Once upon a time, an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful, most gracious, most merciful Allah decided to create the universe, reportedly, in six days — a mysterious infinitude with fiery supernova, budding galaxies, planets, ominous black holes, quarks and quasars. Then Allah created Earth in two days and eventually, from clay, sand and water he created a man, Âdam. From Âdam’s rib cage, came his ladylove, Hawa (Eve). Atrocious Eve one day gave in to the greed of taking a bite on the apple provoked by Satan. Angered and betrayed, the all-knowing Allah notwithstanding his forecasting power to any use, decided to dump the stupid couple on Planet Earth to repent and here I am, the descendent of an incestuous great great (great..) grandparents, writing a blasphemous rebuttal to the collection of my other cousins of the same incestuous lineage with whom I am about to vehemently disagree on their bad reviews of the popular documentary ‘’Islam’s Non-Believers’’.

Fast forward to 2016. In fact, I’m really not the descendent of an incestuous lineage leading from Adam and Eve. Furthermore, I don’t share any direct ancestral link to any of those with whom I’m about to disagree. Thanks to Science. Between the obvious unknown preceding the inception of this universe and me writing this review, a lot of things happened. Importantly, we abandoned some of our deep-seated ignorance about the nature of the Universe and our reality through decades of exploration, observation, experiments and fierce debates of ideas that sees no gender, border, religion or race when it comes to the survival of the robust of them all. We learned the methods to sampling, data collection, devise objective research methodologies, fight our own biases when making observational inferences, conduct experiments, repeat and took these methods of nurturing our curiosity beyond the premises of science and technology to social science, politics and almost every discipline that has shaped today’s modern and civilised world. We established evolution is real so the story of Adam and Eve is like one of those chain emails stuck up on your email’s Spam folder encouraging you to forward it to 50 people in your contact list otherwise something bad will happen to you. Sound familiar? We figured that the Earth is not flat, neither does the universe revolve around us. Unfortunately, such discoveries made a lot of people angry because it offended the tenets of Christianity which was the faith of its then dominant demographic. So one of the earliest proponents of heliocentricism, Giordano Bruno, was burned at stake and another spent the rest of his life in house arrest.

A Muslim, by definition, is a person who believes in Allah as the only one true God, Muhammad as his “Last Messenger” to save the world from ‘’enemies of Islam’’, the 5 pillars of Islam, and the tenets of Sunnah — compilation of Muhammad’s dialogues.

An EX-MUSLIM is a person who no longer submits to the Islamic beliefs of “One True God”, Muhammad as the ultimate prophet whose divine messages will save the world. Neither do they necessarily subscribe to core beliefs of Islam on which the Muslim identity and the theological empire on which the religion is built on: such as, an ambitious Allah crafting a Universe only to be obsessed with what we do with our genitals, the gender of our sexual partner(s), the number of idols our neighbours practice, or prophet Muhammad flying on a horse to Jerusalem or splitting the Moon with his finger, and more importantly, in the political context, an apocalyptic sense of victimhood from ‘’a war on Islam’’ because signs of Kayamat (End of World) to be heralded by increased freedom of women, equal rights for homosexuals, greater visibility of transgenders, increased scepticism within Muslim community leading to apostasy/blasphemy are just some of the word-to-word predictions in Islam’s core vision about the world.

An Ex-Muslim, therefore, is simply a person whose identity is not built on beliefs that is not based on objective reality — very much unlike what Omar El-Hamdoon sneered at, that, as if to be an Ex-Muslim we constantly rely on the wholesome mainstream identity of what makes a typical Muslim. Being an Ex-Muslim is a rejection of an identity built on the fairy tales such as two angels sitting either side of my shoulder constantly logging my activities as either good or bad to decide whether I’d wind up in heaven or hell, and a perpetual sense of victimhood reinforced by Islamic doctrine and its last Prophet as if the whole infidel world has nothing to do except to wage a war against me and my Ummah, and that the Muslim community as a race is a victim the moment the Islamic illusion of a true Caliphate is challenged by social changes, such as marriage equality, acceptance of transgender rights, discoveries on the frontiers of science and technology, and most importantly, women figuring things out on the driver’s seat of an average Toyota rather than confining themselves to the idea of “empowerment’’ so long it is within Islam’s dome of control whether teaching her Hijab can be a ‘’choice’’ on its own merit, advocating male guardianship, slitting half your vagina to seek abstinence for a better chance in Paradise, and everything in between and beyond.

Like in the ancient time of Giordano Bruno when challenging authority that was built on false assumption about the world meant you made the majority of its followers angry, when ITV aired it’s 1-hour documentary ‘’Islam’s Non-Believers’’ on 13th October 2016 exposing -

1) the unfair discrimination, isolation, domestic violence and risk of honour killing faced by Ex-Muslims by their family,

2) the condescending, insulting treatment received by their community outside their family,

3) the mental health support and psychological needs Ex-Muslims are deprived of by the resulting isolation

4) the threat of kidnap, torture and death at the hands fundamentalist Islamic mob experienced by Ex-Muslims as Yemeni blogger Omer Batawil or Bangladeshi Rajib Haider

5) the discrimination, de-platforming and vilification of Ex-Muslims and Muslim reformers by mainstream Western institution and media that are nearly paralysed by political correctness having lost its insight and courage to be on the right side of history.

6) the state persecution of Ex-Muslims that range from disinheritance, disenfranchisement from community, financial penalty to death penalty in at least 13 countries…

… It made a lot of people angry.

You did not have to wait for the documentary to be released to witness how fragile a community is whose foundation is built on beliefs so weak that you need fear tactics embodied as domestic abuse, isolation, insult, intimidation, honour killing, and apostasy laws to keep its people from unfettered scepticism. The proof is that before the documentary was even aired, bulk message via Whatsapp, Facebook, Telegram and other popular messaging apps and social media were sent to the Muslim community warning them about a vile documentary featuring girls who left Islam. Added was the warning that Muslims with ‘’weak Iman (faith)’’ should not watch it because Satan may induce doubt in their mind too.

At least Omer El-Hamdoon from the Muslim Association of Britain had the courage to engage in a dialogue when many mainstream Islamists or even apologists claiming to be secular Muslim leaders would have chicken out from such interviews. Perhaps because you can’t always get away with your doublespeak when you know over a million viewers around the world will look you straight into the eyes. But very much predictably like those flamboyant Islamists who espouse diversity, tolerance, mutual respect when the cameras of BBC or Sky News are rolling in the West but promote discrimination against apostates and non-Muslim in closed community meetings as shown in the documentary, Omer El-Hamdoon burned the very bridge he claims to build to encourage dialogue with the Ex-Muslim community when he called Maryam Namazie a ‘’witch’’.

It turns out he happens to live in a world where common sense means if you are making a career out of your Muslim identity as a community leader and as a president of Muslim Association of Britain, by virtue of your own portfolio and position, people will ask you difficult questions — in this context, what happens to Ex-Muslims or apostates in an ideal Islamic country? — an answer he thought he answered in his response article but ended on a note calling woman a witch because she doesn’t believe in a flying horse rather dedicated and risked her entire life to stand up for the rights of Ex-Muslims — something many revered Muslim leaders won’t dare to do in another thousand lifetimes in fear of being called ‘’Islamophobic’’, ‘’Uncle Tom’’, ‘’Native Informant’’, Coconut, A Jew, A Zionist and the list goes on.

There are 13 countries where it is legal to kill Ex-Muslims and each of these countries are governed by Islamic laws either in part or in full. Apart from death sentence, other state sanctioned persecution against Ex-Muslims include jail time, paying monetary fine, banned from taking public offices, and in the greater community context, being discriminated from job, being disinherited from your family and exposed to domestic abuse, kidnap and if the government doesn’t kill you, mobs from your local area will. So when apologist members from the Muslim community and Islamists, sitting in a beautiful park trashes a documentary on Ex-Muslims insisting that Islam is a cute victim of media propaganda and Islamophobia and tries to discredit the issue of apostasy because they believe such issues should only be dealt in an Islamic court, it takes little to understand that they are vehemently dishonest.

And why not. In countries like Pakistan or Bangladesh, when the mobs from dominating Muslim population burns a Christian couple, very few bats an eye to reinforce real change to prevent another hate crime in future — the news makes trips the front pages of international media for a week or two and then everyone forgets about it. There are charities that caters to the problems of minority discrimination but it’s not big business. In the West, victimhood is big business, partly because now we have certain charities whose funding model is built on the definition of victim only validated by rich, wealthy donors wanting to spread certain victimhood narrative — especially when you have successfully conflated the valid criticism of Islam as hate speech against the minority Muslim community that even the slightest scrutiny of practices such as honour killing, Female Genital Mutilation or Jihad brands you a racist. If the best available tools of science and philosophy operating on a modern advanced world has fallen short anywhere, it’s the failure to cure stupidity and wilful ignorance.

Unlike the times of Giordano Bruno when you will be burned at a stake for free thinking, we Ex-Muslims DO get international attention. But usually when we are dead. In the last few years, mainstream media like BBC, Huffington Post, Guardian, Economist have managed to shed light on the issue of growing atheism within the Muslim communities but only after Bangladeshi and Yemeni bloggers were killed one after another, and when Sadia’s brother, an Ex-Muslim suffering depression committed suicide, the world didn’t even know he existed until the documentary war aired.

If ITV’s documentary was instead about non-Muslims discriminating and killing Muslims in the growing context of anti-Muslim racism, cameras would roll, mainstream media from Buzzfeed to BBC would cover every corner of the debate like it did to the Burkini row, or hijabi Playboy model until you are cowered into the mentality that any criticism of Islam is a hate crime against Muslims and admit that hijab is an amazing symbol of modernity when it’s an individual choice not imposed by an Islamic regime.

It’s a speciality of Islam that the frontline fraction of Islamist leaders that represent Muslims and much of the community behave very differently depending on which part of the world they live in and when journalists from mainstream media are taking notes. In Islam-dominated countries, the moment you become an Ex-Muslim or you are found to be converted to Christianity or Hinduism, you are penalised, at risk of being jailed or being killed. But when members from these Islamic communities export their values in the West, suddenly any intellectual critique of Islam or criticism of unfair Islamic laws is deemed as racism against the Muslim community. Had Britain or United States treated Muslims the way vast number Muslims treat Ex-Muslims or even non-Muslims in countries where Islam is the main religion and Muslims are a majority, international charities that feed off perpetual victimhood narratives will win a jackpot. There will be no shortage of journalistic endeavour of explaining just how anti-Muslim, racist, imperialist the West can be. But when Saudi regimes beheads its people, sponsor pilots to fly planes into buildings, sentences apostates and free thinkers to 1,000 lashes and when mobs from these communities carry out the heinous crimes gouging the eyes out of innocent concert goers in ISIS terror attacks, much of the mainstream West seems to have no obligation than to treat the entirety of Muslim community as a victim of any rational scepticism of Islamic beliefs that motivate violent crimes. From Saudi, Qatari billionaire investors buying think tanks, funding top university departments whitewashing Islam, to funding academic publications branding counterterrorism campaigns as racist, to using mainstream media portraying Muslims in the West as a victim the moment any tenet of Islam is criticised, the Western world turned its political landscape into a mess.

In a world where Islam did not reform, but Islamism (the political goal to impose Islam on society) did by finding its way into MTV and among the pages of Playboy magazines while persecution of Ex-Muslims is a continuous phenomenon, somehow a mere 1-hour documentary on the issues of apostasy in the Muslim world was suddenly branded as ‘’media propaganda’’, a “war on Islam”. When #IslamsNonBelievers became a trending hashtag since October 13 and it got a global community talking, one really has to work hard not to publish a post-premiere review of the documentary on mainstream media. And this time victory is not on our side. Unlike Panaroma documentary or Deeyah Khan’s previous works of Banaz and Jihad, Islam’s Non-Believers received exactly zero attention from mainstream media post-premiere despite being a ground-breaking work culminating from a year of hard work by Deeyah and her team. From following us at rallies and conferences to making sure each volunteer and participants were comfortable during long hours of interviews, waking up at 4 am and running with a heavy camera to film us rescue two Ex-Muslim girls in the dead of night, standing 2 to 3 hours straight filming us while we continued our conference, and being there for us, silently documenting our work without caring about lunch or relaxation, we at Council of Ex-Muslim witnessed how much effort, care and passion Deeyah and her team have invested into the making of the documentary only to see it ignored by people who could really help us spread a message of solidarity.

Messages, words of support, troll all flew following the premiere of Islam’s Non-Believers. I got famous, infamous so did everyone featured in the documentary. Bloggers and activists posted numerous reviews of the film on their own. Viewers from Canada to Bangladesh hunted for a youtube version of the documentary as one upload after another were taken down due to copyright issues. But giants like Buzzfeed, CNN, BBC pretended the documentary never happened. And the Islamist frontline representing Muslim community tried to dismiss the issue of apostasy with accusations such as reasons of leaving Islam were not ‘’intellectual’’ but ‘’cultural’’. Or that teenagers leaving Islam at young age are not matured enough to think ‘’rationally’’.

The irony is that if 15 year olds can separate facts from fiction, the joke is on Islamists in their adulthood clinging to a prophet on winged horse and the idea of virgins rewarding them in heaven. There are kids as young as four who make it to Mensa’s list of top geniuses. There was a Musim girl named Arfa who made history as the youngest computer specialist of Microsoft. Another Muslim boy named Ayan also became Microsoft’s youngest computer specialist at the age of five. Holding Ex-Muslims or anyone to a low intellectual standard just because of their age really doesn’t play here. I deliberately used examples of Muslim prodigies to illustrate the difference between Islamists and these young Muslim prodigies. And what separates the five year old Muslim prodigies promising to change the frontier of science from the 30 year old Islamists insisting you believe in flying horses and heavenly virgins is that the prodigies are made when you invoke your passion of learning and curiosity in your Muslim identity, and Islamists and apologists are made when you do the opposite: invoke your Muslim identity in whatever you are doing. Islam had its golden age when its people invoked their passion for learning and crafting in their quest for spirituality and God. Islam lost it when they did the opposite: invoked God in the endeavours of learning and doing things. A monotheistic, patriarchal, abstinence-loving, power-obsessed God. And the God they invoked made sure they don’t see the light of peace and prosperity in another 800 years.

Most of the reviews claimed Islam’s Non-Believers did not focus on the reasons for leaving Islam or that most reasons were “cultural, not intellectual” or emotional. As the headline mentioned it, the documentary is about ISLAM’S NON-BELIVERS not the reasons Islam’s Non-Believers find the religion unworthy. As the press release hinted, the focus of the documentary was on the experience of Ex-Muslims rather than lumping the shortcomings of Islamic faith into an hour long film whose length is certainly not sufficient to cover the range of issues. I personally found it more conducive to not cherry pick the reasons why Ex-Muslims leave Islam because this further leaves the domain of debate open to exploring all the reasons that would have been overshadowed if the documentary focused on handful of reasons of leaving Islam for there are way too many. Most importantly, the documentary is not about Ex-Muslims dictating how Muslims should think in a way to leave Islam. After all, remaining in or leaving a religion should be one’s own decision. We Ex-Muslims can give one hundred reasons to leave the Islam but what we cannot do is make a Muslim think our way, and it is not our position neither our authority to do so. We can only talk about our experience and our reasons in the spirit of freedom of expression. If you are a Muslim reading this, I as an Ex-Muslim, can only tell you about my own experience, what I felt, how I reasoned out of the religion. But I cannot make you think my way. Simply because you are not me. To each, our own. That’s your brain, your eyes, your ears, your senses, your consciousness, your observations. It’s all up to you to find out what the world looks through your eyes. Even if I surround you with a thousand proofs of evolution and Big Bang, I cannot make you accept them because the path to your knowing is all yours. Whether you choose to remain in Islam or leave Islam is completely your decision and what you do with your decision does not affect me or us Ex-Muslims at all.

The idea that Islam is perfect and leaving Islam is due to “cultural” or “emotional” reasons ignores two basic things. First is the definition of culture. Culture is a combination of set of beliefs, customs, everyday non-religious practices, kind of cuisines, taste in music, art, dress code — variables shared by a group of people collectively. Islam can be part of a culture but an entire culture cannot be part of Islam unless Islam absorbed the whole culture to establish an Islamic caliphate whose codes are now based on Islamic (Sharia) law such as the case of Afghanistan where its traditional Afghani dresses for women are annihilated by forced burqa, and hafiza dance almost extinct.

Jihad, honor killing, child marriage are of course part of a culture but such practices are reinforced by religion. In case of Pakistan or Jordan it’s Islam. Go to India and you’ll find the problem is prevalent among rural Hindu populace. When you are blaming an entire culture for such problems instead of the nuance of connecting the dots between religious belief and such regressive practices, you hold every other variables in that culture responsible. So simply in this case, Pakistani local cuisine of tikka masala has really nothing to do with the doctrine about heavenly virgins that an Ex-Muslim refuses to believe.

Chicken Tikka Masala

Secondly, Unless you are angered by the unfair treatment of non-Muslims, women, transgender, or innocent animals sacrificed in Eid-ul-Adha, the reason to leave Islam is not so much emotional as it is intellectual. You have to resort to rational intellectual integrity to realise the Earth is not like a carpet and chanting a Surah will not protect you from Jinn because they don’t exist. It is rather that the reason to hold on to the Islamic identity is often emotional: perhaps you saw that emotionally overcharged Youtube video of Hamza Tzorsis or Mehdi Hasan, or spent hours at local mosque where the recitation of Quran you heard was so beautiful it brought tears in your eyes, or because you were once like a 11-year-old me who once exhausted all her emotions while praying to feel any proximity to the one divine God.

Apart fromone review I found so far, not a single review from the frontline Islamists purporting to represent the Muslim community paid a bare minimum respect to the innocent lives of the Ex-Muslims lost at the hands of fundamentalist Islamist mobs. The fact the initial reaction from the Muslim community showed a precedence of defending its Islamic faith over any condolence to the lives of Ex-Muslims lost proves just how much Islam fails to extend humanity and empathy beyond its own group –typical group mentality once only prevalent among us when we were tribal members hiding in caves of African jungles. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether a victim is a Muslim or an Ex-Muslims. Yes, Muslims continue to be one of the most mistreated, hurt and deprived communities in the world. And using the suffering of these Muslims in Syria, Palestine or Yemen who are sitting helpless among the rubble of their home bombed by UK-sponsored Saudi planes, to advance the victimhood narrative of frontline Islamists and apologists living in the comfort of Western privilege in order to maximise your facetime on mainstream media and shelter Islam from any legitimate debate branding it as a hate speech against those suffering Muslims you really don’t bother rescuing in this lifetime has to be one of the most disgusting crimes against humanity.

Yes, We Ex-Muslims, too, are victims. But our journey is not one of being at peace with our state of victimhood and glorifying it because some social justice warrior interning at Huffington Post will write about us and make us famous on Tumblr. Our journey is one of transforming from a victim to a survivor. You have to be a survivor to be surrounded in a community where you are constantly mocked and threatened with death for thinking differently and you still dare to think out of the box whether you are in the closet or out in the battle field of activism. Yes, we are victims because we are made homeless, discriminated from education, work and isolated from our community, so many of us need help with social care, mental health and police protection. But that is not what our life is all about — it is a difficult experience that transforms the rest of our life and it transforms for the better, because the journey, the perseverance, the courage, the hope changes us from a victim to a survivor. It makes each of us a warrior. How do we know that? Because we don’t need to be told 24/7 that we are a special snowflake because we hold some values so sacred that questioning or criticising them offends us. We don’t need to be constantly validated by big magazine names like Playboy and CNN about how successful we are in our lives because we wear our Ex-Muslim identity on our sleeves. We don’t need to fund research fellows at posh think tanks to promote our narrative and associate professors at Ivy League universities to slander atheists and humanists as anti-Muslims racist because they are too honest about Islam to make us feel offended and marginalised. We don’t need invisible group of cyber-Jihadists to take down atheist pages in the Middle East and lobby with the NUS to de-platform speakers just because we don’t happen to agree with them. We continue to raise our voice and will do so until blasphemy laws are a thing of a past. We will continue to fight for other Ex-Muslims who are at risk of persecution in Islamic countries and are hounded by their communities even in Western countries and help them rebuild their lives so they can move on as a survivor, as a skilled member of the society giving back to the economy. We will continue to raise our voice until we achieve the same equal treatment of respect, compassion that Muslims and non-Muslims also deserve. And we will continue to tell the world that we exist until mainstream media learns to give our issues equal coverage as any other news that merits attention. We will continue to give voices to all those Ex-Muslims in the world who cannot speak for themselves. We will continue our movement as long as there is one single Ex-Muslim remaining to be empowered. We will continue to fight until the day when being an Ex-Muslim becomes just as normal as being a human being that we no longer will have to make a noise about the human rights we once were denied.

We Ex-Muslims are just as diverse as Muslims, the only difference is that we have abandoned unrealistic and violent dogmas and invoked our purpose in life in things we find passionate or interesting — some of us write songs, some of us want to become fierce politicians, some of us are brave dissenting bloggers, some of us are scientists. Some of us are great mothers raising the future. We are singers, actors, lyricists, doctors, random PhD students at the corner of a library, or a young shy teenager hiding in the closet reading an astronomy book in secret with fire in our eyes. We are young Saudi women secretly promising ourselves to take that driver’s seat in their own lifetime. We are the young Jordanian child brides silently clutching our courage and waiting for a day when we will stand up for our own freedom and individuality. We, Ex-Muslims, are everywhere.