Why I Left Islam: The Quran, Hadith and Women's Rights

The claim that, like, something to be violent and divine just, that can't be in the same sentence, and the Quran was full of absolute violence. And then I looked into Muhammad's life after that.

There's layers to leaving it. So the Quran, I was like, "Okay, I can't just leave it based on this. Let me actually see what the prophet did in his life." Um, 'cause we were taught that, like, his sweat smelt like roses.

He stopped little infant girls from being buried alive, all of this.

So I was like, "Okay, surely Muhammad was not even advocating what the Quran says." But I was so wrong. I went into the Hadith, and matters just got so much worse. And again, I wasn't even focusing on weak ones or ones that were contentious. I was like, "What are,

like, the Sahih Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, the, the most agreed-upon Hadith that people are saying, 'This is a genuine chain of narration that's ir- undisputable?'" It was even worse for women, you know?

You're getting beaten to the point where you're greener than the cloth you're wearing. Um, as I mentioned, Aisha said believing women suffer the most.

She was picking, like, apart the prophet's reasoning for why have you likened us to donkeys and chattel?

Why have you made us equal to them? So all of these things, I was just like, "Oh my gosh, even Prophet Muhammad in his lifetime treated and dealt with women in this manner, which is completely reflected in the Quran, so these two things are completely in agreement." And that's really where Islam started disintegrating itself for me.

I just, I couldn't lie to myself anymore or, or think of this man as being the most perfect, eternal example for humanity.

Like, he just honestly became an egomaniac warlord with this expansionist agenda who was extremely misogynistic and treated women as, like, the booty of his endeavors, and that's what we're still suffering from today.

His words and his actions and these recordings in the Hadith and these verses that have come down in the Quran, um, I just thought, like, "It's high time I trust my mind.

I trust what I'm reading. This is genuinely a cult which is entrapping women, giving rise to situations like child marriage and child brides, things that we're seeing today." And I can't sit here and do what I used to do as a Muslim and blame it on culture anymore because I've seen the evidence for what it is, and this goes beyond

culture. This is deep-seated into our psyche from Islam itself.