Regarding the sacred texts, the Bible is very accessible to a substantial portion of the Christian and ex-Christian populations. That’s not the case with the Quran; growing up, I learned how to read Arabic, but never to understand what exactly it was I was reading. It was a similar story for any other Muslim I knew – back then in Pakistan and largely even now in the US – as it was and is for multitudes of people all across the world, and certainly across the Indian subcontinent. The comprehension that should have been was fairly neglected, so that it could be replaced by obedience and modesty and such, as is often the case. The intellectualism that is generally seen as necessary for people to become secular and the vernacularization that is necessary for holy texts to become accessible was and is missing.

Sectarianism is more visible within Christianity, even when it isn’t part of official education. Catholics are aware of Protestants are aware of Jehovah’s Witnesses are aware of Anglicans and so on. The first I heard of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence was more than five years after I first stopped believing (although, admittedly, I did start disbelieving very early). Many people are aware of Sunnis and Shias and maybe they’re even aware of Sufis, but it’s hardly ever broken down into, say, the different schools of Sunni jurisprudence: Hanafi, Salafi, Hanbali, etc. There are schools within Shia and Sufism and Ahmadiyya also, and that is still not the complete picture. Maybe you could blame the Western gaze for the broad strokes, or the need for a semblance of Muslim solidarity in the post-9/11 world, but this is something that persists even in homogenous communities entirely populated by Muslims.

While this may seem like a critique of how secular communities receive and disseminate information about Islam, a worthwhile one that does need to be made, it isn’t that. Rather, I offer here a critique of the assumption that secular communities need to educate themselves about every religion that exists, and especially those we used to see ourselves as part of, so we can be sure we’re not damning ourselves to the horrific fates prescribed in various different texts. This is a common and entirely disingenuous assumption or prescription, since children aren’t born experts or theologians, yet they’re generally, with very little exception, pushed into a pre-formed ideology, made into identity, made into irrevocable destiny. I myself was decidedly not as educated about Islam before I stopped believing as I became after I did stop. This was used as a reason to undermine my decision to stop engaging in all the trappings of the religion, which is likely why so many of us do find it necessary to know for sure before accepting disbelief. The tactic is entirely a gate-keeping one, from both ends: the religious often ask if you’re sure you know enough, before flipping back to the question of whether you have enough faith, both questions at odds with each other; and the secular abhor the idea that someone might have made the decision to join what they consider their community through any avenue but those predicated on reasoning alone, which cuts out everyone who doesn’t want to undertake all this and simply disbelieves. It shouldn’t be this way.

This assumption isn’t entirely something pushed onto atheists by the religious. It’s often a burden taken willingly. Here we hit upon something that was immediately off-putting to me upon my entry into the secular world: the insistence on intellectualism. The secular community, perpetually on the defensive, needs to be told that it’s okay to not rationalize disbelief. It is possible to feel in your bones that you don’t believe. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an intellectual endeavor. You don’t have to scrounge around for the right answer to know when another answer is wrong. That is not to say that anti-intellectualism is okay or commendable in the least, but when you look at the scientific method itself, the one thing almost universally espoused by (at least intentional) skeptics, the objective isn’t to find the right answer – it’s to get rid of the wrong answers. That’s how I came to atheism myself: it’s not necessarily that science pulled me, but that religion pushed me away (even if I do choose to go along with the loaded-ness of the binary assumption involved here). There are other problematic features to this assumption. Not only does it promote an erroneous oppositional binary between science and religion, but it also often neglects the dishonest, sensationalist practices that go on in the scientific world of journals and publications in the name and promotion of intellectualism, many of which can’t simply be explained away by pointing to the media – it is entirely possible to be scientific and tout intellectualism and still be carried away by subjectivity. One is not automatically the source from which all objectivity flows just because one says, “Science, bitch!” I mention this because the appeal to presupposed objectivity is the main point of referring to science in opposition to religion. (See Nietzsche for more on this.)

For a young brown ex-Muslim, the contrast is amplified, since the discrepancy between what the general Muslim population knows and what ex-Muslims are “supposed” to know is greater than the respective knowledge for, say, Christians in the West. On one hand, you are pressured to know everything about the religion before you can be allowed (allowed!) to defect. On the other, once you do, it becomes yet another obstacle to others who have some doubts about Islam, because all they see is that you have to acquire religious knowledge on par with scholars, which seems like a lot of work just so you can get to a position where you have to fend off the Western right, evade the Islamist fundies, and defend yourself from accusations of Islamophobia from the general left when you’re honestly just talking about your real life experiences with Islam and how they’ve hurt you. This is all before you get to possible vitriolic and maybe fatal opposition from people you actually love and have known all your life and have been vulnerable with. It seems like you need to devote your life to one potentially minuscule aspect of your identity, which often is and has been the case. It seems more beneficial to just shut up and enjoy whatever you currently have, however bad that might be.

In the face of that, commitment to normalcy is in itself a revolutionary act by virtue of how difficult it is to achieve. It’s very important to show secular Muslims and ex-Muslims who are just being mundane, not entirely defined by Muslimness and their efforts to either defend or escape it. You shouldn’t have to feel like you have to be an expert to be able to decide you don’t believe. There are plenty of other obstacles to overcome and they won’t be overcome simply by diligently trying to prove the position that led to defection, as the recent murders in Bangladesh can attest. The task is thankless and it’s probably better to get our priorities straight.

Tl;dr: 1. Science and religion are not opposites; 2. Secularism does not inherently mean science; 3. One should not have to show their scientific credentials to be taken seriously as a nonbeliever; 4. The insistence that seculars have to be well-versed in science and the academia therein is wrongheaded and inherently privileged; 5. This gatekeeping is a big part of why secularism exists in certain populations and not in others; 6. It’s something we do fairly consciously, but shouldn’t; 7. Many parts of the population are actually harmed by this insistence on what could be called a “party line” at this point.