I have immense admiration for those who leave Islam either to find another faith path that is better for them or to become atheists. I have this admiration because I know that unlike those who leave Christianity or Judaism, which can be done quite easily and without too much fuss, those who leave Islam can face violent retribution from believing Muslims for doing so. Indeed it was the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood Yusuf al-Qaradawi who once was said to have stated that: “If they [Muslims] had gotten rid of the punishment [often death] for apostasy, Islam would not exist today.”

It is because so many Muslims are kept in Islam out of fear which is why I make the moral separation between individual Muslims and the ideology of Islam. Whilst Islam is in my view a bad spiritual and political path, individual Muslims may well be following this path with great reluctance and therefore should not be judged as harshly as the ideology that they may unwillingly follow out of fear.

Those who leave Islam are incredibly brave as having grown up within Islam they would have known of the punishments for leaving Islam, but they leave Islam anyway.

I’ve been watching more and more Harris Sultan videos of late and I come across one recently that not only told me a great deal about my own nation and how racism has to a very great extent been eradicated but which also gave me hope that one day the vice like grip that Islam has on Pakistan will be loosened.

The video below shows Mr Sultan speaking with a Hindu caller to his YouTube channel about atheism, racism and Islam and Mr Sultan remarked how little racism he had encountered in England even in areas that were not exactly racially mixed. He said that he went out into the English countryside and wandered around with a camera and he didn’t get any stares from people because of his race. People treated him as an equal which is how it should be.  He’s right that things were not always like this, but he’s also correct in saying that things have improved.

The other thing that caught my attention was his comments on Pakistan. Now having studied this benighted nation and written about it on a great number of occasions, I know that it’s a complete craphole, dominated by some of the worst forms of Islam on the planet. However even there Mr Sultan said there was a growing movement of people choosing to abandon Islam despite the country having some horrifically harsh punishments for doing so. Numerically the number of atheists who were formerly Muslims is quite small, according to some figures I’ve seen roughly two percent as of 2012 but that was up from 1 percent in 2005. Later figures are not available possibly because no reliable surveys have been done but also because people fear declaring themselves as atheists there.

However I suspect that Mr Sultan is correct and that atheism and apostasy from Islam is growing and might even be higher now than the 2012 figure of two percent.

Watch the video from Mr Sultan below it is both very interesting and quite hopeful.