moderne wohnzimmer braun

first of all, i thinkprobably you should talk to people about the organization,how it came about, maybe how you got there. i'm president [of the]ex-muslims of north america, the only ex-muslimorganization in the us and i'd say the only oneof its kind in the world, we're trying to build and empowerex-m communities. the idea is to change the dynamic where ex-m are in the shadows,

much like atheists werea few centuries ago, where nobody spoke up. there are lots of ex-m and in order to secure your rights,you need to be out there. we run support communities,we do advocacy, we have recorded videosabout the life of ex-muslims for other ex-muslims. understand that speaking out is okay, even after speaking out, you're okay.

we're doing a campus tour right now, we're going to schoolsaround the us and canada. again, the idea is to make it normalto meet an ex-m, be able to talk about religion without being accused of, say,far-right sentiments or things along those lines, where the idea thatwe can't criticize islam while standing up forthe civil liberties of muslims, is not envisioned generally.

people don't understand the differencebetween ideas and people. the people are great, we need tostand up for their liberties, but still also need to talk aboutthe problems within the ideology. i'm going to london next weekend and there's a really good chance, considering who i'm sitting on stage with, that topics surroundingthis will come up. exmna obviously focuses on north america.

is there a uk-european branchor similar organizations and how much do the missionsoverlap between? the situation in everycountry is different, so what they're doingis slightly different. we sort of advertise that we do meet-ups and try to get people to come. in the uk, the situationis a lot more tense, a lot more extremists there,so they don't advertise it, they do occur but more underground.

from an advocacy perspective, there's cemb with maryam namaziedoing advocacy-related work. similarly, there's a bunchof advocacy groups in germany, france, singapore and then a lot ofunderground communities in pretty much every country, in pakistan, jordan, egypt. they're a bit under the radar obviously because in a lot of those countries

you'll be killed just for speaking out. but they exist everywhere. wherever you have muslims, you'll find a decent amountof ex-m there, too. one of the things i want tounderstand a little better ... in the process, is -- you're workingtowards ex-muslim normalcy -- primarily for non-believers or, i mean ... we're focusing on non-believers. the idea that we started with

that people leaving and becomingchristian, bahai or other faiths, they have other outlets. atheists among themgenerally are completely alone. we want to providea community and empower them. but from the standpoint of islam,does it matter that much if you leave islam and becomeatheist, christian or buddhist? mu: no, you can't walk away.matt: you're done. we kind of say that with a smile but there's a difference betweenmuslims in dearborn, michigan,

who are doing reality showsand getting tattoos, and then muslims in the uk who ... i have friends in the ukwho are absolutely terrified that there is this attemptto impose sharia law in a gradual takeover, that the uk is going tofall to islam in the near future. i don't know how seriouslyto take those claims. but dealing with muslims and ex-muslims in non-islamic countriesis fundamentally different

from how it has to be dealt within iran, pakistan and jordan, where they're entrenchedin the government. yes, over there you can't speak uplike over here. so, having the privilege over here that the government isn't persecuting us it's sort of incumbent upon us to stand up and demand change here. so, muslims need to stand up for the rights of minoritieswithin their communities,

which is what we ex-m are,or gay people. but change can't happen over therebecause you get murdered. in pakistan right now, for this past year, they've been persecutingand arresting atheists. they've been finding them on facebook and somebody i knewwas arrested and tortured and he hasn't been heard ofin six months. and that's not an uncommon occurrence. there are people who view this

as an issue of reform. because if you're in the west, then you're at least passingly familiar with the way christianityhas worked and changed. i mean, you had christiansbasically running around, murdering whatever non-christiansincluding muslims and anybody else. you had periods of time where the church waseither explicitly or implicitly in charge of the government.

and during those times,dissent wasn't tolerated. and it took the protestant reformationand stuff like that to build a more enlightened culture that valued individual free speech, free expression andthe sanctity of beliefs. but the first thing we had to dowas get to a point where we stopped killing peoplewho just disagree with us. how do you make those first steps in countries that areabsolutely controlled by islam?

you first need to convincethe people on the ground, muslims that are there to support us, that whether supportingis wrong and immoral. and if you're coming froma religious perspective, it is morals from a religious perspective. you need to shake people loose of how deeply they careabout their religion, how sure they are aboutthe validity of [their] claims. so, a rise of atheism withinmuslim countries goes a long way.

having people that you personallyknow that are atheists lowers the bar if you wantedto kill somebody over it. so, while there are a lot of peoplethat want to speak out and we get e-mails from peopleevery day from around the world, empowering to speak out and empowering the onesover here to speak out, and largely it's a matterof the changing opinions of people about what it moral and what is not moral and putting away the ideathat morality or at least government

needs to derive from religious texts. going back to what you were saying about the europeanand christian side of it, they're different religions,so there are differences right there. in islam, dissent is far less tolerated because islam came after christianity. it's a part of it thatother religions are wrong and changing religionseven slightly is wrong, 'innovation' is a bad word,things like that,

so it's much harder to push for change. and within christianity, it's more of an 'inspired by god', within islam it is'the literal word of god', god actually relayed that word, there's no room for changing anything. so, it's a fundamentally different --from my perspective -- concept of wanting to reform islam. from, again my perspective,

it's easier to justget people to walk away. if you take something 100 % seriously and you show there are flaws,'this is wrong in some way', scientifically, morally,women's rights etc., it's much easier to walk away. very rarely have i founda conservative muslim that found the flaws and said, i will be a reformed muslim,a liberal muslim. when they see a flaw, they walk away.

this is similar to a point that i made many times over several years, that literal fundamentalist christians who believe that the earthis 6-12,000 years old and bla bla bla, the foundation is so rigidthat when you start to chip away at it, they are more likely to fall awayand become atheists. the liberal, moderate christians have kind of already dealtwith those issues and 'it's metaphor,this isn't to be taken seriously'.

and so it's much harder to attack. do we have any -- i mean, you'resaying you don't tend to see that -- but do we have, apart fromthe guys in dearborn, do we have liberal, modern ... i wouldn't agreewith the part about dearborn. a lot of people that are outwardlynot practicing to that extent, still believe in it. so, if somebody is drinking, they will say drinkingis wrong and immoral

but 'i'm too weak of a person'. i had a friend thatput on the hijab and took it off and when i asked her, 'why take it off?it is the word of god and the truth', her response was,'i'm too weak, i can't do this. this is the right and moral thingto do, i just can't do it.' there's a big difference between saying, 'this is wrongand that's why i don't care' versus 'i'm wrongand i'm doing it anyways'.

that raises a couple of concerns because we've had peoplecall into the show from the uk, terrified that islamis going to take over the uk. and then there are the argumentsthat are often made of 'oh well, practicing muslimsin countries that aren't islamic, they're all great and niceuntil they actually get control, then everything goes to hell'. the point that i want to get to here is when we talk about what people believe,

what they say they believeand what they do, those are sometimes threedifferent things. not just within islam, but anywhere. you came out with some statisticyesterday in your talk. we know in islamic countries how many people arein favour of stoning adulterers etc. i don't know if you havethat number off the cuff. 91 % of muslims in pakistanare pro religious law. the government should bebased on religious law.

76 % believe that peoplethat leave islam, people like us basically,should be killed. religious people are literally advocating for the murder of other people. how many will be moderates that will stand up and push back? i'm worried it's a very small number. so, if it's 71 % say they believe that apostates should be killed,

which we were talking about earlier, it seems to be consistentwith at least my understanding of the quran and many others, there's 71 % you say,they're in favour of that. what percentage of those people are saying it becausethey can't say the opposite for fear of their own life. and what percentage of those people who say and believe it

would actually support enacting itand participate? people that would participateare generally lower because it's a human thing. when taking a life, you understand that it's wrong in some way on a deep human level. i'd say a good chunkof those won't actually do it but even if 10 % would actually do it, that's 7.5 % of 200 mio. people.

a massive number. just in pakistan, not around the world. and if those are the ones predominantly in control of things, it almost doesn't matter if my grandmother is nevergoing to kill somebody but she's supporting a governmentand a regime that would. the other thing is that generally speaking, isyou're pushing back against that.

say there's 7.5 %that would actually do it and 7.5 % that say this is wrong. those 7.5 % that say it's wrong don't have the language or abilityto really push back because they have tonavigate the waters of apostasy and blasphemy laws themselves. pushing back against that,you're saying the quran or islam is wrong. the tools you have availableto push back are very limited. i guess that gets usto a couple of things.

because i love the factthat your organization is focused primarily onex-muslim normalcy and advocacy. you guys do videosand you're doing different languages and you have a different reach. we're doing that in english but subtitling themin different languages. i would think thatmaybe the long-term goal is to get enough out, open ex-muslimsin the north america area, that we can not only educatenon-muslims about these issues

but maybe, hopefullyget inroads even to places where we're censored, where they're not going to show -- you can't have access to youtube videos, you're not going to getfair and honest news reporting. how ... what is your view ofhow long it takes to get there? i ask this becausepeople ask me all the time, when's religion going to go away?that's even a bigger issue.

my concern, i'd love for allridiculous beliefs to go away, all harmful beliefs to go away. but i live in a country where even the most extremefundamentalist of any religion can't enact the sortof violence, censorship and murder of people who disagree. that's not true elsewhere. i don't know how we getover that hump a little bit. one bit of contextwe need to keep in mind

is that it took the protest,reformation was 5 centuries away, exactly 5 centuries. it took 5 centuries for us to get here and in between you had massive wars,millions of people died. talking about the ideologyand the issues within that provoked those wars -- won't be an easy journey,we need to understand it won't happen overnight either. we need to push for more people

to speak out and have more of these. we need to understandthat is a project in the order of decades,if not centuries. we need to have that kindof patience and understand that we need to side with the people standing up for the valueswe believe in: free speech, human rights,women's rights, whatever those values arethat are dear to us. it's not simply a matter of --

going back to the dearborn muslims -- that they are in fashion showsor drinking or whatever. are they standing upfor the rights of everybody, even people they deeply oppose? as an ex-m, i'm happyto stand up for the right of somebody to advocateagainst ex-muslims or even people that advocatethat ex-m should be killed. as long as they aren't actuallydoing the violence, they have the right to saywhat they want.

we should get to a pointwhere muslims are standing up and say, i stand for the rightof apostates to talk about islam, why they believe it's wrong and harmful. i'm going to throw you a kind of a little curveball here, who knows how this will go. what are we doing wrong? and how can we do it betterin dealing with this? i don't just mean like'former southern baptist',

but i mean the world. we're living in a time where the president of the us has something that's beencalled a 'muslim ban', i don't know if it's fair to call it,maybe, who knows -- but there's a lot of conversations and we talk aboutislamism, islamophobia, whether or not it's racisteven if we're going after an ideology. give me your thoughtson how to fix

all the ways we're doing it wrong so we can maybe do it better together. one of the things is that on the right and the leftwe're doing it wrong. i'd say the vast majority of peopleare doing it wrong. on the right obviously, banning people based on their bad ideas won't make those bad ideas go away. at worst you can say that we're pushing

the problems out to the world and we won't be affected because there's nobody here. but we already have 3-4 millionmuslims in america. the bigger issue isto change people's minds. we need to engage those ideas, when and why certain partsof those ideas are false or wrong. in order to do that we need to have these public, openand honest conversations.

so, when president obama said that islam is a religion of peace,that was a lie. if i said christianitywas a religion of peace, that would also be a lie. religions are much more complex than it is a religion of anything. so, we're willing tothrow these platitudes because we want to be nice, regardless of reality and truth.

that makes the job of peoplethat are trying to change things harder. islam has a bloody past,same as christianity, same as i'd say, any part of the world, no matter where you go. if you go back a few centuries, you'll find horrific things happening that was the state of humanity. in the muslim world, due to the fact that state and religious powerare intermingled,

they can whitewash all,you don't know anything about it. personally -- i'm from pakistan -- in 1971 pakistan had a civil war and half a millionbroke off into bangladesh. in that civil war about 3 millionpeople were murdered. it was a genocide. i grew up in pakistan,i did not know about it. never taught about it,never happened, nothing. i learned about it later on the internet.

i met bangladeshi peoplethat were obviously upset i'm pakistani because of what happened. if you can control the truthto such an extent, change can't happen. by us not willing to talkabout the problems, we're making it worse. when obama saysislam is a religion of peace or when newspapers refuseto cover the problems with islam, they're aiding and abetting censorship

and the problems within islam,from my perspective. apart from a really slow sortof slow-burn infiltration, we see this problem not justwith islamic countries, we see this with authoritarian regimeslike in north korea, where you basically don't haveaccess to the information. you're not going to find out what the rest of the world knows. let's say you live in one of those places and they start givinggovernment-approved internet access.

we already know that you canthrow somebody in a lab coat and people think they're doctors and you should listen to them. we know there's a gazillionwebsites out there that are legitimately fake news, they look like a news source but they're actually putting outbad information. if the governments arein these positions of control, apart from a slow burnwith this gradual change from within,

which would seem to take almost forever because you're bucking a status quo -- you can even be convincedthat you live in the perfect land because you've been lied toabout what 'perfect' is -- what's the likelihood thatactually armed conflict is necessary and would it actually change anything? from my perspective, it's not necessary. i'm a bit of an optimist. i believe in the better angelsof our nature.

i have seen people change just by argumentation very rapidlywithin the course of months. there's no reason that wouldn'thappen in the muslim world as well. the good and bad thing isabout the muslim world, it's not technologicallyadvanced or rich enough to have those kinds of controls. in pakistan they want to prevent, say, somebody from drawing mohammed, so they ban this site or that site.

at one point they banned facebook,at another point twitter. but there are too many sites,too much on the internet and they don't have the resourcesto do a blanket ban. they do read the newsand international sources and it changes their opinion. so if we're talking about it honestly, and about certain issuesthat happened in the past, they would read about themand think that we are wrong and we're lying about it.

but they can look them up themselves. even within islamic texts, islamic historiesattest to all these things. we just need to point and say,look at it yourself. i have a thought and this may be a fantasy. but if you could set up a website that constantly redirectedsuch that it would be difficult to block, do you think there's any benefit

in perhaps doing an information campaign like, fly over andjust drop leaflets everywhere that point everybody to this website, that the governmentcan't do anything about it? i don't think the governmentthe biggest issue [here]. the bigger issue is thathaving conversations at all. i'd say saudi-arabia and iran are good at blockinginformation from getting in but there're about 50other countries that are around.

they can get information directly. a lot of the ex-m that i know left because of atheist talksand atheist books. i mentioned that richard dawkins' book was translated into arabic unauthorized and 10 mio. people downloaded it. as long as we're pushing honestlyagainst what the issues are, the information will get there. we just need to be speaking about it more

and stop empowering dishonest muslims. if a significant percentage of muslims are conservative enoughto want to defend their religion over human rights,that's the rhetoric you're going to get. if hijab is e.g. normalized as a good thing within muslim communities, the people in muslimcommunities pushing forward are going to be peoplethat agree with that and push the narrative forward.

we can evaluate the idea that women need to becovered up is a bad idea in the sense of -- the bottom line iswomen need to do whatever they want to do. we can push back againstall of these narratives that are being pushed out without needing to bea muslim or anything. when we're looking atthe mormon church and polygamy within the mormon church,

we don't need to be a mormonto understand why this is wrong. most of these things are very objective and you can point out why they're wrong and you can promote the truth. for whatever sad reason in the west a lot of people that are being promoted are people trying to defend islam instead of trying to defend muslims. just for the people who are watching,

yes, i'm asking questions that i mayalready know muhammad's answer to but it's for your benefitbecause there's frustration all around. there's frustration onwhether they're bad ideas, whether it comes from islam,christianity or scientology or hinduism or whatever. when are they[and] religion going to go away, is it going to end in our lifetime? and then there's a darker side to this where, 'oh, we don't need tospend any time worrying about,

you know, encroachmentof christianity in the us because islam is thegreatest threat worldwide'. i'll let you chime in on thisbecause i've pointed out that while it may be the case that islam is thegreatest threat worldwide, that doesn't mean it'sthe greatest threat in austin, texas or in my living room or wherever. even if it were,that doesn't necessarily mean that my resources can only be devoted

to the thing that's the biggest threat. from your perspective, given that we have terror attacks and people are -- obama was afraid to say --radical islamic terrorist and other people are using that to basically take every brown person and make them the new enemy. where are we on the clockof danger from islam?

because when we get people to call us, there was a callera month or so ago, maybe two, who was basically warning americansthat we're all too naive and his country was goingto hell in a handbasket because of how theywere dealing with islam. i don't know how much of that's accurate, i'm not convincedthat it could happen here but i've had people, including ex-m, who say that it essentiallycan happen here

because you don't haveto change the government or the constitution. you build up little pocketswhere you're implementing your stuff, eventually the policeare afraid to go there then it spreads and spreads. how much danger is there versus how much are we amplifying danger? and is talking about the danger itself more of a problem thanjust encouraging good ideas?

i wouldn't say it's a problemtalking about the danger, [but] about being accurate. it's very easy to be hyperbolicin either direction, where people say there is no problem,everything's wonderful, [others] say everything's horrible,the world is coming to an end, yesterday was the endof the world, that sort. we need to be carefulthat we're talking about the truth. but obviously there are issues. if you have e.g. 10 % of a population,

regardless of [their] interest group, there'll be significant political pressure to cater to the desires of that group,whatever it may be. regardless of what islam is or isn't, we have a certain percentagedefending that idea and putting pressureon politicians to conform to that. you'll have a less of a pushback, the government spendingcan be modified, things like that will happen.

so we need to be careful about it because that is common in any government, and in itself, i'd saya flaw of democracy. on the one hand, we depend upon people, but on the other hand,people can destroy the government, too. i'm not as concerned about muslimscoming up and doing things as that people, in order to wintheir vote, start doing things. but the question that was listed here, they wanted to discusschristianity versus islam in africa.

i know you're focusedon north america stuff, but you're tunedto the pulse of a lot of stuff. i don't know what his question is. if you have somethingthat you want to mention with regard to islam in africa, go for it. a little controversial perhaps, but often we talk about how the west -- from a christian perspective --is affecting africa

and say, the issue of gay rights,things like that, evangelicals are pushingchristian ideology into africa and are damaging thelocal countries over there. the same thing is happening fromthe islamic faith, too. a lot of african countrieswere more liberal 30, 40 years ago, have had an influx of billions of dollars coming from golf countries,islamic countries, trying to radicalize them and they've succeeded to a great extent.

i have many friends from somalia. if you talk about their parents, that generation was very liberal,outwardly at the very least, and within their generation,it has changed completely. everybody covers,nobody talks against islam, music does not really existin that way anymore, and within 30 or 40 years,the environment changed. it's not just that christiansare pushing bad ideas into africa, so are muslims.

some of it is all about poverty. a poor country is easy to control by spending money on them. i'm not a fan of internet memes,the little graphics with [...] because i think thatthey oversimplify things. while they can on occasion be really good starting pointsfor conversation, i think too many people view them as the end of the conversation.

and i've seen some memes. you had a slide there in your talk which i really liked but it reminded meof another one i had seen where it was, i think,a women's football team from 30-40 years agoand then the one from now. and 30-40 years ago they're not covered and now they're completely covered. you talked about this,we just talked about africa. is it a correct perceptionthat there's been

in a relatively short time worldwide a massive shift backto more conservatism? yes. across the boardin every muslim country that i've read aboutand know people from. it started, i think, in the 70s. there're various dominoes unrelated, in my opinion, that went down. a lot of it was,there was tension between arab nationalism and islamism.

arab nationalism -- egypt wasthe champion of arab nationalism -- sort of fell after the warwith israel, they lost twice. they lost their prestige in the world. as a result, islamism became more popular. and then you had theiranian revolution happen and similarly in pakistan,this genocide that i mentioned. and for clarity, because wementioned islamism twice, we probably ought to define it, so that it's distinct for the ...

the idea is basically thatyour state should be modelled on islam, that law should conform to islam, that islam is -- in the words ofthe muslim brotherhood -- the 'answer'. so basically, the difference betweensomething you practice at home versus something that you'repushing outward to the state. and i'm in an interview,by all means, continue there that this recent change --and you're saying this is essentiallyin every muslim country. we've seen this and there'sa bunch of different factors.

are there ways to perhapsidentify some of those factors and try to correct for them -- apart from just changing minds, which i'm -- trust me,let's change everybody's mind and let's have conversations, i'm not into punching peopleor advocating violence or anything -- but if we knew that thiswas one of the key dominoes, is there any chance to find those out and perhaps repair them

to fundamentally changerelationships between countries? i don't think so, not in that way. in the sense that saudi foreign policy is based on exporting islam because that gives them more prestige. we can work on isolating saudi arabia but until that happens,that is their foreign policy, they'll keep implementing that, we can't really stop that.

the other thing is that a lot of these countries are spending tens,hundreds of billions of dollars around the world,trying to increase conservatism. and it's working. we aren't doing that. there's no -- ex-maren't powerful enough to counter that kind of money. so, we freethinkers or anybody else

that is motivated to fight backagainst conservative islam need to help empower groupsthat are doing this. even within the us, saudi arabia has investedtens of billions of dollars in colleges in various islamic departments. if you read a lot of those publications, they tend to be very apologist,defending islam. that's a viable wayyou can infiltrate academia by spending money.

other groups do that, too. you have liberty universityor other universities. if we're not at leasteven trying to push back both by pointing out where the flaws are or matching their expenditures,we will lose that argument. and not to rile upthe conspiracy theorist base that may be watching these clips, what about somethinglike the united nations? their human rights councilhas been just an embarrassment.

some of the greatesthuman rights violators are on the human rights ... saudi arabia wasthe president of the council. we can talk all day long about how the us andsaudi arabia are allies and how they're essentiallypropping up this stuff. if in this fictional utopiathat i want to create the un actually built upand did human rights correctly, would imposing sanctionson those countries,

is there anything that theycould potentially even do, or is this idea of havinga un take on human rights essentially useless? all these non-binding resolutions, the countries whowant to participate, can. is there anything thatcould even ... i think the un is powerful enough. individual governmentsare powerful enough and when they support a direction

the un is taking,then action can happen. if there is no governmentbacking what the un wants, the un is just bureaucrats.they can't do anything. if we want to backa certain foreign policy initiative that lines up with whatwe want in these issues, we can. going back to the free speech, a lot of muslim countries,not all of them, have blasphemy laws. pushing back, we can put sanctions, make lives for peoplethat do certain things difficult,

also technologically help them, by creating technology and making technologyavailable to dissidents, where they can speak out with a governmentthat can't monitor them. instead we're sending them the equipment to monitor their people. i want to get out some callers here but first of all, giveeverybody information

on they can contact you, how they can find out aboutex-muslims of north america and if they're not in north america, because this showpeople are watching all around the world, what recommendationsyou'd have for, like ... if you're an atheist bloggerin bangladesh, what the hell do you do? who you reach out to? first off, you stay safe.

in a muslim country,stay safe. stay anonymous. unless you're extremely confident you can get away in a bad situation. there are un nationals, for example, that have the privilegethat if something bad happens, they can run away. if you're a local,you won't have that privilege. above all, i'd say be safe. but speak out, the more you [...]

everybody in a local situation [knows] more of what'sgoing on in that country. if a protest in bangladeshis related to something, you're writing abouthow that relates to islam, i can't do that over here.i don't have that context. so we need peoplein every country speaking out. i was mentioning on our end, we're doing a campus tour, you can read about it:exmuslimtour.com.

our own organization's website is:exmna.org and i'm available on twitter,if you have any questions, @motheatheist is my twitter handle.

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