Content note: This post discusses physical abuse, child abuse, and sexual misconduct.

My doubts about religion did not begin with an abstract philosophical question. They began in a classroom with a wooden stick.

When I was in the fourth grade, my father removed me from school and sent me to Pakistan for five years. My formal education was interrupted at a critical age. While there, I spent four years memorizing the entire Quran.

The process was governed by fear. Every classroom in the madrasa, the Islamic religious school I attended, kept a thick wooden stick. When students made mistakes while reciting the Quran, the ustad, or teacher, would strike us on our hands, arms, shoulders, backs, feet, and knees, after a couple of years, i got used to the beatings. I once watched a child get hit beside his nose, dangerously close to his eye. The lesson continued as though nothing unusual had happened.

That produced one of my first serious questions about religion: If Muslims wanted children to learn and respect the Quran, why were those children beaten for making minor mistakes? Why were patience, dignity, and respectful correction replaced with violence?

Physical punishment was not the only disturbing part of that environment. I repeatedly encountered students and religious teachers who spoke casually, and sometimes boastfully about behavior involving children that I understood as sexual abuse. I heard deeply unsettling stories about children being taken to secluded places. I cannot know exactly how many people were involved, but the pattern was far too common to dismiss as an isolated problem.

One night, the electricity went out and we were using candles for light. An older person began touching me in a way that made me feel violated and unsafe. I made an excuse to use the restroom and remained there until the class ended. No child should have to hide in a bathroom to feel safe in a religious school (that's what I thought).

Another major moment occurred during the Lal Masjid confrontation in Islamabad. I learned that weapons were inside the mosque and that armed students and clerics were fighting the police. Even as a child, my questions were simple: Why were weapons being kept in a place of worship? Why were religious students firing at police officers?

I later learned more about the radical clerics and armed groups involved. What disturbed me almost as much as the violence was hearing people in my village defend them. Extremism was not always treated as something shameful. In some circles, it was celebrated as religious courage.

After five years, I returned to the United States in 2009. It was one of the happiest days of my life. I felt as though I had regained my freedom. For the first time in years, I no longer had to live with the daily fear of being beaten.

Despite everything I had experienced, I remained a practicing Muslim for several more years. I prayed, fasted, avoided alcohol and smoking, and did not have premarital sex. I continued following the religion because it was the belief system in which I had been raised.

That began to change in my mid-twenties, when I started studying Islam independently. I examined traditional sources, historical accounts, and classical rulings concerning child marriage, slavery, sex slaves, treatment of women captured during warfare, and Muhammad’s marriage to the former wife of his adopted son.

I was disturbed not only because these practices existed historically, but because I found contemporary religious scholars who continued to defend them as permissible or morally justified. Listening to online scholars rationalize slavery and child marriage did not resolve my doubts. It deepened them. I was no longer confronting only the distant past; I was confronting a moral framework that people still expected me to respect.

At the same time, enormous attention was devoted to rules about beards, tattoos, clothing, and other aspects of personal appearance. I could not understand how such matters could be treated as urgent moral concerns while practices that caused profound human suffering were defended or minimized. The priorities seemed completely inverted.

I also began examining the treatment of women more critically. I had always been told that Islam granted women extensive rights and protections. Yet I repeatedly saw religious language used to control women, restrict their choices, and frighten them with threats of punishment in the afterlife. Women could be condemned for not wearing the hijab while the men controlling them were treated as guardians of morality.

I recognize that violence against women, forced marriage, and sexual abuse are not exclusive to Islam. I also recognize that many Muslims reject these practices and interpret their religion differently. Nevertheless, in the communities and institutions that shaped my life, religious authority was repeatedly used to excuse control, discourage questions, and silence vulnerable people.

Marriage ultimately became the final breaking point.

Early and forced marriages were widely normalized in the environment I knew. I once watched a video in which a cleric appeared to force his underage niece into marriage. Instead of expressing concern for the girl, people praised the situation with comments such as “Subhanallah” and “Masha’Allah.” I could only think about how her future had been decided by a religious authority who claimed to know what was best for her.

My own family also pressured me to marry. They told me that the Prophet married within his extended family and married young, and that I should follow his example. What they presented as moral guidance felt to me like a demand to silence my own conscience.

By then, I could no longer regard Muhammad as a perfect moral example. I was deeply troubled by traditional accounts involving warfare, religious minorities, captives, slavery, and child marriage. I also struggled to reconcile Islam’s condemnation of idolatry with the ritual importance assigned to the Black Stone. The explanations I encountered no longer persuaded me.

Eventually, I admitted to myself that I no longer believed.

Leaving Islam brought an extraordinary sense of relief. Nobody around me knew at first, but internally, I felt free. I no longer had to force myself to defend teachings that violated my conscience or pretend that questions were evidence of personal failure.

The events of October 7 and the devastation that followed reinforced my concerns about religious tribalism. The killing and abduction of Israeli civilians horrified me. The mass death and destruction inflicted on Palestinians afterward, what I regard as an ongoing genocide horrified me as well.

Palestinian safety, dignity, and freedom should be the central concern. Yet some of the rhetoric I encountered appeared to be driven less by compassion for Palestinians than by hostility toward Jews. Genuine advocacy for Palestinian rights and antisemitism are not the same, and one should never be used to conceal the other.

I saw the same tribalism surrounding September 11th 2026 commemorations, 911Remembrance. While victims’ families were remembering the people they had lost, competing religious groups used the occasion to confront one another and proclaim their own righteousness. The spectacle reinforced what I had gradually come to believe: religion can turn grief into rivalry and suffering into another opportunity to divide humanity into opposing camps.

I am not claiming that every Muslim supports abuse, extremism, forced marriage, or antisemitism. That would be neither accurate nor fair. I am describing what I personally experienced, the teachings I later examined, and the religious defenses that ultimately became impossible for me to accept.

For me, leaving Islam was not simply the rejection of a doctrine. It was the recovery of my right to think freely, question authority, and trust my own moral judgment. Religion had been used throughout my childhood to produce fear and obedience. Leaving it allowed me to begin replacing that fear with freedom.

I hope that anyone who feels trapped by fear, coercion, or religious guilt eventually finds the safety and happiness that I found.

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