Before Zim begins sharing his story, he makes it clear that he was not a good person, and that he shouldn’t be seen as someone that others like him should strive to be. After all, this was exactly what he did before he became what he calls the “Malay pariah”, someone who has “stepped out of the culture and the inner circle”.

While Zim has renounced Islam, he distances himself from being labelled an ex-Muslim. The term he’s most comfortable with is ‘agnostic’, and while he doesn’t believe in God per se, he does feel a sense of omnipresence that he finds reassuring.

“Terms carry so much weight,” he says, explaining how labels like ‘atheist’ or ‘ex-Muslim’ tend to be seen as inherently aggressive positions.

“The thing I stand against most is that when you take a certain position, you must be against something or for something, and I don’t share that. Once you label yourself and people, that’s when you create that ‘us and them’. That is the core of divisiveness in any community.”

Growing up, this was his experience with religion at home. At the beginning, he shares, the rifts that started between his parents had nothing to do with Islam. Instead, it was simply a case of his parents not getting married on the best of terms. Neither half of his extended family approved of the bride or groom, and so the union was not blessed by either side.

“Naturally, we withdrew, so we were isolated in that sense. I saw my father from being the alpha male of the family starting to stray, starting to have a mid-life crisis, suddenly wanting to break out on his own. He was a sailor, and so he was starting to get tired of the domestic life.”

His mother, on the other hand, turned to religion as a refuge. She went in the opposite direction, trying to reason and reconcile her way through adversity by diving deeper into Islam.

“As much as they seemed to think that religion could explain everything, it couldn’t,” he says. “It couldn’t save their marriage, it couldn’t save them. So why should it be forced on me?”