Hammoki fled from Iraq to Germany in 2015 and was granted refugee status in 2020. We asked him about his history.

Hammoki, for what reasons did you flee your home country?

Since I am an atheist, my life was in danger. I had to expect to be killed.

How did it come about that you became an atheist?

I come from a liberal family belonging to an old Bedouin tribe. However, my parents have become more and more religious over the years. As a child and teenager I was forced to visit the mosque and observe the Holy Month and Ramadan. Then I began to deal more intensively with questions of faith, and more and more critical questions came to me. After careful consideration, I decided at the age of 18 to turn away from Islam for good. The ubiquitous violence, the lack of freedom, the lack of critical faculties, the entanglement with the state, the understanding of marriage and the strict rules in general have deeply deterred me. I also found no answers to existential questions in Islam as well as in all other religions. For me, facts, realities and science became the basis of my thinking. The poet and freethinker Abu l-Ala al-Ma`arri, who lived 1000 years ago, the author and critic of religion Abdullah al-Qasemi and the social scientist Ali Al-Wardi became sources of inspiration for me.

How was your atheism discovered, how did the threatening situation arise?

“The story of Mohammed, an atheist from Iraq”