Leaving Faith Behind edited by Fiyaz Mughal and Aliyah Saleem (Darton Longman and Todd, London, 2018). Pbk. 192 pages. £9.19.
This book contains six contributions by people from a Muslim background; five of them no longer consider themselves Muslims. The sixth is one of the editors, Fiyaz Mughal, who is ‘a Muslim who believes in a divine entity that created life, yet who also believes in evolution’. The other editor Aliyah Saleem is the founder of Faith into Faithless which supports people leaving their religion. Faith into Faithless is now fully integrated into Humanists UK.
Three of the contributions are from women, including Aliyah Saleem. Two of the women write under pseudonyms, Marwa Shami and Aisha Hussain. All of them left Islam largely because of its attitude to women. It may be significant that they are all university educated.
Aliyah emerged from attending Islamic Academies in Canada and Pakistan as a ‘fully veiled fundamentalist Muslim’. She came across feminism while studying for an A level in Sociology and ‘the more I studied feminism, the more my own world started to fall apart’. The defining moment for her was listening to Carl Sagan reading from his book The Pale Blue Dot and then googling the photographs of Earth taken from space, so small in the immensity of the Universe. She could no longer imagine the tiny god of this tiny world calling people before him on judgement day to explain why they hadn’t worn a hijab.
Marwa Shami’s piece is called ‘Purity’. She developed an hourglass figure when very young.
She wore loose clothing to disguise it but she still seemed to attract male attention and believed herself to blame for being a source of temptation. She developed an eating disorder but nothing she did by way of extreme exercise or vomiting after meals diminished the size of her breasts. She ceased to be a Muslim at university.
Aisha Hussein’s family are still not aware that she no longer considers herself a Muslim. She was not only a practising Muslim but an evangelist for Islam, at first in online forums and later on stalls at university events. At university she began to explore the rich and varied history of Islam including the origin of the Quran. It is often claimed that in leaving Islam Muslims lose touch with their heritage but Aisha’s researches have given her a wider and deeper grasp of it.
The contributions by the three men are very different. Jimmy Busani’s is a series of anecdotes illustrating his problems with Islam up to the day when his elder brothers threw him out of the family home because he is gay.
Probably the most interesting contribution to me was Hassan Radwan’s ‘Losing Faith at Fifty’.
He began to read the Quran critically rather than devotionally after 9/11. He left Islam for the same reason as I ceased to be a Christian: the contradiction between claims that God was loving and merciful and the existence of Hell. The descriptions of Hell in the Quran are far more detailed and graphic than those in the Bible but in the end both orthodox Christianity and Islam are inviting adherents to worship a torturer. Liberal Muslims and Christians use the same argument about the matter: ‘It’s metaphorical’. It may be, but it is still a metaphor for indescribable suffering. Hassan spent four years with the Council of British Ex-Muslims and still values their work but now he refuses to wear a label. He is simply Hassan.
Fiyaz Mughal’s piece, ‘Liberal Fallback: the Assault on Liberalism’ has an undertone of sadness that some Muslims feel obliged to leave the faith.
He describes a situation which will probably be familiar to some SOF members who are still engaged with churches under increasing pressure from evangelicals. He asks readers of the book to read on ‘with an open mind and without fear or trepidation, for some of the most enlightening events are the ones that make us question the world around us, including who we are and what we believe in’. I would join him in that request.
I am conscious of how much more there is to this book than I have been able to cover in this review.
Please read it. It will amply repay your time and attention with insights into a world which is unfamiliar to most of us.
Barbara Burfoot is a former Chair and Secretary of the SOF Network and a retired Humanist celebrant.