Adil Zeshan 

EX-MUSLIMS HAVE a bad rep. In Muslim circles, those ad hominems fly thick and fast when even mere mention is made of their existence. For instance, numerous "progressive" Muslim blogs, while having achieved much respect across the blogosphere, happily take up this more regressive attitude when discussing former Muslims. Alas, many conspiratorial Muslims generally demonise their "fallen" brothers and sisters both in public and in private, as if they were secret agents constantly scheming and plotting away, with each and every one briefed and sent by the devil himself.

But ex-Muslims are people. And most of them are very good, caring people. Many of them have families and friends who remain Muslims, but, of course, still care just as much about them, if not more. And one big reason for ex-Muslims' even deeper empathy with their Muslim families and friends is their worry about what manner of dark alleys the faith will lead them to. Many things can be said about ex-Muslims but at the end of the day, while they may have enduring disputes with central aspects of Islam itself, they are as pro-Muslim as one can get.

One Muslim critique of the ex-Muslim stance is that the primary identity of the latter is de facto negative i.e. apostates go around parading themselves as being not of Islam. For ex-Muslims, it may or may not be true that it is primary (whatever that means), but it is not the whole. The act of renunciation is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to enter the ranks of the enlightened. Being an ex-Muslim is a starting identity, not an end point in itself; it is the undertaking of a journey, the mere contemplation of which invites outright fear for practising Muslims. Those who have intellectually deconverted from Islam tend to do so on grounds that their former faith restricts their outlook on exploring more humanistic, life-affirming identities. As a result, - and here I hijack a tired-sounding cliche - ex-Muslims constitute a mosaic, not a monolith.

For most religions, while defecting from the ranks of believers does demand some price to be suffered by the disaffected individual, it is usually not a very heavy one. In such cases, a decision to abandon the faith tells you little that is significant about the person defecting since the religion itself is relatively non-strict with regards to exit. With Islam, however, the command to stay within the faith is done under pain of death. Ex-Muslims do not have the luxury of fantasising about their prospects of public deconversion, because they do not suffer deluded notions of Islam being inherently peaceful. As a result, the ex-Muslim label conveys something significant about the intellectual courage of someone who has begun a journey under that starting identity.