If there is one group of people that I have little hesitation in supporting or who I believe have a right to speak freely, then it is ex-Muslims. Whilst I may not agree with everything that all of the individuals in this group say, I do support their right to both live as ex-Muslims, to speak of their experiences as an ex-Muslim and to engage in criticism of Islamic theology, culture and belief. The right of people to criticise an ideology or a philosophy whether it be a secular or religious one is vital right and it is a right that should be protected and in some parts of the world, enhanced.

I support the right of ex-Muslims to speak freely because I understand enough about Islamic theology and belief to know that there are parts of Islam that are really not nice. There are parts that encourage the doing of harm to non-believers, to treat women like dirt, that accept slavery and to punish those who leave Islam. Of course not all individual Muslims believe in these aspects of Islam, some just ignore these precepts and are decent individuals because that’s what they are, inherently decent individuals. There are also small groups within Islam that have rejected the nastiness or who have, as Christians and Jews have to an extent, placed the nastiness in the context of the time that they were written down and treat this nastiness as something of ‘then’ rather than ‘now’.

Ex-Muslims, just as ex-Christians or ex-Jews or ex-Hindus or ex-Neo-Pagans do, should have the right to speak about negative aspects of their former faith. Ex-Muslims should be able to publicly discuss such matters as Islamic misogyny, supermacism, slavery and the treatment of apostates. Unfortunately there are parts of Big Tech that don’t believe that ex-Muslims should have that right.

According to a post on the Parler platform by a critic of Islam, the Ex-Muslims of North America group are claiming that Twitter has locked their account on that platform because they put up a video of a Muslim cleric discussing Islam’s permissive views towards slavery. This looks to me to be an example of outrageous and indeed bizarre censorship. Twitter are applying a rule to an ex-Muslim group that they would probably not apply to any other group of apostates from any other faith path.

Here’s the screenshot showing the Twitter ban for the Ex-Muslims of North America group.

It needs to be said at this point that the EMNA group was not approving of the idea of slavery in Islam but using the talk as an example of it in order to condemn it.

What Twitter have done is apply the very broad and extremely vague rules about ‘hateful conduct’ to silence a group that someone, presumably a believing Muslim, took ‘offence’ to. By doing so Twitter have prevented this ex-Muslim group from voicing their opinion on a form of slavery that isn’t merely a nasty bit of ancient history, as is the case of the Transatlantic slave trade, but is slavery that has gone on in living memory and in some places still goes on today. Shame on Twitter for doing this. Twitter are not helping anyone with this act of censorship apart from those within orthodox Islam who do not wish to have these negative aspects of Islam discussed. The only winners in Twitter’s censorship are those who wish to interpret Islamic theology in a harmful and extremist way.