Why I am an Islamophobe

[Osama bin Laden’s] claim to speak for Islam or for all Muslims might be contested, but the religion itself was an expression of deeper yearnings that needed to be sympathetically understood. On no account–and this imperative was put forward by President Bush as well as by many liberals–were the less tender elements of his doctrine to be used as a critique of religion. A hitherto marginal propaganda term, “Islamophobia,” underwent a mainstream baptism and was pressed into service to intimidate those who suspected that faith might indeed have something to do with it.

—Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy

What worries me is that so many moderate Muslims believe that “Islamophobia” is a bigger problem than literalist Islam is. They seem more outraged that someone like me would equate jihad with holy war than that millions of their co-religionists do this and commit atrocities as a result.

—Sam Harris, in Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue

Note: This isn’t about anything proposed by Donald Trump, who is a bigoted narcissist with a hopelessly simplistic view of the world. Please give yourself some time to read this essay beyond the headline. The truly impatient might at least look at its conclusion.

———

When my mother called me on the morning of September 11, 2001 and said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, my first reaction was, “So what?” I pictured the small wreck of a Cessna stuck into a few windows, an accident resulting from some grossly incompetent private pilot.

September 11th [Flickr page]

After I’d rubbed the sleep from my eyes and walked over to my computer to watch the live coverage online, I saw that huge plume of smoke and realized this was bigger than I’d thought. Then the second plane hit, and Islam–as envisioned by a small group of its most fanatically devoted followers–had introduced itself to my world.

In an effort to understand what my President was calling a “religion of peace,” I bought a paperback copy of the Qur’an¹ and started reading. It didn’t seem all that peaceful to me. Just in the first three pages, Sura 2 (“The Cow”) went on and on about infidels who will receive “a severe chastisement,” whose hearts are diseased, for whom a fire has been prepared.

On page 17 (still in Sura 2), I encountered a command for Muslims to “fight for the cause of God against those who fight against you.” It was accompanied by the caveat that they should not attack the unbelievers first, at least, though that’s pretty much a moot point now, with Middle Eastern grievances stretching back many hundreds of years. Then, the text went on, “kill them wherever ye shall find them, and eject them from whatever place they have ejected you; for civil discord is worse than carnage.” With the sound still fresh in mind of turbofan engines and screams and bodies falling onto the pavement, this didn’t seem like a promising start.

And it wasn’t. Sura 8 (“The Spoils”) instructed the reader, in the name of “thy Lord” who’d apparently told some angels, “I will be with you: therefore stablish ye the faithful. I will cast a dread into the hearts of the infidels,” to “Strike off their heads then, and strike off from them every finger-tip,” because “they have opposed God and His Apostle.” Further instruction was to “Fight then against them till strife be at an end, and the religion be all of it God’s.” Sura 9 (“Immunity”) urged, “Believers! Wage war against such of the infidels as are your neighbors, and let them find you rigorous: and know that God is with those who fear him.”

September 11, 2001 [Flickr page]

Sura 24 (“Light”) sets forth a brutal punishment for the “whore and the whoremonger,” of the type that is still being carried out by faithful Muslims of ISIS and Saudi Arabia today: “scourge each of them with an hundred stripes; and let not compassion keep you from carrying out the sentence of God, if you believe in God and the last day.” Raif Badawi may have recalled the next line as the lash bore down on him in January: “And let some of the faithful witness their chastisement.” As he himself recalled it, “when I look within, I only see that thin man who miraculously withstood fifty lashes, while a group of people celebrated his pain, repeatedly chanting Allahu Akbar.” ²

The first verses of Sura 47 (“Muhammed”) included this framework for interfaith dialogue: “When ye encounter the infidels, strike off their heads till ye have made a great slaughter among them, and of the rest make fast the fetters.” Two pages later, it urged believers not to be fainthearted, “and invite not the infidels to peace when ye have the upper hand.” In Sura 66 (“The Forbidding”), the Prophet was told to “make war on the infidels and hypocrites, and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their abode! And wretched the passage to it!”

My passage through the text to this point had been pretty wretched, too. It was all so very repetitive, bleak, defensive, and angry. Denunciations of infidels were littered everywhere, along with copious eternal threats (“for the infidels is the torture of the Fire!”, Sura 8). There were provisions giving special privileges to slaveholders (“Forbidden to you also are married women, except those who are in your hands as slaves,” Sura 4) and the prophet (“No blame attacheth to the Prophet where God hath given him a permission,” Sura 33).

“Make war on the infidels” [Flickr page]

One entertaining diversion from the overall gloom of my reading project was coming across this license given by Allah to the man who (coincidentally!) was the very one to transmit the divine words:

O Prophet! We allow thee thy wives whom thou hast dowered, and the slaves whom thy right hand possesseth out of the booty which God hath granted thee, and the daughters of thy uncle, and of thy paternal and maternal aunts who fled with thee to Medina, and any believing woman who hath given herself up to the Prophet, if the Prophet desired to wed her–a privilege for thee above the rest of the faithful. [Sura 33, “The Confederates”]

That’s some real forward thinking on Mo’s part there. If you’re going to write a holy book, you might as well get all of your special sexual privileges defined right up front.

It’s an example of how “temporal power, aggrandisement, and self-gratification mingled rapidly with the grand object of the Prophet’s life” during the latter period of his life, in Medina. That char­acterization is from William Muir’s four-volume, mid-19th century biography Life of Mahomet, which the ex-Muslim writer Ibn Warraq says passed “a judgment on Muhammad’s character that was to be repeated over and over again by subsequent scholars.” Muir observed that Muhammad’s “personal indulgences were not only excused but encouraged by the divine approval or command.” In addition, “Battles were fought, executions ordered, and territories annexed, under cover of the Almighty’s sanction.” ³ The Arab pagans of the 7th century had plenty to be Islamophobic about.⁴

The Prophet also seemed–to my layman’s reading at least–pretty touchy about the idea that his revelations might be questioned. He has Allah proclaim reassuringly that infidels like me will say, “This Koran is a mere fraud of his own devising, and others have helped him with it, who had come hither by outrage and lie” (Sura 25, “al Furkan”). We unbelievers scoff at Allah’s “distinct signs” by saying, “This is merely a man who would fain pervert you from your father’s worship,” and “This (Koran) is no other than a forged falsehood” (Sura 34, “Saba”).

Circling the sacred black building with its very special black rock in Mecca [Flickr page]

But wait! Sura 41 (“The Made Plain”) provides a handy rationalization for our skepticism. It’s one that sounds all too familiar from my days in Christian fundamentalism: The Qur’an “is to those who believe a guide and a medicine; but as to those who believe not, there is a thickness in their ears, and to them it is a blindness.” ⁵

I’ll agree to that, at least. In all those pages, I saw nothing about love, nothing about joy or any real wisdom. It looks to me like blindness, all right–to everything that is good and decent about humanity.⁶

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), famous historian of the Roman Empire, wasn’t impressed, either. The Qur’an he called an “endless incoherent rhapsody of fable, and precept, and declamation, which seldom excites a sentiment or an idea, which sometimes crawls in the dust, and is sometimes lost in the clouds.” Philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) was even less charitable, calling it a

wild and absurd performance. Let us attend to his [Muhammad’s] narration; and we shall soon find that he bestows praise on such in­stances of treachery, in­human­ity, cruelty, revenge, and big­otry as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.⁷

The Qur’an and Muhammad’s sword are, in the assessment of biographer Muir, “the most stubborn enemies of Civilization, Liberty, and Truth, which the world has yet known.” ⁸ Admittedly, in the 150 years since he wrote that, we have seen plenty of uncivilized behavior totally unrelated to Islam or even religion–the Holocaust, Stalin’s murder of millions, the Bataan death march, and my own country’s detonation of two nuclear bombs over civilian populations come to mind. But we are also still seeing all too much of the bloody sword of Muhammed, not just in the Middle East, but in the concert halls, banquet rooms, and subway stations of the Western world.

Submit or Die

And fuck you, sir.

Nor is Liberty (to say nothing of an impartial search for Truth) a viable partner with Islam. Its very name–meaning “submission” or “surrender”–is contrary to that.⁹ Islam is a totalitarian ideology that hacks away at human rights and freedoms with two bloody edges of Muhammad’s sword: sharia, which subjugates those currently under Islamic control, and jihad, which seeks to extend that control to everybody else, having “for its ultimate aim the conquest of the entire world, in order to submit it to one single authority.”

The sharia or Islamic law is “based on four principles or roots.” ¹⁰ One of course is the Qur’an, with all its restrictions and barbaric punishments. And it’s not going anywhere. Even the moderate Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, who is doing much-needed work to help promote a tolerant (and tolerable) form of Islam, admits that “most Muslims today believe that the Qur’an is the eternal, literal word of God.” ¹¹

The other three principles behind sharia are “the sunna of the Prophet, which is incorporated in the recognized traditions; the consensus (ijma) of the scholars of the orthodox community; and the method of reasoning by analogy (qiyas or kiyas).” The whole thing is a “doctrine of duties” that is

aimed at “controlling the religious, social and political life of mankind in all its aspects, the life of its followers without qualification, and the life of those who follow tolerated religions to a degree that prevents their activities from hampering Islam in any way.” . . . It intrudes into every nook and cranny: everything–to give a random sample–from the pilgrim tax, agricultural contracts, the board and lodging of slaves, the invitation to a wedding, the use of toothpicks, the ritual fashion in which one’s natural needs are to be accomplished, the prohibition for men to wear gold or silver rings, to the proper treatment of animals is covered.¹²

Warraq notes that Christianity has a biblical basis for separation of church and state (“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things which are God’s, Matt. 22:17), but there is no such separation with Islam. The reason goes back to Muhammed, who

was not only a prophet but also a statesman; he founded not only a community but also a state and a society. He was a military leader, making war and peace, and a lawgiver, dispensing justice. Right from the beginning, the Muslims formed a community that was at once political and religious, with the Prophet himself as head of state.¹³

“Western Islamic apologists and modernizing Muslims continue to look for democratic principles in Islam and Islamic history,” says Warraq, noting many reasons why their search will be in vain. Perhaps most glaring is the legal inferiority of women, whose testimony in court is worth half that of a man, whose movements are strictly restricted, and who are prohibited from marrying non-Muslims. Non-Muslims of either sex who live in Muslim countries suffer their own form of subjugation, while atheists and apostates from Islam can expect only death. (Warraq notes Islam’s hypocrisy in welcoming converts who move in the other direction.)

Indeed, the very “notion of an individual–a moral person who is capable of making rational decisions and accepting moral responsibility for his free acts–is lacking in Islam.” One of the greatest obstacles standing in the way of any Islamic democracy is Islam’s “emphasis that it is the final word of God, the ultimate code of conduct: Islam never allows the possibility of alternatives.” ¹⁴

Mission Work, Muhammad Style

Intolerance was built into Islam from the very beginning. No “religious toleration was extended to the idolaters of Arabia at the time of Muhammad. The only choice given them was death or the acceptance of Islam.” The Prophet himself slaughtered around 600-900 Jews, expelled others, and subjugated the rest under extortionate taxes.

Then, just a couple of years after Muhammad’s death, “the caliph Abu Bakr organized the invasion of Syria,” expanding the reach of Islam outside the Arabian peninsula.

During the campaign of 634, the entire region between Gaza and Caesarea was devastated; four thousand peasants Christians, Jews, and Samaritans who were simply defending their land were massacred. During the campaigns in Mesopotamia between 635 and 642, monasteries were sacked, the monks were killed, and Monophysite Arabs executed or forced to convert. In Elam the population was put to the sword, at Susa all the dignitaries suffered the same fate.¹⁵

Islamic expansion under Muhammad (622-32), the Patriarchal Caliphate (632-61), and the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750). Dark brown, light brown, then gold.

About 70 years later, the Umayyad Caliphate, “the second of the four major Islamic caliphates established after the death of Muhammad,” ¹⁶ provided another example of such early barbaric behavior. Another Muhammad, bin Qasim, was a commander tasked with conquering the Sindh and Multan regions of what is now Pakistan. According to Warraq’s recounting of this bit of early jihadist history, the commander had instructions from Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, governor of Iraq, to “bring destruction on the unbelievers.” He was “to invite and induce the infidels to accept the true creed, and belief in the unity of God.”

This was not accomplished by door-to-door missionaries offering copies of the Qur’an. Al-Hajjaj prescribed harsh treatment and injury to anyone who “does not submit to Islam.” But after three days of slaughter at the port of Debal, it seems that commander bin Qasim got soft and allowed many of the inhabitants to stick with their religion.

The governor shot off a displeased letter to the commander via Indus Express, citing one of the same Qur’anic passages I did above, the one about striking off the heads of unbelievers. That was, he admonished, “a great command” that “must be respected and followed. You should not be so fond of showing mercy, as to nullify the virtue of the act.” ¹⁷ Alas, governor Al-Hajjaj hadn’t gotten the memo from Reza Aslan et al. that Islam doesn’t promote violence.

Iraq was at the center of the Umayyad Caliphate. It’s the same neighborhood as another Caliphate that exists in the Qur’an-crazed imaginations of our latest outbreak of Islamic fanaticism, the Islamic State or ISIS. Christopher Hitchens, who did not live long enough to witness the current horrors of ISIS, saw its genesis as “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” in 2011 calling it “the fantastically sadistic and homicidal so-called ‘insurgency’ put together by the Jordanian jailbird and psychopath Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.” ¹⁸

In his recently published dialogue with Maajid Nawaz, Sam Harris recalled how the Islamic State had “been burning prisoners alive in cages and decapitating people by the dozen and gleefully posting videos attesting to the enormity of their sadism online.” These atrocities, he observed, “represent what they unabashedly stand for.” ¹⁹ Yet, when “one asks what the motivations of Islamists and jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion.” ²⁰

Nawaz acknowledges many of the difficulties Harris raises throughout their discussion, and laments “regressive leftists” (his words) who “have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogeneous and inherently opposed to human rights values.” ²¹ Regarding the Islamic State, he notes that more “violence does not necessarily equate with greater religious conviction. Each group is deeply convinced of its approach to achieving Islamism in society, and both face much danger in pursuit of that goal.” Not only do “they differ in methodology,” but they also very much despise each other.” Islamic State, for example, “would kill members of the Muslim Brotherhood” in Egypt.²²

His efforts to salvage something separate and worthwhile from “Islamism” are commendable, but knowing that various Islam-inspired groups hate each other as well as everybody else doesn’t make me feel much better about Islam itself. My “Islamophobia,” a term I accept for myself despite its pejorative intentions, is a very reasonable aversion to Islam. It is not a phobic (i.e., irrational) fear at all, but an entirely sensible response to something very dangerous.²³ Frankly, I wouldn’t want either the Islamic State or the Muslim Brotherhood anywhere nearby.

Nawaz also attempts to draw a distinction between Islam and what the Islamic State is doing, as he and millions of other decent Muslims must. “Islam is just a religion,” he says, contrary to what we have seen above from Ibn Warraq about totalitarianism. “Islamism is the ideology that seeks to impose any version of Islam over society. Islamism is, therefore, theocratic extremism. Jihadism is the use of force to spread Islamism. Jihadist terrorism is the use of force that targets civilians to spread Islamism.”

“It is this extremism,” he says, “that must be named as Islamism and opposed,” adding “that one cannot argue that the Islamic State represents all of Islam.” Then, with refreshing candor, Nawaz goes on to admit the obvious:

one cannot argue that it has nothing to do with Islam. But it should be obvious that “a desire to impose Islam” cannot reasonably be said to have “nothing to do with Islam.” Clearly, it has something to do with it.²⁴

Yes, it certainly does. And it has everything to do with those bloody bodies of innocents lying on the ground in Paris and San Bernardino.

The Empty Quarter

Camel market - Saudi [Flickr page]

Perhaps the best example of a devoutly Islamic society today is the place where Islam got its start, the portion of the Arabian peninsula now governed by the Al-Saud. In the assessment of John Bradley, a rare Western journalist who had some real experience there, they are “perhaps the most corrupt family the world has ever known.” Saudi Arabia, he says, is

teeming with extremists, where children are taught that “the Jews” are the eternal enemy, and where Westerners are periodically blown up in their residential compounds or gunned down in the street by attackers filled with hatred for them and seeking martyrdom. It is a place that treats Third World immigrants like slaves, where Saudi men never get to see a woman who is not a direct (and usually very close) relative, and where Saudi women themselves cannot leave the house without a male chaperone, let alone drive, and live for the most part in absolute purdah [separation from men].

Fluency in Arabic, an eager cultural curiosity, and a willingness to risk living outside some fortified expat compound allowed Bradley to spend time in another Saudi Arabia. This was one

where Westerners with an open mind and sense of adventure can and often do encounter the finest traditions of Islamic hospitality, generosity, and kindness. In this Saudi Arabia, they may spend an evening sitting with liberal-minded, and even secular, Saudi friends, drinking coffee in Starbucks while talking about the latest Western movies. Princes and princes­ses, selfless and in­corruptible, can talk pas­sionately of the need to in­troduce sweeping reforms that would limit their own power. Teenagers surf the web in Internet cafes while watching the World Cup or Superbowl on widescreen TVs, or play soccer in the street. Women, shed of their long black cloaks in the home, can quickly prove themselves to be as independent and single-minded as any in the West.²⁵

Guess which version of the country is more faithful to Islam? Despite that business about “Islamic hospitality,” which I suspect is really no different than Arabic hospitality, it is the first one–the repressive, hate-filled, all-controlling Saudi Arabia–that has enacted a bleak dystopia of pure Islam. The “universities, charities, schools, orphanages, and print media are all . . . now in the control of the Wahhabi clerics,” spewing and sowing the seeds of extremist rhetoric, indoctrinating the next generation with the joys of jihad and martyrdom.²⁶

University College London in Saudi Arabia. No burka on the glossy brochure. [Flickr page]

For this we can thank the British and their tragic decision in the 1930s to back a certain Abdulaziz Ibn Saud,²⁷ whom they “viewed as the leader most likely to pacify rival tribes in the Arabian Peninsula and [who] had already proved himself very willing to cooperate closely with Britain in order to achieve his goal of carving out a state for his family to rule over.” ²⁸

Ibn Saud did not arrive on his own. He was accompanied, like a dog with a bad case of worms, by clerics who followed the depressingly fundamentalist Islam of one Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who had signed a pact with Ibn Saud’s ancestor back in 1744. “Their aim was to bring about, through force if necessary, the reign of the word of God.” Sound familiar? “Abdul Wahhab had begun his preaching some years earlier. Wahhabism, his legacy, advocated a literalist and legalistic stance in matters of faith and religious practice.” ²⁹

Now, more than two hundred years later, the Saudis remain “loyal to the cynical pact that earned Wahhabi clerical endorsement of the ruling dynasty in return for heavy subsidy of Wahhabi clericalism,” as Hitchens observes.³⁰ Together they have produced a miserable cultural desert where the only form of public entertainment, apart from soccer matches, are the beheadings that take place in “chop-chop square.” ³¹

Funded by the second-largest oil reserves on the planet, Allahu Akbar, they are “putting billions of dollars at the disposal of madrassas and mujahidin alike” to infect the rest of the world with their toxic meme of Islamic madness.³² And once again, the darkness has made its way north from the Arabian Peninsula to Iraq:

For their guiding principles, the leaders of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, are open and clear about their almost exclusive commitment to the Wahhabi movement of Sunni Islam. The group circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks from Saudi Arabia in the schools it controls. Videos from the group’s territory have shown Wahhabi texts plastered on the sides of an official missionary van.

There’s one difference, which is of critical importance to Saudi Arabia itself: “Wahhabi scholars preach obedience to earthly rulers,” probably because they themselves are captive to the House of Saud. ISIS wants to do the ruling and taxation (i.e., extortion) itself in Iraq and Syria, not just the kind of religious propagandizing and religious policing that the Wahhabis handle in Saudi Arabia. Despite that and the Islamic State’s absolutist “with us or against us” attitude, which made even the likes of Al Qaeda uncomfortable, “a certain mutedness” lingered among the Wahhabis about ISIS. Finally, King Abdullah, a sort-of-secular ruler put in an uncomfortable position by all this Islamic caliphate business, “publicly urged them to speak out more clearly.” ³³

Calling the project of ISIS “nothing more than reviving the Wahhabism of the founding generation” and noting how the Islamic State’s leadership “absorbed the Wahhabi doctrine and mastered all its details,” Saudi researcher Fouad al-Ibrahim explains in one tidy sentence the Wahhabi clerics’ reluctance to condemn ISIS: It “adopts a global project that Wahhabism tried to achieve from the mid-eighteenth century until the end of the 1930s.” But that is a serious threat to the House of Saud, “which seeks to undermine any internationalist project that might reach within its borders.” ³⁴ The nation is, after all, the product of Al-Saud’s bloody victory over and repression of “various tribes, sheikhdoms, emirates, and kingdoms” across the Arabian Peninsula.³⁵

Hubbert’s oil production model (upper bound) vs. actual oil production for the U.S. lower 48 states, with a recent and unsustainable fracking uptick.

The Saudi dog is feeling pretty sick nowadays from that load of Wahhabi worms it carries. But none of its symptoms, or the manifest moral failings of the Al-Saud family itself, can be publicly acknowledged by Saudi Arabia’s oil-thirsty clients. The Obama administration surely recognizes how tenuous our own oil supplies are, 45 years after the peak of conventional crude production in the U.S.³⁶ And don’t count on hydraulic fracturing to keep your gas tank full for long: The depletion rate of those fracked wells in the Bakken is averaging 85% three years after drilling.³⁷ If that upward spike at the end of the graph above looks anomalous to you, you’re on to something. It’s not gonna last.

Until the supergiant oil fields that lie beneath the sands of Saudi Arabia finally run dry, the United States will remain in what Bradley calls a “fundamentally absurd and self-contradictory ‘special relationship’ with the Kingdom “that has stood since February 1945, when Ibn Saud met President Roosevelt on the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal.” ³⁸ We will continue to look the other way as the cowled barbarians of Riyadh lash and behead their bloggers and poets and make a mockery of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, and as their Wahhabi parasites continue promoting toxic Islamism around the world.

We may not have that long to wait before the whole pathetic charade comes to an end. Ghawar, the biggest of the supergiants, which alone supplies 60% of the Kingdom’s output, has been producing for nearly 70 years. The notoriously secretive Saudi Aramco reported that it had gotten about halfway through the field’s proven reserves in 2008, and it may well have peaked a few years before then.³⁹

Withdrawal symptoms will be severe, of course, for a world grown addicted to this black tar heroin from the earth’s depths. Nor can we expect Saudi Arabia to face its own austerity with much good grace. It will finally exhaust its last ancient reserves of groundwater⁴⁰ along with the fossil energy it needs to run desalination plants, along with the sole economically viable export it can trade for food from the infidel world its clerics hate and condemn.

The place is an overpopulated hellhole, hotter than ever due to climate change ⁴¹ and packed full of unemployed and entitled youth who have no work ethic, useful knowledge, or positive role models to fall back on once the handouts stop. A large part of what their educations have been about is the hatred of others, repression, and jihad. There a “complete lack of any kind of youth culture.” Except for a bit of four-wheeling out in the sand dunes,

young Saudis who do not have the means or desire to travel abroad remain, by and large, locked away with their frustration in their bedrooms, watching satellite TV, surfing the web, and con­templating an in­creas­ingly dif­ficult life in a kingdom full of un­employ­ment, poverty, re­pres­sion, and nepotism. That, of course, is great news for radical Islamists, ever-eager to recruit to their ranks young men who have few critical faculties and a crudely simplistic world outlook. With so many youngsters wandering aimlessly into adulthood with increasingly few prospects of a decent job, ruled by a corrupt elite closely aligned to an America the young are told to hate and hold responsible for Israel’s ruthless suppression of the Palestinians, the call of the Islamists is not falling on deaf ears.

Their “essentially shallow understanding of Islam” has been taught to them “by hard-line Wahhabi teachers and clerics,” and it “sits in their minds like a highly combustible tinder box, just waiting for a loose spark to set it alight.” ⁴²

Watch out, world. Things are just getting started.

A Civilized Defense of Civilization

Women in The Hague, Netherlands: one free, and the others?

Is it any wonder, gentle reader, why I fear and loathe this ancient and insidious Arabian export? Yes, indeed, I am an Islamophobe. I embrace the slur that was intended to shame people into not questioning this totalitarian belief system, just as some gays have decided to embrace the term “queer.”

Islam is different, of course, than a race or an innate sexual orientation. It is a belief system, one that aspires to be more than just a religion. A religion it is, though, and as such, our Constitution and sense of human de­cency (not shared by Is­lamists or a certain nar­cis­sis­tic pres­iden­tial candidate) demand that we tolerate its free exercise. At least to the extent that it doesn’t threaten us with harm, which is an important caveat.

But I damn well don’t welcome its spread into Western society, nor do I intend to be kept silent about it. Even so, more out of consideration for your attention than the hair-trigger sensitivities of Islamists and their doe-eyed apologists, this essay has glided pretty gently over the atrocities and pain that Islam inflicts, and has from the very beginning, on its followers and resisters alike. Some of its crimes against women so disgust me that I have declined to mention them at all.

Nor have I said much about the combination of mental anguish and physical danger it poses for those who dare to shake off its cold embrace, probably unequaled in any other religion. There too, many gripping stories could be told here, like the one from “Jamila” who wrote recently about the question of when the apostasy she’s been hiding will come out and tear her apart from her family. That troubling question–when?–lurks

in the double life I live with the man who shares my bed after my father drops me home, it’s there telling me that I can’t keep him a secret forever. It’s there in the folds of the headscarf I pull out of my drawer on visit days, whispering to me that if I don’t tell them, the lies, like the material I drape over my head, will suffocate me. It’s there in slight hesitation in my voice when I recite the duaas to younger siblings and I wonder if they realise that this is not the recitation of a person who prays regularly. It’s there, it’s there, it’ll destroy us again one day, and I don’t know how to stop it.⁴³

You can see more of this personal evidence about the iron grip that Islam keeps on its subjects via the /r/exMuslim subreddit and the #ExMuslimBecause Twitter hashtag, and by following the work of courageous and vocal ex-Muslims like Maryam Namazie, Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Riz Rashid, Ali A. Rizvi, and Aliyah Saleem. And be sure to read the sobering article by Suraiya Simi Rahman, MD–an ex-Muslim who has lived in Bangladesh, the UAE and Pakistan–in which she says one “really can’t tell until the moment before they pull the trigger, who is moderate and who is jihadi.”

These people are all standing up to the many bullies and defenders of Islam, not just mullahs and creepy ISIS shills, but their own families and even–dismayingly–supposed feminists and leftists whose good intentions have somehow been co-opted to serve the Islamist meme. I have tremendous respect for the courage and strength of character that ex-Muslims have shown. To help support them, I’ve made donations to each of two important organizations that assist people like them on their difficult journeys to freedom: the Ex-Muslims of North America and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.

The stories of apostates from this backwards, controlling religion need to be told–more and more, and with polite but firm criticism of the religion itself. Ibn Warraq was another one who courageously did so, regardless of the risks. “Without criticism,” he writes, “Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified in its totalitarian, intolerant, paranoid past. It will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality, and truth.” ⁴⁴

Standing up to all that is a project of civilization well worth our effort, and with care to avoid adopting any of its loathsome aspects ourselves.

———

The first Twin towers photo is from Mark Yokoyama and the second from Wally Gobetz, both CC-NC-ND licensed. The UCL London photo is CC-NC licensed by UCL Institute of Education.

The photo of firefighters at the World Trade Center is CC licensed (re-licensed?) by Flickr user World Trade Centers with the note: “Andrea Booher–FEMA Photo News.Mandatory byline–No payment.” The caption, a quote from Sura 66, is my own.

The map of Islamic expansion from 622-750 A.D. is adapted from a public-domain SVG file accessible at Wikimedia Commons The crude oil production graph is adapted (with my annotation) from “Hubbert Upper-Bound Peak 1956,” CC-SA licensed by “Plazak,” Wikimedia Commons.

The photo at the sacred mosque is CC-SA licensed by Citizen59. The Saudi camel market photo is CC licensed by Michael Glasgow. The photo of women in The Hague is slightly post-processed from a CC-licensed image by Flickr user FaceMePLS. The “Freedom go to hell” protester photo is a cropped version of a CC-licensed image by Vayou Desoeuvre.

Notes

---

1. The Koran (Ballantine Books, 1993), based on an English translation by J.M. Rodwell. All of the following quotes are from there, as I encountered them during my reading. An ex-Muslim correspondent once advised me that the preferred spelling of the name is Qur’an, and so that’s the one I use here. ↩

2. Raif Badawi, 1000 Lashes (Greystone Books, 2015). For guidance on judicial amputation and crucifixion, see Sura 5 (“The Table”). The horrors of ISIS are, of course, merely the result of careful and uncompromising attention to the text. ↩

3. William Muir, quoted in Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim (Prometheus Books, 2010), p. 87. Here I depart from my usual practice of only quoting from books that I’ve actually read. Hopefully you will excuse me for declining to slog through a four-volume biography of Muhammed written 150 years ago. I have read Warraq’s book, however, and highly recommend it. ↩

4. “The basis of the Islamic attitude toward unbelievers is the law of war; they must be either converted or subjugated or killed (excepting women, children, and slaves); the third alternative, in general, occurs only if the first two are refused. As an exception, the Arab pagans are given the choice only between conversion to Islam or death. Apart from this, prisoners of war are either made slaves or killed or left alive as free dhimmis or exchanged for Muslim prisoners of war” (Warraq at p. 181, quoting Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law). ↩

5. E.g., “the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5). ↩

6. “But what about the Bible!” is the common interjection at this point by Islam apologists. Well, yes, what about it? I’ve amply criticized that collection of backwards and violent writings, in two books and plenty of essays. See, e.g., Gutting Your Kid for God, Moral Midgetry, Jehu’s Jihad, and Fighting Words. ↩

7. Both quoted in Warraq, p. 10. Again, I must confess to not having read the original works cited here. But it’s hard to imagine any context in which Gibbon and Hume might have written that would have made these scathing critiques much less forceful. Indeed, Warraq says Gibbon “painted Islam in as favorable a light as possible to better contrast it with Christianity” (p. 21). ↩

8. Quoted in Warraq at p. 88. ↩

9. “Islam is a verbal noun originating from the triliteral root s-l-m which forms a large class of words mostly relating to concepts of wholeness, safeness and peace. In a religious context it means ‘voluntary submission to God.’ Islām is the verbal noun of Form IV of the root, and means ‘submission’ or ‘surrender.’ Muslim, the word for an adherent of Islam, is the active participle of the same verb form, and means ‘one who submits’ or ‘one who surrenders.’ Believers demonstrate submission to God by serving God, following his commands, and rejecting polytheism” (Wikipedia). That part about “following his commands” is problematic, of course, when they include the Qur’anic violence described above. ↩

10. Warraq at p. 163. ↩

11. Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue (Harvard University Press, 2015), loc. 626. ↩

12. Warraq at p. 163. I have taken the liberty of replacing Warraq’s quotation remarks with italics in quotations that include Arabic words. ↩

13. Warraq at p. 164. ↩

14. Warraq at pp. 172-73, 83-84 ↩

15. Warraq at p. 215-16, 219-20. ↩

16. Umayyad Caliphate, Wikipedia. ↩

17. Warraq at p. 220, writing about Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, governor of Iraq and his commander Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 A.D. The passage is Sura 47.4, which reads as follows in Warraq’s quotation of Hajjaj’s letter: “O True believers, when you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads.” ↩

18. Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy (2011), loc. 124. ↩

19. Harris and Nawaz at loc. 706. ↩

20. Harris and Nawaz at loc. 457. ↩

21. Harris and Nawaz at loc. 481. ↩

22. Harris and Nawaz at loc. 425. ↩

23. See also this truly excellent video counter-argument to the silly and pernicious “Islamophobia” meme. ↩

24. Harris and Nawaz at loc. 1196. ↩

25. John R. Bradley, Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis (St. Martin’s Press, 2015). ↩

26. Bradley at loc. 1223, 1237. ↩

27. His full name, in case you were curious, is Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman ibn Faisal ibn Turki ibn Abdullah ibn Muhammad Al Saud (Wikipedia). ↩

28. Bradley at loc. 235. ↩

29. Bradley at loc. 243. ↩

30. Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy (2011), loc. 172. ↩

31. Bradley at loc. 2537 ↩

32. Hitchens at loc. 172. ↩

33. David K. Kirkpatrick, “ISIS’ Harsh Brand of Islam Is Rooted in Austere Saudi Creed.” New York Times, September 24, 2014, nyti.ms/​Y4erG6. ↩

34. Fouad al-Ibrahim, “Why ISIS is a threat to Saudi Arabia: Wahhabism’s deferred promise.” Al-Akhbar, August 22, 2014. english.al-akhbar.com/​node/21234. ↩

35. Unification of Saudi Arabia, Wikipedia. ↩

36. Hubbert Peak Theory, Wikipedia. ↩

37. J. David Hughes, Drilling Deeper: A Reality Check on U.S. Government Forecasts for a Lasting Tight Oil & Shale Gas Boom (Post Carbon Institute, 2014). shalebubble.org/​drilling-deeper. ↩

38. Bradley at loc. 1374. ↩

39. Ghawar, Wikipedia. ↩

40. Bradley at loc. 1863. ↩

41. Nathan Halverson, “What California can learn from Saudi Arabia’s water mystery.” Reveal, April 22, 2015. Center for Investigative Reporting (link). ↩

42. John Schwartz, “Deadly Heat Is Forecast in Persian Gulf by 2100.” New York Times, October 26, 2015, nyti.ms/​1LRVcSO (“By the end of this century, areas of the Persian Gulf could be hit by waves of heat and humidity so severe that simply being outside for several hours could threaten human life”). ↩

43. “I craved too much the warm welcome home,” atheistinaheadscarf.wordpress.com. ↩

44. Warraq at p. 14. ↩

 

Getting Out

“Relax,” said the night man, “We are programmed to receive. You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave!”

—The Eagles, Hotel California

The world beyond the gate. Can you make that first step and keep going? [Flickr page]

I spent the first forty-odd years of my life in a fundamentalist Christian sect that considers itself “God’s Kingdom,” the exclusive repository of grace on this earth after 2,000 years of Christianity. Leaving it was one of the best and hardest things I’ve ever done.

Conservative Laestadianism attracts few converts and retains fewer still of those, with the notable exception of some vibrant missionary activity in Africa. In Finland–where most of its 100,000 or so adherents reside–and in North America, almost all new members arrive at the maternity ward. There are plenty of them, since birth control is frowned upon.

The church safeguards the souls of its new arrivals by instilling into their small brains its doctrines and all the nuances of a uniquely closed and controlling subculture. Its own survival is at stake. These are the innocent little lumps of fresh clay that this religion, like so many others, molds and shapes into the soft living stones of its shaky spiritual house.¹

A substantial portion of them last through early adulthood, until young marriages can start producing their own fresh batches of new members. The cycle continues anew, as it must. These blocks of flesh and blood wear out, sometimes even slip away, and must be replaced if the structure is to stand.

———

Until recently, it was very rare for anyone beyond their twenties to walk away from this “living faith.” The few cases I’d heard about were older singles who despaired of having their nets come up empty in a stagnant little pond of church-approved prospects, and a few spouses who had been faced with or created problems in their marriages. Then a friend of mine left the church, staying happily married and with kids, for reasons that focused on the church itself. That sort of thing just did not happen once you reached a certain age.

Then it happened to me, too, and my wife. And now it has been happening to quite a number of people, both in Finland and North America. Even more than the open defections, there seems to be a lot of private grumbling, questions no longer so easily tamped down. Pressure slowly and silently builds inside the minds of troubled believers–sermon after sermon, baby after baby–and the familiar preaching of forgiveness for “sins and doubts” no longer seems to provide much relief.

But the believing brain can withstand a lot of pressure. Those who make it through all those years of indoctrination and cozy familiarity–of family, friends, and social setting–have strong containers in their heads to keep it all bottled up. Sundays pass, more children are born and taught sound doctrine, and for every person who manages to leave, there are probably a dozen who want to but do not.

Pine Droplets and Webbing [Flickr page]

A Finnish correspondent who did manage to leave describes a web of stuff that he had to cut through before he could finally set himself free. The first strand of it is social dependence.

“My whole life I have been ‘rooted into God’s Kingdom,’” he says. That made him “almost completely dependent on this religious community.” He was taught that most of his “friends should be ‘other believers,’ meaning other Laestadians,” and spent his childhood being brought to services, church camps, Sunday schools, Bible classes, and church youth activities. Molding and shaping the clay.

There was plenty of time for it. He was kept from the “‘worldly’ leisure activities that non-Laestadian kids attend.” No team sports at school, no dances, no TV or movies.

Next is moral dependence. There was little emphasis on any individual conscience. Rather, he was taught about a “community conscience: An individual may be erring but ‘God’s congregation’ cannot.” From childhood, he had been told

that ministers and Laestadian publications are God’s Word. When they say that God is Almighty, and that he doesn’t want us to use birth control, that he tortures the disobedient people infinitely, then I have no other option but to believe. I have also been warned that I can’t make decisions based on my own opinions and thoughts, because I should ask the congregation for advice.

He was also made spiritually dependent on Laestadianism. His “own will and conscience” was “crushed and replaced with a gospel”–a formulaic preaching of absolution central to Laestadian doctrine and practice–“that only this community can provide.” Laestadians preach “the gospel” often, regular believers in private conversation and ministers from the pulpit: Your sins are all forgiven in Jesus’ name and blood.² My correspondent was

taught by these minister-gods that I get my sins forgiven by the absolution gospel. If I don’t go to Laestadian services, I won’t hear this sermon and the gospel, and therefore I remain a prisoner in sin. And if I remain a prisoner in sin and die in such condition, I will be condemned to eternal perdition and torture.

Light at the End of the Tunnel [Flickr page]

“Wouldn’t a smart individual, living in modern Finland, be able to question these doctrines?” he asks. “Of course, but everything is not always as simple or easy as it may seem.” Indeed not. My own process of questioning and eventually rejecting that same inherited faith compelled me to do a year of full-time research and writing, spending “thousands of hours researching seemingly every aspect of Conservative Laestadian history, doctrine, and practice, plus Christianity in general, plus the Bible and the very nature of God,” as I put it in the resulting 700-page book, An Examination of the Pearl. It was “a labor driven by love, but also by the mental anguish of being unable to avoid questioning a doctrinal system that demands firm confession of belief, on pain of eternal damnation.”

Leaving the faith I had inherited and cherished for 40 years was not an easy thing for me to do. Nor was it for my Finnish correspondent. He “had been made dependent on the community in every possible way.” And when he “started to question a small portion of this doctrine,” he “was immediately faced with the alarm mechanisms in the community.” Structural damage, one of the building blocks is slipping out of place!

He got rebuked and heard about people’s worries that he was on the wrong path. “The community that now pressured me threatened to take away all the good that the community was giving me, if I continued to question these matters” (my emphasis). Because of this threat, he says, “most Laestadians don’t let these questions arise even in their own minds: They stifle these thought processes immediately, and ask for their sins and doubts forgiven like they have been taught to do at services.”

Now he happily reports that he’s been able to build a social life outside the church. The old “Laestadian-based network was getting thinner,” anyhow, because of his questioning things. And he’s noticed that he just doesn’t “need the spiritual nourishment in this community” anymore: “I was able to break free from this dependence and obey my own conscience.”

The church social network doesn’t readily extend far outside its narrow confines, and that’s certainly true among Conservative Laestadians in North America, too. One man who left the LLC (Laestadian Lutheran Church) has managed to stay somewhat attached, though only after dealing with a huge outcry from church friends and family. It was, he says, “one of the most painful experiences I ever went through.” But the “constant badgering only reinforced the thought that I made the right decision.”

After a few months of heated arguments and accusations about not loving family, of hearing about people’s prayers “for me to have restless days and sleepless nights so I would see the condition of my heart,” it finally started to get better. “People must have finally realized that I no longer wanted to remain inside the LLC box.”

The same thing happened to a correspondent from another branch of Laestadianism, the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. She got “calls, texts, voicemails, old-fashioned letters, and even emails.” (The Internet is mostly a no-no in the OALC.) “A majority of what I received was genuine concern–for my soul, my life, my eternity.” There was some coercion and manipulation there, too, she says, but believes that was done out of concern. “Though it hurt me then, I understood where they were coming from, and still feel the same today. They know only what they know. I think Maya Angelou said, ‘We did then what we knew then, we do now what we know now,’ or something along those lines. That is all that they know, and I pity them for it.” ³

There are a lot of religious groups filled with people who “do only what they know” and make life difficult for their friends and family who have learned a bit more. I’d like to give some perspective and encouragement to people facing a difficult path out of their inherited religions–Laestadian and otherwise–by discussing two extreme examples.

The Exclusive Brethren

The first of these is a Protestant Christian sect that holds what Wikipedia calls “an uncompromising ‘separatist’ doctrine.” David Tchappat’s fascinating book Breakout (official excerpt available here) describes the difficult departure he made from their midst. This fascinating half-hour audio interview with the author is highly recommended, especially for troubled Laestadians; you will hear a lot of things that sound weirdly familiar.

Social dependence was certainly a factor for Tchappat. Being “born into the Exclusive Brethren,” he says, “ensured that your small following of fellow churchgoers was your society whether you liked it or not. Having a social circle outside of this was not an option.” ⁴

Journalist Michael Bachelard estimates the number of worldwide members at 43,000, Australia being home to about a third of them.⁵ Tchappat provides the same estimate, adding, “Almost all growth comes from births, as conversions into the faith are practically unheard of.” ⁶ It is indeed a “small following,” as Tchappat puts it, at least when compared to most Christian denominations. But that’s a matter of perspective; the closed church society in which I grew up has about half as many members in my country as Tchappat had in his.

The Australian TV program A Current Affair recently aired a scathing documentary, twelve minutes of which you can watch online, about what it bluntly calls a “secret cult.” Bachelard describes the Brethren as having erected “a wall between themselves and the outside world.” Since 1960, he says, there has been a rule against “eating, drinking, or socializing with any outsider.” What that means, he says, is “there are no friendships, no social intercourse whatsoever with outsiders, and sect members are encouraged to behave with an air of being impervious to the outside world and aloof from it.” ⁷

A fascinating book

Tchappat refers to his life in the group as a “fishbowl existence.” He fantasized numerous times about leaving it before finally doing so. But that was a daunting prospect: “I knew no one in the outside world and had no idea how to look after myself. Since birth, every decision had been made for me. My life was regulated by rules and laws set in place by the Man of God, which were in turn implemented and policed by the local priests.” ⁸

Some of the prohibitions he lists are the same as those from my own upbringing: marrying outsiders, physical contact before marriage, contraception, TV, hair coloring, make-up, gambling, and attending “anything that could be deemed as fun or entertainment.” As I did in my childhood Laestadianism, it seems Tchappat felt an urge to confess any infractions of all those rules: “After church when the rest of my family had gone to bed, and my dad was tidying the kitchen, I approached him and told him I had to speak with him. He shut the kitchen door and I immediately broke down, pulling out my list of sins and confessing them to him.” ⁹ And this part sounds uncomfortably familiar, too: “We were told that we were the chosen people and should feel privileged to be born into this group.” ¹⁰

“It was only the courageous and inquisitive minority that ever dared to leave the Assembly of God,” says Tchappat. That is also true in the Kingdom of God, my old group’s informal self-designation, though the number of defectors is growing surprisingly fast. In my own case, the fear was more of eternal rather than earthly consequences. After many dark and bloody centuries under the Church, secular governments are finally forcing Christianity to leave its exit doors unlocked. But most of them still have the awful eternal threat written in fiery letters overhead. Abandon all hope, they read, in a twist from the words inscribed on Dante’s gates of Hell, you who leave from here.¹¹

According to Tchappat’s account, the Brethren are no exception. More than a year after leaving, he “would wake up in the dead of night dripping with sweat and would dream of the burning pits of hell.” Going back, he thought, “was the only way to avoid eternal punishment.” ¹² Though “the Brethren do not officially believe that they are the only Godly people,” in modern times, anyhow, Bachelard says they do “believe that those who leave the sect will not be saved.” ¹³

While still in the group, Tchappat had worried about being excommunicated for having sex with his girlfriend. Those in that position fared no better in the eternity department. They were, he says, “described as being worse than people of the world because they had known the light and turned their back on it. It was considered an eternal damnation to die out of fellowship and only the grace of God and forgiveness of the Brethren would redeem such people from the pits of hell.” ¹⁴ Here is his harrowing description of “massive guilt attacks” he suffered several years after walking away from the group:

I would lie in bed on my days off staring at the ceiling and crying to myself. I was falling apart. I had my [friends] but I could not confide in them about my inner personal turmoil. All my teachings from childhood were coming back to me. I was petrified that I was going to the gates of hell if I did not fall down and repent. I began to read my Bible constantly and could not sleep for fear of dying and entering eternal damnation. I was seriously entertaining the thought of returning to the Brethren. I did not know how I was going to cope with such a life change but I did not care. It was a way of escaping my problems.¹⁵

That is some heavy shit. Eternity has a way of messing with people’s heads. But he also describes dire consequences right here on earth, in this brief life, for those who “enter the world” from the Brethren:

If caught planning an escape, the local priests would place them under house arrest along with their families and have them put under assembly discipline, revoking any rights to attend church or socialise with those in the inner circle of the Brethren. Those over sixteen years of age who made it to the outside world without detection, would be ex-communicated and starved of all monetary assistance and family support, forcing them to return or find alternative methods of survival.¹⁶

Bachelard’s book is full of tragic stories about family breakups occurring because one spouse was excommunicated from or voluntarily left the group, about parents devoid of contact with their children. Tchappat’s own story is much the same–a final letter he sent was “the last form of contact I would ever have again with my family.” His gripping and sad narrative has an upbeat ending of sorts, though: “There has never been a time in my life where I have experienced such inner peace, happiness and satisfaction as the present day.” ¹⁷

Islam

One way. You’d better believe it. [Flickr page]

Leaving the fold is also serious business for the nearly one fourth of the world’s population who are professing Muslims. In addition to social coercion and the prospect of their own version of Hell, there is often a serious threat of physical harm.

Just look at this comment thread on a web forum calling itself “the online Muslim community” to see how real that danger is. Some guy with over 2,000 comments posted at that site states that death is preferable over continued life to people who claim to be of Islam, leave it, and then call others away from it. Presumably, the actual preferences of the apostates themselves are of little consequence. “It’s a mercy,” he says, “for if they continued, their place in hell would be lower, and lower, and lower. We judge law by the belief of an afterlife 100% without a shadow of a doubt. Thus, death is not a ‘bad’ thing if it is done to prevent chaos.”

Another commentator (4,000 posts) clarifies, “The death penalty for apostates is for those apostates that leave Islam then work against Islam in some way.” It’s the same as treason, after all, and the “penalty for traitors throughout history has been death.” Still another commentator (not quite 500 posts) adds, “The apostate should not be put to death until he has been asked to repent three times,” generously allowing him three days to think things over first.

What a disgusting little attempt to defend medieval intolerance and barbarity. And there it is, polished with a veneer of twisted logic, showing up on an Internet discussion forum built by the technology of a more enlightened age. Seeing that sort of thing helps us outsiders appreciate why an American ex-Muslim highly regarded on reddit was moved to post a “Public Service Announcement” on Reddit warning about coming out. If you are considering telling “your friends and family that you are not a Muslim anymore,” he says, you should only do it if:

• You are 18+ years of age
• You are old enough to live on your own
• You are financially independent from your family
• You know where to go if you get kicked out
• You do not live in a religiously conservative country like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.

If even one of these conditions is not met, he adds with sober emphasis,

do not tell anyone you are not a muslim anymore. Seriously. I understand how hard it is to live a lie and to put up with bullshit, but in the end, you are going to have a bad time. This can’t be stressed enough. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read self-posts by young, financially dependent ex-Muslims in Muslim countries that want to do this or have done this and felt deeply worried for them. It’s not a rational decision to make, and it’s not gonna do anyone any good if you end up hurt or even killed over it. Don’t put yourself in danger like that. Believe me, it’s not worth it at all. Please be considerate of your safety and well-being, and don’t be a hero unless you’re fully capable of facing the consequences.¹⁸

Those consequences are very real for one high school student in Saudi Arabia. I hope he’s been careful about keeping his identity and IP address well concealed when posting to public discussion forums online. Out of an abundance of caution, I will just paraphrase his comment without a link. He hates living in the closet, he says, but coming out to his parents means that he’ll be shipped off to Mecca to study Islam for the rest of his life or get beheaded. And his parents will grieve about his apostasy. Only if he can become financially independent and move to a country that respects religious freedom will he even consider it.

Reading this stuff does have a way of putting things into perspective. Your family has sent you emails and texts expressing sadness for your soul and offering some self-righteous prayers? You’ve lost most of your oldest and dearest friends? You miss having a place to go see familiar faces every week? Yes, that sucks. But at least you don’t need to worry about being sent to a religious re-education camp or having your head chopped off. Count your blessings.

Heina Dadabhoy

Islamic states are not good places to be when you don’t enthusiastically share the state religion. (Or when you are in the female half of the population, or when you have been accused of a crime, or when you would just like to have a little enjoyment in life, but that’s another blog posting.) These anonymous comments from fearful closeted nonbelievers often express a longing, sometimes even hope, to live in secular countries.

As an American citizen, Heina Dadabhoy had that good fortune, at least, when she told her family she was leaving Islam. They thought she was “turning [her] back on them,” she said in an interview with the New York Times, her parents accusing “her of thinking that she was better than her grandparents and other ancestors.” They “reacted the way they knew how, which was to freak out.” Public defections from the faith are still very rare, and her parents “had never heard of anybody leaving Islam. We were raised with the idea you can’t leave, that nobody can leave. Leaving Islam was something somebody incredibly deranged would do.” ¹⁹

At a conference a few years ago, I asked Dadabhoy if the fear of Hell is also a factor for those considering leaving Islam. It definitely is, she said. Indeed, you can see the eternal fate of the ex-Muslim spelled out in the Quran itself:

Whoso desireth any other religion than Islam, that religion shall never be accepted from him, and in the next world he shall be among the lost. How shall God guide a people who, after they had believed and bore witness that the Apostle was true, and after that clear proofs of his mission had reached them, disbelieved? ... Their recompense, that the curse of God, and of angels, and of all men, is on them! Under it shall they abide forever; their torment shall not be assuaged! ²⁰

Moving On

There are countless other examples of the difficulties people experience trying to get out of the religions that were foisted on them at birth. The stories I’ve read in books and on Internet discussion forums are so numerous and compelling that this essay would turn into a book of my own if I were to venture too deeply into any of them.

Indeed, even thinking about that makes me recall a whole genre of books about Leaving the Fold. That, for example, is the exact title of both Edward Babinski’s fine collection of stories about people deconverting and Dr. Marlene Winell’s thoughtful guide to doing so.

People are leaving these high-control religious organizations–slowly and at great cost, and often thinking they are the only ones going through such a difficult process. Many more stay behind, wishing they too were in the right circumstance to leave, biding their time until they can. Here is a brief listing of a few groups I’ve read about, with quotes from former members who have walked away and told their stories. I recommend every one of their gripping, illuminating books.

• Scientology: “All of a sudden, I felt as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. These were things I didn’t have to worry about ... a radical thought formed in my head. Because I am not a Scientologist. It felt good to think it, to say it, to scream it. I am not a Scientologist.... If something is wrong, I can say so, honestly and openly, without fear.” –Jefferson Hawkins, Counterfeit Dreams (2012).

• Non-Denominational Christianity: “When you’re five and contemplating Hell, concepts like ‘proportionality’ exist far out of reach, well beyond climbing range, unknowable. No young child can digest or discern whether such overt sadism is an appropriate punishment for the heinous act of simply being born as a descendent of Adam.” –Seth Andrews, Deconverted (2012).

• Fundamentalist Baptist Christianity: “I had developed some kind of gag reflex for my brain. I just couldn’t think clearly or objectively about my childhood or my surroundings. I felt like if I acknowledged things done to me in my childhood that were negative, I would be guilty of breaking a great commandment. I would be dishonoring my parents or somehow loving them less. Love entailed a lot of denial.” –Timothy Michael Short, Preacher Boy (2011).

• The People’s Temple (Jim Jones, thankfully defunct): “When our own thoughts are forbidden, when our questions are not allowed and our doubts are punished, when contacts and friendships outside of the organization are censored, we are being abused for an end that never justifies its means. When our heart aches knowing we have made friendships and secret attachments that will be forever forbidden if we leave, we are in danger. When we consider staying in a group because we cannot bear the loss, disappointment, and sorrow our leaving will cause for ourselves and those we have come to love, we are in a cult.” –Deborah Layton, Seductive Poison (2010).

• Evangelical Christianity: “Imagine what it would cost you to give up your faith tomorrow morning; if it is unbearable even to think of it, then you ought to consider how much the cost of leaving your faith is influencing your ability to judge your faith critically and objectively.” –Kenneth W. Daniels, Why I Believed (2010).

• The Churches of Christ: “I was deprived of showing spiritual compassion to others because I was taught that if they were not in the CoC they were not ‘real’ Christians, and the CoC didn’t seem to have a lot of concern about people who weren’t real Christians in their eyes. I was deprived of the fellowship of my classmates on their religious turf.” –Charles Simpson, Inside the Churches of Christ (2009).

• Mormonism: “I had been taught early on that the only reliable evidence about the Church–in fact the only evidence at all worth looking at–comes from the Church itself. This evidence can be undeniably confirmed, not through logical, deductive reasoning, but by the emotional feelings we were taught from early childhood to recognize as being from the Holy Ghost.” –Jack B. Worthy, The Mormon Cult (2008).

• The Jehovah’s witnesses: “[T]he only way out of this dilemma was to acknowledge my feelings and doubts about the organization that I had suppressed for so long, and what it meant that I was having them. But doing so was extremely frightening to me, because trying to face up to my doubts nine years ago only resulted in panic attacks and anguish, which ultimately drove me back into the organization. This time, though, I knew I would have to see it through, as my body would not cooperate with the charade any longer.” –Diane Wilson. Awakening of a Jehovah’s Witness (2002).

There is a lot to learn and think about for people who are considering the exhilarating but terrifying possibility of leaving their childhood faith. Are you one of those people? If so, let me offer you my respect and encouragement, whatever you ultimately decide. Even without taking another step, you have allowed yourself the delicious freedom of thinking for yourself, in the privacy of your own brain.

Take your time. The church is right to say that this is the most important matter of your life, even if its own web of dependencies–social, moral, spiritual–is what made things that way. Don’t beat up on yourself for acknowledging how strong that web is. Cut through each strand at your own pace, however slow that is, or not at all.

———

And in the process, if there is still a God in your heart that is the object of your private devotion, give him a little more credit than your hellfire preachers ever will. Would you ever torture anyone, for five minutes, even for some terrible crime? You’re better than that, aren’t you?

How about a child who wandered into your office where she didn’t belong and messed up your papers, and, after being scolded, angrily told you she didn’t love you anymore? Would you throw her little body into a pit of flames and watch the smoke of her torment swirl and rise as you listen to her scream? ²¹ For five minutes?

“What kind of a monster do you think I am?” you say. The thought upsets you, and it should. Think about how slanderous it is against anything remotely resembling a loving God. Or an omnipotent one: A God that could stop such horrors but stands aside, unmoved and doing nothing, is no better than whatever diabolical force you might imagine feeding the fire.

How about five hours? Five days? Let her scream and burn for five long days. Disgusting, isn’t it? How about forever? Unrelenting agony, pain without end, utterly pointless suffering with no hope of relief. And for what? For not knowing better, just like everybody outside the particular group you are thinking about leaving? There is simply no way that anyone–person or God–with the slightest shred of decency could do such a thing.

Whatever else you do, take that awful and impossible idea off of your shoulders and quietly put it down. It is not worthy of another moment’s belief.

Incandescent Forest [Flickr page]

Step up from your computer, put down your smartphone. Look at your innocent child, look outside. See the blue sky and the green trees and all the good things that you have joyously attributed to your God. Leaving a controlling religious group does not make all of that disappear. There is still wonder, there is beauty, there is joy. And there is a whole lot less guilt and fear.

———

Thanks to Heina Dadabhoy for her photo and the suggestion to “go with the more modern transliteration of ‘Quran’ rather than ‘Koran.’” Also thanks to my anonymous correspondents. Several opined that there have indeed been more departures of late from the SRK, which added to my own impressions about the recent state of affairs in the LLC. I am grateful to the one in Finland who provided an insightful analysis of the various dependencies established by religious groups, and to his able translator. The two in the U.S. have never heard of each other, and come from different groups that call each other heresies, yet they expressed so well the same difficult experience of leaving.

A note of continued appreciation, too, to my dear friend and mentor Robert M. Price, who helped me stay, and then, when I was ready, helped me leave.

I neither have nor claim any inside knowledge about any of the religious groups discussed here except my own former faith, Conservative Laestadianism, and, to some extent, its rival branches. Everything written in this essay about other groups is quoted directly from various published works or publicly available materials. Those who are seriously interested in particular groups should consult the footnotes, read the sources cited as well as the many others available, and form their own opinions accordingly. Those intrigued by Laestadianism may wish to consult the hefty volume I spent a year researching and writing, An Examination of the Pearl, and its 180 or so references.

Click on (most) individual images to enlarge, or check out their photo pages in my Flickr photostream. All except for the cover of David Tchappat’s book and Ms. Dadabhoy’s portrait are Copyright © 2014 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Notes

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1. “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5). ↩

2. Suominen, Edwin A. An Examination of the Pearl (2012), §4.6.2 (“Forgiveness of Sins” / “The Sole Means of Grace”). Available at Amazon.com and for free online reading at ExaminationofthePearl.org. ↩

3. OALC members are “spiritually dependent” on the proclamation of absolution, too. But the SRK/​LLC considers the preaching of forgiveness in the OALC to be just the empty words of “heretics,” without the Holy Spirit behind it. The person proclaiming the absolution needs to be the correct kind of Laestadian for things to work. That raises an interesting dilemma. One correspondent from the LLC says he’d had church friends come to him countless times with serious sins for absolution, and he preached it to them without actually believing himself. According to Conservative Laestadian doctrine, they are, to use a theological term, shit out of luck. ↩

4. Tchappat, David. Breakout: How I Escaped From The Exclusive Brethren, New Holland Australia (2011), Amazon Kindle ed., loc. 3213. After being known as the Exclusive Brethren for many years, the group has recently started calling itself the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church. ↩

5. Bachelard, Michael. Behind the Exclusive Brethren, Scribe Publications Pty Ltd (2008), p. 2. ↩

6. Tchappat at loc. 3467. Same with my old group, except for 600 or so conversions in Africa over the past decade or so and a handful elsewhere that have stuck around. It’s plenty “exclusive,” too, at least in a spiritual sense. Outside of that one little flock–the correct one of a dozen schismatic branches of a 19th-century revival movement of Scandinavian Lutheranism–you cannot be saved. It’s not a doctrinal tenet that is discussed much in public. ↩

7. Bachelard at p. 49. ↩

8. Tchappat at loc. 105. ↩

9. Tchappat at loc. 300-350, 842. The Brethren seem to go quite a ways beyond even the moral conservatism of Conservative Laestadianism, whose confession expectations have also diminished substantially since I was a kid. Brethren marriages must be pre-approved by their top leader, the “Elect Vessel”? No computers, except, says the documentary from A Current Affair, approved ones purchased from an official Brethren supplier? No domestic pets, including goldfish? The rules make my strict upbringing sound positively libertine. And some of what Tchappat says sounds just bizarre to me: “Cordless telephones and remote control-operated garage doors are also outlawed. Prestige vehicles such as BMWs and Mercedes Benz are not permitted and any vehicle red in colour is banned. Personalised number plates are not allowed and the ownership of a motorcycle is also not acceptable with farmers being the only exception.” Wow. ↩

10. Tchappat at loc. 109. In my own former church, I heard a preacher say that giving up “this most precious gift of living faith” is the worst thing a person could possibly do–even worse than murder. It’s an outrageous statement, and not one that most Laestadian preachers would make–at this point, probably not even the one who originally made it. But it does accurately convey the importance Laestadians place on being “God’s Children.” And the punishment for murder is not an eternity of unspeakable torture. ↩

11. Those still troubled by the Hell idea might take a look at my December 2013 blog posting on the subject, “Healing from Hell Horror.” ↩

12. Tchappat at loc. 2681. ↩

13. Bachelard at p. 56. ↩

14. Tchappat at loc. 2129. ↩

15. Tchappat at loc. 2929. ↩

16. Tchappat at loc. 110. ↩

17. Tchappat at loc. 2602, 3258. ↩

18. reddit.com/r/exmuslim/​comments/2gzm42/​psa_for_exmuslims_considering_coming_out_to_their ↩

19. Oppenheimer, Mark. Leaving Islam for Atheism, and Finding a Much-Needed Place Among Peers. New York Times, May 23, 2014. ↩

20. Quran, Sura 3:80 (J.M. Rodwell trans., Ballantine Books, 1993). Liberal apologists for the supposed tolerance of Islam like to toss around another passage that states, “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (Sura 2:256). Regarding that, one ex-Muslim on reddit cites the passage I quote here and asks, “If there really was no compulsion in religion, then why does Allah not accept those who desire religions other than Islam? The Quran is one big contorted contradictory mess from which nothing consistent is ever going to emerge.” The same can of course be said about the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike. ↩

21. “And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name” (Rev. 14:11). ↩