The Humanist Struggle: A Saudi Arabia Perspective

by Zac Alarayyis

Saudi Arabia is one of 13 countries where leaving Islam is punishable by death. Leaving Islam here is not limited to publicly announcing one's rejection of the faith, it also includes any contradiction in expression or behaviour to the state doctrine of Wahhabism, which is an extremely strict interpretation of Sunni Islam. In a country where even religious clerics with doctrinal differences to the state ideology, journalists who criticize religiously mandated practices like the death penalty, get disappeared, are sentenced to long prison times, and too often sentenced to death, apostasy law is the Swiss army knife at the disposal of the Islamic autocrat to shut down dissent.

In 2012 a blogger and public figure named Raif Badawi was arrested and sentenced to death for apostasy. This is a prime example of the nefarious use of this political tool. Badawi, according to all known records, does consider himself a Muslim. His crime was that he has spoken out for secularism and human rights: for religious freedom, for women's liberation, and against the death penalty, all red lines for the Saudi state. After immense international pressure and a campaign led by his wife in Canada, this sentence was commuted to 1,000 lashes in public and 10 years in prison. He has been dragged and tortured in public, an attempt has been made on his life at least once, and remains in prison to this day.

Even as a believing Muslim I was very sympathetic about the cases of people like Raif Badawi and I did occasionally express myself about it. I eventually stopped believing and left Islam in 2013 and in the years after that, I made an unwise habit of expressing many nontraditional social and political views that I had adopted, even on social media, like interests in veganism and civil rights. More bold expressions were reserved for my anonymous Twitter persona. People in and outside my family started calling me an apostate as a result I had to cut whole sections of my family out of my life after an incident that included a heated discussion and a murder threat against me. People in this part of the world find this kind of thing hard to understand because they have a fundamentally different view of religion. In communities like mine, religion is not just an ethnic or social identity, it's not just belief in God and divine order, it is an all-encompassing system that dictates one's political and social beliefs, lifestyle, even personal relationships. Not conforming makes you an apostate. Here's a typical example of how the logical sequence, better said how the mind control mechanism of the terror state works:

A person suggests that women should have the right to get married without the permission of her father >

The religious establishment presents a canonized saying of the prophet that contradicts this suggestion >

The person making the suggestion is given an ultimatum, to either admit they were wrong or admit to contradicting what is considered a necessarily known doctrine of the religion >

If they choose the latter option they run the risk of being called an apostate, and so to ensure their safety they learn to know their place and stay quiet, as their country is not one where they are entitled to an opinion.

This process is applicable to pretty much any unorthodox opinion. It's actually an ingenious and age-old method of stifling dissent and discussion that's inexpedient for the establishment, to simply accuse one's interlocutor not of disagreeing with oneself, but with God, thereby using God as a shield and making him responsible for the coming retribution.

With this background in mind, there are few things more dangerous there than rejecting the state religion, so I made sure not to tell more than a handful of people I trust about my apostasy, still, over the years I was threatened with being outed, but it thankfully never came to that actually happening. Here I can count myself lucky because I know apostates who were blackmailed into degrading acts, people who were beaten by their own families, people who have been imprisoned and tortured by the state for failing to fall in line with the state ideology.

In 2018 I managed to get to Germany to study, but I was on a temporary visa and I had to do some paperwork back in Saudi Arabia. I felt unsafe with the prospect as things there were getting worse, the crown prince was leading a new crackdown that was alarming even by Saudi standards. In this period all prominent women's rights activists in the country were either arrested or disappeared, the prince's advisor was encouraging Twitter users to spy on and report one another for any expressions critical of the regime, people were arrested and made to disappear for anonymous Tweets, due to what was later discovered to be a security breach in the servers. Assassinations and mass executions were on the daily. By January 2019 I had come to accept that it's not and probably won't ever be safe for me to go back to Saudi Arabia.

I am one of hundreds in exile who have lost hope in the idea of moving positive change and pursuing freedom within our country and are doing what we can to organize abroad. Every day I wake up in my new home I am thankful for the immense privilege I have, that of freedom and safety, a scarce resource in our world that must be made use of to carry the lights of giants for future generations, for history, of great men and women who have sacrificed everything for our nation, for our most basic rights and freedoms as human beings, and that cannot be done from within the police state anymore. Sacrifice has its place and is incredibly noble, perhaps something for braver and more noble men and women than myself, but by itself, without their lights being carried across the world, sacrifice will be buried and forgotten. That's what the state is hoping for after all.

As an echo to the stifled masses on the inside, the Saudi diaspora is organizing in the free world to have their voices heard, their demands considered. In the past decade alone, groupings such as the European Saudi Organization For Human Rights, the Saudi Diaspora Association, and the National Assembly Party have emerged for this purpose. Despite differences in our political visions, it is clear to all of us that things cannot be allowed to go on as they are. Through collective international action, Raif Badawi's life was saved and the women's right's activist Loujain Alhathloul was released from prison after many restless lobbying campaigns. Still, a lot more has to be done in terms of structural change and religious freedom is at the core of it, so I am hoping to see the movement going in this direction in a more focused and coordinated way. My plea to the citizens of the free world is very simple: pay attention, because it really can save lives.