I suppose I’ll have to say it for all the new readers here but I’ve been saying it for years on blogposts, social media and to those I speak to in real life. That is that I don’t hate individual Muslims. I can’t do that.
I can’t do it because like how the Biblical Abraham and Sarah effusively welcomed unknown guests who turned out to be angels, I don’t know which Muslim or seeming Muslim I meet might be a closet Apostate. I can’t do it because I know that those decent Muslims that exist are decent not because of the precepts of Islam, but in spite of them but they are decent none the less. I can’t hate a random seemingly Muslim individual because I can’t see into his soul. Because I cannot see that which only he sees and which I believe the Eternal One sees, I therefore don’t know whether this soul is the soul of someone who is a committed Muslim, who genuinely and wholeheartedly holds to an ideology that wants me dead, or someone who would rather be a Christian or a Jew or a Pagan or an Atheist. The man who is identified by a fellow to me as a Muslim might have a soul that wants to follow a different, maybe better path for them, but is imprisoned by Islam and has a soul that is screaming to be heard but is not, and too often cannot, be heard.
I’m firmly of the view that apostasy from Islam is something that is good for the individual who has hitherto been a Muslim and also good for humanity as a whole. The human capital of the individual who apostasies and the social capital of the nation that had previously been dominated by Islam is therefore freed for maybe much better things. This is why I’ve always believed that non-Muslim societies should protect and cherish the ex-Muslims around us whether they be near or far. The ex-Muslims out there are I believe fighting a good fight and sometimes putting themselves at extreme risk for doing so.
Apostasy has always been there in Islam just as it is in other faiths and has been at various times both open and occluded, spoken or silent depending on the type of society and especially the type of Islamic society that the apostate is in. It was probably easier for someone to reject the beliefs of Islam in an Islamic society that is broadly secular at that particular time. For a very very long time those who ruled the Islamic world were able to use Islam including the Shariah law to keep their people under the control of the authorities by using the fear of hellfire as a spiritual goad and the Shariah punishments as a temporal one. Such an undertaking as keeping your subjects isolated and controlled is relatively easy when communication with other cultures or other ideas is difficult for the average person.
However Islamic communities and Islamic nations are no longer isolated. Successive communications revolutions from radio to the internet have brought the outside world to those who would seclude their people in moral and spiritual degeneration and in ignorance. Out of all those technological spears of information including information that contains the seeds of freedom that have been hurled at the Islamic world over the decades, it is the internet along with the crash in price of internet enabled devices that has had the biggest impact. People living in Muslim worlds can now see ex-Muslims speak. Ordinary people in ordinary towns and cities across the Islamic world can hear these ex-Muslims speak of how they found spiritual, ethical, moral, historical and chronological flaws in Islam and in Islamic scripture. These ex-Muslims who are speaking out about their former faith are finding a wide and receptive audience for their words.
There is now an astonishing growth in apostasy in Islamic societies and nations and also in some surprising places. I recently saw a short video by the YouTubers David Wood and Apostate Prophet (Ridvan Aydemir) on the subject of apostasy in Saudi Arabia. I was astonished to hear claims based on 2012 figures that even back then there were approximately 5% of the Saudi population who had walked away from Islam. It’s quite possible that the percentage of apostates in Saudi Arabia is even higher now. After all this is a society that is rapidly modernising not just in technology but in attitudes. Women can now drive in Saudi Arabia and it has been claimed that there’s less official enforcement of some Sharia law such as hijab but oppression of women is still a problem culturally in Saudi Arabia.
Here is the video with Mr Wood and Apostate Prophet. It makes some bold claims about the rapid change that is occurring in Saudi society and about the possible influence on the social change in Saudi Arabia of the current Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,
I was quite surprised to hear the claims about Saudi Arabia as I would have expected there to be a rapid rise in apostasy in somewhere like Iran as that is where the Islamic theocracy that rules that country has oppressed to the extreme the Iranian people since the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and where pushback against the ideology of Islam is strong. Maybe the leadership and future leadership of Saudi Arabia is beginning to understand that it is Islam itself that is holding them back? Maybe some in the Saudi ruling class are realising that petrodollars can’t keep the country afloat forever. Some day the Saudi oil will run out and other energy sources and other sources of hydrocarbon fuels will come on stream all of which will badly impact Saudi Arabia as their oil reserves come to an end. They need more than they’ve got and which their current societal set up can get them. Maybe those in the know in Saudi understand that they need the business, technological, cultural and industrial developments that only a free thinking, open and curious society can properly create.