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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.”

She adds she cannot imagine what would happen if she told her father, a well-known religious leader. “That would be the end. He would never accept my apostasy.”

Halima, who asked that her real name not be used, has good reason for concern.

“There was a lot of pressure to be completely religious,” she says of her childhood. And any and all deviations were vigorously punished.

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.

‘I just couldn’t agree with most of the stuff, especially with the treatment of women — that got me out of Islam’

Halima still spent up to three hours a day studying Arabic and the Qur’an into her teen years, and rarely missed the five daily prayers that are obligatory for Muslims.

But ultimately, she says, “I just couldn’t agree with most of the stuff, especially with the treatment of women — that got me out of Islam.”

In her mid-teens, she also discovered the online forum of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, which gave her the courage to finally admit to herself she didn’t believe anymore and wanted to leave the faith. Before that, she “had never even heard of apostates.”