The Islamic State Led Some Muslims to Become Atheists

One example of ISIS’s mass killings was described by Patrick Cockburn in The Independent:

It is one of the most shocking of many sadistic videos shot and publicised by Isis in which its gunmen are seen executing their victims. It shows scenes from the Camp Speicher massacre on 12 June 2014 when Isis murdered 1,700 army recruits in a former palace compound of Saddam Hussein on the banks of the Tigris river near Tikrit.

Columns of terrified young men are filmed being driven at gunpoint by masked Isis gunmen dressed in black towards mass graves which the victims can see are already filled with bodies. Others are beaten as they stumble down stone steps onto a small dock under a bridge on the Tigris. As each one is dragged forward by a guard, he is shot in the head by a man with a pistol so he falls into the water. The ground where the killings are taking place is covered in blood.

These are the scenes that were videotaped and could be seen, online, by tens of millions of Muslims. Those videos and stories had an effect. Here was ISIS, which consisted of people who claimed to be the best and most observant of Muslims, dutifully following the commands in the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad in the Hadith. If this were so, then what should we Believers make of Islam? For some – no one knows how many — belief is shaken. And so the doubts grow, more so among the most morally and intellectually advanced Muslims, but these doubts were seldom discussed before with others, given the possible punishment for those accused of atheism. Now those who leave Islam for atheism may live in non-Muslim lands, where they are less likely to face any consequences except family disapproval. And Muslims everywhere now have access to safe communities online, where they can discuss their own and others’ doubts without revealing their identities. And there are former Muslims who, living in the safety of the non-Muslim world, do not hide their identities but proselytize openly for atheism.

Samuel Tadros says this about growing atheism in the Islamic world here:

At the end of the day, it is a personal choice for every individual. The real problem is with regimes and nations that are convinced that atheism is a Western conspiracy against them, that [atheism] did not exist among them at all in the past, and that it is only [the West] that implanted it into their midst. The problems and the ideas that exist in our societies are what drive people towards atheism, if you view atheism as a problem.”

Those who are fixed or fanatical in their Islamic faith have a hard time believing that anyone born into it, or who has converted to Islam, might ever turn away from the faith. Such people are incapable of grasping that in the 1,400 years of Islam’s history, the absence of observable atheists has several explanations. First, until the 18th century and the advent of the Enlightenment, no society accepted atheism. While Christians and Jews came eventually to tolerate, begrudgingly, freethinkers in their midst, Muslims never did. Second, Islam actively discouraged free and skeptical inquiry about anything, because of the fear that in the end the faith itself might be questioned; no mental space was to be granted to those who wanted to question this or that aspect of Islam. Third, in Islam, those who expressed their doubts about the faith were promptly punished or, most often, killed. Muslims have been living, religiously speaking, in a police state; in an environment of ever-present mortal threat to those who disbelieve; in such an atmosphere, the fraternity of doubt could not increase its numbers.

Muslims are constantly assured, as it says in the Qur’an, that they are the “best of peoples” and Infidels “the most vile of created beings.” It is they alone who possess the immutable truth, as expressed in the Qur’an and hadith. It is not possible for such people as the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khamenei, to conceive that anyone born into Islam might turn to atheism on his own. Surely the appearance of atheists has only one explanation: it is the result of a conspiracy of Western Infidels, spreading fitna and lies, in order to undermine the faith of the world’s Muslims.