Disenchanted Arab Women: Leaving Islam in the Age of Social Media

Theoretical Background

Over the past two decades, scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa has focused on exploring piety and religious commitment (Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006; Jouili and Amir-Moazami 2006), so much so that the experiences of malaise, moral rejection, or intellectual incompatibility with religion have remained largely unthinkable. While several scholars have sought to address this gap in the literature (Schielke 2012; Van Nieuwkerk 2021; Cottee 2015; Elsässer 2021; Richter 2021), prevailing academic narratives continue to centre religious commitment and piety as the normative framework for understanding individuals in Muslim-majority contexts, such that when analysing ‘native testimonials’ by Muslim and nonreligious women who have experienced a sense of malaise within Islam, Mahmood dismisses such accounts as narratives fraught with orientalist tropes, arguing that they ‘have been handsomely rewarded by conservative political parties’ in the United States to serve the civilisational clash narrative between Islam and the West. Reformist voices, too, are often perceived as part of this imperial project (Mahmood 2006: 329). Within this framework, discontent, moral criticism, and the rejection of Islam are not examined as independent phenomena emerging from within Muslim-majority contexts, and in relation to lived reality, but are instead interpreted primarily through their relationship to the West. When ‘native testimonials’ are analysed through the lens of individuals who have aligned themselves with the conservative right, nonreligious discourse is thereby reduced to an act of political betrayal, financial opportunism, or ideological complicity with imperialist agendas. This tendency to frame nonreligion and critical Muslim voices in relation to the West and Western politics, while situating religiosity firmly within local contexts, implicitly positions nonreligion as an inauthentic, Western-imposed phenomenon rather than as a discourse that can emerge organically from deep engagement with Islam. The nonreligious account is thus placed under suspicion, accused of betrayal, and framed as providing ‘the cultural rationale’ for imperialist interventions (Mahmood 2008: 2001). This perspective makes the study of nonreligion in Muslim-majority contexts particularly challenging, as it forecloses the possibility of understanding nonreligiosity on its own terms. It erases the cognitive and affective motivations underlying nonreligious expression and flattens the plurality of political positionalities of nonreligious individuals. While it is essential to critically analyse the instrumentalisation of minority voices within hegemonic imperialist frameworks, reducing reformist, or nonreligious critical readings of the Qur’an, an intellectual tradition that has long existed in many Muslim-majority societies, to a U.S. State Department project seeking to ‘propagate liberal interpretations of Islam, reform public school curricula, and influence media production’ (Mahmood 2008) obscures local dynamics. It also disregards the long history of Islamic reform, internal critique, and progressive interpretations that predate contemporary security concerns.

While critical and nonreligious voices are viewed with suspicion and discarded as the U.S. State Department attempts to shape ‘Islam from within’ (Mahmood 2006), piety is presented as a project of radical alterity which rejects such attempts. Mahmood (2005) explores the women’s piety movement in Egypt and how Muslim women cultivate pious selves that do not align with the liberal and feminist norms of agency, resistance, and freedom, and as a form of agency that unsettles Western feminist and liberal discourse. This focus on piety highlights cases of exceptional coherence, potentially obscuring the complexity, inconsistencies, and ambivalence that mark life (Osella & Soares, 2010). It has been previously criticised by Schielke, who perceives it as a ‘problematic tendency to privilege the aim of ethical perfection’ (2010: 34), and by Bangstad (2011) for erasing the economic, socio-political contexts in which this piety is embedded. I shall follow the same line of critical inquiry by examining nonreligious trajectories as a gradual, complex, multi-layered, and long-term process (Streib et al., 2011). While the stories of Mahmood’s interlocutors reflect physical and spiritual harmony within a Muslim framework, it is the acute sense of cognitive dissonance and malaise that my interlocutors described as part of their disengagement journeys after leading religiouslycommitted lives.

Methods

The study is based on a total of 34 interviews, including 20 in-depth, semi-structured face-to-face interviews with Tunisian women and 14 online interviews with nonreligious women from Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. The interlocutors ranged in age from 20 to 43 and predominantly came from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds. Most held university degrees and worked in a variety of professions, including law, architecture, sales, dentistry, academia, and the arts. The interviews lasted between two and four hours, and the study includes six longitudinal cases. To ensure anonymity, all names have been replaced with pseudonyms. Despite sharing knowledge of Standard Arabic and belonging to a Muslim-majority context, these women do not form a homogeneous group. What Reinhart (2020) terms ‘lived Islam’ and the legal implementations of Islam vary significantly across Muslim-majority countries. Where women are located, the type of religious education they received, and the nature of institutional Islam shape their conceptualisation of Islam and how they live it, and why they leave it. While accounting for these differences, I examine the commonalities and recurring arguments that characterise my interlocutors’ narratives. The inclusion of participants from diverse national backgrounds was intentional to ensure that the identified patterns and themes are not merely unusual cases. I aim to document and conceptualise the process of leaving among nonreligious Arab women who were raised in religious environments and who, at some point, experienced a period of voluntary or involuntary religious commitment (iltizam) and piety (taqwa).

The Emotional Dimension of Disengagement

In a video entitled How to convince an Atheist of the validity of Islam in 40 minutes, Haytham Talaat, an Egyptian anti-atheist preacher, asserts ‘there are no Arab Atheists …it is a personal reaction against religion; it is not atheism. It is trauma, psychological instability, and Western influence…’ This pathologisation of Arab nonreligiosity, which frames it as a product of psychological trauma, has affected nonreligious self-representation on social media, which tends to highlight the intellectual elements of their trajectories. Nonreligiosity, as it manifests in various digital narratives, presents itself as the triumph of rationality—a cognitive stance seemingly unaffected by emotions. This ‘enlightenment story’ (Engelke 2019: 200), which frames nonreligion as the product of reason, erases its affective dimensions. This nonreligious narrative is embedded in a digital landscape where nonreligiosity is frequently cast as an irrational anomaly, thereby reinforcing an acute emphasis on rationality among nonreligious content creators. However, my aim here is to document the interplay between the emotional and the rational by focusing on fieldwork encounters and interviews rather than online self-representation. Drawing on ‘the myth of dispassionate investigation’ by Jaggar (1989), which challenges the tendency to obscure the role of emotion in the knowledge acquisition process, I argue that the anger or aversion experienced by my interlocutors in various situations functioned as ‘active engagements’ (Jaggar 1989: 158) that helped them embark on a journey of scrutiny and research. The side-lining or lack of awareness of emotions’ role does not mean that they do not continue to influence nonreligious actions and thoughts. After researching atheism in three different Western contexts, Lanman concluded that ‘our beliefs, behaviours and moral sentiments are not simply the result of dispassionate reason (2011: 38).’ Furthermore, the binary opposition between emotionality and rationality has been problematised in various academic works. Scholars such as Damasio (1994), Loewenstein and Lerner (2003), and Peters and Slovic (2009) have challenged the notion that emotions and reasons are inherently conflicting or mutually exclusive. Instead, they argue that emotional responses do not necessarily impair cognitive performance and can, in fact, enhance rational decision-making. In studies of religious deconversion, Wright and Ebaugh argued that deconversion encompasses affective (disaffection), cognitive (disillusionment), and social-organisational (disaffiliation) components (1993: 119). These findings suggest that the process of disengagement cannot be reduced to a binary between reason and emotion, or personal experience and abstract reflection. Nadia, a nonreligious Moroccan teacher in her forties, explained that her departure from Islam stemmed from her discovery that her idealisation of the futūhāt was ahistorical.

The realisation, which she described as ‘repulsive,’ prompted her to evaluate the concept of justice critically. She questioned: ‘Couldn’t a just God ban slavery in his revelations, couldn’t He reveal his message without permitting looting?’ If empathy toward slaves were dismissed as merely an emotional reaction and rationality were equated with detached deliberation, these two concepts would appear to be in opposition. However, Nadia’s account illustrates a process in which empathic emotions served as a catalyst for systematic engagement with theological and historical texts. This engagement, in turn, led to critical reflections on whether such practices aligned with Qur’anic teachings, and, by extension, whether they were consistent with the attributes of a just and omniscient deity.

Leaving Islam does not occur in an emotional vacuum, and emotions such as anger, disappointment, or repulsion might arise in response to moral violations, perceived injustices, or a lack of coherence within religious tenets. Anger was one particularly salient emotional experience in these accounts. Cyrine, a Lebanese lecturer, initially felt anger toward God for permitting slavery. However, this early anger evolved into a reflection on the nature of divine justice:

Emotions such as anger or disappointment in response to perceived moral violations or inconsistencies often serve as catalysts for deeper engagement with religious doctrine, spurring individuals to question inconsistencies. As Solomon argues, ‘When is anger rational? When it is right on target, that is, when it recognizes rightly that an offense has been committed’ (2007: 186). Rather than being antithetical to rationality, emotions may have a positive epistemic function, facilitating an acute awareness and critical evaluation of religious beliefs and practices.

I have chosen to focus on Basma’s emotionally charged narrative as her trajectory embodies the interplay between personal experience and intellectual inquiry, as well as the entanglement of rational and emotional dimensions in the process of leaving Islam. It is worth noting that in contexts where nonreligious individuals are acutely aware of accusations of irrationality, there is a tendency to craft a rational narrative of the self. As Mumford has argued, emotions could be ‘validated through engagement with intellectual arguments.’ (2015: 157) During my fieldwork, I observed this propensity to emphasise rationality and intellectual reasoning, particularly in initial encounters. Certain fieldwork encounters were experienced by some interlocutors as spaces for the formation of the nonreligious self, during which they presented a type of narrative that celebrated their critical thinking and ability to challenge rather than blindly follow, traits seen as epitomising the ideal nonreligious self. However, in Basma’s case, the emotional dimension of her trajectory was neither erased nor side-lined; on the contrary, it remained integral to her narrative. Basma is a nonreligious Tunisian woman in her mid-thirties who grew up in an upper-middle-class Tunisian family that adhered strictly to Islamic rituals. Her family exemplified a devout Muslim household, one that sent its daughters to the Kuttab (Qur’anic school), observed the five daily prayers, fasted during Ramadan, and undertook the Hajj pilgrimage. Basma recounted the history of her family’s religiosity, emphasising that her parents’ religious commitment was not inherited but rather a personal conviction they developed during their university years, influenced by their socialisation with Islamist circles. She contrasted her mother’s transformation with the moderate religiosity of her maternal family, whom she described as ‘fun, free, less religious. A typical bourgeois family with moderate religious views.’ She added that her mother’s early encounter with Islamism at university was later exacerbated by exposure to Egyptian television channels. For Basma, her mother’s deepening religiosity redefined their relationship, stripping it of warmth and affection. Reflecting on this estrangement, she expressed a profound sense of loss:

Rather than feeling loved and supported, she perceived herself and her siblings as projects moulded to fulfil a vision of pious Muslimhood. This left her with a profound sense of estrangement from her mother. Her mother’s reference to her as ‘firewood for Hell’ exemplified her daily attempts to correct her conduct by reminding her of Hell and the pain of suffering as part of her daily evocative technique to foster moral and religious commitment among her family members. Basma described her mother as someone primarily preoccupied with correcting behaviours that were deemed insufficiently Islamic. For example, my interlocutor highlighted her mother’s refusal to allow her to study in a different city, where her daily life could not be closely monitored, as evidence of her mother’s prioritisation of her Islamic ideals over her daughter’s aspirations. She also described the pressure to marry at an early age. Although she ultimately succumbed to this pressure and married in her early twenties, the marriage ended in divorce shortly thereafter. Basma expressed an emotionally charged rejection of her mother’s religiosity, but framed her decision to leave Islam in relation to two primary concerns. First, her incapacity to establish a meaningful spiritual connection with God, despite actively participating in religious practices such as performing Umrah with her family, praying, and fasting. Second, she criticised the use of threats and ‘emotional manipulation’ as mechanisms employed by God to induce human obedience, instead of offering valid arguments. She argued that this fear-based manipulation mirrored her parents’ approach to discipline, ultimately prompting her to question the divinity of the God depicted in the Qur’an. Basma found it troubling that God, His prophet, and even His angels might threaten or curse women, even for trivial acts, interpreting this as inconsistent with divine justice and mercy, and instead resembling childish behaviour. The ‘emotional manipulation’ and ‘emotional terror’ that Basma experienced with her parents were not the only ‘lived Islam’ shaping her understanding of Islam, she anchored her decision to leave Islam in her engagement with religious texts.

She explained;

Basma’s moral criticism of Islam was mainly directed at scripture, rather than the behaviour of Muslims. While she passionately expressed her frustration with what she perceived as immorality and inconsistency among Muslims, she emphasised that the core issue lay in the religious texts themselves. After years of internalised discomfort, forcing herself to perform rituals, concealing her discontent, her desire for clarity and coherence grew stronger. The turning point came with her divorce, which prompted a re-evaluation of her life choices. Realising that her marriage had been mostly motivated by a desire to fulfil her mother’s expectations led her to question the legitimacy of the religious ideals imposed upon her. The process of distancing herself from Islam and establishing clear boundaries was solidified after she decided to work abroad and away from her parents.

What has hopefully become clear from Basma’s trajectory is how the experience of malaise and intellectual doubt could be tightly intertwined. Her trajectory could also offer us insights into the anthropology of Islam. Several scholars, including Mahmood (2005) and Hirschkind (2006), have directed their research toward understanding the Islamic Revival in Egypt, focusing on how individuals cultivate a pious self through practices such as veiling, listening to Qur’an ic recitations, and attending Islamic courses. However, this perspective, which interprets almost every action of Muslims through the lens of religiosity, risks overshadowing other dimensions of lived experience. As Schielke (2010: 1) asks, ‘Is there too much Islam in the anthropology of Islam?’ An alternative lens through which religious practices can be understood is the social dimension of belonging. Consider, for example, the case of Basma, who attended mosque prayers with her mother to avoid offending her and to maintain a sense of belonging. For Basma, these actions were mainly about navigating familial expectations by seeking to ‘fit in.’ Had Mahmood observed Basma at the mosque with her mother, she might have interpreted Basma’s presence as evidence of a coherent, fulfilled and devout Muslim life. Yet such an interpretation would overlook the complexity of Basma’s motivations, reducing her actions to a singular religious narrative and failing to account for the multifaceted nature of her lived experience. The inability to outwardly reject religious practices or abstain from fasting and praying was linked to the hope of cultivating acceptance and harmony, and the fear of disappointing her family, and being branded as a sinner or violator of family values and morality. While the cultivation of piety is framed by Mahmood (2005) as ‘an epistemological closure’ (Abu-Odeh 2019: 4) in which self-transformation ends when individuals remake themselves into virtuous Muslim subjects, my interlocutor’s journey does not end with piety. My aim here is not to invalidate Mahmood’s work. Rather, I seek to document and reflect on the process of self-cultivation and transformation as a process that does not necessarily end with piety, but with the possibility of disengagement. The shift in Basma’s life occurred from within the Islamic tradition, as a result of a direct bodily and intellectual engagement with it. As I have explained earlier, resistance, reform, and critical discourse on Islam are often framed by Mahmood (2006) as an ideology inculcated by the West through Western influence or direct civilisational intervention. Thus, implicitly, the possibility of self-transformation is recognised as authentic and local when it leads to deeper religious commitment but not when it leads to disengagement. Basma’s trajectory challenges this assumption, illustrating how engagement with Islamic texts, and everyday life within a Muslim religiously committed household, rather than external ideological impositions (Mahmood 2008), can itself generate scepticism and rejection.

The Role of Cognitive Dissonance and the Pursuit of Coherence

Understanding the trajectories of my interlocutors requires paying attention to the interior change that occurs with the continuity of outward piety, or when their idealised conceptualisation of Islam is met with newly acquired knowledge. Several of my interlocutors described the experience of ‘cognitive dissonance,’ a term coined by Festinger to highlight the state of psychological discomfort that occurs when a person holds two contradictory cognitions. This state urged the person to ‘try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance’ (Festinger 1962: 3). When avoidance and reconciliatory strategies fail to achieve consonance, dissonance culminates, leading to a rejection of Islam.

Before I delve into the role of coherence and cognitive dissonance in these nonreligious trajectories, it is important to specify that it would be analytically inaccurate and ethnographically flawed to presume that my interlocutors move through the world with a sustained and internally consistent logic across the various registers of their lives. This part does not purport to capture the entirety of their lived experience: the ambivalences of the everyday, the tensions between their inner convictions and their deeds, the contingent accommodations they make in response to their socio-religious surroundings, or the ambiguities of navigating nonreligiosity in an environment saturated with religious normativity. Rather, the invocation of coherence here refers to a specific epistemic moment: when Islam, as a framework of intelligibility, becomes incompatible with newly encountered forms of knowledge, often through scientific, philosophical, and historical readings that unsettle previously taken-for-granted truths. What I trace is not a generalised orientation toward coherence as a mode of ‘nonreligious living,’ but rather the emergence of a desire for internal consistency at a critical juncture, when epistemic dissonance becomes unmanageable, and the grammar of Islamic life no longer suffices to account for one’s evolving ethical and intellectual commitments. For instance, a nonreligious mother may find herself helping her children memorise the Qur’an, not as an endorsement of faith, but as a strategy to shield them from social exclusion, to preserve familial belonging, or to avoid being marked as deviant in a society where religiosity is normatively encoded. These decisions are integral to the complex negotiations nonreligious individuals engage in, shaped by structural constraints, emotional ties, and a deeply gendered politics of respectability. Yet, documenting these layers of ambiguity and the everyday compromises they entail lies beyond the scope of this article. My focus here remains on the trajectory, the discursive and affective shift through which Islam becomes untenable as a moral-epistemological framework.

Unlike Basma, whose experience of Islam was tainted with pain, Hind, a Moroccan woman in her late twenties, recounted a positive and deeply enriching childhood and teenage years. Growing up within a practising Muslim family, she explained that ‘Islam was an integral part of her identity.’ She performed daily prayers, fasted, attended schools to learn tajwid, and donned the veil. However, the desire to cultivate a more religiously committed life and to defend Islam on social media led her to explore facets of Islam that were unknown to her.

For Hind, the critical point of tension is her realisation that there is a discrepancy between her belief that Islam uplifts women and the verse that sanctions the disciplining of disobedient wives. The concept of takrim that Hind used to defend Islam on Facebook is a common trope according to which Islam accords women a status incomparable to the Jahiliyyah (pre-Islamic era), rescuing them from practices such as infanticide. Hind immersed herself in research and encountered numerous progressive interpretations of the Qur’an, including Muslim feminist readings that sought to reconcile women’s rights and Islamic teachings. Many of these interpretations argued that the injustices faced by Muslim women stem from patriarchal misinterpretations, rather than the text itself. In examining deflection among Salafi women, Dawood (2025) explores their gradual disaffiliation in relation to the cultivation of a pious feminist consciousness. While their growing awareness of gender inequalities within Salafi communities prompted them to leave Salafism, they retained their religious sensibilities, viewing these inequalities as the result of Salafi misinterpretations rather than being intrinsic to Islam. Unlike Dawood’s interlocutors, Hind perceived this gender inequality as deeply embedded in Islam. As she delved deeper into hadith and sira, she found these reconciliatory efforts increasingly unconvincing. Her discomfort intensified as she perceived a dissonance between the Islamic ideal of justice and its historical or textual reality. A common element in the trajectory of several of my interlocutors is their growing perception that authoritative texts such as the hadith and the Qur’an are obstinately androcentric and unjust. Emna, a Tunisian doctor in her late thirties, expressed a similar dissatisfaction with this reconciliatory discourse;

According to Ebaugh (1988), the process of exiting involves the following stages: first doubts, seeking alternatives, then the turning point, and finally establishing an Ex-role. Before exiting Islam, Emna and Hind went through the stage of seeking alternatives, yet they failed to convince them. Emna echoes the critique of many nonreligious Arabs towards contemporary reformists of Islam. The assessment of reformist thought is highly ambivalent. While reformists are hailed for their efforts to make Islam liveable in contemporary Muslim societies, they are also severely criticised for intellectual manipulation, as they are believed to obscure rather than reveal the unembellished reality of Islam.

One of my Egyptian interlocutors explained;

To illustrate this serious approach to Islam or serious, one that rejects the nonchalant middle-ground stance of those who identify with the religion without possessing deep knowledge, several interlocutors referenced a popular nonreligious trope: ‘There are two types of people—those who read the Qur’an, understood it, and became Salafists, and those who read the Qur’an, understood it, and became atheists. The majority, however, never bothered to read it.’ According to this perspective, a thorough examination of the Qur’an inevitably leads to either full acceptance or outright rejection. However, most Muslims, they argue, have not engaged in such intellectual scrutiny, which accounts for their perceived ‘moderation’ or in-between stance. The emphasis on taking seriously one’s conviction was also noticeable in statements such as ‘I cannot trick my mind’, ‘I cannot erase what I know,’ ‘I cannot blame my supposedly deficient mind, which cannot understand God’s wisdom behind each verse.’

In some cases, exposure to reconciliatory or apologetic accounts reinforced their doubts. For Yara, a Lebanese lawyer in her forties ‘preachers are an insult to our logic and intelligence. While listening to their attempts to present even slavery as a blessing for women, I felt disgusted.’

What distinguishes most of my interlocutors is their rejection of reconciliatory narratives, their thirst for clarity, and their refusal to occupy an -in-between position² or to accept living with unresolved inner tensions. Leaving, therefore, becomes a means of attaining coherence. Schielke captured a similar desire for clarity: ‘It requires the desire to make sense of the whole thing, an urge to make things fit, a discomfort with gaps, ambiguities, and silences’ (2010: 24). The engagement with Islam, initially intended to ‘deepen their knowledge of Islam’, and ‘strengthen their faith’ led to malaise and disillusionment. Similarly, scholars have observed that engaging with scripture can also have a negative impact on faith, as noted among members of the clergy who have become atheists (Dennett and LaScola 2015).

A Gender Story

Gender is a salient component in the narratives of disengagement from Islam. This phenomenon is not unique to the Muslim context, as several scholars have also highlighted the role of gender in the declining significance of Christianity (Brown 2022). Moreover, it is not exclusive to women; several of my male interlocutors also identified gender-related issues as key reasons that initially sparked their doubts. A common critique targeted the concept of guardianship, viewing it as a form of infantilisation that relegates them to a childlike position. The Qur’anic conceptualisation of women as beings in need of protection, corporal discipline, and whose testimony is considered less reliable than that of men, is frequently contrasted with the empirical reality of women’s capacities. Jihen, an Algerian doctor, argued:

For Jihen, the tension between scriptural understanding of female memory as inferior and underdeveloped, and her own empirical experience and scientific knowledge led her to reevaluate Islamic teachings. She questioned the requirement that two female witnesses be equivalent to one male witness, perceiving it as emblematic of a misogynistic epistemology, one that assumes inherent male superiority in judgment and memory, reflecting the limitations of 7^th-century understanding, rather than accurate scientific knowledge of the human brain.

Mounira, a Tunisian pharmacist in her thirties and who left Islam in her early twenties, recently expressed doubts about her nonreligiosity:

For Mounira, who presented many scientific arguments during our initial meeting in 2016 that highlighted the incompatibility between the Qur’an and science, re-listening to the Qur’an was her way of verifying whether she ‘made the right decision.’ Maintaining her nonreligiosity involved reminding herself of the way women are perceived in the Qur’an. In the same vein, Ghada, an Egyptian woman in her late-twenties, experienced a similar dissatisfaction with the position of women in Islam. Ghada donned the veil when she was sixteen, perceiving it as her ‘way of getting closer to God.’ This understanding of the veil was common in da’wah discourse and among her family members. Similar to Mahmood’s interlocutors in Politics of Piety, Ghada sought to cultivate a God-fearing self through the practice of piety: veiling, fasting, prayer, and daily reading and listening to the Qur’an, and attending Tarawih during the month of Ramadan. Her account of her religiously committed phase elucidates how she understood the authority of religious texts: she believed that there exists a correct and virtuous model of the Muslim woman, derived from the Qur’an and the Sunnah. She strove to embody this ideal, as delineated in the foundational Islamic texts. However, this understanding of veiling as a means of cultivating spirituality and closeness to God was challenged by her discovery of certain previously unknown facts. While browsing dorar.net, a website which offers digitalised collections of Quranic interpretations, she came across a report that describes the encounter between a slave woman and the Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab. The latter hit a veiled slave woman for donning the veil.

The realisation that Islam kept a hierarchical distinction between women, protecting free Muslim women, and maintaining the institution of slavery through sartorial distinctions, was the starting point of Ghada’s re-examination of Islam. Like Nadia, Ghada’s discovery led her to question her idealised perception of Umar ibn al-Khattab, finding it incompatible with historical evidence, and later to doubt the justice of a God who reinforces a hierarchical system instead of abolishing it. Her discoveries shifted the desire to submit to Islam and emulate the behaviour of the pious ancestors into a sense of disillusionment and later rejection. The act of unveiling and coming to the realisation that she is no longer a Muslim reflected her desire to achieve consistency and solve dissonance. Her decision to remove the veil cannot be solely attributed to feminist influence but must instead be understood as the result of an internal engagement with Muslim normative tradition. Mahmood (2005) conceptualises habitus as a repeated practice capable of disciplining and shaping internal emotions, ultimately cultivating moral virtues through bodily performativity. Ghada initially embraced the bodily practice of veiling. However, a shift occurred when her understanding of the veil, first perceived as a technique to cultivate modesty and spirituality, evolved into the realisation that it functioned as a marker of difference between slave and free women within a highly stratified society. Her rejection of veiling stemmed from a refusal to belong to a framework that had historically sustained the institution of slavery. Islam, once perceived as an ethical system, was no longer deemed to align with her understanding of religion as a solid moral foundation. This reflection on the veil evolved into a contemplation of divine justice. While the gendered nature of this reflection is undeniable, the discourse articulated by my interlocutor is not that of a feminist critique of veiling as a practice that affects bodily integrity or a symbol of oppression, but a rejection of a framework she perceived as fundamentally unjust. Leaving behind her an idealised conceptualisation of Islam, she came to perceive its hierarchical nature through an awareness of the sartorial regulations governing Islamic society. While feminism undoubtedly shapes the trajectories of many nonreligious women, it is crucial to avoid projecting feminist framings onto narratives where rejection is articulated primarily in relation to notions such as dignity, morality, or scriptural contradictions. Ghada’s ethical self-fashioning through veiling was eventually deconstructed from within, when the previously idealised ethical dimension of veiling was confronted with its theological and historical function as a tool of segregation. Ghada’s trajectory challenges Mahmood’s assumption that rejecting Islam is necessarily tantamount to aligning oneself with imperialist ideologies. For many, such rejection is instead articulated in anti-imperialist terms, critiquing Islam’s historical role in erasing pre-Islamic local identities, marginalizing minority epistemologies, or legitimizing ethically problematic hierarchies, such as the distinction between free and slave women, highlighted by Ghada. In these cases, Islam itself becomes the imperialist formation under critique. Rejection, then, is not a submission to Western secularism, liberalism, or a U.S. state department agenda, but an assertion of ethical agency against a dominant religious discourse perceived as unjust.⁴ Ghada’s understanding of the veil was unsettled through her own engagement with historical and theological sources such as Ṭabaqāt Ibn Saʿd, Tafsīr al-Qurṭubī, and Tafsīr Ibn Kathīr. Such insights led her to challenge her previous understanding of veiling as a devotional act. What is being rejected here is not submission per se, but the moral justification for submission. Mahmood’s insistence on piety as the endpoint of religious formation ultimately constrains the analytical space for considering those who, having traversed the path of piety, arrive at disavowal, not through external imposition, but through internal critique. By conceptualising reform, critique, or disengagement as always already complicit with Western imperial projects, she forecloses the possibility that nonreligious subjectivities can emerge after an engagement with Islamic scholarship and years of religious commitment. Mahmood’s desire to safeguard certain lifeworlds in the face of Western hegemonic discourse often rests on two presuppositions: first, that such lifeworlds, particularly those grounded in pious practice, are mostly stable and continuous; and second, that any rupture or transformation within them can be traced primarily, if not exclusively, to the incursion of Western liberalism and feminism. Yet, the trajectories of my interlocutors, individuals once deeply embedded within religious commitments, compel us to reconsider these assumptions. Their lives suggest that shifts in ethical and religious sensibilities can, and indeed do, emerge from within the very logics and practices that constitute these lifeworlds. Such internal transformations necessitate a conceptual space that neither considers pious subjectivity as fixed nor understands rejection and disengagement as the embodiment of an external Western project.

Unlike many contemporary Western contexts where individuals lose their religion before reaching adulthood, mostly due to parental socialisation (Strhan, Lee & Shillitoe, 2024), the nonreligious women discussed here are not ‘cradle nones’ (Bullivant 2022). Instead, they were raised within Islam, and experienced periods of religious commitment. By examining the trajectories of nonreligious individuals who reflect on their experience of piety, as well as their doubt, malaise, and moral doubt, ‘The Anthropology of Islam’ could benefit from ‘nonreligious studies,’ and precisely from the hindsight narratives of ex-pious Muslims. One advantage of studying the trajectories of ex-Muslims is that they tend to reflect on their pious past in a manner that does not erase or mitigate moments of weakness, ambivalence, or contradictions. The fact that commitment to piety did not produce a feeling of satisfaction and serenity but rather a malaise and doubt, is worth examining in relation to the narratives of ‘religious coherence’ that naturalise committed religiosity as the real and authentic way of being an individual in a Muslim-majority context. What these trajectories show is that religious commitment could be a temporal stage in the journey of self-transformation, and that in some cases, this self-transformation is mediated by the internet.

The Role of Digital Platforms in Facilitating Disengagement

Much of the literature on Islam and digital media highlights its role in cultivating Muslim values by documenting how the unprecedented accessibility of exegetical texts, hadith collections, and theological works has influenced Muslim’s engagement with Islamic knowledge (Bunt, 2003). Scholarly works elucidated the myriad ways Muslims engage with their faith online, demonstrating how the digital landscape is pivotal in shaping modern Islamic practices (Kesvani, 2019; Caidi, 2018). However, the preceding statement by Maha, a Saudi teacher in her thirties, illustrates an alternative engagement with Islamic resources, which leads to disengagement. The very websites that Muslims use to cultivate piety also facilitate a contentious and agonistic dialogue around Islam. The digitisation of Islamic sources has rendered knowledge that was once confined to academic circles, such as departments of Arabic civilisation and theology, available to the average layperson. While some deepened their commitments, others began to question Islam upon encountering aspects that challenged their previously idealised or taken-for-granted perceptions. This ‘digital turn’ often emphasises only one side of the equation, which is how devout Muslims engage with the digital landscape; however, it is highlighted by nonreligious women as an important component in shaping their understanding, criticism, and disengagement from Islam. The process of looking for Qur’anic verses or hadiths, comparing the different interpretations, and seeking replies to shubuhat (doubts) is often described by several of my interlocutors as part of their journey.

Maha’s experience with the internet echoes that of several of my interlocutors who described their online exploration as ‘an eye-opening experience.’ In the Tunisian context, such ‘discoveries’ are particularly striking since religious education has been heavily reformed by progressive thinkers who excluded hadiths and Qur’anic verses deemed discriminatory, intolerant, or morally objectionable (Feuer 2017). Consequently, the average Tunisian state school student is presented with a carefully curated version of Islam, rendering these newly discovered facts shocking and transformative.

Nouha recounted her turning point:

The excavation of digitalised Islamic sources allowed Nouha to verify for herself, and discuss her findings with other doubters. Initially, she had conceived of the enslavement of women by ISIS as an un-Islamic perversion of Islamic teachings. However, upon encountering historical records, she realised that her romanticised perception of Islam is not compatible with the newly discovered facts. When seeking to verify whether the acts of ISIS aligned with Islamic teachings, she found the treaties written by the group. She found that their justifications were embedded in an Islamic jurisprudence, supported by clear textual evidence. She also learned that slave concubinage was a common historical practice throughout Islamic history. For Nouha, leaving Islam was framed as an act of moral opposition to the institution of slavery and female subjugation. She did not frame her rejection as a denunciation of the actions of a radical group, but as a recognition that such practices were deeply rooted in Islam, and a result of a serious engagement with it, rather than in opposition to it. While most Muslims view these acts as the product of mere deviant ‘bad apples’, Nouha highlighted the compatibility of such deeds with Islam, questioning the divinity of the Qur’an itself, and the inconsistency between God’s mercy and justice and the existence of milk al-yamin. She added:

This question echoes a persistent interrogation I frequently encountered during my fieldwork and interviews: ‘If the God of the Qur’an is a perfect and all-knowing, why did He not explicitly prohibit slavery?’ It is important to contextualise this question within the period in which I conducted my research. I began my fieldwork in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, a period marked by radical socio-political transformations in the Middle East and North Africa, the rise of ISIS, and post-revolutionary ideological and political antagonisms. The resurgence of modern-day slavery, embodied in the enslavement of Yazidi women, triggered a moral dilemma regarding whether the Qur’an is a universally valid text for all times and places. These socio-political changes accompanying the rise of ISIS altered perceptions of slavery. Previously seen as abstract historical concepts, these practices re-emerged as contemporary realities, forcing many to reassess their compatibility with Islam. This contemporary revival prompted a surge in articles, and videos assessing the compatibility of ISIS’s actions with Islam. For instance, Al Hiwar Al Mutamadden (Civil Discussion), a secular-leftist website features, contributions on the subject. Similarly, YouTube channels such as those of Sherif Gaber and Kosay Betar have engaged extensively with the topic. Despite state control and surveillance of nonreligious content, the increasing number of suppressions of nonreligious forums (Hamidaddin 2019) the closing of Facebook pages due to mass reporting, and even the tracking and arrests of citizens for critical anonymous Facebook postings (Lindbekk & Baghat 2020), the number of Arab nonreligious content creators kept increasing. Elsässer (2021) describes the nonreligious Arab scene as ‘a lively and growing virtual community.’ These platforms play several roles in triggering doubt and sustaining nonreligion. They disseminate revisionist theories about the life Prophet Muhammad, present critical academic studies to a wider audience, and even provide vernacular translations of the Qur’an.

Hedia, an Algerian PhD student in physics, with a passion for history, explained;

Hedia, who left Islam five years ago in her early twenties, is part of a generation of young Arabs who grew up in the digital age. Unlike my older interlocutors, she had access to an extensive array of nonreligious websites and YouTube channels. While the accuracy of the representation of the Jahiliyya in Islamic sources was conceptualised as a Muslim-constructed narrative by two of my nonreligious interlocutors, a historian and an Arabic civilisation teacher in their late fifties, what is particularly striking about Hedia’s trajectory is how the internet enabled her to engage with discussions that were once largely restricted to academically trained scholars. While the density and technicality of many scholarly works may hinder the engagement with their content, as comprehending them requires sustained devotion, social media conversations and debates offer a more interactive and accessible format. They require less time and patience and are more accessible to those without a formal academic background. This shift underscores the transformative power of digital platforms in redefining the boundaries of religious discourse and accessibility. Whereas the process of unlearning an idealised Islamic narrative once required years of extensive research and access to academic libraries in the pre-internet era, it has become significantly more accessible, often just a click away from a PDF or a YouTube video.

In Western contexts, Wilkins-Laflamme and Thiessen (2020) demonstrate that individuals who become nonreligious after being raised in religious environments are more likely to engage with digital nonreligious communities and organisations compared to ‘cradle nones’ (Bullivant 2022). The experiences of my interlocutors, who come from religiously committed families, align with these findings, as digital spaces serve as the primary avenue for encountering like-minded individuals. In contrast, those raised in nonreligious households tend to find a sense of belonging within their immediate social environments, reducing their reliance on digital communities. Among my interlocutors, the significance of the internet begins before moving out of Islam. It is not limited to its function as a space for epistemic practices that may lead to nonreligiosity, it also facilitates online interactions that normalise nonreligion. Engaging in debating on social media gradually fosters affinities that make nonreligiosity a conceivable and liveable possibility. As Taira aptly observes, ‘Perhaps the real revolutionary impact of the Internet and social media in terms of becoming an atheist is their ability to reassure individuals that they are not alone in their doubts.’ (2021: 1034) One of my interlocutors, a Tunisian lab technician in her mid-thirties, highlighted this reassuring effect: ‘even though I was convinced that religions are man-made. I felt scared and isolated. How could someone erase years of fear of Hell instilled since childhood? It took me some time, but watching other people explain why they left Islam helped me manage my anxieties.’ This is by no means unique to Muslim-majority contexts, Perez and Vallières (2019) revealed the role of the internet in alleviating the feeling of loneliness. Several scholars have also highlighted the role of the internet in facilitating nonreligious socialisation and activism (Fader 2020; Copeman and Schulz 2022; Smith and Cimino 2012). Religious socialisation, which takes place within religiously saturated milieus, finds itself competing with online nonreligious socialisation. Descriptions of feeling crazy, fearful and confused during the phase of doubt were common among my interlocutors. Thus, online socialisation operates as a push factor away from offline religiosity, fear, and loneliness by fostering a sense of normalcy. The presence of nonreligiosity on social media forms an online repertoire that contributes to supporting the plausibility of nonreligion. In this sense, Internet use is both a cognitive and affective practice that transcends the mere act of seeking information.

Conclusion

By refocusing the documentation of nonreligiosity on nonreligious individuals themselves, I seek to reframe the analysis of nonreligion as an integral part of the anthropology of Islam. Rather than assuming that nonreligious individuals are merely products of Western intervention, their accounts reveal how the internal engagement with Islamic sources and serious religious commitment can unravel Islam from within. These narratives illustrate that the pursuit of pious goals may lead to internal contradictions that ultimately result in disengagement. Specifically, their deconstruction of the idealised Islamic past and the concept of takrim, through engagement with Islamic sources, could contribute to such a departure. Mahmood’s theoretical framework, however, leaves little conceptual space for such possibilities to be acknowledged or explored. The problem with such framing is that it only recognises moral self-transformation when it leads to greater religious commitment. The trajectories of my interlocutors reveal that ‘not only do different conceptions of the self inhabit the space of a single culture, they are also present in the life experience of a single individual.’ (Schielke 2009: 37). Furthermore, I sought to contribute to scholarship that explores the role of affect and emotion in shaping nonreligiosity (Schaefer 2022) as well as media studies on nonreligion (Taira 2021) by documenting how the internet facilitates the critical scrutiny of digitised Islamic resources, fosters dialogue among like-minded sceptics, and ultimately establishes nonreligion as a credible and viable alternative.