Published: 24/05/2025, 14:35 CEST
Updated: 24/05/2025, 14:35 CEST
By modulus
In politics .
1. My Position
I am an atheist. A materialist. I don’t believe in gods, holy books, miracles, or divine injunctions. I don’t think revelation is a sound basis for ethics, nor that clerics of any stripe deserve automatic reverence. My political commitments are to socialism, equality, anti-imperialism, and reason—not to faith.
And yet, I find myself drawn into solidarity with Muslims—not out of shared metaphysics, but out of shared antagonism. Not because I believe, but because I know what it is to be lied about.
I reject Islamophobia not in spite of my atheism, but because of it. If you’re serious about truth, you don’t get to caricature a billion people. If you’re serious about justice, you don’t outsource your anxiety to a scapegoated minority. And if you’re serious about freedom, you don’t cheer for bans on language, clothing, or community just because they make you uncomfortable.
This is a piece written from the outside. I do not claim Islam. I do not follow it. But I have learned to hear the slander, and to know it for what it is. And I will not be silent while it parades as virtue.
2. Where I Began
Like many secular leftists, I once held a standard anticlerical view. I thought religion was an obstacle to reason, a residue of pre-modern thought that persisted out of fear and habit. I knew there were political uses for religion—mobilisation, resistance, comfort—but I did not take them seriously as sources of insight. I saw all religions as structurally alike: hierarchical, patriarchal, dogmatic. Islam, in that schema, was just one more case in point.
Then I moved. First to Norway, then to the United Kingdom. And something changed—not in my beliefs, but in what others believed about me. Suddenly I was no longer white. Not quite. Not reliably. I became brown in northern Europe, ambiguous in airports, “interesting” in banks, offices, classrooms. People asked where I was from before asking who I was. They said salaam to me in the street. They speculated about my heritage. In one particularly absurd incident, a man at an Indian restaurant refused to believe I wasn’t Punjabi and accused me of denying my roots.
And with that shift came another: I began to see that Islam was not merely a religion. It was a container, a suspicion, a placeholder for foreignness. I had entered—not fully, but noticeably—into the field of racialisation through Islam . And suddenly, all the confident secular critiques I once co-signed began to ring hollow. They were critiques of doctrine by people who hadn’t read any. They were critiques of violence by people who ignored the violence of the state. They were critiques of misogyny by people whose feminism dissolved the moment a hijabi spoke.
It was in that moment—not of conversion, but of re-perception—that I began to understand: Islamophobia isn’t about belief. It’s about position
3. Being Misread, and What It Opened
Once I realised I was being mistaken for Muslim, I began to see how brittle most secular critiques of Islam actually were. Not just inaccurate, but incurious—lazy in form, and often vicious in tone. Taqiyyah, I learned, did not mean permission to lie. Sharia was not a monolith. “Allahu akbar” was not a threat display. And the more I read—out of curiosity, and now, increasingly, out of solidarity—the more I understood that Islam was not just a faith. It was also a juridical tradition, an epistemology, and a structure of life.
I began to study fiqh—Islamic legal theory. Slowly, and without illusion. I wasn’t trying to convert. I was trying to stop lying —to myself and others. I developed preferences. I learned distinctions between schools. I found myself disagreeing with things, but still admiring the system . I didn’t believe, but I could see the coherence of belief. And I felt increasingly disturbed by people who knew none of it, but still spoke with the confidence of experts.
Some of the worst offenders weren’t the far-right. They were secular progressives projections. By the sort of people who should have known better.
This is not to say that you need to read Islamic theology or legal theory, but you have little standing to criticise it if you don’t. Politically, if you come from outside and haven’t heard of the Amman Message or know what takfiri are, maybe you shouldn’t be making grand pronouncements.
There is no royal road to science. In Marxism, we do the coursework.
I was like that once too. Criticising religion superficially felt easy, correct, and harmless—perhaps even virtuous. But now I’d seen how easily that posture curdled into hate. Not principled anticlericalism. Just fear in a suit.
4. What I Found in the Reading
The more I read, the more I realised I wasn’t just correcting misconceptions—I was encountering a system of thought that deserved engagement on its own terms. I found intricately argued positions on ethics, commerce, ritual, jurisprudence. I found intellectual traditions capable of debating analogy, contradiction, and the limits of textual authority. I found disagreements not just between Sunnis and Shia, but among schools of law, between jurists and reformers, mystics and grammarians.
No, I did not find a worldview I could accept. But I found a world I had no right to reduce.
Take, for example, the claim that Islam reduces women’s testimony to half that of men’s. This emerged in a specific commercial law context, rooted in assumptions about experience in trade—assumptions that are themselves open to critique. But even there, jurists allowed exceptions. Some acknowledged that women with commercial expertise, such as widows or traders, could testify fully. The principle was not universal. It was argued, bounded, and less crude than its secular critics imagine
Likewise, taqiyyah is often portrayed as a blank cheque for deception. In fact, it is a concept from Shia jurisprudence, invoked under conditions of serious persecution—not a standing license to lie, but a mechanism for survival under existential threat slander in the guise of scepticism
I still don’t believe in God, and I don’t think I ever will. But I do believe in coherence , in rigour , and in the right of people to narrate their own lives . That’s what I found in Islamic legal theory: not a perfect doctrine, but a landscape of meaning made by people trying to live with dignity under real constraints.
And once you’ve seen that—really seen it—you cannot unsee the violence of the lie. You cannot pretend that calling someone “backward” is anything but an attempt to erase their intellectual lineage
What I found in the reading wasn’t agreement. It was a refusal to continue being stupid on purpose.
5. Where the Left Fails
The liberal Islamophobes don’t surprise me. They’ve always outsourced their unease to the racialised Other. They dress it up as feminism, or democracy, or public safety. They ban minarets and hijabs and call it progress. Their betrayal is predictable.
The harder thing to swallow is when the betrayal comes from the left.
I’ve seen it from those who claim the mantle of Enlightenment radicalism. I’ve seen it from atheists who sneer at Islam with a fervour they’d never dare apply to Judaism or Christianity. I’ve seen it from so-called internationalists who side with French laïcité laws, with the German ban on “Allahu akbar” in demonstrations, with policies designed to erase not just belief but visibility.
And I’ve seen it most grotesquely in the Anti-Deutsch current, where Islam is treated as inherently fascist, and any sympathy with Palestinians is coded as antisemitism. Where decolonisation itself is suspect
Then there are the tactical alliances—“with the Islamists sometimes, with the state never.” As if that were analysis. As if siding with clerical authoritarians is justified so long as they’re anti-American. That’s not dialectics. That’s cowardice pretending to be courage.
Some of these alliances crossed the line from naive to grotesque. Western leftist factions offering support to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or even, in some ultraleft circles, Daesh, on the basis that they were fighting American proxies or imperial forces. There is no anti-imperialism in supporting fascism with a beard.
There is a line between principled opposition to theocracy and opportunistic hatred disguised as critique.
6. A Better Position
We need a left that knows the difference between critique and caricature. That can oppose theocracy without falling into the arms of the surveillance state. That can defend secularism without siding with racist bans. That can call for universal emancipation without demanding uniformity.
This means being willing to say: yes, religion can be reactionary . But so can state power. And so can atheism, especially when it wears a Protestant mask—fixated on the rejection of belief, abstracted from context, and blind to the fact that religions are not mere doctrines but communities of practice. Religion is not an argument; it is a way of living among others, often where the state has failed or cannot be trusted.
It also means recognising that religion often performs real social functions: conflict resolution, poverty relief, personal dignity. One can oppose private charity and parallel legal systems without pretending that they meet no need. People turn to them not because they’re duped, but because the institutions meant to protect them have too often looked the other way.
It means refusing tactical alliances with clerical fascists—but also refusing alliances with a liberalism that only remembers women’s rights when it wants to invade something.
It means, above all, restoring rigour have the decency to know what their words mean.
This isn’t about policing speech. It’s about demanding seriousness. If the left won’t do that, it will keep losing—intellectually, morally, and politically.
7. Why This Matters
I am not writing this to persuade racists. I am not writing this to defend religion. I am writing this because I refuse to live in a political tradition that thinks it can only stand tall by stepping on someone else’s dignity.
The left has to be better than its reflexes. It has to be more than the mirror of empire, more than the echo of liberal condescension. It must be capable of self-correction, of learning, of taking seriously that we do not need to win the argument by being the loudest who refuse to lie.
This is not a call for unity with Islamists. It is a call for intellectual honesty, historical literacy, and political restraint. stop mistaking ignorance for militancy projection for critique.
You don’t have to be Muslim to refuse the caricature. You don’t have to believe to insist on understanding. You don’t even have to like religion to know that a billion people cannot be reduced to a threat model.
I remain a materialist. But the more I’ve learned, the more allergic I’ve become to easy stories that punish the vulnerable and flatter the powerful.
So this is what I offer: not a defence, but a refusal to betray the truth in the name of my own comfort. fidelity to complexity. rigour.
If we want to change the world, we have to stop lying about it first.