Sarah Hader is the co-founder of Ex-Muslims of North America, an organization dedicated to fighting Islamophobia and Islamophobia in the West. In this episode, Sarah talks about her experience as an ex-Muslim living in the United States, and how she came to leave her conservative Muslim upbringing. She also talks about the challenges of being an apostate Muslim in the modern world, and why she founded her organization in the first place. She also shares her experience of growing up in a liberal Muslim family, and the experiences she had when she left them to become an atheist. And she talks about how she became a better version of herself, and what it means to leave Islam, as opposed to being a Christian or a Mormon, or even a secular, ex-Scientologist. We don t run ads on the podcast and therefore, therefore, are made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. If you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of what we're doing here. Please consider becoming one of our sponsors, so that you can get access to all the great shows and resources that we're making available to all of our listeners. You'll get twice as much quality and value as you listen to the Making Sense Podcast. Thank you, and remember that you're listening to something that matters to you, not just for your ears, but for your brain and your brain. Make sense of it all. - Sam Harris Make Sense Podcast Subscribe to the podcast by becoming a subscriber, and you'll be helping to make sense of the world. The Making Sense by listening to more than just one thing, not less of it, and more of it. Enjoy! Sarah Hader: . Sam Harris: . . . Sarah: , . , , and : - | & ~ ... (p. ) And, and :) Thanks for listening to this episode? Thank You, Sarah:) (Thank you for listening? (Make Sense Podcast: ) . (The Making Sense: The podcast is a podcast by Sam Harris, ) Thank you for being kind enough to share this podcast with me, Sarah, and I'm very happy to finally get her on the podcatcher. (Sam Harris)
00:05:44.720Well, I think we would be called economic migrants.
00:05:48.300And I think it was just this general desire for a better life.
00:05:52.500However, my father does tell me that he specifically wanted a better life for his daughters.
00:05:57.520He had two daughters at the time, and he wanted us to have more opportunities, and he knew he would get that here.
00:06:03.100So when did you realize that you were a bit of an outlier in terms of your family environment with respect to religion?
00:06:11.580I started, well, I think most atheists would say this, and that's how I do identify as an atheist, that we were always sort of questioning.
00:06:20.820There were always sort of problems with religion, and I had them from an early age.
00:06:25.980But there was always ways for me to justify religious traditions that I may have found problematic.
00:06:32.940Until I got to be a little bit older, I was in my mid-teens when I really started looking at the religion in a really critical way.
00:06:41.200I started actually reading for myself the Quran and finding that there were problematic verses and things that didn't really make a lot of sense to me.
00:06:53.580And the more that I looked into it, the less that it made sense.
00:06:57.420And I actually encountered quite a few militant atheists, and this is why, even to this day, I don't think that militant atheism is such a horrible thing,
00:07:06.980because it does push people like me to look into their faith, if only for the reasons that we want to defend it.
00:07:15.460And that is what happened to me, that I knew some atheists, and they were giving me some questions, some probing questions,
00:07:23.380and I wanted to be able to defend my faith.
00:07:25.480So that was one of the reasons that I looked into it with such urgency, because I wanted to be able to defend it,
00:07:32.400and I found that there really wasn't much there for me to defend.
00:10:09.560There were a hundred different reasons that the religion was making less and less sense for me.
00:10:14.620And I was starting to figure that out on my own.
00:10:17.180And pushback from people that were non-Muslims did, you know, did influence me into looking at it in a deeper way with more urgency than I would have otherwise.
00:10:28.300But I was finding that there were a lot of problems on my own.
00:10:31.460There were, you know, historical problems.
00:10:33.380There were contradictions within the Quran itself.
00:10:37.100So there were a variety of issues with the faith.
00:10:39.460So what is the organization you founded, Ex-Muslims of North America?
00:10:47.760And it's hard to imagine many people listening to this podcast would be confused about this, but still there must be some.
00:10:53.820But certainly many people, even most people in a wider society, might not understand why there's a special need for an organization like this.
00:11:05.660What is so hard about being an ex-Muslim?
00:11:07.700I think, well, like you said, it's not really well understood the extent to which there is Muslim conservatism and the way that Muslim communities in the West practice their faith and practice their traditions.
00:11:21.420I know that at the time that I was sort of starting on getting involved in this sort of activism, that I thought that my experience with Islam was normal.
00:11:36.740I thought that I was a representative of a moderate Muslim.
00:11:39.340And then when I started to meet other ex-Muslims, I found that this was not the case at all, that I was extremely lucky with my experience with my parents, the fact that I had left the faith and, you know, I hadn't been threatened by them.
00:11:54.120I hadn't been abused in any serious way.
00:11:56.400And I hadn't realized that I was kind of an outlier with that experience.
00:12:03.000And as I began to meet other ex-Muslims, I started to see that there was a huge need for people to just to meet others like themselves.
00:12:12.780And for me, it was kind of a curiosity, just wanting to meet other ex-Muslims.
00:12:16.240But I knew that for others, that was not the case.
00:12:18.360So myself and Mohammed Sayyid, we were we were holding meetups for for ex-Muslims very covertly.
00:12:26.080There was a lot of like, you know, security protocols involved.
00:12:30.300But we were holding these just private gatherings of ex-Muslims.
00:12:33.260And we started to find that there were people coming from I mean, it was outrageous from from eight hours away.
00:12:40.180There would be coming eight hours one way to attend, you know, an hour and a half long meeting just to just to be there and to experience the feeling of of being with people that are like yourself, who don't demonize you for thinking the way that you do.
00:12:56.620And so when we when we started to see that, how big of a how major of a thing it was for other ex-Muslims, we knew that this was something that needed to be this needed to be a real thing.
00:13:08.480We needed to organize, we need to create an organization around it.
00:13:11.080We needed to foster communities like the one that we had started to build in D.C., all across the United States and Canada and teach them what we had learned about community building, about security, about privacy.
00:13:22.080And I don't think, like you said, many Western, even atheists wouldn't really understand the extent to which ex-Muslims are ostracized and even persecuted with their communities within their communities, even in the West, to the extent to which that there's anyone who can relate to this.
00:13:40.640I find that people who come from Mormon backgrounds or just extreme Christian sects and Hasidic Jews can can kind of understand what we're coming from and can kind of understand the extremes to which their community can go to defend their faith.
00:14:01.000So I don't think this is something that is understood by the broader community of even atheists.
00:14:07.280And so XMNA exists so that we can form these communities.
00:14:10.220And I think the the thing that we do that is most different than any other kind of atheist community is that we provide ways for them to be anonymous.
00:14:17.900All of our all of our all of our meets and our events are completely secret and they're only available to people who are already part of the ex-Muslims of North America communities.
00:14:30.080And in order to join the community, you you have to go through kind of a screening of sorts.
00:14:36.860And it's not a science, it's kind of an art, but we do the best we can to ensure that the people that are joining are those who understand the rules and regulations that we have and also will keep the privacy and security of others in mind and to screen as best as we can for people who may be malicious actors who are coming in for for other reasons.
00:14:57.500The emphasis on security issues is a sign of how different the situation is for Muslims and, you know, I have a weird vantage point or a unique vantage point on this, perhaps, because I see so much of what it is to become an atheist from all these different sources, being an ex-Mormon, an ex-Muslim, an ex-member of a cult, an ex-Scientologist.
00:15:24.280I see the exits and what is unique about Islam is this implicit or very often explicit threat of violence.
00:15:36.840And so the security concerns that you're describing strike me as fairly unique to Islam.
00:15:43.080And that's just still, again, it amazes me that this is an issue that people are unaware of or that obscurantists can successfully cover over when this gets debated in public.
00:15:57.820But it is a controversial point about which it seems to me that there can be really no debate at this point, that the laws around apostasy, the fact that leaving the faith is considered worthy of death, certainly if you speak against it, you can find that in the Old Testament, too.
00:16:17.020You're not tending to see Jews or Christians, however extreme, even reference that edict.
00:16:25.220It's just there are theological reasons why that's the case, there are historical reasons, but I'm not hearing from ultra-Orthodox Jews.
00:16:33.600I hear from them and I hear just how difficult it is to be exiled from their community and to lose their marriages and lose their kids and all the rest.
00:16:41.300But I don't hear that they're worried that their members of their family will come and kill them.
00:16:46.740And I routinely hear that from ex-Muslims.
00:16:50.620Right. So there's a pretty common thing I hear from ex-Muslims is when they're describing their family, they'll say, well, you know, my parents are pretty liberal.
00:17:05.240I'm not worried about them killing me.
00:17:07.120And in any other context, that would be an outrageous thing to say, that they're pretty liberal.
00:17:12.400And in order to justify this feeling, you know, you feel like they're not going to they're not going to kill you.
00:17:18.500But that in itself, I think, should be it should be telling that that our organization needs to exist the way that it does,
00:17:26.400that that we do need to follow all these bizarre security and privacy protocols.
00:17:34.140We should we really shouldn't have to, but we do. And we do for a reason.
00:17:38.280And it's interesting to me that that that is I find it to be ignored largely by the mainstream media,
00:17:44.840that this is something that ex-Muslims feel like they need to do.
00:17:48.560They need to hide. Many apostates are not open about their lack of faith.
00:17:52.780I see, you know, I know many ex-Muslims privately.
00:17:57.080You know, I would say that myself and maybe, you know, Mohamed Sayed, the president of XMNA,
00:18:02.680I would I would say that between the two of us, we probably know more ex-Muslims than anybody else in the world.
00:18:08.140And I see sometimes, you know, I'll see in the media of various people that are participating in charities or in public service organizations,
00:18:19.980and they are represented, you know, they're represented as Muslims.
00:18:23.260You know, this Muslim person is doing, you know, XYZ charitable endeavor, and it's very wonderful.
00:18:28.200And I will know privately that these are ex-Muslims, but they're not able to be open about their lack of faith
00:18:35.300because of the blowback that they will get in their community.
00:18:37.900So if you're, for example, you're working on a charity serving people in poor women in Pakistan,
00:18:45.940you're not going to be open about your lack of faith, because if you are open about your lack of faith,
00:18:50.080you're not going to be able to reach that community at all.
00:18:52.200You're not going to be able to have any contact with them.
00:18:54.160So in order for you to continue doing the work that you're doing, you're going to have to lie about your faith.
00:18:58.720So a lot of ex-Muslims do do exactly this.
00:19:02.380And to the extent that we're talking about religious freedom, I know we talk quite a bit in the mainstream media,
00:19:08.220especially liberal media, leftist media, there's a lot of conversation about civil liberties of ex-Muslims
00:19:15.840and religious freedoms, and we talk about them in context of certain traditions like the hijab.
00:19:21.360To the extent that the most fundamental freedom within the context of a belief system isn't guaranteed,
00:19:28.960that is, to say, the freedom to leave, the freedom to not believe at all,
00:19:34.900to the extent that that isn't guaranteed, in my opinion, we can't have a conversation about freedom within that religion at all.
00:19:44.740Everything is, to some extent, coerced, because the most basic freedom, the freedom to leave, is never guaranteed.
00:19:50.760And the security concerns are really pernicious because even if nothing ever happens, right,
00:19:57.820even if you never become a victim of any kind of violence, the plausible concern about violence is ever-present,
00:20:08.360and it adds friction to everything you do.
00:20:11.840Now, I encounter this in my personal life because of the issues I touch,
00:20:15.880but it has to be considerably worse for you and for anyone who's doing something similar.
00:37:27.760You don't get any of the social cues that are actually important for understanding whether you're safe around a person.
00:37:35.120The person who's having this imposed on them is being deprived of almost everything that's good in the world in terms of interacting with other human beings.
00:37:45.720What's your feeling about whether or not something like take the French approach to banning the niqab in public?