A must-read blog: The House of Apostasy

A blogger who is forced to remain anonymous has compiled a roundup of ex-Muslim blogs, a sort of Carnival of the Apostates, and the excerpts are powerful enough to make you want to read them all.

A sample:

Now that I am no longer a Muslim and don’t live in a Muslim country, my connection with Islam does not suddenly disappear, nor do my grievances against what it has done to my life evaporate. I have built a new and better life in the U.S., but I’ve paid a heavy price: I’ve lost my family, I’ve given up all right to public security or the government’s support in my native country, I’m committed to lying about my religious status in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (where my family lives, whom I have not seen in 4 1/2 years) or foreswear visiting these countries that I called home for most of my life, I’m condemned to never have full acceptance in my own culture, by my own people.

These are not random events which are nobody’s fault, that nothing is responsible for. All this is Islam and Muslims’ fault.

Another sample:

I cannot resist relaying a personal episode when I was about 7 years old, which took place here in good ol’ England. I used to regularly attend a class after school to learn to recite the Koran, and we all sat cross-legged on the floor. One day, one of my friends mispronounced one of the Arabic words as he went through a verse. The large, bearded, and rather strict teacher, who had been listening intently, told him to stop. He quietly stood up and then slowly but surely placed each foot on both of the student’s knees until my friend was carrying the teacher’s entire body weight. The rest of us stared in abject fascination, appalled. As the teacher balanced on my friend’s knees, he then bounced up and down slightly. My friend was in tears.

I always took extra care not to mispronounce any Arabic word after that.

And one more:

Today, while in the elevator with a man, I noticed the fact of being in an elevator with a man. And not feeling nervous in the slightest. Or even noticing it, even vaguely registering it in the back of my mind. This is significant because I used to be terrified of getting into elevators in case men got on, and I wouldn’t enter elevators if there was a man already in there. And if ever, perchance, I happened to be alone with a man, trapped for another 30 seconds, I would near-panic.

The fear was sexual assault. And it wasn’t ungrounded. I wasn’t the only woman I knew who felt or acted this way about men and secluded spaces.

Read the blog. Read the posts collected there. And then link it, and the bloggers, as widely as you can. And take the time to think that of all the religions in the world, only one carries—and carries out—the death penalty for apostasy.