Young Pakistanis Are Asking: If There Can Be Secular Jews, Why Not Atheist Muslims?
In Lahore a Facebook group dedicated to atheists and agnostics serves a silent minority in the world’s other religious nation-state
(Photoillustration Tablet Magazine; original photo Aamir Qureshi/AFP/Getty Images)
By Mina Sohail|March 10, 2014 12:00 AM
The eight young people who gathered recently at a popular restaurant in central Lahore looked like any others, laughing over samosas with tangy chutney sauce as a table of older ladies in hijab looked on from a nearby table. But the jokes the boisterous twenty-somethings were sharing were about the absurdities of religion, and they weren’t social friends.
Rather, they were members of Pakistani Atheists and Agnostics, a five-year-old group that advertises itself on Twitter as “a social organization for freethinkers of Pakistan.” Two or three times a month they gather to talk about religion—or rather, about rejecting religion—and about politics. On this day, they focused on how Islam rejects the idea of evolution and shared memories of being taught in school that evolution is merely a Western concept.
In Tel Aviv or New York, where the idea of a “secular Jew” isn’t seen as a contradiction, such a conversation would hardly attract notice. But in Lahore, the second city of Pakistan—which, like Israel, is a religion-based nation-state—the notion of a secular Muslim remains subversive and potentially dangerous for members whose relatives still adhere to traditional religious views.
No one knows how many atheists there are in Pakistan exactly, but more than 1,100 people have signed up for Pakistani Atheists and Agnostics on Facebook. “For every member I have now, there are two people who message me saying they would like to join but cannot as they are afraid,” said the group’s founder, a 30-year-old man who calls himself Hazrat NaKhuda—literally “Prophet of no God.”
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/165226/pakistans-secular-muslims
https://twitter.com/PakistaniAA
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