Why the Term ‘Ex Muslim’ has Become Banal
In the age of internet and social media, everything is instant — outrage, applause, valorization, and denunciation. Reactions in this virtual town square can range from that of a council of Greek elders banishing an unpopular citizen, to a mob baying for blood and revenge in a street corner, to a populist at the hustings trying to soothe passions while dishing tropes and homilies. Internet is today a simulacrum of public opinion and a barometer of polarization.
In this vast space, gratification can seldom be segregated from the voyeuristic thrill of confirmation bias, which goes along with the need to virtue signal in a feverish marketplace of ideas where all identities have their essential values assigned in the pecking order.
The singularity of one identity, no matter what it is, that trumps all other affiliations and other identities, again takes us back into the crucible of identity politics. People are a lot more than their immediate ethnic or religious identities, or the overweening importance given to the fact they have outgrown them forever.
Eschewal as a marker
As someone opposed to all hues of identity politics, one reason why I have always been tepid about this ‘Ex Muslim’ label is because of its almost routine appropriation as an appellation, a nimbus of rationality, a medal of being non-contrarian, and a revolt against conformism.
It is bandied as a title that denotes evolue status, or a scratch card that can be redeemed to fit the needs of impending reformism — whatever that’s supposed to mean remains unclear like all other lofty sermons for the ideal world that’s beckoning us, and whose sibilant vibrations only a few can hear.
In a religion where politics is inextricably embedded at the core, fraternal conflicts predating a millennia are still sharpening modern fault-lines, and where the agony of a lost past and the yearning to reclaim it coexist, the quest for a total reformation and undiminished zeal for it, is more or less a foregone conclusion. It resembles Sir Walter Raleigh’s doomed El Dorado expedition, memorably mentioned in ‘A Way in the World’ by VS Naipaul.
It’s like a mission to depoliticize politics, or denude ideology of any fundamental idea. Not only will it result in kitsch varieties but also there would be a tendency to gloss over the root cause or come up with specious post facto explanations.
A reductionist rubric over an overwhelming large set of issues, complexities and challenges. It is used as a marker of someone who has made that irrevocable break from the past, a leap of faith in reverse direction. While often they are not sure whether like a spurned lover they have exorcised the memory of their ex, or it is still with them subconsciously and subliminally.
The hyphenation means that they are expected to think within a confined space, and the ‘burdens and ghosts’, ‘experiences and values’, ‘dawning realizations and buried past’ of being a Muslim will be confounding, leading to a dilemma or refashioning of what the identity signifies. It isn’t a coming-of-age experience or going beyond that, but struggling with the vestiges in the dark recesses of memory.
The struggle of man against power, is the struggle of memory against forgetting, said Milan Kundera. It is often excruciating, and perilously leads to defeat.
Same old story
It is again a sort of exceptionalism towards Islam or holding it to different standards that instead of simply agnostic or atheist, ‘Ex’ is pronounced as an independent, standalone virtue.
By accentuating any identity marker, it cannot be transcended. The same merry-go-round, bench marking one and using that prism to look at various issues, is a pretty cavalier approach.
Without rigor, depth, clarity, conviction, ability to constantly seek new ideas and rubbish old ones, and holding everything open to debate, ‘Ex’ this or Ex that has as little value or meaning as publicly proclaiming oneself to be ‘Ex Athlete’ or ‘Ex Junkie’.
Other than evocations of a past, it doesn’t convey anything except the apparent fact that the person has now abjured these two once defining traits. It is an enduring maxim in stock trading that past performance is no marker of future outcomes. Similarly, neither a chequered, turbulent past or idyllic old days, could give a picture of the present if the situation has changed. Conditions cannot be transposed to a non-contextual avenue and the flux is ongoing.
A new re-imagination
“In fact, I think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a person who is also a left liberal, an intellectual, a college professor, a person who’s had a whole range of experiences, who reads many books about the Middle East. Why would I be expected to relate to this particular kind of conflict solely by virtue of the fact that I went to Hebrew school and that my grandfather was a rabbi? Obviously, all identities are plural”, said Robert Boyers in an interview with the New Yorker.
What really matters is the significance and merit of work, writings, thoughts, ideas, and whether or not they can have the potential to make a real, marked difference, not the identity that is predicated on the accident of birth, and prominence given to the fact of dissociation.
Careerist SJWs, edgy provocateurs, cheerleaders of US interventionism, lackeys of PC culture and votaries of Wokeness being Ex Muslim or whatever, doesn’t really mean anything in the era of culture wars when every thought is bound to be seen as another salvo fired.
Just the fact that they have disavowed Islam doesn’t make them best placed to understand that religion, or expatiate on it, or embark with gusto on a Mission Civilisatrice, while glossing over complexities and historical processes.
Their ‘lived experiences’ count and are among the numerous testimonies, but they aren’t necessarily legitimate authority on a concealed truth that shall set you free.
If they are not crystal clear about the fundamental differences between religious outlooks vis-à-vis Islam, multifaceted dynamics at play, how faiths change and interact with society, how history effects the present, and how old suppurating civilizational anxieties and wounds animate the current landscape, then they can only offer a placebo as a remedy.
Without casting a spotlight on the underlying fissures inimical to reformation, their insider’s perspective can be nothing more than another opinion take.
If they lack skin-in-the game or fail to look at a holistic picture, then the analysis doesn’t have the merit of coming from the vantage point of first observer and witness.
“What have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person”, wrote George Orwell.
It’s time for well-meaning Muslim atheists to discard the term ‘Ex Muslim’ before it becomes just another product in the shelf of identity and virtue-signaling bazaar and coin a new term of self-identification.