Last December, Dar Al Ifta,
a venerable Cairo-based institution charged with issuing Islamic
edicts, cited an obscure poll according to which the exact number of
Egyptian atheists was 866. The poll provided equally precise counts of
atheists in other Arab countries: 325 in Morocco, 320 in Tunisia, 242 in
Iraq, 178 in Saudi Arabia, 170 in Jordan, 70 in Sudan, 56 in Syria, 34
in Libya, and 32 in Yemen. In total, exactly 2,293 nonbelievers in a
population of 300 million.
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Many commentators ridiculed these numbers. The Guardian
asked Rabab Kamal, an Egyptian secularist activist, if she believed the
866 figure was accurate. “I could count more than that number of
atheists at Al Azhar University alone,” she replied sarcastically,
referring to the Cairo-based academic institution that has been a center
of Sunni Islamic learning for almost 1,000 years. Brian Whitaker, a
veteran Middle East correspondent and the author of Arabs Without God,
wrote, “One possible clue is that the figure for Jordan (170) roughly
corresponds to the membership of a Jordanian atheist group on Facebook.
So it’s possible that the researchers were simply trying to identify
atheists from various countries who are active in social media.”
Even
by that standard, Dar Al Ifta’s figures are rather low. When I recently
searched Facebook in both Arabic and English, combining the word
“atheist” with names of different Arab countries, I turned up over 250
pages or groups, with memberships ranging from a few individuals to more
than 11,000. And these numbers only pertain to Arab atheists (or Arabs
concerned with the topic of atheism) who are committed enough to leave a
trace online. “My guess is, every Egyptian family contains an atheist,
or at least someone with critical ideas about Islam,” an atheist
compatriot, Momen, told Egyptian historian Hamed Abdel-Samad recently.
“They’re just too scared to say anything to anyone.”
While
Arab states downplay the atheists among their citizens, the West is
culpable in its inability to even conceive of an Arab atheist. In
Western media, the question is not if Arabs are religious, but rather to
what extent their (assumed) religiosity can harm the West. In Europe,
the debate focuses on immigration (are “Muslim immigrants” adverse to
secular freedoms?) while in the United States, the central topic is
terrorism (are “Muslims” sympathetic to it?). As for the political
debate, those on the right suspect “Muslims” of being hostile to
individual freedoms and sympathetic to jihad, while leftists
seek to exonerate “Muslims” by highlighting their “peaceful” and
“moderate” religiosity. But no one is letting the Arab populations off
the hook for their Muslimhood. Both sides base their argument on the
premise that when it comes to Arab people, religiosity is an
unquestionable given, almost an ethnic mandate embedded in their DNA.
The Arab Spring may have stalled, if not
receded, but when it comes to religious beliefs and attitudes, a
generational dynamic is at play. Large numbers of individuals are
tilting away from the rote religiosity Westerners reflexively associate
with the Arab world. In 2012, a wide-ranging WIN/Gallup International
poll found that 5 percent of Saudi citizens—more than a million
people—self-identify as “convinced atheists,” the same percentage as in
the United States. Nineteen percent of Saudis—almost six million
people—think of themselves as “not a religious person.” (In Italy, the
figure is 15 percent.) These numbers are even more striking considering
that many Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab
Emirates, Sudan, and Yemen, uphold the sharia rule punishing apostasy with death.
Capital
punishment, however, is almost never put into practice; the convicted
atheists spend varying periods in jail before being granted an
opportunity to recant. Arab countries with no apostasy laws still have
ways to deter the expression of religious disbelief. In Morocco and
Algeria, prison terms await those convicted of using “means of
seduction” to convert a Muslim. Egypt resorts to wide interpretations of
anti-blasphemy laws to condemn outspoken atheists to jail. In Jordan
and Oman, publicly leaving Islam also exposes one to a sort of civil
death—a set of legal measures including the annulment of marriages and
the stripping of inheritance rights.
Officially
sanctioned punishments can be severe. This January, a 21-year-old
Egyptian student named Karim Al Banna was given a three-year jail
sentence for “insulting Islam,” because he declared he is an atheist on
Facebook. His own father testified against him. In February 2012, Saudi
writer Hamza Kashgari was imprisoned for almost two years without trial
over three tweets addressing the prophet Muhammad; the most
controversial was, “I will not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand.
Rather, I shall shake it as equals do.” The following month, a Tunisian
tribunal sentenced bloggers Ghazi Beji and Jabeur Mejri to seven years
for “transgressing morality, defamation and disrupting public order,”
after they posted satirical comments and cartoons of the prophet
Muhammad. Last year, Raif Badawi, the founder of Free Saudi Liberals, a
blog discussing religion, was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000
lashes. And last December, Mauritanian columnist Mohamed Cheikh Ould
Mkhaitir was sentenced to death for penning a critique of his country’s
caste system which traced its mechanisms back to decisions made by the
prophet in the seventh century. The sentence is pending appeal.
Despite
such draconian measures, the percentage of people who express some
measure of religious doubt is higher in the Arab world (22 percent) than
in South Asia (17 percent) and Latin America (16 percent). And that 22
percent is only an average; the percentage goes higher in some Arab
countries, from 24 percent in Tunisia up to 37 percent in Lebanon.
Considering the extent to which the Arab social and political
environment impedes the expression of nonbelief, the numbers of
doubters and atheists would likely be significantly higher if people
felt freer to speak their minds. In January, Egyptian atheist activist
Ahmed Harqan told Ahram Online, “If the state preserved and protected
the rights of minorities, the numbers of those who reveal they’re
atheists would increase tenfold.”
In the spring of 2011, the Arab world
was experiencing a regionwide revolutionary convulsion. In Tunis,
Cairo, and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, thousands of
young people took over public squares, demanding new freedoms. At the
same time, Waleed Al Husseini was in a jail cell in Qalqiliya in the
Palestinian West Bank. The 22-year-old had been arrested a few months
earlier in a cybercafé by Palestinian intelligence agents. Al Husseini
was at the café because he had decided not to blog from his home because
of threats he’d received for posts on his blog Noor Al Aqel, or the Light of the Mind.
As The New York Times
reported, Al Husseini had “angered the Muslim cyberworld by promoting
atheism, composing spoofs of Koranic verses, skewering the lifestyle of
the Prophet Muhammad and chatting online using the sarcastic Web name
God Almighty.” He told me he was brought before a military court because
his online atheism was considered a “threat to national security.”
Al
Husseini was locked up for ten months, during which he was physically
abused and endlessly interrogated. Of the hundreds of questions he was
asked, one stuck in his mind: “Who finances your atheism?”
“Posting
my thoughts on a blog obviously didn’t require any financing,” Al
Husseini told me. “But the question was an indication of their utter
inability to understand that renouncing Islam was my personal choice,
just as it could be anyone else’s—including them. In their minds, there
had to be a foreign conspiracy behind this, preferably led by Israel.
That was the only way my atheism could make sense for them.”
Al
Husseini was eventually freed and fled to Jordan, where he sought
refuge in the French Embassy. Today he lives in Paris and has published a
memoir, Blasphémateur! Les Prisons d’Allah (Blasphemer! The Prisons of Allah). After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, he wrote an op-ed in the French daily Libération
defending the slain cartoonists’ freedom of speech. The headline the
editor put on it was, “I, a Muslim, Commit to Secularism.” Al Husseini,
who by then had already published his memoir as an atheist and a
blasphemer, commented in an amused tone, “They probably thought that
putting ‘Muslim’ and ‘secularism’ together in the same sentence was
bizarre enough to trigger interest.”
During
a 2014 appearance on HBO’s "Real Time with Bill Maher," American author
Sam Harris, a pillar of the New Atheism movement, fell into the same
essentialist trap when he referred to “Muslims who are nominal Muslims
who don’t take the faith seriously.” One can only marvel at the
oxymoronic complexity of that sentence. If these people don’t take Islam
seriously, why then call them Muslims, “nominal” or not?
Religiously
motivated trials like Al Husseini’s are always a serious affair, with
the accused considered not just an enemy of God, but also of the state.
All Arab regimes use religion, to various extents, as a source of
legitimacy. The expression of disbelief represents, for them, an
existential threat. In 2014, Saudi Arabia went as far as listing atheism
and questioning the Islamic faith as terrorist acts. There is an
understandable logic behind the move. “Saudi Arabia depends greatly on
religious credentials, since its basic law roots the regime in Wahhabi
Islam,” Whitaker, the author of Arabs Without God, told me. “If
you are an atheist in Saudi Arabia, you are also a revolutionary. If
atheism is allowed to flourish, the regime won’t be able to survive.”
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It’s
not just the authorities that consider disbelief a problem. Arab
societies as a whole are not wired to accept declared atheists in their
ranks. The first reason for Arab atheists to keep quiet is to not upset
their relatives. Amid omnipresent religious references, claiming that
you don’t believe in God is hardly seen as an expression of your
singularity. Rather it is considered a challenge to society in its
entirety. Religiosity in the Arab world is not just mainstream; it is
the norm, to which one is supposed to adhere unquestionably, or else be
deemed a “deviant”—the literal translation of mulhid, the
most-used Arabic term for atheist. And since religion is seen as the
cradle of morality, godless people are assumed to be devoid of a moral
compass. Whitaker cites Mohammed Al Khadra, a Jordanian atheist and
civil society organizer, who said, “The main view is that if someone is
... an atheist then he must be living like an animal. That’s how they
see us. I have been asked so many times why wouldn’t I sleep with my
mother?”
It’s even more
problematic when the nonbeliever is female. “The popular association of
atheism with immorality is a particular deterrent for women who have
religious doubts, since in Arab society they are expected to be
‘virtuous’ and not rebellious in order to marry,” Whitaker wrote in his
book.
In such a milieu, one would
assume the vast majority of Arab people are devout religious
practitioners. The fact of the matter is, except in relatively small
ultrareligious circles, secular lifestyles and attitudes are largely
tolerated in the Arab world. For example, though forbidden in Islam,
drinking alcohol is commonplace, particularly among the educated middle
and upper classes. Until recently in Morocco, a country that produces
large quantities of wine (alongside Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon,
and Jordan), alcohol was sold in a supermarket chain owned by King
Mohammed VI, also known as the Commander of the Faithful. In a recent
speech, Nabil Al Fadhl, a Kuwaiti member of parliament, deplored his
country’s prohibition of alcoholic beverages, in effect since 1964, for
driving young people to drink clandestinely manufactured—and thus
dangerous—beverages.
Sex outside
of marriage, another practice prohibited by Islam, is also
unexceptional, especially in urban environments where genders have been
mixing in the public space for more than half a century. In Morocco, a
study determined that 800 clandestine abortions (presumably prompted by
out-of-wedlock pregnancies) are performed on any given day.
Likewise,
while Islam requires its followers to pray five times a day at fixed
times, including twice during working hours, believers typically skip
the prayers while they’re at work and perform them once back home. In
Saudi Arabia, one of the most zealous Arab countries when it comes to
religious protocol, shops have to close for about 15 minutes at each
prayer call to allow the customers to perform their religious duty. But
you can often see small crowds of people gathered on the sidewalk and
waiting idly—some taking a cigarette break—until the shops reopen.
In
today’s Arab world, it’s not religiosity that is mandatory; it’s the
appearance of it. Nonreligious attitudes and beliefs are tolerated as
long as they’re not conspicuous. As a system, social hypocrisy provides
breathing room to secular lifestyles, while preserving the façade of
religion. Atheism, per se, is not the problem. Claiming it out
loud is. So those who publicize their atheism in the Arab world are
fighting less for freedom of conscience than for freedom of speech.
It
hasn’t always been so. Since the 1960s, larger-than-life Arab
intellectuals, such as Palestinians Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish and
the Syrian Ali Ahmad Said Esber, also known as Adonis, haven’t shied
away from challenging religious orthodoxy. Abdullah Al Qasemi, a Saudi
writer who died in 1996 and is considered the godfather of Gulf
atheists, famously declared, “The occupation of our brains by gods is
the worst form of occupation.” Back then, such statements were much less
of a problem. As the Associated Press’s Diaa Hadid reported in 2013,
“In the 1960s and 1970s, secular leftists were politically dominant. It
wasn’t shocking to express agnosticism. ... But the region grew more
conservative starting in the 1980s, Islamists became more influential,
and militants lashed out against any sign of apostasy.”
Abdel-Samad,
the Egyptian historian, experienced this firsthand. Today, at 43, he is
a declared atheist, but he was an enthusiastic member of the Muslim
Brotherhood in his university days. But while he was attending a summer
camp run by the Brotherhood, doubts started to creep in. “It was meant
to be some sort of collective physical and spiritual effort,” he told
me. “We were each given an orange and instructed to walk in the heat for
hours. After an exhausting journey in the desert, we were ordered to
peel the orange. We were happy to finally get something to quench our
thirst. But then, our group leader ordered us to bury the fruit in the
sand, and eat the peeling. I felt utterly humiliated. The objective was
obviously to break our will. This is how you make terrorists. I left the
Brotherhood soon after that.” In 2013 an Egyptian extremist cleric
appeared on television and issued a death fatwa against Abdel-Samad
after he’d asserted that Islam had developed fascist tendencies since
the time of the prophet.
Why are more Arabs turning their backs on religion? The New York Times’
Thomas Friedman argued in a column last December that the horrors
committed in the name of Islam by terrorist groups like ISIS are to
blame. This reflects the mindset of many American pundits, for whom
terrorism is central to all things Middle East. In reality, repudiating
terror is rarely the motivation of those who veer from Islam. “While
researching my book ... I spent a lot of time trying to find out why
some Arabs turn to atheism and none of those I spoke to mentioned
terrorism or jihadism as a major factor,” Whitaker wrote. “That’s not
particularly surprising, because atheism is a rejection of all forms of
religion, not just the more outlandish variants of it.”
For
the vast majority of Arab atheists, the road to disbelief begins as it
did for Abdel-Samad, with personal doubts. They start to question the
illogicalities found in the holy texts. Why are non-Muslims destined to
hell, even though many of them are nice, decent people? Since God knows
the future and controls everything, why would he put some people on the
wrong path, then punish them as if he had nothing to do with their
choices? Why is wine forbidden, yet virtuous Muslims are promised rivers
of it in heaven? Such questions began bugging Amir Ahmad Nasr, Sudanese
author of My Isl@m: How Fundamentalism Stole My Mind—and Doubt Freed My Soul, when
he was twelve, and he brought them to his sheik, the imam of a mosque
in Qatar. The answer he received—that doubting God’s commandments is haram
(religiously illicit) and can only be inspired by the devil—only
prompted him to continue digging. As Islam Ibrahim, the founder of an
Arab atheist Facebook page, said: “I wanted to secure a spot in
paradise, so I started studying the Quran and Muhammad’s teachings. But I
found a lot of contradictory and bloody things and fantasies in it. ...
Anyone who uses his brain five minutes in a neutral way will end up
with the same conclusion.”
Al
Husseini, the Palestinian blogger, recalled his journey after he decided
to leave Islam. “I began reading the books I could get my hands on,” he
said. “The discovery of the elementary notion of evolution was
mind-blowing. Books like Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Darwin’s The Origin of Species
opened my eyes to a whole new paradigm.” The 24-year-old Moroccan
atheist activist Imad Iddine Habib told me that he read books by
American astrophysicist Carl Sagan.
The
story of Iman Willoughby illustrates the second-most frequently cited
reason, after doubting, for Arab citizens to turn to atheism: The
oppression they personally experienced in the name of religion.
Willoughby today is a happily married 39-year-old mother of two with her
own massage clinic in Nova Scotia. But she went through a two-decade
nightmare in her country of origin, Saudi Arabia. Physically abused by a
father who broke her bones and a stepmother who chased her with knives,
Willoughby was jailed twice by the Saudi religious police. The first
time, she was spotted unveiled near a stream outside her hometown
Riyadh. “It was an isolated place, I liked to go there and just close my
eyes, feel the wind in my hair,” she told me. But since females aren’t
allowed to drive in Saudi, a male driver had to take her. The day the
religious police caught her unveiled, they accused her of having an
illicit relationship with the driver. She spent three days in a police
station before her father came to free her—and then “beat the living
life out of me,” she said.
The
second arrest happened a few years later, while Willoughby was in
medical school. The university was a 45-minute drive from home, and one
night her driver didn’t show up. A male student offered her a ride, and
while they were crossing a small desert town, the religious police
forced them to stop. They beat Willoughby’s classmate unconscious and
took her to a police station, where they forced her, under threat of
physical abuse, to sign an “admission statement” that she was sleeping
with her friend. Three months of imprisonment and “religious
reeducation” followed, during which mandatory prayers were the only
distraction from the cell she occupied, with nothing in it but a
mattress on the floor, persistent cockroaches, and a video camera
constantly filming her. She received no word from her family or friends.
Willoughby was eventually freed, only to find out that she had been
convicted and sentenced to 80 lashes. Her brother interceded before a
prince—“not because he cared for me, only to salvage the honor of the
family,” she said—and she was pardoned.
Before
prison, Willoughby had applied for a scholarship to continue medical
school in Canada. She obtained it, begged her father to give her her
passport (a scene she recalled as her “ultimate humiliation”) and left
forever. Her atheism? It had felt like a natural calling for a long
time. “I never really prayed in my life,” she told me. “Even in jail, I
was just going through the motions to keep people quiet.”
“Religion
is a form of surveillance,” said Habib. “It’s not about God; it’s about
the power wielded by those who act in his name.” Habib, Willoughby, and
many others have switched to atheism as an act of rebellion. But their
rebellion is less against Islam than against the abuses committed by
religiously powered individuals and political systems.
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Many
Arab atheists weren’t political at first. But it seems there is just no
way around it. Momen told Abdel-Samad he didn’t mean to politicize his
atheism. “But when people’s faith is political, my lack of it is just as
political, by definition,” he said. “As long as unbelievers are
persecuted, as long as religion encroaches on people’s private lives, I
can’t reject it purely as a private matter.” And since politics is
around the corner anyway, might as well do it well—and straight-faced.
That’s the conclusion Egyptian atheist activist Islam Ibrahim shared on
the YouTube program “The Black Ducks.” Started in August 2013 by another
Egyptian atheist, Ismail Mohamed, the program invites atheists from the
Arab world to speak their minds. When you’re anonymous, you can say
silly things and not be held accountable for them, Ibrahim said on the
program. “I thought, if we atheists stop being ghosts and materialize,
we will be taken more seriously, because our statements will become
better thought through. Also, we’ll never get what we want if we don’t
have the courage to claim it with our real names and faces.”
As
of mid-April, more than 140 “Black Ducks” episodes have been uploaded,
and they’ve received hundreds of thousands of views. The channel has two
objectives: Achieving “a secular society in the Middle East and North
Africa. ... [and offering] solace and courage to those who are atheists
in secret so they may know they are not alone in the world.” In the
episode featuring him, Ibrahim said: “Your brother, co-workers, friends,
family members might be atheists, just like you, but they’d never dare
say, unless they see you come out on Facebook. It actually happened with
my neighbor. We became friends in real life, as it happened for many.”
Toward that end, Ibrahim established a Facebook page where hundreds of
Arab atheists posted their stories, including their names, photographs,
countries of residence, and the reason behind their atheism.
Being
connected to each other is crucial to Arab atheists. After Willoughby
started her blog and Twitter feed in 2008, she said, numerous strangers
reached out to her, thanking her for sharing her story, and anxiously
asking for advice about how to deal with their own personal
predicaments. To her, it felt like duty calling. Willoughby said she has
helped a dozen atheists get out of Saudi Arabia by giving them access
to information, and even sending money in some cases.
In
2007, a now-worldwide network of “ex-Muslims” was established to
support refugees, exiles, and anyone from a Muslim background. The first
such group was created in Germany at the initiative of Iranian exiles
vowing to support the freedom to criticize religion and to end
“religious intimidation and threats.” There are now chapters in several
countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom,
Germany, France, Belgium, and New Zealand. There is no central body, and
each chapter runs independently, but they collaborate on conferences
and advocacy campaigns. Many of the ex-Muslims’ activities are conducted
online, but a good deal also happen in real life, which elicits
security concerns. “If you’ll be holding real life meetings, you should
screen each person who wants to join for safety’s sake,” Kiran Fatima
Opal, a Canadian-Pakistani active member of the ex-Muslims of North
America, told me.
Habib started
the ex-Muslims group in Morocco, which has about 20 members, and he has
given news conferences alongside other activists. One last summer
launched a campaign to gain the right to abstain from fasting during
Ramadan (breaking the Ramadan fast in public is a criminal offense in
Morocco, punishable by one to six months in prison.) “I created the
Council of ex-Muslims so we’d stop saying, ‘We are with the atheists,’
and start saying, ‘We are the atheists,’” Habib told me. “Like
for gays, [the] time has come to claim ‘atheist pride.’” Habib came to
the attention of the public in March 2013. The police were looking for
him, apparently to indict him because he had mocked the Islamic creed,
“There is no god but God,” on his Facebook page by turning it into,
“There is no god but Mickey Mouse.” Instead of turning himself in, he
went into hiding while a support campaign was taking off on the
Internet. By the time he resurfaced, the police had apparently given up
on bringing him in. His relative international exposure (Western
journalists such as The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof had interviewed him) may be what has shielded him from arrest so far.
Despite the risks and the social and
political challenges they’re facing, all the atheist activists I
interviewed said they were confident that the future of the Arab world
belongs to secularism. Willoughby told me that “atheism is spreading
like wildfire” in the Middle East. Brian Whitaker views it as “the
symptom of a much bigger thing, which is the battle against oppression.”
The booming Arab underground music scene is another example of the
irresistible impetus for change that is quietly transforming the Middle
East and North Africa. A full cultural revolution will probably take
some time. Speaking about his country, Abdel-Samad said, “I think
secularism is a certainty, not just a possibility, for Egypt’s future.
All that remains unclear is what price the country will pay first.
History tells me blood.”
Waleed
Al Husseini told me that he’s “pessimistic for the next 20 years, but
optimistic for what’s coming afterwards.” He can afford it: By then,
he’ll be only 46.
Ahmed Benchemsi is the editor in chief of FreeArabs.com.
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