Secret Infidels

What is life like for a secular Muslim?

ON A FALL DAY IN 2001, the towers of the World Trade Center having barely ceased to^ast their twin shadows on the Hudson River, 1 was listening to a radio talk show that attempted to convey the "Muslim perspective" on the September 11 attacks. Speaking on behalf of a Canadian Muslim association, a commentator on the show did her best to address the host's perplexity at the Islamic concept of jihad. "True jihad is not a war against this or that group of people," she said/'but a personal war against unbelief itself. That is the true enemy."

The ensuing three and a half years would give air time to thousands of similar discussions. Some spokespeople, like that radio commentator, would rise to Islam's defense, claiming that terrorists and other extremists weren't practicing the" true Islam." Others would denounce Islam, calling tot a whole-sale reformation of the faith, but very few would renounce it altogether, at least in public. Neither the events of September 11, nor any other world event appears to have stopped the "world's fastest-growing religion" from continuing to grow.

Even Irsliad Manji, the lesbian Muslim media personality whose recent book, The trouble with Islam, read as an end-to-end diatribe against Islam in its current incarnation, holds steadfastly to her Muslim identity, having concluded, from her reading of the Qur'an, that "Only God fully knows the truth of anything [and] what true belief is." As a group, lesbian and gay Muslims in Canada have banded together in an organization called Salaam in order to reconcile their two technically irreconcilable identities, rather than leave their faith behind.

And vet people who leave Islam do exist, as I've learned in reccnl months, and in apparently sizable numbers. Almost without exception, they leave without fanfare. Many don't even tell their closest family members that they no longer believe in the basic tenets of Islam, and continue to follow the rituals^-at least insofar as placing their bodies in the appropriate positions at the expected times—of their erstwhile faith. Some even continue to see themselves as Muslim in the cultural sense, much as an atheist Zionist can identify as a passionate lew.

Having always found it next to impossible, even when 1 still coloured out-side the lines, to accept the tenets of my own inherited religion (or any other that I knew about), 1 felt a surge of solidarity, on that day in 2001, with those nameless, faceless doubters who either stood on the margins of their Islamic faith or had left it altogether. If a Canadian Muslim woman called unbelief the enemy, then how did unbelievers of Muslim origin fare in this country? Did these so-called infidels have a place in the mainstream Muslim community, or did they fear for their physical or psychological safety? Did they risk having fatwas declared against them, or did a fatwa have as much chance of striking them as a bolt of lightning? "THERE IS MORE THAN ONE KIND OF FREEDOM," wrote Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale. "Freedom to and freedom from." Freedom to wear revealing clothes on a summer evening in Central Park, and freedom from sexual assault if so attired; freedom to believe Mohammed transcribed the word of God in the Qur'an, and freedom from ridicule for this belief; freedom to believe the Qur'an is a fable, and freedom from receiving bullet wounds in the shin for publicizing this view.

The Qur'an itself states that "there shall be no compulsion in religion," but it also states that "surely those who believe and then disbelieve again, believe and again disbelieve, then increase in disbelief, Allah will not forgive them nor guide them in the path."

Progressive Muslim scholars have pointed out that the Qur'an doesn't threaten apostates with punishment in this world — only the next one. But Islamic law (sharia), developed and fine-tuned in the centuries following the Prophet Mohammed's death, does not leave such punishment to Allah's discretion. Depending on the Islamic sect or scholarly interpretation in question, the recommended penalty for an adult male apostate might be death, divorce from a still-practicing wife, and forfeit of personal property or loss of the right to appear as an eyewitness in a court of law, among other possibilities.

Islam is not the only religion to formulate such harsh proscriptions against defectors, of course. Sitting shiva for a daughter who marries a non-Jew, as Orthodox Judaism permits families to do, hardly rates as a good-natured finger wag. And the shame of excommunication can sting an errant Catholic for the rest of his or her life.

And yet there are differences, which even Muslim scholars recognize. On a December day, I call McGill University Islamic law professor Wael Hallaq, who surprises me by answering on the first ring and agreeing to talk about these differences. "Islam could never accept apostasy," he says. At the same time, "Islam calls upon its followers to obey the laws of the land they live in and to strive for a peaceful resolution when Islamic and local laws are in conflict." For example: "Islamic law forbids Muslims from taking on mortgages with interest. But if you're in Canada, well, you do what you can." Apostates, in turn, "would be legally and practically safe in this country. But they would probably lose all their Muslim friends. You sometimes hear of a Christian who converts to Buddhism and then returns to his home to celebrate Christmas with his family. That kind of scenario doesn't play well in Islam."

In Japan, where I lived for over a year, brides and grooms can "do" Shinto on the morning of their wedding day, change into Buddhist garb for the after-noon, then finish off with a Christian church ceremony, without experiencing either internal conflict or social disapproval. I attended one such wedding, in fact. Some years later, a cousin of mine married a man of Chinese ancestry and held a Jewish-Chinese ceremony in Greenwich Village that garnered a photo and approbatory blurb in Modern Bride New York magazine.

The Jew who finds her faith in God faltering can confidently turn to secular humanistic Judaism, as has Eva Goldfinger, a psychotherapist and member of Toronto's Oraynu congregation. Raised in a Hassidic milieu, Goldfinger lapped up the texture of Judaism — the songs, foods, communal warmth—but found it impossible to sink her doubts about a supreme being.

She ended up marrying a secular Jew and becoming a madrikha—a congregation leader. Disapproval from mainstream Jewry? "Certainly," she says, "but no outright threats. We're one of five recognized branches of Judaism, and no one branch holds the monopoly over what constitutes 'correct' practice."

The questioning or doubting Muslim, on the other hand, has no "secular humanistic Islam" to turn to; the very notion repudiates Islam's sine qua non of submission to Allah. Canadian Muslims who yearn for the songs, foods, poems and stories of their upbringing while eschewing belief in the perfec-tion of Allah, Mohammed or Qur'an may be, culturally speaking, out of luck.

But at least they have Canadian law on their side. Well, sort of. Chapter H-6 of the Canadian Human Rights Act states in part that individuals should have equal opportunity to live "without being hindered in or prevented from doing so by discriminatory practices based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted."

While clearly covering the rights of Buddhists and Wiccans, the statement doesn't make specific provisions for people who forsake religion altogether. But Errol Mendes, a professor of constitutional and human rights law at the University of Ottawa, notes that the "freedom of conscience" cited in Section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, covers "freedom from religion" as well as "freedom of religion." The caveat is that the charter "only applies to government and government activities, not to private relations."

In private organizations, says Mendes, provincial laws protect people — including Muslim apostates—from employment discrimination. In their own living rooms, however, the protection dwindles. While documented threats constitute a criminal offence, "there's no law against shunning. Religious groups are free to shun or exclude people if they so choose, as long as they're ; not breaking any laws."

Given the suspicion non-believers arouse in the believing mainstream, ' some people maintain these "freethinkers" deserve more clearly delineated rights. Marvin Zayed is one such advocate. A committed Islamic apostate, | Zayed allegedly received a death threat when he began criticizing Islam in ; print. The Canadian Humanist News reprinted the threat, which ended, "There ; is no hiding place for the devil worshippers; we can reach you wherever you are; repent, and may Allah have mercy on your wretched soul." To show sup-port, the Humanist Association of Canada helped Zayed line up a series of safe houses, where he lived incognito for several months in 2001.

In a letter he drafted in early 2002, Zayed stated that the RCMP and CSIS officials he met in Ottawa had reached the collective conclusion that no special program existed to protect Canadian freethinkers who received such threats. "The threat was real," says Sheila Ayala, the HAC's senior administrator, "but since it couldn't be traced to anyone, nobody was arrested."

And then there's Irshad Manji, who, though not an apostate, reportedly thought it prudent to install bulletproof glass in her apartment and advise her roommate to move out when The Trouble with Islam came out. When I ask , Tarek Fatah, host of the program Muslim Chronicle on CTS TV (Crossroads : Television Systems), and one of Toronto's best-known progressive Muslim personalities, to comment on her case, he loses no time in pointing out that "her book has her face right on the cover. Think about it: is that the behaviour , of someone who fears for her life? It's disingenuousness in the extreme."     '

When I press Fatah to comment on the threats he himself has received over the course of his career as a feminist, gay-positive observer of the Muslim , scene, I can almost see him shrug at the other end of the phone line. "The | worst that happened to me is having people point at me in the subway and | tell me I'll burn in hell," he says. "This idea that people are putting their lives at risk for criticizing this or that aspect of Islam is nonsense. People say their life is threatened, but we in the Muslim community know that they're short of cash. Having a fatwa issued against you is a way to get rich and famous."

ON A BALMY SUMMER EVENING in a modest house on the outskirts of Toronto, a meeting of Muslim apostates is about to begin. I know I've come to the right house when I spy a "HUMANIST" license plate on a car parked in

"It's just common sense, right?

You go to Central Park at night, you could get mugged.

You tell a devout Muslim he's full of baloney, well, connect the dots,

But if you quietly share your views among friends,

you have nothing to fear"

front of it. The apostates in question have set up this meeting to tell me their stories of disengagement from Islam and to hash out the question of their safety, for which I thank the beaming host, a middle-aged man called Shiraz, profusely as I step into his curry-scented foyer.

The group owes its existence to the efforts of one Khalid Sohail, a Whitby, Ontario, psychiatrist, writer and documentary filmmaker who has hand-picked, over the two decades since his arrival in Canada, a "family of the heart" that shares both his Islamic roots and uprootedness. United by their departure from Islamic observance and belief, most of the group's members call themselves atheists, although a few hang their hats on pantheistic or spiritualist hooks.

As I take my place in the living room among the seated guests, I am struck, as I have been many times before, by the strength of the human impulse to band together in like-minded groups. Six members of Sohail's "family" are in attendance this evening—five men and one woman—along with the host's wife and son. All hail from Pakistan, a country that, Sohail reminds me, owes its very existence to Islam. Most live in or around Toronto, although one of them, a neurologist, has driven up from Buffalo for the meeting. I assure them, as I dig into the steaming lentil curry I've loaded on my plate, that I plan to use pseudonyms for everybody but Sohail, whose books and articles have already thrust his views into the public arena.

Farzana goes first. "Members of the Muslim sect I was brought up in considered themselves to be the direct descendants of Mohammed," she says. "When my sect was suddenly declared non-Muslim by the government, I became aware of the political workings behind the religious exterior." Unable to express her disillusionment in Pakistan, she immigrated to Canada at the age of 26. "When I saw four races represented in two rows of seats on a bus a week after my arrival, I knew I'd found my spiritual home." While conceding that her pantheistic, citizen-of-the-world ethos has been hard on her kids ("I have no community to offer them"), she cannot reconcile herself to the Islamic concept of jihad, "which also means purification. Ridiculous is not a strong enough word for jihad and fatwa."

One by one, the guests tell me their stories, all cut from the same cloth: conventional Muslim childhood, adolescent jolt into doubt, gradual relinquishment of faith and, in most cases, a continuing show of observance to family members and friends. "It's simple," says Pervez, a computer programmer and father of one daughter  and one son. "If I want to get my daughter married off, I have to play the part of a conventional Muslim father. My wife doesn't know about my true feelings. My children don't know. Nobody in my family knows."

The host's wife, on the other hand, does know. She's sitting two chairs away from me. When I ask her how she feels about her husband's (and more recently, son's) estrangement from Islam, she looks down at her hands. In a sad, stoic monotone bespeaking years of psychic strain, she says, "I'm happy as a conventional Muslim woman. I don't really want to talk about this. It's hard to cope with my husband's non-belief."

Shifting gears, I ask Sohail whether he thinks it fair to hold apostates accountable for their loss of faith; I feel more relief than strictly necessary for a journalist when he shakes his head. "For the first 10 years after I lost my faith, I wished I could still believe in Islam so my life could be simpler," he says. "But I learned that you can't will yourself to have faith. Which means you can't be blamed for not having it any more than, say, a gay man can be blamed for not being turned on by a woman."

When the discussion moves on to the issue of safety, Sohail grows still more animated. "I've seen friends become as militant about their apostasy as Islamic zealots are about their religion," he says. "They want to convert every-one else to atheism and to wave anti-Islamic placards around mosques. I tell these people they have a humanistic world view but a religious personality." It's no surprise, he continues, that such people should encounter opposition or even threats. It's just common sense, right? You go to Central Park at night, you could get mugged. You tell a devout Muslim he's full of baloney, well, connect the dots. But if you quietly share your views among friends, you have nothing to fear."

Several people nod.

Intuiting that this group won't mistake rhetorical argument for confrontation, I venture into "Yes, but..." territory. Yes, but if you don't challenge people's beliefs, how then will you harness others to your cause of pluralism and religious tolerance? How will you help weaken the pillar of fundamental-ism? "Ah," nods Sohail, his twinkling eyes and untamed beard giving him the air of a sage. "There's certainly a place for protest. If you think people should have better health care or education, by all means go wave your placards at Queen's Park. But you can't browbeat people into giving up their beliefs. I'm a shrink, and I can tell you that human nature doesn't work like that. The only way to make people think is through respectful dialogue, one conversation at a time. Like we're doing here in this living room."

SIX MONTHS LATER, OVER COMPARABLY SPICY FOOD, I'm talking with three Islamic dissenters who don't abide by Sohail's ruffle-no-feathers ethos. They want the right to shout out their unbelief as brazenly as the faithful praise their gods and holy books. They want Ibn Warraq's recent compilation, Leaving Islam, to stand proudly and prominently on bookstore shelves.

I have selected a Southeast Asian restaurant, thinking it would help the pair of young Malaysian friends seated opposite me to feel at ease, but it soon becomes apparent I'm in the company of true globalists. Not only do Alex

Merdeka and Mawar Brasser (their chosen pseudonyms) waste no time pining for their homeland, they offer advice to other apostates seeking to emigrate from Malaysia or even to obtain refugee status.

When I ask the pair whether they feel safe criticizing Islam on Canadian soil, they respond with a synchronized eye roll. "It's never safe," says Brasser.

"Look at Tahir Gora [the exiled liberal Pakistani writer who settled in Hamilton]. He got a death threat in his mailbox." She goes on to tell me how she tried to get the Canadian authorities to take action against a Web site that endorsed conservative Islam's position on apostasy, including the death penalty for those obstinate in their dissent. "The police did nothing," she says, contrasting their phlegmatic attitude with the Ontario Court of Appeal's upholding of the conviction of a Christian evangelist, Mark Harding, for distributing pamphlets likening Toronto Muslims to raging wolves. "When the police are like this, why should Muslim apostates think Canada is safe?"

The last member of our quartet, who settles on Omar Farouk as his pseudonym, has been largely silent up to this point. A scientist in a research institution by day, Farouk devotes most of his evenings and weekends to the cause of secularization. "Apostasy destabilizes the group, which is why there are all these rules against it," he says finally, with the quiet authority of a schol-arturned-activist. "But when you try to legislate people's beliefs, you end up with people who say one thing in public but another in private."

Farouk's current mission is to help expand the reach of a lobby group called No to Political Islam, which was "soft-launched" on Voltaire Day in 2003. The home page of NTPI's Web site invites browsers to sign a petition calling for the dismantling of "political" (meaning supremacist and militant) Islam and the promulgation of democratic values in Muslim societies. The roster of NTPI partners includes the International Humanist and Ethical Union, the Council for Democracy and Tolerance and the Committee to Defend Women's Rights in the Middle East.

Though an independent thinker by any standard ("The Qur'an? People use it like a dollar store-they shop for what they want and ignore the rest"), Farouk deems it more prudent and effective to promote NTPI from a progressive Muslim perspective. "We have a better chance of getting Muslims on board if we approach them as Muslims, rather than atheists or humanists," he explains. "It's not religion we're opposed to, but political Islam. Our position is that political Islam is actually anti-Islamic, and we've had several liberal Muslim groups agree with us."

The ambitions he has for NTPI - to create a network of secularists in   1 Islamic countries, publicize acts of terror and establish a database of print   1 materials - leave him in a state of chronic unrest. "I cannot watch idly while   1 political Islamists behave as though the planet belongs to them," he says,   1 then ventures into still more prickly territory. "We're under attack. Political   i Islam is making inroads in Canada, and the government doesn't know it." A  i touch of paranoia, perhaps? Shaking his head in evident frustration at my  t Western naiveté, he pulls out a copy of a Toronto Star article written in 2001,   1 an investigative report about the city's mosques. The article quotes several preachers and guest speakers telling their Muslim audiences to dissociate   from Christians and Jews and to work to convert Canada into an Islamic   state. "Canadians are so concerned about being fair, celebrating Eid in the   public schools and so forth, but political Islamists have no such compunctions. It's not a level playing field."

Then he brightens. "The Internet is our ally," he says, explaining that the s   innovation and reach of the Net has made it possible for other Muslim apostates to reveal themselves, at least in the virtual world. "There are thousands--   who used to participate in online  discussion groups on Web sites with names such as apostatesofislam.com. "The Internet has given our side a voice."

ONE MORE GATHERING, JUST A FEW DAYS LATER, puts me face to face with a group of people who manage to take some of the chill out of Farouk's dire pronouncements and make me believe, at least for an evening, that cultural pride and reasonable discourse can coexist. The occasion is a Hanukkah party held by Barbara Landau, the Jewish co-chair of the Canadian Association of Jews and Muslims. Shahid Akhtar, the Muslim co-chair, tells me that, as far as he knows, the association is unique; the group has no counterpart in any other country.

The party begins with a round of formal introductions in the living room, where I learn that virtually all the Muslims in attendance are originally from

Pakistan. Where are the Arab Muslims? I wonder. "Perhaps the issues we deal with are too raw for them," sighs Akhtar, who hastens to add that "they're certainly welcome here."

Although secularists and progressives dominate the scene. Landau tells me that conservative Jews and Muslims occasionally attend the CAJM's monthly meetings. As for opposition, the issue has been largely non-existent. "There's been no negative feedback at all, not even from conservative groups. People ask me where they can sign up." And how do the various constituencies get around those sticky religious differences, like believing that they're God's chosen people or that their holy book represents the final word on the human condition? "In any religion, you can find language that encourages you to feel superior and do harm to people from other faiths," she says. "It's easy to lose hope if you follow the political scene, but when you meet face to face, it's a different story. At our meetings, we're always hugging and kissing, asking about our kids' engagements or university courses."

As I pile up my plate at the buffet table, which gives equal billing to kosher and halal cuisine, I spot Tarek Fatah walking toward me, a convivial glow on his face. He asks me if I received the newspaper article he e-mailed me, "My Uncle the Muslim Atheist," by British author and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi.

I nod and, between bites of just-cooked pakoras, mumble something about the incongruity of the juxtaposition.

"Don't just look at the media reports, at the theory," he chides me gently.

"Look at the contradictions. Many of our leading poets in Pakistan challenge

God. And many of these same people call themselves Muslim. I'm on record as supporting same-sex marriage, and I still call myself a Muslim-twice hajj, in fact." He walks backward toward the dessert table, almost bumping into a female guest wearing a yarmulke. "Don't be such a media person."

Point taken, Tarek, I tell myself as I drive home from the party, energized by the evening's warmth and cultural sophistication. It's important to avoid knee-jerk mediathink when writing about Islam. By the time I get home, though, the devils advocate has kicked in with mil force. That the people I've been talking to are civilized and agreeable is beyond question, I think, but where are they when their voice is most urgently needed? When, say, brick walls are being sprayed with hate graffiti or buses and their human cargo are blown to smithereens? Cozy Hanukkah parties notwithstanding, if secular

Muslims fail to step out beyond these comfortable, preach-to-the-choir gatherings and grab the public microphone, can they be surprised if certain factions in the West paint Islam with broad black strokes? Still more to the point, can mainstream Islam ever come to grips with the issue of doctrinal dissent in the modern world?

It's all about dialogue-on that point I fully agree with Sohail. It's just the volume that needs to be turned up. n

JUNE 2004 < SATURDAY NIGHT 35