To mark National Apostasy Day, Dr Benjamin Jones, Director of Case Operations and Outreach at the Free Speech Union, details how British ex-Muslims are increasingly under threat of censorship.
Writing for the National Secular Society, Jones details the moving story of Zainab
“By the time I spoke to her, Zainab was safe, for the most part. But it had been a close-run thing. And she was still far from ‘free’.
“Zainab, aged 19, had been in a lesbian relationship. When her parents found out, they beat her. Then they seized her phone and tried to cut off her every connection with the outside world. “I couldn’t contact any of my friends and I couldn’t talk to my girlfriend,” she said. They even took her laptop, depriving her of the material she needed to study for her exams. “I had to pretend that I turned straight,” she told me of these long, oppressive months.
“But when her sister betrayed her and revealed that she was still in a covert same-sex relationship, the situation escalated rapidly. Zainab managed to alert a friend who contacted the police, but despite numerous police visits and the involvement of the Crown Prosecution Service, she remained in her parents’ house.
“She had no choice but to begin planning her escape. Her parents monitored and shut down her internet access, inspected her room, and would regularly burst in to see what she was doing. She had no privacy at all. But carefully, covertly, she began to hide packed bags, hoping that her parents would not find them or realise what she was doing. Despite the restrictions on her, Zainab had managed to make a plan with a friend: when she made a run for it, her friend would have a taxi waiting to collect her. She did make a run for it, but her parents realised what was happening and tried to stop her. The police returned, just in time, and finally they took Zainab to the relative safety of a women’s refuge, where she would remain for the duration of the summer before she planned to start university.
Zainab was far from alone in going through an experience like this, and she knew other gay or lesbian former Muslims were in virtually identical situations: living a doubly closeted life, unable to be open about either her relationship, or the fact she no longer believed in Islam. Her thoughts quickly turned to speaking out about what had happened. She spoke to the police officer who was with her about her concerns: “I feel like if I speak up about this then the Muslim community will attack me.”
The police had arrived in time to rescue Zainab, but very quickly the state reached the limit of what it would do for her: “You should just consider not speaking about it at all,” the police officer replied.
Zainab eventually made it to university. She notified her institution about the situation she was in and was reassured by the security available on campus and in the halls of residence where she lived at the time I spoke to her. But even after escaping a hellishly controlling childhood and parental abuse, she was still not free. Not really.
I asked if she could be open about being an ex-Muslim. She replied: “Absolutely not, because half my year group, which is 87 people, are Muslims so it would just not be a good idea for me to be out at all. Because even if they’re not going to like attack me… it would still just spread gossip and rumours and drama and I just don’t want to be involved in something like that; I’m already under too much stress as it is.”
Although Zainab found solace through meeting other ex-Muslims, Jones notes that “this network is under attack, and ex-Muslims’ precarious access to the rights of freedom of speech, belief and association, tentative at best, are imperilled even further.”
“The threats are myriad. They include the proliferation of loosely drafted hate speech laws in western countries. They include the bizarre calls to end online anonymity which emerged following the very much offline murder, by a jihadist, of Sir David Amess MP. They include increasingly heavy-handed internet regulation by governments, coupled with the ruthless, unthinking algorithmic censorship of social media platforms. All of this risks combining to form a perfect storm for ex-Muslims.
“But by far the most dangerous threat on the horizon for ex-Muslims (and many other people besides) is the definition of ‘Islamophobia’ being advanced by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims. This definition, among other things, brands as Islamophobic anyone who makes “mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Muslims”.
“How does that leave the ex-Muslim who draws a link between the treatment they suffered and the treatment suffered by tens of thousands of others? Would drawing an adverse inference about the entire religion from this overwhelming data be branded as Islamophobic on the basis of stereotyping? If translated into law, as seems possible under a new government, ex-Muslims’ strident criticisms of Islam and elements of the Muslim communities they grew up in could well be criminalised as hate crimes.
“The definition would also prohibit “claims of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword”. Which again, if translated into law, could easily criminalise Iranian dissidents who celebrate and mourn pre-Islamic Persia, or mainstream historians like Tom Holland who have written about the early Islamic conquests and the wars of Muhammad’s followers against the Eastern Roman Empire. Indeed, the definition is so inimical to freedom of speech that it has united no two more disparate figures in opposition than one of religion’s staunchest critics, Richard Dawkins, and Tim Dieppe of Christian Concern.
“Ex-Muslims are in the unenviable position of being canaries in the coal mine for the rest of us: if ex-Muslims cannot speak freely then none of us can. If they cannot criticise or satirise religion, nobody else is safe to. Their warnings should be heeded most urgently.
“Yet the encroachment of hate crime laws, internet and social media censorship, and now the APPG definition of Islamophobia risk creating a situation where women like Zainab are treated not as victims, but as hate-mongers, merely for speaking out about their own traumatic past and their experiences of abuse.”
Worth reading in full.
All names of ex-Muslims referred to in this article have been changed in order to protect their safety.
The FSU has long warned against any attempts to define Islamophobia.
As Jones notes, in March, the FSU published an essay by Tim Dieppe, with a Foreword by Richard Dawkins, arguing that any attempt to define ‘Islamophobia’ will have a chilling effect on free speech.
Tim Dieppe, the Head of Public Policy at Christian Concern, believes that defining ‘Islamophobia’ and punishing those responsible for it, whether by cancelling them or changing the law to make ‘Islamophobia’ a ‘hate crime’, would undermine free speech. That’s particularly true of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims’ definition, which is so broad that, among other things, it means anyone disputing Hamas’s description of Israel’s military operation in Gaza as a ‘genocide’ is guilty of ‘Islamophobia’.
Click here to read Tim Dieppe’s essay ‘Banning Islamophobia: Blasphemy Law by the Backdoor’.
