The Devil We Don't Know by Nonie Darwish

Author:Nonie Darwish
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781118197912
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2012-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

Muslim leaders today can no longer contain their fear about the growing numbers of people becoming disillusioned with Islam. This topic was recently openly discussed in the Arab media. The site aljazeera.net published an interview with Islamic cleric Ahmad Al Qataani, who expressed deep fears: “In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity. Every day, 16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity. Every year, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity.”5

I think his claim that 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity annually is an exaggeration, but we can never know the exact number, because most converts do so secretly. Yet there is undoubtedly a strong movement to silently leave Islam, perhaps a few million people annually. The apostasy movement today is unprecedented in Islamic history, ever since the seventh-century Riddah Wars were won by Muslims.

The recent exodus out of Islam is no longer exclusively made up of intellectuals, but now includes average Muslims. They are leaving Islam to embrace other religions, especially Christianity. The attacks of 9/11 accelerated this exodus, because it forced many Muslims to reevaluate their religion and what it really says. They have seen how it has not led them to a loving God but to desperation, ignorance, chaos, poverty, and war.

Although Muslims assert that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world, they fully understand that such numbers are inflated and are not due to Western infatuation with Islam, but instead to the high birthrate of Muslims. Another reason that, statistically, Islam appears to be spreading rapidly is because apostates and nonpracticing Muslims are also counted as Muslims.

The courage of former Muslims was bolstered in 2008 by the public conversion of a prominent Muslim journalist in Italy, Egyptian-born Magdi Allam, who was publicly baptized by Pope Benedict. Allam said,

I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a “moderate Islam,” assuming the responsibility of exposing themselves in the first person in denouncing Islamic extremism and terrorism, ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Quran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.6

The plight of former Muslims in the West drew the world's attention when in the summer of 2009 a seventeen-year-old Muslim girl in Ohio, Rifqa Bary, ran away from home. Her father had threatened to kill her on discovering that she had secretly converted to Christianity. Her family mosque, Noor Mosque, had uncovered the story of her conversion and warned her parents to do something. When Rifqa's father threatened to kill her, she was forced to seek refuge at a church in Florida. Her family, with the help of the Council on American Islamic Relations, fought her in court for several months, after which she lived in a foster home until she turned eighteen. During Rifqa's legal and emotional ordeal, she also received death threats from her home country of Sri Lanka.

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