourself are afraid of the consequences. So like it's uh double whammy. And back then when we started, there were no public ex-Muslims. Like um Ayan Hirsi Ali was the only one that had come out with a book and was well known.

James Hodgson 4:23

Even if you looked it up, you would find one person. Yeah, and she was well known to be threatened. I think she had to have security. I don't know if she still has to have round-the-clock security for airing her views.

Muhammad Syed 4:32

Aaron Powell Certainly she does. She had to leave the country like as a result of that. She was in the Netherlands because of the threats. Her neighbors essentially didn't want her in the neighborhood because they were worried and she had she was kicked out of her neighborhood, and then she eventually moved to the US because she wasn't getting security over there.

Why the term "ex-Muslim" matters

James Hodgson 4:46

Aaron Powell So why is the label ex-Muslim important?

Muhammad Syed 4:50

To identify the phenomena. So uh taking that same framing and inverting it, if you talk to Muslims back then and even to a great extent now, the response tends to be that nobody leaves Islam. The conspiracy theories are very abundant in the East. So it's you've been funded by somebody, if you're in Pakistan, you've been funded by India, if you're in sub the Middle East, you've been funded by Israel, Zionist, or whatever else. Like in the sense of the only reason anybody would speak up against Islam or say anything negative or leave is because there's a financial incentive involved. By creating a label and talking about it publicly, there's a specific group and we come from where you are, we are part of your families, it gets much harder to deny. So you can say that about somebody on the internet. You can go down the internet and say, ah, her CL is a Zionist or is X, Y, and Z, and she's doing it for money, she's whatever. But if it's your own kid, if you're your cousin, it's your if your best friend in school, but that label doesn't apply as well. And it also gives people something to rally around in the sense that I'm not part of this category, but I am part of this category, it encapsulates what your experiences were.

James Hodgson 5:45

Yeah, because one of the objections that I've heard from, I guess, more moderate people of faith is who will say, yes, it's fine to have your doubts and believe what you want to believe, but adding that X part to the label can be seen as a criticism of the faith.

Muhammad Syed 5:58

It is a criticism. It is 100% a criticism. So if somebody was trying to murder you and were anybody that thought like you around the world, no matter where you are, um and you've pointed that out, is that criticism invalid in some way? If this is a moderate voice, what is their response to that? Like in what world is the response to somebody's trying to kill me and anybody that thinks like me is why are you speaking about this? I wouldn't call that a moderate voice. I would call that a self-serving voice. I was interested in how they view themselves. Like they're, to me, to a great extent, an agent of oppression. If you're not willing to acknowledge what your faith is doing to other people around the world and are self-centered on how that makes me feel or makes me look, you're not a part of the solution.

James Hodgson 6:37

Very well put.

How the movement has grown since 2013

James Hodgson 6:38

And how has the conversation changed since you founded the organization in 2013?

Muhammad Syed 6:42

Massively. And you can go online and go on Instagram, go on TikTok, go on any social media and just search up the term ex-Muslim. It's been amazing. It succeeded far beyond my wildest dreams. Essentially, the way we envisioned it was step one was building these communities so people don't feel alone and consequently feel empowered. We had a lot of positive things come out of that. A lot of people. The funny part was like dating and getting married and all of the things you get from community. The whole point is like you're around like-minded people, you get to know them, you become friends. So that sort of dynamic happened. And then the secondary part of it is you feel empowered, you want to do something, you want to change things, you want to make things better for your friends, other people coming after you that are in a similar predicament. And so our goal after that was to empower people to speak up. We did a mini documentary series, and you and your viewers should look that up. It's very powerful. We profiled a lot of different ex-Muslims and their experiences, and their experiences varied widely. There were people whose families were relatively okay with it, similar to my experience. We had arguments, we had fights, but nothing major. And then we had people who had to run away. One kid, Somali, he was kidnapped, taken to Kenya, and they wanted to re-educate him. There's re-education caps over there, and he was also gay, so the parents found out both that he was gay and that he was an atheist, which was unbearable to them. And they took him to Africa on the pretext of a vacation. And when they got there, they found out he found out what was going on. He they confiscated his passport and stuff. We were able to get him out. But we did a documentary about him. There's a mother who's in Canada whose kids were taken away from her. It's about her journey, and she hasn't seen her kids in a decade now, a little more than a decade. And it was a similar thing. It was a pretext of a vacation, and they went to Africa. So this is not commonly talked about. Like we talk about women's rights. Hijab is often discussed uh in an Islamic context. In Islam, women have no rights outside of being a mom. Like as a mom, mother, you're venerated because you're generating the next generation of Muslim, but as an individual woman, beyond that, you're not. And even as a mother, your veneration is contingent upon the approval of your husband or the father. So Islamically, the kids belong to the father, not to the mother. So if you go to any Muslim country, you by fire lose custody. Islamically, I think there's a certain period where your mother has custody, that's when they're breastfeeding. But when they get a little older, like toddlers and kids, they by default go to the father. A lot of people in the West, when they talk about these things, they don't talk about that larger overhang. As a result of it, a lot of people suffer. Like you enter a relationship with somebody that seems okay, and all relationships have this, right? You have conflict at some point or the other, that's human. But if a conflict is theological and you're talking about the souls of your children, people react much more viscerally. And then if you're from that part of the world where the father has all rights, you have an out.

James Hodgson 9:15

I can just go there and hey, my problem's solved. I guess when we're talking about the representation and rights people have within a religion,

Scripture vs interpretation: where do the rules come from?

James Hodgson 9:22

there's there's often debate in society about how much of it, can you say, is actually fundamentally prescribed by the religious text and how much is based on interpretation by authorities and the people that are prescribing the rules to a society. You know, as you say we're talking about uh identity of two billion people, there's many ways to be Muslim and there's always a m a multitude of views within that. So when you talk about obviously women's rights within faith, how much of it you can tie it back to the text or back to the the coming straight from the creed of the religion rather than, as I said, the the people in authorities that are interpreting these rules?

Muhammad Syed 9:53

So I would say the vast majority comes from the religion itself, and uh the distinction you're drawing doesn't really exist in the sense that the authority comes from those sources, and even then the vast majority can be traced back to Muhammad himself. Like the way the authorities work in Islam at the very least is that you have multiple tiers. The primary tier is the Quran. What the Qur what does the Quran say? That's sacred, sanct, and that's perfect, and there's no deviation from there. The second level of that is what did Muhammad say? So his words are supposed to be perfect, and what he said is canon and law, and you have to follow that. And then wherever education show up, then you have scholars interpreting based on those two and the order in which they appear, things like that. For example, there's this form of prostitution in Islam called Mufta, where um you have a marriage, but it's meant to be a temporary marriage, and you can have it for three days, two days, things like that. Muhammad allowed that and later it was banned. So there are variations like that. But for the vast majority of things, it's in the Quran itself. And the distinction is basically drawn by people that don't agree with Islam. And so I was one of those people when I grew up. I was more much more of a humanist type individual. I was Muslim identified as a Muslim. I talked about being Muslim, but there are parts of Islam that I was uncomfortable with. And my rationalization to myself was that I did not understand Islam. I'm a human being. God knows best. And obviously, God isn't bad, and these things are bad. So there's some part of me that does not understand what God actually intended. So when the Quran says that you can have sex slaves, that's obviously morally horrific. So I don't understand what the context was, I understand what was going on. Therefore, it can't be a part of Islam because Islam is good and I'm good. Like that sort of rationalization is where it flows from. It has nothing to do with the faith. It has to do with how I view myself and what my view of good and evil is. But if you look at it holistically, I don't believe in that specific part of Islam. Muhammad himself had sex slaves. There are multiple sayings of his about sex slaves and how he treated them and how you should treat them. So there's a saying that is particularly repugnant about, and this is not just Islam, this is the ancient world. Like that happened across the board. You have a major war, men are killed, women are enslaved, children are enslaved, they're sold off. You have in a Roman Empire, it happened everywhere. So Islam is not unique in that aspect. The uniqueness is that people want to portray the seventh century as some sort of perfect sount of civilization in Arabia that is spreading around the world and making the world a better place. That is the disconnect. So if you took the seventh century as something that was barbaric that happened in the 7th century, there's no problem there. So the saying that I'm talking about is women were captured, they were raped, sex slavery was perfectly fine. And Muhammad was talking about an incident where a lot of men survived the battle and they were captured, and their wives were captured, and the issue of sex slavery came up, and Muhammad's men were reluctant to rape these women because of the fact their husbands were right there. And Muhammad said that no, it's perfectly fine. And the only caveat was that you should pull out. So again, Muhammad is saying that, how are you going to dispute that? The way Muslims often do it is, again, I did this to a great extent as well. This was my last step before leaving the faith itself is that, okay, the hadith themselves are sayings of Muhammad, they were captured at a later date. So they may be wrong. The Quran itself is the actual optimal absolute truth. So hey, I can discard the hadith, I can still call myself a Muslim and move forward from there. But the problem that comes from that is that the Quran also has a bunch of these horrific things. Sex slavery is within the Quran, wife beating is within the Quran itself. And the other part of it is if you dismiss the hadith, you lose 90% of Islam entirely. Core elements of Islam are defined in the hadith or in Muhammad's sayings or how he behaved. So for example, uh in Islam, if Shaqani Muslim asks them how many times do you pray? It's five times a day. The Quran does not have that. It's a very fundamental part of Islam, and it's one of the five pillars of Islam. There's also circumcision. In Islam, all men must be circumcised. The Quran does not have that. Hadith have that. So core pieces of Islam tend to vanish if you reject the hadith entirely. And a lot of terrible things are in the hadith as well. So you're stuck with uh the only way you can move forward is cognitive dissonance. That I know better and I'm going to choose these good hadiths and I'm going to reject these bad hadith. Charity is wonderful. Muhammad talks about charity. Sex slavery is bad. That was a mistake. Aisha was a kid, that's in the hadith, so that was a mistake. That's not real hadith. So you have to sort of have those weird cognitive dissonance to be able to cling on to that. And most people do that. They come up with weird justifications. One of the funny ones about Aisha, for example, like she was a kid. There's hadith where she's talking about playing with dolls. She talks about herself that her age was six and nine and consummation and things like that. It's all in the hadith. Fine. If you talk to somebody that is quote unquote a modern Muslim that rejects that part of Islam, they're a better person than Muhammad ever was. That they will say that she was 19. There's no mention in the literature of any kind that she was 19. They come up with this weird justification that her sister was this age. And based on her sister's age, you can reverse calculate her age and their age difference. Therefore, she must have been 19. Ignore all the sources that directly reference the age and go to some of this weird convoluted way of saying that, hey, she wasn't. But again, this only matters if you view that as sacrosanct. In the seventh century, bad things happen all over the world in all cultures. There's nothing unique to that. The uniqueness is that you're elevating this individual and using his life as an example. And you may be a good enough person that you're saying that, okay, this part I'm willing to dismiss because I intuitively know this is bad. But there are another billion people out there that aren't that person, and they will use this as justification to do horrible, horrible things. And you see this right now in every single Muslim country. So I don't know if you read about this in Iraq after the invasion and all of that, the new constitution. The age of consent was set to 18. Recently, they repealed that and moved it to nine because that was what Muhammad wanted. So, how can you say that it's a reinterpretation or if it's something scholars are imposing, if it's all across the literature? For 1400 years, people have practiced it. And when it's pushed away, the religious authorities come in and say this is un-Islamic because Islam says that it should be lower, and it's subsequently lowered. And you see this time and again where there's secular pushback, or maybe not secular, humanistic, or secular Muslims or cultural Muslims, however you want to frame it, that things do change in the positive light, or they attempt to change it, and there's immediate pushback from the religious citing scripture, and you lose that argument. So as Muslims, you're having an argument, and one person is throwing you the Quran and the Dith, one person is saying, This feels wrong. Which person wins that argument? By default, you're going to lose. And that's another really good point for us as ex-Muslims, as what we the role we serve in society, is we don't have to use that framing where we have to justify things about Islam. We can outright say this entire framework is wrong. And therefore, what you're doing is wrong. It doesn't matter how you're justifying it or not. And that puts the religious conservatives on the back foot. Then they have to have a larger argument. And if they lose that larger argument, you have more people like me popping up. This belief spreads much more rapidly because intuitively, I would say talk to any teenager and tell them that it's okay for a 50-year-old to marry a nine-year-old or any of these other things that are in a religion, wife beating, whatever. Intuitively, most people, in my estimation, are good people. Like that's who we are. We recoil to these things. And when they see a religious scholar justifying it and showing good Islamic justification for something terrible, it shakes your faith. And then you go and reevaluate and try to figure out what's actually happening.

James Hodgson 16:30

And it it seems like whatever people's views are, whether they agree with the scripture or not, it's always the case that we choose our own or decide our own morals, having reviewed and considered things. It's very few people who actually just say, I'm going to follow a book exactly to the letter. We're always, in our own way, doing our own work to justify it. So that argument of that morality or ethics comes from a specific text always falls apart because you have to analyze it. Even if you agree with it, you have to use your own morality and put that on top. And as you say, people will usually come to a point of going, well, I agree with these parts because that that supports what I believe, but I don't agree with these parts because it doesn't support what I believe.

Muhammad Syed 17:04

Sure, but to a certain extent, that's that's framing is a framing of privilege from the perspective that the average person isn't educated, isn't uh world read, doesn't have the bandwidth to actually look into any of these things. These are like the people you and I are talking about, people that are educated, have gone to college, have a have the ability to open up a book and research and look into things. The average Joe, particularly in the East, is not like that. I don't know what the rate is right now, but when I was in Pakistan like two decades ago, the uh literacy rate was in the 30s. So 30% of the population is literate to begin with. So what they're learning is what they learned through osmosis or they're going to a mosque or whatever. So if at in society at large you have, hey, kill the apostate, and that's what you've always been raised around by default. You're gonna be, yes, that makes perfect sense. Of course, this guy is gonna corrupt my children, they're gonna go to hell as a result of that. So killing him is perfectly justifiable. They haven't gone deep into figuring it out where their morals are. And all of this, like in a Western context, is the consequence of the printing press and people having availability for info to information and now with the internet. In a lot of the world, that isn't the case yet. It will happen. And to a great extent, I would say the larger ex-muslim movement is benefiting from the internet. It's our printing press essentially, but for a lot of people, they don't have access to that. So in Pakistan, like there was a pupil about how many people uh are perfectly fine with feeling apostate, and the numbers were in the highest 60-70%. So those people haven't actually sat down and grappled with their fate. They've just learned from what their society is telling them, and their society is telling them based on what the scripture actually says.

James Hodgson 18:28

That's a very

The numbers: how many people are leaving Islam?

James Hodgson 18:29

good point. So let's talk about the numbers then. What do we actually know about the number of people who have left or are genuinely no longer believers?

Muhammad Syed 18:37

So it's hard to pin down because there isn't much data, again, going back to the fact that people don't want to talk about it because they're scared. But over the past decade or less than a decade, actually, past five, six years, we've started to get polls on this. Um, there was one that came out from Pew about the United States, and in it, uh, one in four people that were raised Muslim have left the faith. And to me, that is massive, one in four. So if you America has like uh three or four million Muslims, 0.75 or 1 million have left the faith. That is insane. And it's very s similar to numbers that you see for Christians and other groups, like the rise of the nuns is a phenomenon that's been talked about for the last two decades where a lot of people are leaving all sorts of faith. It's not just Islam or Christianity, Judaism, whatever. So the same sort of phenomena you can see in the West. Then you would think that the East, as I was saying, is more insular and doesn't have access to the same information. You can't talk about it as much, but the phenomena's popping up over there as well. Uh, there was an Arab barometer survey in North Africa, like Algeria and Tunisia and countries like that, and they found that for younger people it's 18%. Um, there's a survey out of Turkey, survey out of Iran that show even higher numbers in Iran. I think it was like 40%. I think that was a Gallup survey. There was a survey out of Saudi Arabia that showed, I think the number was 4 or 5% for confirmed atheists. I don't recall what the number for like non-belief. Non-belief is usually larger than atheism, but it was a larger number than the 4-5% for atheists. So it's a global phenomena. Even in a highly repressive country like Saudi Arabia, you have a lot of people leaving. Then is the trend usually that people then migrate to non-belief? Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. So for the other countries they didn't analyze that uh specific behavior, but in the US they did. But with Pew poll, it was like 55% became entirely non-believers, and 23%, I think, became Christian. And then you had a variety of other things.

What EXMNA's own data shows about risk

James Hodgson 20:15

Aaron Powell And you produce your own reports and trackers within ex-Muslims of North America. And what are the patterns that your data is showing in terms of the risks that people are facing?

Muhammad Syed 20:24

So a lot of people don't come out at all. And this is heartbreaking, but people are closeted to their own families, to their wives, to their children. They don't want their children to find out because they're worried that their children would speak out. And we've seen this happen as well. There's a Somali woman we were working with in Europe who wanted to, like me, wanted to change things. And she wanted to be open about it. And we established a fund for her and we established a program to try to spit up another organization like ours in her country. And she started working on that, and her kids knew about that. And her kids went and talked about it in school or something, and her kids started getting threaded. And these are like elementary school kids. And in Europe, in elementary school, kids were being threatened by other kids for her mom going down this route of trying to make the world a better place. So a lot of people are closeted. Of the people that were coming out, again, violence is rare because you don't have the government to back you up over here. But physical abuse being kicked out, emotional manipulation, loss of family, loss of friends is fairly common. For people that came out, for example, loss of social circle, like 60% or so lost their friends. Similar numbers had verbal abuse, 50% or so high 40s lost their family entirely. One in three experienced threats of violence. So it was pretty widespread. And the people that are coming out, most people don't come out at all because they're aware that are of these consequences. On the other hand, the benefit of coming out is that you empower other people. So an analogy I like to draw is uh the gay rights movement. It's one of the most successful movements we've had. In decades, it changed the landscape, at least in the West, entirely. What was the biggest achievement they had was they normalized it. People started coming out, people started speaking out at the workplace and in media everywhere. And as a result of it, other people felt empowered. So it was sort of this dominant effect that multiplied rapidly and escalated until it's hard. To hold back. You can have bigotry towards people you don't know. You can have expectations that are not founded in reality. But when you know people, it becomes much harder. So the people that are coming out are being very brave. They're suffering the consequences, but as a result of that, they're empowering the next generation or next person to come out as well. And

Coming out risks and ripple effects

Muhammad Syed 22:15

we see this a lot. And there are many funny stories regarding that, where somebody came out or was discovered and the chain effect led that led to their entire family leaving. One of my favorite stories is that this guy left the faith and his wife figured out something was wrong. She didn't figure out what. Like he was acting cagey and weird and whatever. And Islam, you can't be married to an atheist, period. So by default, your marriage is null and void. So that's why he was being cagey, he wasn't telling his wife, because he loved his wife and he didn't want it to end. She figured they had heart to argue. He told her and she said she'll he made her promise that she'll give it a certain amount of time to engage with the arguments. And by then of that time where she engaged with arguments, she was an atheist as well. So both of them were closeted now. And then the wife's younger sister, similar with what's going on, you guys are acting weird. And they told her, and she was the head of a Muslim students association. So she was much more religious than the others. And she said, I'll prove to you, it's not a problem. You guys are mistaken, I'll prove to you you're wrong. And I have access to scholars and things like that. I have resources at my fingertips, I'll figure it out. And she tried to figure it out a year later. She also was an atheist. And then they came out to there were three siblings, a brother and two sisters, and they came out to the brother, and the brother was, I've been an atheist for a long time. I just didn't want to tell you guys.

James Hodgson 23:23

That's nice. Because I was thinking that there's a there's a there's a difference in a way with the the the sort of simile with the with the gay movement is works in one aspect, I suppose, as you say, you know, in terms of trying to normalize coming out and thinking differently. But in the gay movement, it could be anybody that you know or anyone in your in your family. And so that suddenly if somebody in your family who you already care about dearly and you think fondly of comes out, then that normalizes it and that that humanises the person. Whereas what we're talking about here is communities that are already and families that are already have that shared identity. So it's it it's a little bit different. But as you say, the the the the other side

Islamophobia, identity and culture

James Hodgson 23:57

of that is it can actually open the door for many more people to identify or consider or share those doubts.

Muhammad Syed 24:03

Jumping off of that point, to me that's a very Orwellian thing that religion does, and it's not just Islam, but the fact that your identity, the more conservative you are identity, is deliberately tied into the religion rather than any of the other identifying or characteristics you have. So like I had a call with a prominent secular Muslim reformist type individual, and we're talking about that, and he was like, What about your Muslim identity, like your culture, things like that? So my family's from India and Pakistan. Is my culture Islam or is my culture from there? Like tell me the famous Islamic dishes that are mentioned in the Quran, like in all honesty. And compare the dishes of Malaysia and uh Pakistan or the music of Malaysia and Pakistan or of Arabia and Pakistan. We are all independent cultures and we should proud of be proud of our independent cultures. It's saying, like, the culture of the UK and the culture of North Africa, where there are a good amount of Christians, or in Goa and India, they are our Christian cultures. Like that's a very untrue and I hate using the word, but colonizing way of looking at it. Like in the sense of our way is the only way, and we shall erase all other ways that exist. And religions are very good at doing that. Islam is very good at doing that. Um so instead of saying that I'm from Pakistan and these parts of Pakistanic culture, I really adore it, be it the music, be it the food, be it whatever, like community, however you want to frame it. It turns into this totalizing Islamic culture, and therefore your identity is tied into Islam. So if I'm rebelling against Islam or if I'm saying no to Islam or whatever, like they frame it that you're gonna lose everything rather than this minor part of my identity that is tied into how I view reality and truth in the world, but everything else is exactly the same. So I'm again, I'm from Pakistan originally. I still like Pakistani music, I still cook Biryani, my like it's the same, nothing has really changed from that perspective. My culture hasn't really shifted. It's just that I don't worship anymore and I don't believe in fairy tales anymore.

James Hodgson 25:44

And I think that broad cultural identity is also imposed from outside. And I'm talking, of course, that we're continuing to see a rise in Islamophobia, certainly this side of the Atlantic. Um I don't know if it's the same in in North America. How are you working with other groups in terms of combating that? Because presumably it still impacts non-Muslims just the same.

Muhammad Syed 26:02

So my name is Muhammad. Um sincerely doubt nine out of ten people I don't talk to will say that, hey, this must not be a Muslim. It's it is what it is. But from my perspective, at the very least, you can't define yourself by how people are viewing you. And that's a very disempowering way of moving forward in life. So, yes, Islamophobia is an issue. Yes, there are people out there that view, and part of it is I would say the fault of Muslims and of people on the left as well, in the sense that they play into this framing of Islam versus, say, Pakistan or whatever. So if you create a monolith and then things are attributed to that monolith that are negative, and of course we'll have reactions, no matter what that monolith may be. Like right now, you have Jews being targeted for what's going on in Israel, for example. And there is a deliberate attempt by a lot of people to sort of conflate those two for whatever a variety of reasons. I won't go into that. But when you do that, you automatically victimize the people that are involved in that group. And we should be playing against that, not playing into that. So to me, the Islamic identity should be not put as center as it is. And like we can stand up for the rights of individuals, and we should, obviously. So, whatchamacallit? Hijab, for example. Everybody should have the right to wear what they want, even if we disagree deeply with that right. But that doesn't mean that we lionized that. That doesn't mean that we display that and get in and talk about how wonderful it is. One of the examples that really annoyed me was there was a Olympic fencer, Ibtahaj Mohammed, um, and she was lionized and was on media and everywhere, and she won, I think, the bronze or the silver for fencing. And it was talked about how wonderful it was from a hijabi representation perspective. But it wasn't talked about was the only reason she was doing fencing was her dad was a religious conservative that owned only allowed her to do fencing. She was a gifted athlete. But that was the only kind of sport she could do where her body was entirely covered and her dad, the misogynist he was, allowed that.

James Hodgson 27:41

The numbers that you've shared and then some of the specific cases that you've raised in Europe and North America are really quite alarming. It is interesting that we don't really hear about either the statistics and also the severity of some of the cases that you

Why media and politicians stay silent

James Hodgson 27:54

mention. Why do you think that media and politicians might be reluctant to address some of the issues that you've raised?

Muhammad Syed 28:00

It's a complex issue. One of the things is that it's quite unpolarized. You're a left and right issue, so people have their own biases, and for whatever terrible reason, over the last decade or two, we've become very tribal. Allegiance to truth doesn't really exist on any side. Everybody thinks that they're the right side, but you don't really care about reality. In general, that affects how people portray things, how politicians engage with issues. So there was a line by another ex-Muslim that you're talking about in American contents, like that Republicans are wrong about Muslims, uh, Democrats are wrong about Islam. So there's this broader issue where nobody's really willing to engage with what's actually going on. And correspondingly, if you're in one camp or the other, if you don't engage in exactly the right way, you're labeled as being part of the other camp. So there's a lot of reluctance that comes from there. And then the other side of it is also that for media to engage with things, it needs to be easy for them to engage. Like as a journalist, there are very few people in any profession that are very, very dedicated, that are willing to pull out the stops and spend lots of time trying to figure things out. So naturally, a minority within a minority like us, like you have a minority of Muslims at the West and a minority within that that is being oppressed, harder to reach out to them. And then we're not that organized. Like as I mentioned, we were the first nonprofit, I think globally, for ex-Muslims. And then advocacy groups don't exist, things like that. Again, if you're people are trying to murder you, trying to organize is a little hard. So part of it is based on that. So there's also a political aspect to it as well, in the sense of uh as Muslim populations have expanded in the West and we have been more vocal about what they want and what they believe is okay or not okay. Politicians accede to those demands because that's where their votes are coming from. And it varies country to country, like uh different demographics is in the US versus UK versus France. And that sort of informs things. So a politician whose vote bank is a certain percentage of Muslim is not going to say that. There's some problem over here that we need to discuss. So it's very easy to just ignore the issue and sidestep it rather than engage with

How the left and right make different mistakes

Muhammad Syed 29:50

it critically.

James Hodgson 29:50

Aaron Ross Powell You said something really interesting there that I'd love to draw out that the left and the right are making different mistakes when they address this issue. Could you draw out some of the common mistakes that you see from both sides of the political argument?

Muhammad Syed 30:02

Aaron Powell So one thing that we don't really address because of the way racism and bigotry is framed in the West is bigotry exists on both sides. It expresses itself differently. I'll speak more to an American context in the sense of I'm not as educated about, say, France or UK, but uh dynamics are somewhat similar from what I understand. So on the right, you often have a reflexive mistrust of the outsider, some uh immigrants, things like that. So there's a xenophobic element to it. So if your culture is different, if you look different, you're not really accepted in the same way. If you're not speaking the same language, speaking the same um by language I don't mean English, I mean um cultural language. And there's it's easy to push you away and say you don't belong. And so often it's coded as xenophobia. Like Islam is treated as the other, it's wrong, it's bad, it's not Christian, it's demonic, satonic, whatever. So, for example, in Texas in the US, it's a very Christian state, and a lot of their laws reflect that. So they've been pushing a lot for religion in the state, which goes against the US Constitution. But they're trying to subsidize religious schools, they're trying to bring biblical teachings to public offices. So they have the multiple times there's been an issue of bringing the Ten Commandments in. But obviously, when you do that, you open up the door for all other religions as well. So Muslim schools are benefiting from these subsidies that they're trying to offer. I believe the same happened to the UK, and that is pissing them off, but it's a natural consequence of that. So that's sort of what is stemming on one

Cultural relativism and the hijab as symbol

Muhammad Syed 31:23

side. On the other side, from where I stand, it's more of a benevolent bigotry in the sense of they're not viewed as equals. Like if you view somebody as equal, you'll criticize them equally, you'll talk about their issues equally, their flaws, their foibles, whatever they are. If you have a friend that you look down on, you think they're miserable, they're bad, that like not bad as in evil, but bad as in they're not able to achieve things. You may have a more paternalistic attitude towards them. That it's okay that you're not doing well, it's okay that you're X, Y, and Z, whatever that may be. But if you view them as a peer, you're willing to take hard criticisms from them, you're willing to give them hard criticisms, you're willing to talk about whatever problems they're actually having in a very real sense. On the left, we don't see that. So, for example, cultural relativism is a huge issue. If something that is not okay for your child is okay for a child that looks differently than yours, how is that not bigotry? Like straight up, for example, uh one of the most prominent symbols, and it's not as big of an issue as it's made out to be, because it's a very potent symbol, it's talked about a lot more, is the hijab. So if you ask any average left-leaning Westerner that is it okay for a man to tell a woman what to wear? Is it okay for a father to force up his daughter to dress his right away? Is it okay for the state to do that? And you'll get a very resounding hell no. But if you change the skin color, then it's their culture, it's their way of living. Like either it's right or it's wrong. A funny way of looking at it, again, going back to Texas is so again, Texas is a very Christian state. Abortion access has been taken away to a great extent in Texas. Republicans have been voted, they're the majority for many decades now. How many leftist, uh left-leaning whatever, are gonna say that is Texas culture, right? It's okay because it's their culture. Who are we to criticize their culture? They're a conservative culture, they're a Christian culture, they don't believe women should have bodily autonomy. Why are we criticizing them? That is who they are. It's imperialistic of us, it's whatever else of us. We would never ever view it that way. We would view those women as being equal to us, and therefore their rights should be equal to ours. But when it comes to other women, we don't view it that way. And that is a great big failing on our part, and I'm sorry to say, but it is bigotry. If you don't view two people as the same and you're not willing to talk about it, their issues in the same way, then you are the problem. Actually, one very clear example of that, which is not as well known because again, the media didn't cover it. So Itahaj Muhammad, um hijabi fencer in the Olympics in 2016. She was on the cover of many magazines and it was talked about like how groundbreaking is American Muslim hijabi went on to the Olympics. In the same Olympics, another Muslim woman, Delilah Muhammad, won the gold. Have you heard of her name? Probably not. Why? Because she was not wearing the hijab. She was dressed as she was a sprinter in shorts and like whatever, like tank kind of shirt. And so she wasn't coded visually, so it didn't benefit people to talk about her. So her achievements sort of uh vanished away, even though she won a gold medal and was a Muslim. So it's not really about, hey, we're elevating Muslims, it's about we're elevating the symbol because it makes us feel good. It has nothing to do with the actual underlying issue. And people love patting themselves at the back. I am the right kind of person, I'm a good person. Again, it's human dynamic. It's not you're evil, it's hey, I like feeling good about myself.

James Hodgson 34:17

So you have to push past that. You've mentioned the hijab a few times now in in the interview. Again, again, is this something specifically that you think that people are getting getting wrong?

Muhammad Syed 34:26

It's very obviously people are getting wrong. It's more that it's a visual symbol, so they people keep latching on to it. It's not as big of an issue. Like uh from a young woman's perspective that wants to live her life. It matters a lot in her individual life, sure. But from a broader perspective, when people are being killed, when honor killing is an actual issue, where people are being married against their will, like we have a lot of much larger issues than hijab. The reason it's talked about is because people have latched onto it as a symbol, every demographic, like in the sense of you've got the political left that is trying to champion it. Again, you can champion the rights of individual Muslim women that want to wear the hijab. That's perfectly fine. That's a good thing, individual choice, whatever. But you shouldn't be championing a restrictive, misogynistic garment. You shouldn't be elevating that itself. You can talk about Ibta Hajj Bahama and how she overcame the adversity of her dad. And that is a wonderful thing of her overcoming adversity. But if you eliminate the side of her actual adversity, which was the misogyny she encountered as a child from her own family, then you're not doing anybody a service. And then you obviously have Muslim conservatives that want to push the hijab forward because that is what the religion says. And you're do you're doing the legwork for conservative religious, fundamentalists, zealists, whatever you want to call them. The majority of Muslim women do not wear the hijab. Like if you look in the US, when I grew up in Pakistan, it wasn't the majority. A couple of people in my family didn't wear the hijab and did wear the hijab, most people didn't. It's something that's a conservative percentage that is being elevated as mainstream because it's very easy to draw a picture of it, a pretty picture, saying that, hey, this is the hijab, this is Muslim, and I support this guy. I'm a good person. Reality is much more complex than

How to contact EXMNA and other support groups

Muhammad Syed 35:52

that.

James Hodgson 35:52

And if anybody is listening to this who would like to access your services or even just want someone to talk to, what is the best step to safely get in contact?

Muhammad Syed 36:01

Our email address is infoinfo at xmuslims.org. If you have any questions, you're free to reach out to us and we can connect you to other resources if they exist in your area that aren't available in every single area around. The other thing is for a lot of ex-Muslims, Reddit has a community of ex-Muslims, which is I think one of the largest in the world, like over 100,000 participants over there. That is very useful. And then there are also regional ones uh set up on Reddit as well for people that have left in Egypt and Somalia, things like that. So finding other like-minded people, even if you can't meet them in person, goes a long way because you can learn from their experiences. If there's a girl in Saudi Arabia that has escaped, like we know plenty of those people that have escaped and are in the US now and are living a happy life. So you can learn from their experiences what they did and move forward in your own life. One thing I would say to anybody, the younger person that is watching this, that if you're in that situation, be patient. When you're young, it's often very hard to think about five years down the road or ten years down the road. Like your present is miserable miserable, then you want to do something about that. But if when you're in a country where, again, laws exist to imprison you or jail you, your family can turn against you, it's better to be patient and make the long plan. So most people that have succeeded in that context tend to be ones that say, plan to go to college, plan to get a job in a different country, figure out a way out of the entire situation, and it won't happen overnight. You have to work hard, you have to make sacrifices. But a lot of people are able to escape and are able to get out of the specific situation they're in. And it doesn't even need to be the West. Like I know people that have moved from, say, conservative Muslim country to somewhere in Central Asia or in Dubai or the various parts around the world. It doesn't just need to be with the West. Like you can improve your situation by getting out of, say, Pakistan, which is one of the more conservative countries around.

James Hodgson 37:36

And we'll include links to ex-Muslims in North America. And also for those in the UK, we have Faith to Faithless, some people we've featured on the podcast previously. But if I understand correctly, your services can be accessed by anyone internationally.

Muhammad Syed 37:50

Um we can refer you to other groups like Faith to Faithless over there, and there are other groups in various countries in Norway, things like that. We could uh uh we're based in the US, but if you're in another country, we're happy to let you know if we know of other groups that may be helpful for you. Aaron Powell Very good.

James Hodgson 38:02

And it sounds like the Reddit group is uh Reddit Forum is a great place to start if you're looking for help or advice from your own situation. I'm curious to know as well before we go, you mentioned being a minority within a minority, but with the numbers and the statistics that you quote, do you uh foresee that you'll maintain being a minority within a minority, or do you think in a few years' time you'll be a much larger group?

Muhammad Syed 38:25

I hope the latter is true. Uh but the problem is that you need people to stand up and talk about it. Like so if you're in a position where you're privileged enough that you can, take that chance. Like you will have problems with your family, things like that. But if you don't have larger problems, you need to stand up because that's how change happened. That's how we made change to the extent we have by getting more and more people to speak out. Um like the statistics are accurate. One and four people have left the faith. If imagine if one and four people started talking about it, you'd change the narrative on the political left because it will not will no longer be tenable for them to just talk about conservative Muslims because we'd be see this rising demographic. And then it would make it harder for Muslims themselves to be as conservative because their own family members are standing up and talking back to them about how things are and are and not. So I really hope that we move in that direction, but it'll require a lot of courage from people that are leaving the faith.

Changing minds

James Hodgson 39:10

And before we go, our standard closing question what is something which you've changed your mind on recently and what inspired that change? So this will be a bit controversial.

Muhammad Syed 39:18

So to put it bluntly, the gender wage gap is a lie. And like I realized that uh in relation to COVID. So with COVID, you saw that a lot of people dropped out of the workforce. But if you look at the numbers, it was a lot more women that are dropping out of the workforce than men. And what happened was childcare wasn't available. So childcare often falls on women. So women had to quit the workforce in order to take care of children. And we look into the data itself, the data that's often quoted, like Hillary Clinton has talked about lots of major, major figures have talked about it. Women earn like 78 cents to a dollar compared to a man. An aggregate that seems right, that number, like it's not a made-up number, but the issue is it's looking at the wrong part of it. If you look at young women, under 30, college educator, even if it's not, don't look at college educator, divided up by occupation, divided up specific groups, women tend to outperform men. In New York, for example, I think the numbers are 170% income for women compared to 100% for men. Like women out-earn men in New York City if they're young women. Where it falls off is if you have kids. The moms don't make much money. There's I think a 20-30% income drop for mothers. And what happens is mothers prioritize their kids and there's a penalty in the workforce. If you're a mom, you don't work the extra hours or a more dedicated career person would. Like you can't work till 8 p.m., 9 p.m., whatever. And there's a huge penalty for moms as a result of that. And there's even data that the more kids you have, the steeper that penalty gets. Said like 20% or something for mothers with one kid, and with two kids, it go rises to 30%. With more kids, it rises even up to 40%. So there's a very large wage gap that exists, but it's for moms. It's not for just women. Um, the problem then comes into if we're just talking about women, we're trying to solve the wrong problem. The real problem is mothers, how they're they lose opportunities. And if we focus on the right problem, we can actually fix the wage gap. It's a matter of diving into the numbers. But again, going back to politics and stuff, easy solutions, easy soundbites, easy things that activate a large group of people is more palatable. A politician can talk about it easily, it'll enrage people, it'll elevate their sense of victimization, but it doesn't actually solve the problem. Solve the problem, you need to understand exactly why it's happening, what the specifics of it are, and implement policy. And that policy may be unpopular as well. So if you're specifically addressing issues with mothers, there may be other women that aren't happy with that, because why am I being left out? But that is where the actual problem lies.

James Hodgson 41:27

That's fascinating. Mohammed Said, thank you so much for taking the time and joining us on Humanism Now. Thank you. It was great speaking with you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Humanism Now. If you enjoy the podcast, please leave us a rating and review. And why not share this episode with a friend? It really helps more people hear about the show. And we're building a growing community over on Ko Fi. Special thanks to our supporters. If you would like to join them, the links are in the show notes. You can follow us on all social media at HumanismNowPod, and thanks once again for listening to HumanismNow.