liberal muslims ‘understand not everyone in a muslim household has the same liberty as you’ challenge. liberal muslims stop undermining and speaking over people hurt by the very ones who follow the same religion as you do. liberal muslims understand we can have a simultaneous conversation about islamophobia + violent bigotedness and the essence of islam + the harm it does to many people whose voices and stories are not heard for fear of being labeled islamophobe.

hey just came to update: religious people are still out there being Dummy Stupid as Fuck Thick 

sometimes i think about how different my life would be, had i not been raised in this religious cage. i think about the opportunities i could have had, the happier i would have been, the better life i could have led. i think about the comfort of having supportive parents, ones that know who you are and not just the perfect outer shell they expect of you. i think about how less damaged i would be, how much better i would be equipped for dealing with the outside world. now it’s time to grow up and i’ve spent so much of my life disconnected from society and hiding myself from people who’d harm me if they knew what i truly felt and i’m so scared. i’m plagued by the thought ‘it would be so much better if i just...stopped existing’. but i don’t want to die. i’m just tired of every single day feeling like a struggle, every single a vacuum that i have to exist in until...better days come. until i can leave. but it seems so far away and some days, it’s so tempting to give up. the irony is though that i am terrified of dying. i don’t believe in manipulative allah but the concept of hell is drilled into muslim kids before they can even go to school, no? do this, do that or else...and my family have always been quite descriptive with the wonderful punishments allah has waiting for sinners and non believers. it makes me wince so hard when i hear them telling my younger siblings. bc at this moment it’s just a ploy to get them to obey allah or whatever. but when they’re older and can reason for themselves, when the gravity of following islamic rules or going to hell sinks in, how many of them will be scarred and plagued with gruesome nightmares like me? how many of them will find it hard to sleep and recite shahada before they sleep...just in case they die in their sleep and hell is actually real? i feel helpless and anxious. anyway i’ve digressed so much but i always think of the life i could have had had this one not been robbed from me. sometimes that anger motivates me. to work hard for myself and get away. to come to a point in my life where i’ve completed my education and can support myself and live out of their abusive clutches. but most days it’s crushing and i can’t function. these dark days seem endless. 

i can never stress how frustrating it is trying to explain to ‘modern’ or ‘liberal’ muslims how islam has oppressed you when they’re dead set on their ‘islam is peace/islam is liberal’ narrative and even refuse the to entertain the idea that their perfect religion is a fraction less than so. they always go back to blaming the victim, “no it’s how you chose to act, how you chose to live, your family was like that, not every muslim family” and yet how many people that grew up in muslim families, especially female, have the same stories to share, the same oppressive lifestyle they were subjected to? but stay willfully blind and deaf i guess. ignorance is bliss.