Leaving Islam for Atheism, and Finding a Much-Needed Place Among Peers
Mark Oppenheimer reports in The New York Times on women who have taken the “last, often painful, step” of publicly leaving Islam. “I couldn’t handle the cognitive dissonance anymore,” says Sadaf Ali, a founder of Ex-Muslims of North America, “…but I didn’t go around telling my parents.” The process of leaving a family faith “can be especially difficult and isolating for women who have grown up Muslim,” Oppenheimer writes, because so few have publicly done so.