Malhar Mali: Can you tell us about your journey from being a believer to leaving your faith?
Sarah Haider: As with most people who leave, it started long before I knew it had begun. I started questioning parts of the faith, but I thought that was just the natural process of getting to know my religion, and I blamed a lot of my misunderstandings on the way I was taught Islam. I thought I just needed better teachers, books, and resources so that I could understand it correctly. In that sense I didn’t know I was on the path to leaving religion. I thought I was on the path to better understanding it.
But then I started looking into the scripture myself, which is to say, I read the Quran directly and I read the Hadith directly. Judging for myself I realized it really wasn’t the religion I thought it was. It wasn’t a lot of the things I had been taught — I was taught it was a religion that promoted women’s rights, for example, and that it was more beneficial to women than any other religion.
The post Sarah Haider on Leaving Islam, Changing Liberals’ Minds, and Ex-Muslims of North America appeared first on Ex-Muslims of North America.