The psychological abuses of fundamentalist Islam
Shrinkwrapped writes of the epidemic of rape in the Islamic world as a series of mini 9-11’s, a term we used immediately below. The fundamentalist Islamic world is dysfunctional in many ways that are important to mental health. Shrinkwrapped’s piece triggered a question we asked him about apostasy in that world:
One thing I keep wondering about in the world of fundamentalist Islam, such as Saudi Arabia, is this: what happens if you wake up one morning and no longer believe in the Koran or Mohammed or Allah or any of it? Apostasy is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, so it is clear you have to keep faking it, but that is not my point. My point is rather this: where do you go in your mind? As I pointed out in this piece, it is not only that you can’t choose to be an atheist, Christian or Jew, but many of the ways we make sense of the world, apart from religion, in art and technology, do not exist — even as words — for many who live in the mental tyranny of a fundamentalist Islamic society. Where do you go if you wake up as an unbeliever in a country where unbelievers are murdered. Do you despair? Do you want to end it all?
The apostate Saudi reminds me of an abused child. A little child is weak and dependent on his parents. He must love them even if they beat and abuse him. The thought of seeing them as bad, the thought of no longer believing in them, in unacceptable. Like the Saudi apostate, the child fears he may be killed for such treason. I imagine the child retreating into a small fantasy world to survive. What does the Saudi apostate do to survive and not go insane?
Making apostasy a crime is conducting psychological torture, and it should be forbidden if human rights mean anything at all. You believe something or you don’t believe it — it’s as simple as that. It is absurd that unbelief should be a crime, let alone that it can command the death penalty. What are a Saudi’s choices if he wakes up and decides all religion is rubbish? The denial of what his own mind tells him? A deeply dishonest inner life? Despair? Fantasy? Suicide? Perhaps the ultimate in ironic acts for a hidden non-believer: murder-suicide? We don’t have the answer; we want merely to point out how deeply sick are the governments of fundamentalist Islam.