What can a former Muslim’s testimony show about Islam? 6 points

A testimony is good evidence that something happened to a person. When a woman says that she was beaten in her husband’s house while he quoted a verse, a reader who doubts that she was beaten has no ground. When a man says that his teacher told his class that other peoples were unclean, the sources do not say that no teacher ever said it. Muslim readers should believe such accounts where they describe harm, and say so.

A testimony is also good evidence of what was taught in a place. If many people from one school or one region report the same lesson, the lesson was taught there. Some of the accounts in such collections describe teaching in schools and mosques that is plainly contrary to the Quran’s verses on kindness and justice, as set out in the article on befriending non-Muslims. That teaching is a fact about those schools.

What the testimony shows in these respects is real, and a Muslim who answers it by denying that it happened has done a wrong to the speaker. Verdict: yes, a testimony shows what happened to the person and what was taught in their place.

A testimony names a cause: Islam. The writer lived inside a family, a village and a state, and the cause of harm may lie in any of them. The accounts in such collections come from many countries, among them Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh, Morocco and England, and they describe very different rules. In some the state enforces dress, in some a father does, in some the cause is a clan’s idea of honour.

The same books show that rules called Islamic change when a state changes its policy. Saudi Arabia lifted its ban on women driving in 2018, and in 2019 it let women over twenty-one apply for a passport without a guardian’s permission. This is stated from general knowledge and was not checked on a page for this article. If a rule can be dropped by decree, the rule is one of policy, and the testimony of a woman under it shows the policy.

A reader who wishes to know what the religion teaches has to ask what the Quran and the Prophet’s sayings give, and what the jurists made of them. That is what the other articles on this site do, taking each rule in turn. Where they find that the sources support the rule, they say so, and where they find that the rule is custom they say that too. Verdict: a testimony shows that something happened in a place. It does not show by itself which part of that place came from the faith.

A collection of testimonies by people who left is, by its nature, a collection of one kind of story. The editors of one such collection say that more than a hundred were gathered and a score included. They do not say how many came from people who had left for reasons that had nothing to do with violence, or from those who kept the faith after the same experiences.

A comparison needs the other side. Many people who suffered in a household that called itself Muslim stayed Muslims, and say that the cruelty was a betrayal of the religion. Many who entered Islam as adults describe a different experience, and the surveys of the Muslim world show a broad range of views on every question. The article on Muslims by the numbers gives what the surveys record, and the article on the fastest-growing religion deals with conversion.

A set of stories chosen for a purpose is a sample of those stories. It cannot give a rate, and it cannot say how typical any story is. Verdict: a collection of testimonies tells us that such lives exist. It cannot tell us how common they are.

Several accounts reach the same conclusion: the terrorists follow the true religion, and the peaceful majority are “pretend Muslims”. The conclusion is offered as a finding, and it is a rule of method. It says that where a Muslim is violent, he is an authentic one, and where he is peaceful, he is diluted. A rule that gives the answer before the evidence is looked at cannot be tested.

The sources give a way to ask the question. Who decides what the religion is? The Muslims of the early centuries decided it by the Quran, the Prophet’s sayings, and the consensus of scholars. Early on a group called the Kharijites decided that anyone who sinned was an unbeliever and could be killed. The Companions fought them, and the community condemned them, as the article on the Kharijites sets out. A modern group that uses the same logic is in that line, and it has no more claim to be the faith than they had.

The article on the data sets out what is known about who commits terrorist violence and who its victims are. It is also true that the militants quote verses, and a fair article answers that, as the article on the fighting verses does. Verdict: the claim that the violent are the faithful is a rule that excludes counter-evidence.

Some accounts offer a map of leaving: shock, then denial, confusion, guilt, disillusionment, anger, and finally calm. They present the map as a path from ignorance to enlightenment, and they say that believers who resist the arguments are in the stage of denial. It is a useful description of what it can feel like to lose a faith.

The map has a problem. It treats every response to an argument as a stage on the way to agreeing, so that a believer who rejects the argument is in denial, and one who accepts it is enlightened. An argument that cannot be refused without being diagnosed is not being offered for examination. The same map could be drawn in reverse for a person who comes to faith from unbelief, with the sceptic as the one in denial. It describes the shape of a change of mind, and does not decide who is right.

A Muslim reader can learn something from the map. Many who leave describe a stretch of being told not to ask, and the sources say the opposite: the Quran asks its hearers to think (3:190-191) and the faith as al-Fārūqī presents it takes counter-evidence seriously.^[1] Where a teacher said otherwise, he was wrong. Verdict: the stages describe an experience. They cannot be used to show that the religion is false.

Several accounts say the word “Islam” means submission and so is the opposite of peace. The first part is true. The second does not follow. The Arabic root s-l-m gives both islām (submission, giving oneself to God) and salām (peace, safety, soundness). The words are cousins. The lexicon entry for the root, shown on the Hawramani Arabic Lexicon site as Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon, gives salām as “Safety, security, immunity, or freedom, from faults, defects, imperfections”, and aslama as “he was, or became, resigned, or submissive”.^[2] The Quran uses the two words together.

It calls Paradise “the Home of Peace” (6:127) and says the greeting there is “Peace” (10:10).^[3] It says God guides to “the ways of peace” (5:16), and that the servants of the Merciful, when the ignorant address them harshly, “say [words of] peace” (25:63).^[4] It commands, “if they incline to peace, then incline to it [also]” (8:61), and it forbids saying to someone who offers a greeting of peace, “You are not a believer” (4:94).^[5] The Muslim greeting is as-salāmu ʿalaykum, “peace be upon you”. The Quran names God al-Salām in 59:23, a name the translation used here renders “the Perfection”.^[6]

None of this means that every Muslim is peaceful, or that every action done in Islam’s name is peaceful. The articles on whether Islam is a religion of peace and on jihad go into the harder verses. It does mean that the argument from the dictionary fails, since submission to God in the Quran is joined in its vocabulary to peace. Verdict: the word argument fails. The questions about violence have to be answered from the texts and the history.