28
Nadia (Morocco)
I left Islam not as a reaction against an Islamic fundamentalist or a restrictive upbringing. I left Islam for the simple fact that the religion is not logical, and I am by nature a very logical person. My parents were Moroccan immigrants to the United States. They loved America, but they also loved Islam. I was raised to be a Muslim, but in a very loving fashion. I wore a hijah, but I also wore typical American clothes-blue jeans and polo shirts. As a teenager, I was very proud to be a Muslim. It made me distinct from my classmates. I went so far as to believe that it made me superior. I reveled in the fact that I belonged to the "true" religion and that my religion held a monopoly on the word of God.
Around age twenty-five, I decided that I wanted to get married. Of course, I had to marry another Muslim. I did not have the freedom to marry outside of my faith, like Muslim men can do. I traveled back to my parents' homeland in search of a husband. It did not take me long to fall in love and marry a young man of my age. At first, he seemed to accept my "American" ways. However, before long he started to encourage me to change how I dressed, how I spoke, how I looked at people, how I ate, how I thought. The message was: You are not a good Muslim woman. He thought I was too forward and that I had no shame because I would say hello to his friends on the street. He almost died when I went so far as to shake hands with an American man I met one day. He was horrified that my shirts sometimes left a glimpse of my collarbone or that you could see the shape of my legs through my linen skirts.
It did not stop with my dress, though. He did not like me to watch singers or romantic shows on TV. He did not like me listening to love songs. And he almost fainted when I explained the theory of evolution to him. He began to preach to me about what Islam truly was. I listened. And then I read. I was sure I would prove to him that he didn't understand what Islam was at all. To my utter shock, I found out that it was I who didn't have a clue about Islam. Islam slowly transformed itself in front of my eyes from a benign, comforting faith to a demoralizing, vindictive cult. I kept trying to reassess my view. But the more I read the Koran, the more I realized that God could never have written those words.
I thought about divorcing my controlling husband, but despite his Hitler-like qualities, I am still terribly in love with him. I am sure that if he finds out that I am an apostate, he will kill me. Literally. So every day, I go through the ritual motions that the religion requires, disguising my true feelings of revulsion for the hate that Islam preaches. I did make one concession to my feelings when my husband and I moved to the United States: I took off my hijab. My husband almost went into seizures, but he hasn't been able to get that horrid piece of material back on my head again. To this day, I enjoy the feeling of the wind blowing through my hair, reminding me that although my life is repressed, my mind is not.