I'm Rabi Ami Hirsch of the Stephenwise Free Synagogue in New York, and you're listening to In These Times. The fiercest spirits are forged in the most intense heat. Yasmin Muhammad's childhood was a furnace. Born in Canada, she made a few happy memories until the age of five or six. Abandoned by her Gazan father, her Egyptian mother succumbed to the lure of Islamic extremism and became the second wife of a violent and abusive man. Forced to marry a person whom she later discovered was a member of Al Qaeda. Yasmin eventually found the strength to break away. And her story continues to inspire men and women around the world. Yasmin, welcome to In These Times.

Thank you so much for having me, rabbi. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

I read your book, Unvealed. It was searing for me. I know that it must have been painful to live through, painful to write, and I hope it was also to a certain degree cathartic for you. You speak about the abuse that you endured as a child. For those listeners who haven't read it, first of all, I highly recommend it. Could you give us a summary of your childhood and what are the things that brought you to who you are today?

Essentially, my dad was born and raised in Gaza. My mom was born and raised in Egypt. My dad went to Egypt to go to university, and that's where he met my mom. They got married and they moved to San Francisco. I had my sister, and then they moved to Canada, where they had my brother and I, and that's where their marriage fell apart. My mom was essentially a single mom to three kids. She went looking for community, looking for support, and she went to the local mosque. She wasn't religious in any way. Either was my dad, but it was just for other people that maybe spoke Arabic, have cultural comforts.

This was in Canada?

This was in Canada. That's right.

What part of Canada?

Vancouver. Vancouver, BC, Canada. Yeah. So this was early '80s when political Islam was starting to take over the world. It started in Iran with the Islamic regime, and it was just starting to spread. My mom got caught up in it. When she went to the mosque and she met a man there who believed in all of this ideology, and he was already married, already had three kids, but my mom accepted to be his second wife. In Islam, a man can have up to four wives. When he came into our lives, that's when everything changed. That's when it went from pretty much a normal childhood to suddenly, you can't ride a bike, you can't go swimming, you can't listen to music, you can't have non-Muslim friends, you can't celebrate birthdays. Everything was forbidden. Just haram, haram, haram. We had to start memorizing put on so that we could pray five times a day. If we didn't, we'd get beaten. My sister and I got put in hijab. We started going to Islamic schools, just completely turned our lives upside down. That was my childhood. I kept hoping that my mom would snap out of it and then we would go back to the way life was before she allowed this man into our lives.

But that didn't happen. My mom became a born-again Muslim. She jumped in, she She became such a zealot. She felt like she needed to make up for all of her years wearing mini-skirts and whatever. She just wanted to be the most Muslim Muslim possible. She felt that by raising us to be incredibly observant zealots, really, that that would, for her, be some... She would, in that way, be repenting for her years of living as a secular Muslim versus a very observant Muslim. Because I was always quite resistant and unhappy, it caused a lot of strife between my mom and I. Lots of things happened, but I'm just going to fast forward to when I was 19 She chose a man for me to marry who was a member of Al Qaeda. She said that she chose him because he was strong enough to control me. She thought, Well, this man will be able to keep this girl in line. It worked. I was put in niqab. I was imprisoned in my house, basically. I had to accept that he would beat me and accept that he would rape me and accept anything because I was his property and he could do whatever he wanted with me.

It wasn't until I had my daughter that I felt such an overwhelming sense of love for her and responsibility to protect her, and I didn't want her to live the same life that I had lived. That's what made me start to feel like I need to get her out of this world. My mom and him had this discussion where they were talking about taking my daughter to Egypt to get FGM performed on her. That was for me the moment that I felt like, even if I have to grab my daughter and jump out the window, I'm getting out of this house. There's no way I'm going to let her, let them mutilate my perfect little baby's body.

I just want to explain to the audience FGM is female genital mutilation.

That's right. It's very common in Egypt. It wasn't done in our family, but it was done in his family. I felt like my life was horrible already, but now it's going to be that much worse. My daughter is going to have an even worse life than I did. There's no way I could let that happen.

I'm just curious. You write about and You've spoken about both verbal and physical abuse that you endured from your mother as well as from your former husband, perhaps other people in your life. How much of that do you attribute just to the nature of human beings? Because lots of people practice abuse on their children and on other people, on their spouses, and they don't necessarily need to be religious for them. How much of that do you attribute to just this is human nature and some social structure, lifted the restraints so that it was permissible? And how much of that was actually attributed in your mind to tenets of Islam.

You're absolutely correct. Not everybody is going to beat his children or her children. Not everybody's going to beat their wife, but the religion sanctions it. It offers In some ways, it actually encourages it. There's one Hadith that says, Hang your whip by the door so that your wife, your children, and your slaves can see it. It's essentially saying, Rule by corporal punishment. Keep the whip there visible for them to keep them in line. When it comes to beating children, there's a Hadith that talks about if children are not praying, if they miss a prayer after the age of seven, then they should be beaten. Chapter 4, verse 34, Surrittenesat instructs men that if they fear disobedience or arrogance from their wives, they should beat them. What all of these edicts are doing is They are first and foremost, encouraging this behavior. You're saying not everybody would partake in these things. That's true. But if you were the type of person to partake in these things, you have religious justification. You have a law on your side. You have Muhammad on your side. It's a carte blanche, really.

You have the law on your side. Is that a consensus of the people who interpret the law in Islam, or are There are others who are just appalled by these standards?

According to Islamic law, I'll take Egypt, for example, which isn't even a Sharia law country, but it has some laws that follow Sharia, women there have been trying to criminalize domestic abuse for decades, and they're unable to because the men refer to the Quran and they say, If Allah has made something halal, then how can some lowly human feminist woman think that she's going to change the laws and make something that Allah has already made halal and make it haram? That same argument is used for marital rape, for child marriage, for so many other atrocities. As long as there are still people who are referring to 1400-year-old laws and they're wanting to continue living that way today, literally, then how can progress occur? It cannot. Of course, there are individual people all over the world that choose to not follow these edicts. But when there are people who do want to do these things, the religious justification is there. When you ask if it's widespread, the answer is yes.

Let me ask you, most of your childhood, you spent in Canada, you were born in Canada. Canada is a Western country. Abuse is illegal. Verbal abuse, but certainly physical abuse. Polygamy is, I assume, is illegal in Canada. How did all this happen under the nose of the Canadian authorities?

As far as polygamy is concerned, they know. It's very common. I've spoken to many people who actually work for different ministries in Canada, one of them being the Ministry of Children and Families, and they talked about how they are very aware of how common it is for a man to have four wives, and each one of those wives to be on social assistance for her and her children. And quite often the man is unemployed because each one of these women is getting supported by taxpayers. And this means housing as well. Each one of these single moms plus the husband are all getting government housing as well. And they know that that is siphoning millions and millions of dollars from the system, but there's nothing that they will do about it because they're afraid of being attacked for being Islamophobes or racist or xenophobes or whatever. And so they're just letting it go. So my mom was another one of those recipients of social assistance Until she started going to Al-Alzheimer University, and she got her master's degree in Islamic studies, and she started teaching at the Islamic School. And that's because when this man met her, she was working as an accountant for the government, Actually, she had a great job.

He told her that women shouldn't work. He told her that it would be more honorable if she were to quit her job and go on social assistance for herself and her children than to continue this work that she was doing because she was a university-educated woman and she was skilled and she could have been empowered and sustained herself, but he didn't want her working outside the home. Anyway, long story short, the first wife that this man had was his legal wife. The second wife, my mom, was an Islamic wife. They basically viewed it as his mistress. So there was really nothing that they could legally do because he wasn't legally married to both of them. He was only legally married to the first one. So technically, he wasn't breaking the law.

Do the Canadian authorities enforce laws against child abuse?

Absolutely not. The forward of my book is written by one of my teachers named Mr. Fabro. After I was going to Islamic School for Elementary School and there was no high school, I was allowed to go to public school for a year. And In that year, Mr. Fabro discovered, we talked about it, and I told him all about my home life, showed him the bruises, showed him the welts, showed him the cuts, talked him about everything, and he said, It's my duty that I must inform the authorities. He told the police who got child services involved, and then it went to family court. It was this huge investigation. My mom's got three kids, and then he had two of his kids living at home. The oldest one had already moved out. So there were five children, and we were all interviewed. I have to say as well that one of his daughters had previously gone to school with what was very clearly a handmark on her face. They could see the four fingers on her face. So they alerted the authorities at that point. So he already had a strike against him for child abuse.

When I told Mr. Fabra what was going on, that was strike two. Still, at the end of all that, the judge said to me, It's your culture, it's your family. This is how they choose to discipline you. Basically, I'm not going to protect you.

If it was a white, Protestant, Canadian family, would the judge's decision have been the same, do you think?

No question. Absolutely no question. Again, I'm going to go back to FGM that I was referring to before, female genital mutilation. That happens commonly in America, Canada, the UK, Sweden, France, all over the place as well. Now, if you have a blonde-haired, blue-eyed family that took a razor to their daughter's genitals and then sewed her shut and just left her a tiny little hole, the parents, whoever did this, would either be in an insane asylum or in prison. They would never just let that go. But when it's a Somali or an Egyptian family that do that to their daughter, they say, Oh, well, that's just cultural differences. That's exactly what happened here, too. I was left by my government to... It wasn't just child abuse, it was torture. And they allowed that to happen because of cultural relativism. They thought, Well, this is your culture. Who am I to judge your culture and how they raise their children?

You write at the beginning of your book that, Liberals are happy to criticize white theocracies, Christian theocracies, but they fail to criticize the same evils in the Muslim world. Could you explain a little bit of that? I imagine that, leaving aside the question of theocracies, just What you're describing now is an example of what you mean by this double standard that we in the West have. Expand on that. Explain to us what you mean by that.

Yeah, absolutely. I'll take the most prominent example, which is is how we are very quick to talk about how the church is so homophobic, and people will very openly talk about how Christianity is really bad for self-hate of gay kids, et cetera. But then when you talk about the fact that 15 Muslim-majority countries will execute people for being homosexuals, they don't want to have that conversation. They don't want to talk about that. Here in the West, we'll talk about abortion issues, the nipple, all sorts of women's issues. But when we're talking about women in Iran just wanting to not wear a hijab or women not wanting to cover their faces, they don't want to have those conversations because they feel like that's Islamophobic. I just recently watched a clip of an Iranian woman on a podcast. There was a group of people there, and she started talking about the oppression of Iranian women, and she was shut down by the American women who were there who started telling her that what she was saying wasn't appropriate. There's a million examples of that. I'm sure your listeners and probably you yourself may have seen or heard examples of this where you can have the conversation when it's in different contexts.

If you're complaining about the Westborough Baptist Church, for example, then you're fine. Everybody is agreeing with you. But if you take those exact same harmful elements and you say, Islam also sanctions this same abuse, suddenly they want to shut the conversation down. In the UK, you might have heard of the Ratheram gangs, the rape gangs of Pakistani Muslim men that thousands of girls over decades were caught in these gangs that would take these girls and basically use them as sex slaves. Girls as young as seven and eight years old, right? This went on for decades. Whenever a politician or a journalist or anyone in law enforcement, anyone tried to speak up against this, that person was the one who is demonized. That person is the one who lost their job. That person is the one that lost their reputation because how dare you speak about Pakistani Muslim men doing something wrong. Those girls were left to continue to be victimized because everybody was so worried about being called Islamophobic or racist or xenophobic or whatever. So when they're doing that, what they're doing is they are essentially protecting the oppressors. They are protecting the perpetrators of these crimes by saying, We can't talk about that.

So they're letting the victims continue to be victimized.

I can sense the frustration in your voice, but it's even more than that, I think. It sets back the cause for which these movements devote their entire attention to. So it undermines the purity of their principled positioning. Do you feel that?

Absolutely correct. Absolutely, yes.

I tell you, I feel it. I don't know what your views are. I hope to ask you in a bit about your perspective on the Middle East, but I don't know how closely you follow the Jewish community. But we're in a crisis, both in Israel and around the in particular here in America, the American Jewish community, because most of us are liberal. We have not only devoted our lives and believe full-heartedly in liberalism, both in terms of what's good for the West as well as what's good for the American Jewish community. We helped to build some of these social justice movements, helped to fund them, helped to lead them. It was just shocking to us. We still haven't really gotten our hands around it that There's such sensitivity in the West about sexual assault on women. But when it happened in a mass gang rape way to Israeli women, it's almost like the social justice movements and the feminist movements completely turned a blind eye, so much so that they denied the evidence. The very organizations that made a point of saying the assumption is women should be believed when they talk about sexual assault.

All of a sudden, they demanded proof, and the proof was right in front of them. Hamas filmed much of their atrocities.

We all saw it.

I fully share the frustration that I sense in you and just how disappointing it must be, not only on a personal level, but for all of those people who seek to build a better world.

Yeah. No, absolutely. What you're saying is absolutely true. I think definitely a big part of it is just hate for Israeli people and hate for Jewish people. I think that definitely, unfortunately, unasset, that it, unfortunately, plays a part in this, even though that's something that we don't want to talk about, that we don't want to admit, that we don't want to see. But I think that we're forced to accept that. We're forced to acknowledge that. But The other side is also true in that if it's the wrong perpetrators, if the perpetrator isn't a white male or a Jewish male, then they don't want to hear from these women being victimized. It's the same whether it was me, whether it was the British girls in Ratheram, whether it's Hindu girls in Pakistan, whether it's Christian girls in Nigeria, or whether it's Jewish girls in Israel. It's the same thing because the perpetrators, the people who are victimizing us, are the protected class. We can't speak of them because that would make us bad people. That would make us Islamophobic. All of these women across the globe are being thrown under the bus.

Yeah. It not only undermines, it cast a shadow not only on the character and the qualities of leadership these social justice movements, but also on the very ideology that they claim to represent. There's some rot in the philosophy itself.

There's no question. I mean, October seventh happened, and a heartbeat later, they were immediately glorifying Hamas. They were glorifying a terrorist group. They were sharing pictures of those paragliders and talking about resistance and freedom fighters. These are supposed to be social justice, progressive, open-minded liberal thinkers, and you're supporting a terrorist organization. You're supporting an organization that if you look into their charter or if you look into how they treat people, you will see how they dehumanize not only Jewish people, but women, minorities, how there's videos of them dragging men at the end of motor cycles because they found out that he was gay. They don't realize that the thing that you are supporting is the exact antithesis of who you say you are, of who you pretend to be.

How do you explain that? You say, I don't realize. Do you think it's ignorance or is it something else?

I think a part of it is just ignorance. When you see strippers for Gaza or queers for Palestine, it's like they really have no idea who it is that they're supporting.

These are some of the smartest people in the world.

Yes. Unfortunately, You can be smart in a lot of parts of your life, but really stupid in other parts. I think a huge part of it, again, I have to go back to this unfortunate fact, which is a lot of it just has to do with it's not even that they love Palestinian people or that they want to support Gazans, it's just that they hate Israel or just that they hate Jewish people. Antisemitism, I think, runs through the Marxist ideology just as deeply as it does through the Islamic ideology. That's so common in our universities, both in Canada and in America. There's this very simplistic formula that they're given about good Good and bad and white and brown. In that formula, when you look at a Jewish person, which they have deemed Jewish people to be white now, and then you look at a Palestinian person, they're basically looking at the color of the skin and deciding, Okay, well, this one must be the oppressor and this one must be the oppressed, so this must be the good guy, and this must be the bad guy. It's just incredibly simplistic TikTok level of understanding of the conflict.

Even when I talk about the conflict, even that's not the full picture because everybody talks about Hamas versus Israel as if it's in a vacuum. That's just a microcosm for the much larger problem across the globe. Iran are the ones who funded Hamas. The Shia's are funding the Sunnis when it's against the Jews. You know what I mean? We have a global problem. We're We're familiar with many of the names. We've heard the names Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hazbalah, Al Shabbat. You know what I mean? It goes on and on and on and on and on. All of these Islamist groups all have the exact same goal, and that goal is to spread Islam across the globe. They see the world as us and them. It's Dar al-Islam and then D'ar al-harb. D'ar al-islam Is basically the land of Islam, and then Dar al-Harb is the land of war. Everything that isn't Islamic is at war with Islam until they become Islamic. If you are a Muslim, Then everybody else is your enemy, and you have to try and spread the religion of Islam so that these people are no longer your enemies.

Try and get them to become Muslim. That's That's the caliphate. That's the global caliphate aspirations. The FBI in the '90s released a document called the Hundred Year Plan, where the Muslim Brotherhood were talking about taking over America through these diplomatic means of immigration and childbirth, increasing the population so that they could affect the politics and all sorts of other different means. We are looking at the one little Hamas Hamas versus Israel issue, but we're not understanding that it's all interconnected. Why are the Hamas leaders in Qatar? Why is Iran paying for Hamas's terrorism? It's much, much bigger. This isn't a land dispute, you know what I mean? But they look at it as this little tiny situation that can be clearly outlined for them in a meme or in a quick TikTok video, and that's all the understanding that they have of it. And so they just see Good guy, bad guy, as if the world is a Disney movie, and that's it. They wash their hands of it. They think they understand it. And so no matter what Hamas does, they've already decided that they are the good guys. No matter what the Israelis have to endure, and not just Israelis, a lot of those people were from Brazil and America and all over the world in that music festival, whatever innocent people have to endure at the hands of Hamas, It doesn't matter to them because they've already decided, But you're the bad guys.

Even if you're babies, you're the bad guys.

It's really scary what you're describing because I think one of the ramifications of your point is that, as you said, this is not simply a local dispute, and it's certainly not about territory or borders in a corner of the world in the Middle East. This war is really the front lines of a clash of civilizations, and that if the Islamists win in Israel, they're not going to stop in Israel. They'll continue on to the streets of Europe and to the streets of the United States and Canada. Is that right? Is that your perspective?

That is their perspective. I'm just conveying to you what they have made very clear. They have said this so many times. Hamas leaders have said this, ISIS have said this. Bin Laden has said this. You've heard this many, many times over, that their hate is not only for the Jewish people. Their hate is not only for Israel. That's just what they are getting a lot of attention for and a lot of sympathy for. But as soon as they're done with Israel, they're going to move on to America. You'll have another 9/11. You'll have 9/11s all over Europe. That's The aim is to anybody who does not convert to Islam must be killed. Everybody on the planet needs to be praying to Allah. That's their ultimate goal, a global caliphate.

Yes, you have a chapter here on the Jews, which, of course, was interesting to me. You write that you and many Others are taught that the Jewish people were subhuman and that the most hated of all were the Jewish people, that there were all kinds of conspiracy theories that you were exposed to when you were a child, like the Jews put cancer in vegetables, and generations of Muslim children are brainwashed to hate all Jewish people. Could you describe that a little bit more for our listeners and assess for us how widespread do you think that education is?

It's so much more than an education. It's just accepted, normalized reality. It's just the way it is. I mean, it's part of your everyday vernacular. The worst thing you could call somebody is Yehudi. You could curse their mother and they'd forgive you. But if you call them a Jew, it's like, That's it. This friendship is over. That's the worst thing that could happen. Then if something good happens, If they're happy about something, they'll be like, Yey, wahid Yehudi mat. That means a Jew died. That's their exclamation of joy. It's not considered, it's not thought of, it's not acknowledged as anti-Semitism or hate of Jewish people. It's just the normalized everyday speech. It's like a fish not knowing they're wet. That's just the way it is. Because most of these people who are indoctrinated with such hate for Jewish people, I've never met a Jewish person in their life. There's so many stories. One of my favorites is Hamid Abdesamad, who is an Egyptian-German author He wrote a book called Islamic Fashism. He tells the story of when he was working at a hotel, and this guy came in, and he was an older gentleman, and he spoke like Egyptian, Arabic, and so they connected.

Hammond noticed that this man's Egyptian was antiquated. It was old school, but he thought, Oh, well, I guess it's because he's older. They connected on playing a musical instrument together, the oud, and they spent all night getting to know each other. Then finally, the man told Hamid that he was Jewish and his family had been kicked out of Egypt and that he missed Egypt, et cetera. Hamid, at that point, had this His cognitive dissonance was just like it all reached ahead. He just felt like he had been betrayed by this man because you made me like a Jew. You know what I mean? You didn't disclose the fact that you were Jewish and you made me like you. Now all of a sudden, he's having to deal with these feelings of, How could I have liked a Jewish guy? How could I have befriended him? That moment for him really allowed the indoctrination to break because He realized, All of my life I've been taught to hate Jewish people, or I thought I hated Jewish people, and I thought they were these horrible people, and now I just met one and we hung out all night drinking and playing music together.

Was it all a lie? Is it not true? Are they not these horrible people? That led him down his path of enlightenment. There are so many stories just like that. A lot of these people that have this Irrational, obsessive, genocidal hate for Jewish people have never met a Jewish person. Jews to them are like this boogie man. It's so easy then because they've never actually met a Jewish person. It's so easy to feed them this hate. It's so easy to feed them this indoctrination because they've got no frame of reference. They've got nothing in their mind that's going to counter these lies.

And yet Egypt is at peace with Israel now for 45 years. It's a cold peace, but it's held. Jordan, the Gulf States. Do you have hope that Islam and Judaism can reconcile an Israelis and Arabs?

I'm never going to say that I don't have hope, but I will say that it has to... Our hearts and minds have to change. This can't just be a political decision. Egyptians, for example, they're still incredibly anti-Semitic. So In order to change hearts and minds, it's going to take a lot more than just political alliances. I think what the UAE is doing, and Saudi Arabia, too, I think that they're taking some steps in the right direction. Saudi Arabia has removed all the Hadith that are anti-Semitic from their curriculum in their school. That's a huge step. To remove a Hadith and to not teach it to the children is a really big step. Obviously, I commend them for that. That's wonderful. These books wouldn't cause any damage if we weren't indoctrinating what's written in them into the minds of little kids, right? Mm-hmm. That's a huge step. Obviously, UAE has made some big strides. I remember calling a friend of mine who lives in Dubai, and I was like, Is this real? Do they actually have Israeli fruit in the stores? She's taking videos for me, and it's got an Israeli flag over, I don't know what it was, pomegranates or something.

I was like, I can't believe it, because when I lived in Qatar, they would black out any mention of the word Israel. It didn't exist. If you said Israel, they'd be like, What's that? It doesn't exist. Actually, it was in the UAE where a friend of mine was working in the UAE. He's an American, and he's an American Jew, actually. He couldn't call out to Israel. He couldn't call out using his work phone to Israel because the phones just wouldn't connect. To see the progress that I'm seeing now, even though it's baby steps, they are actually massive steps for how normalized the anti-Semitism was in those areas, or still is in those areas, but hopefully getting better. So yeah, I do definitely have hope, but it's going to be slow and it's going to require a lot of education. I mean, even the Holocaust is still denied openly and casually, and praising Hitler and all sorts of horrible things like that are still so normalized personalized. It's going to take a while, but nothing is impossible.

I'm actually quite in awe of you. As I said, it was painful for me to read your book, and yet here you are, liberated, accomplished. I think you wrote that you have three degrees. You must have sensed that something was wrong, even as a child. How did you manage to find the reservoirs of courage and strength to break away, finally?

Short answer is my daughter. But yes, definitely. As I was growing up, I had a lot of resentment and just anger towards the new world that had taken I wanted to go back to when I was five and six years old, to this world before my mom became a zealot. I kept hoping that somehow she might snap out of it and we would go back to that world. I kept that hope in my mind, and I would dream about it and wish and plan. I never really fully submitted. I was terrified. I was very, very scared of the man my mother married. He was incredibly abusive. I I was scared of my mom. I was scared of a law. I was scared of the punishments that would happen in the grave for the day of judgment. I was scared of everything, and so I listened. Also, I wanted my mom's love and support, and so I did what she wanted me to do because I wanted her to approve of me. I never thought I would ever go to post-secondary school. I never thought I would get a higher education. For me to be able to get myself to university and to get subsequent degrees was such a sense of empowerment.

When I was in university, I took a course called History of Religions, and it was focusing on the three Abrahamic religions. The professor of that course was a Lebanese Christian man. Because he was also an Arab, I felt an affinity to him. He encouraged me to look at the parts of the Quran and the Hadith that he knew I probably wasn't aware of and tried to get me to see like, Oh, look how many times Allah mentions that the Earth is flat. Do you see how many times that's referenced? That's quite shocking. It just forced me to start to critically examine the edicts of this religion in a way that I was never allowed to, even though I went to Islamic schools and my mom was an Al-Adha, a scholar. You can't ask questions because as soon as you do, that's the devil whispering in your ear and you're the bad person. You have to just accept it blindly, shut your mouth, shut your brain, and just do as you're told. In that course, where for the first time, I was bombarded intellectually with all of this information about this religion, 9/11 happened. As I'm being bombarded intellectually, simultaneously, I'm being bombarded emotionally.

Because when 9/11 happened, even though When I'm in Canada, it's like right next door. It felt like it was happening to us. We're watching the Twin Towers, we're watching the people jump out, and I'm watching my family and my community full of joy, full of just feeling... Moral has just been boosted, and they're feeling so empowered like, Oh, look, we are defeating the infidels. It was really It was hard for me to reconcile that I was going to raise my daughter to be part of a community that is excited about the death of innocent people. How could I do that to her? And so by the end of that year, I knew I couldn't be a Muslim anymore, and I certainly wasn't going to raise my daughter to be a Muslim anymore.

So that's what did You have a lot of courage and conviction. It's great to see. You're estranged from your mom, is that right? Yeah.

I haven't seen her in over 20 years.

And you have two siblings, brother and a sister? Mm-hmm. Have you been in touch with them?

No, same thing. No one in my family. I had one cousin who was disowned by the family because she married a Jewish man. So her and I are the only ones because we're the two disowned ones. So she's the only family member I have. And I have one uncle who speaks to me because he doesn't like my mom. And that's it.

Isam Marzuk, your former husband, who was an Al Qaeda terrorist. He was He's really one of the key plotters. He wasn't even a minor figure. He was a central figure. Is he still in prison now?

Yeah, he's still in prison as far as I know.

My final question to you, Yasmin, is most of our listeners are well ensconced in liberalism and in the Western liberal world. Do you have a final message for me and for us and our listeners?

I would say, hold fast to those values. When you grow up as a liberal person believing that live and let live and everyone has the right to believe whatever they want to believe and let's all work together, you tend to not want to acknowledge or accept that some of those beliefs want you dead, and some of those beliefs are incredibly dangerous, and they need to be fought against. It's such a hypocrisy because when I talk about neo-nazis or white supremacists, people will get it. They'll understand like, Okay, yes, those are dangerous ideologies that we have to fight against because they want to dismantle our freedoms. But there's more. Expand your view, open your mind, and just hold fast to your values, and fight for them as much as others are fighting for their values. That's really important. We don't value our freedoms in the West because we've never had to fight for them. But those of us who've had to fight for our freedoms, we understand how valuable and how fragile our freedoms are. I guess my final message to everyone is, freedom is not free, and you have to fight for it. We're all counting on you.

I want to thank you, Yasmin, first of all, for who you are and for providing such a stunning example of the beauty of the human character and the human will. We have a saying in Hebrew, may you go from strength to strength. I hope that you continue accumulating all kinds of accomplishments and successes and continue to be a role model for so many other people and consider us your allies.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

As I read Yasmin Muhammad's book and absorbed her riveting conversation with me, I kept thinking how fortunate I have been in my life. I've had an interesting and exciting life. I would do it all over again in the same way if given the choice. I wouldn't change a thing. I grew up in a loving household with the best parents, three siblings, all of whom were and still are exceedingly close. Of course, I endured loss in my family, and like everyone, I've had disappointments and challenges. But nothing like the immense trauma, pain, abuse, and downright cruelty that Yasmin describes, and that so many others around the world experience. To emerge from that depraved environment, whole in body and spirit and liberated, is the result of enormous fortitude, strength of character, courage, and determination that is awesome to behold and is a shining example of the glory of the human creature. Yasmin Muhammad is remarkable. I will never forget her. I always ask myself whether religion is the cause of so much cruelty or the excuse. If there were no religion, would religious extremists simply find another intellectual framework to perpetrate cruelty? After all, there have been plenty of extreme and intolerant secular philosophies that have also imposed enormous suffering on fellow human beings.

And religion has often been a source of good, inspiring so many people to go beyond themselves, to do heroic deeds of sacrifice and courage to improve and repair the human condition. Listening to Yasmin describe her forced marriage to a person who turned out to be an Al Qaeda terrorist, it brought me back to that awful day on September 11th, 2001. What demonic force propels people to murder? What goes through the minds of those who speak of paradise in heaven and inflict hell on earth? What impels the faithful, the very people who claim to serve God, to take the place of God in dispensing life and death. It's not difficult to claim divine sanction for murder. Even those who have a casual understanding of religion can cite chapter and verse to justify acts of violence. There are proof texts to support any position you choose to take. Both religious abolitionists and religious slaveholders cited biblical sources. If your nature is inclined towards power, conquest, control, domination, revenge, and retribution, there are plenty of sources you can find to validate these impulses. If, on the other hand, the arc of your life bends towards goodness, compassion, understanding, kindness, tolerance, and mercy, these texts too, exist in abundance.

In the end, it is not about sighting chapter and verse. It is about establishing a mindset. At its best, religion is a source of inspiration, not intimidation. Religion is sublime when it animates us, awakening the better angels of our nature. We seek to instill a sense of right, goodness, and decency that is so overwhelming that any inconsistent thought or deed is rendered considered reprehensible in our eyes. Surely, if religion is for anything, it is for life. The key insight of religion is the insistence upon the distinctiveness of the human creature. All were created by God, we alone were created in the image of God. Every religious principle flows from this axiom. If both you and I were created in God's image, we have equal sanctity, equal worth, and equal dignity. Reference for life is religion's primary preoccupation and central principle. Every life is precious. Every life is sacred. The Talmud states that to save a person's life is akin to saving the world entire, and to destroy a life is akin to destroying the world. Whoever sheds blood destroys the image of God, claimed the sage Akeiva. Imams have told me that Islam teaches the same lesson.

Our age has produced wolves in sheep's clothing. Savage and cunning, they They cry peace, but let slip the dogs of war. They claim virtue, but vice is their ally. They postulate goodness, but are zealous for all that is vile. They consider themselves demigods, freely invoking the name of the Holy One to justify horrendous crimes. They bestride the narrow world like modern day Goliaths, their swords dripping with blood. There's something primal and bestial about them. You see pictures of chopped off heads of burnings, bombings, and knifeings, and You ask yourself, from what dark place did this emerge? And what is the source of such fathomless depravity? How did the pious become agents of intolerance and religion, the enemy of progress? For many today, God represents bigotry, oppression of women, violence, and rage. How trippingly do the basest impulses of human beings form on the lips of those who swear loyalty to a higher cause? So-called holy men invoke heaven to perpetrate the most earthly crimes. By invoking divine authority, they aggregate to themselves powers not theirs. They speak for themselves, not God. They act for themselves, not God. They represent themselves, not God. It is their needs they pursue, not God's needs.

It is their flaws they exhibit, not God's flaws. It is ambition disguising itself as a calling. Religion is the veneer. Religion emphasizes the power of the spirit more than the power of the sword. Not by might nor by power, but by my spirit, said the Lord of hosts. Religion seeks to convince, not coerce. Spiritual understanding comes through reflection, not rage. Speaking about God requires humility. Theology requires intellectual modesty. The Talmud states, Teach your tongue to say, 'I don't know. ' lest you be exposed as a liar. ' 'I am but dust and ashes, said Job. How then could human beings be in possession of absolute truth? The very assertion is blasphemous. Only one who doesn't understand the religious mindset considers doubt an indictment of religion. Doubt is not the enemy of faith. Doubt is what gives faith meaning. Certainty is not faith. Certainty is the opposite of faith. In religious matters, it's best to follow the advice of rabbi Minahha Mendel Morgenstern, commonly known as the Kotzker Rebi. Take care of your own soul and another person's body rather than your body and another soul. Until next time. This is In These Times.