It is often said that the penalty for leaving Islam is death. That doesn’t deter many people from escaping what they believe is the bondage of Islam. Jewish and Islamic theology expert Joel Richardson co-authored the book, Why We Left Islam: Former Muslims Speak Out, which brings such stories to light. The former Muslims included in this compelling work do not testify of a religion of peace, but one of hate and brutality. According to a witness, Islam influenced a man to beat his wife to such a point that she had to have her womb removed. What horrible crime did she commit? She bore three daughters instead of at least one son. It is also declared that the Koran is not a holy book but one filled with verses that call for the deaths of unbelievers and their eventual torture, by Allah, after death. Below is an excerpt from Chapter One:
MY SISTER
ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, the world saw the seventh century mentality of fundamentalist Islam gain possession of twenty-first century technology. The results were catastrophic. The violent nature of Islam arrived on American soil unforgettably and irrevocably. Many Americans, along with other Westerners, hadn’t thought much about Islam before then. September 11 changed all that, bringing Islam home to the twenty-first century Western world. Suddenly, Iran and Iraq didn’t seem so far away after all, and Westerners, especially we Americans, wanted to learn more about this faceless enemy who’d declared war on us in the most barbaric way imaginable. We found ourselves confronted with a deadly force that we’d thought lay half a world away and fourteen centuries in the past. Those terrorist bombings we’d heard of only on television had moved from a faraway Middle East to our own backyard. On September 11, what Islam represents became one of the most important questions facing the Western world, and our first experience with it left a bitter taste in many American mouths.
Parvin Darabi doesn’t just talk about the barbarity of radical Islam that Americans experienced that day, she’d lived it long before the Twin Towers fell. In this poignant and painful letter, she writes of her sister, Homa, who struggled mightily against the heavy hand of the Islamic government in Iran. Living as a woman carries a heavy price in Iran. Homa was willing to pay it. Now Parvin carries on, and she urges us all to ignore the peaceful rhetoric of Islam and focus instead on the violent reality of Islamic rule. What Homa Darabi experienced in Iran could one day come to the West if Islamofascist terrorism is not defeated. Homa’s story is a specific example of how an Islamic government works and why it would never work in the West.
My Sister
My sister, Dr. Homa Darabi, was born in Tehran, Iran, in January 1940, two months premature, to Eshrat Dastyar, a child bride who at age thirteen had married Esmaeil Darabi. Homa was my older sister, my protector, and my role model. Homa had a life full of hope and promise that a tyrannical and fundamentalist Islamic system destroyed…
During her professional life my sister was under pressure from some parents of her younger patients to give the label of mentally incapacitated to many perfectly intelligent young girls so that they could be saved from the tortures of the zealots (150 strokes of a whip for things such as wearing makeup or lipstick). Having to label these young women truly broke my sister’s heart.
When a sixteen-year- old girl was shot to death in northern Tehran for wearing lipstick, my sister could no longer handle the guilt she felt about her former involvement in the Iranian Revolution. My sister felt Iran had been hijacked by the religious factions, and the way women were treated in Iran was unforgivable. She wanted the world to know what was happening. She finally decided to protest the oppression of women by setting herself on fire in a crowded square in northern Tehran on February 21, 1994. Her last cries were:
Death to tyranny!
Long live liberty!
Long live Iran!
Personal accounts such as these are often ignored by the mainstream media out of fear of violating political correctness. However, the first step to tolerance is allowing all voices to be heard without a regard for appeasement. This book is part of the step in the right direction.
Filed under: Books, Life, Religion | Tagged: Islam, Joel Richardson, Koran, LorMarie, Middle East, Quran, Religion
I would love to read this book. It sounds fascinating and informative.
Cheryl
We recently wrote on a similar issue at Brain Blogger. We drew on the parallels between the Catholic Church and radical Muslim ideology. Just as the Catholic Church was once known as much for their political actions as it was for religious doctrine, many Muslim doctors today are regarded both as medical adviser and religious leader. Sometimes, in fact, their professional clout gives them more religious stature than someone known only for their religious authority.
We would like to hear your comments on our article. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Shaheen
So much lies were told about the Islamic religion… Now I do not believe to anything from non verified sources… I do not believe in any god, so I’m not defending the religion but for many decades we women were beat by our men in Christianity society. Did the bible influenced them to do this?
By the way. I wanted to left the Christian religion too, because I did not made the decision to go into it and I do not like it, and do you know what? I have to DIE to left it!!! They do not want let me go and till the end of my life I will have the sign Christian! It is true, that they do not want to kill me, but some people, who know that I do not believe in the same thing as they do, behave to me impolitely and act like I was totally stupid and something less than they are. So I believe, that the behave of people do not depend on the religion, but on the personality.