#161 Women Leaving Faith
Three women from three different Abrahamic religions talk with host Gita Sahgal about their experiences growing up in and leaving fundamentalist expressions of faith. Yasmine Mohammed, an ex-Muslim; Frimet Goldberger, formerly an ultra-Orthodox Jew; and Alice Greczyn, an ex-evangelical Christian, share how their different stories overlap with common bonds. Unpacking how religion perpetuates patriarchy offers listeners firsthand accounts of why so many girls and women are leaving toxic faith behind.
Listen here (Transcript below):
Gita Sahgal
Gita Sahgal
Gita Sahgal is a writer and journalist on issues of feminism, fundamentalism, and racism, a director of prize-winning documentary films, and a women’s rights and human rights activist.
Gita was formerly Head of the Gender Unit at Amnesty International. Gita has served on the board of Southall Black Sisters and was a founder of Women Against Fundamentalism and Awaaz: South Asia Watch.
Frimet Goldberger
Frimet Goldberger
Frimet Goldberger is a writer and award-winning journalist. She is presently pursuing an MFA at New York University where she is working on her second book. Frimet has written widely about growing up in the Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel and ultimately leaving with her husband and children. Her essays and op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, CNN, Electric Literature, The Forward, among others. Frimet's radio stories have been broadcast on PRI's The World and on BBC World Service. Her story on the cover-up of sex abuse in the Hasidic enclave of New Square, New York, was awarded a 2015 Ippies Award for best investigative/in-depth story, and was also a finalist for a 2015 Deadline Club Award. Frimet lives in Suffern, NY with her husband and children. Her debut novel, Turn it Over, is about a couple in an arranged marriage who leave the constraints of their ultra-strict Hasidic community and manage to retain familial relationships even as they struggle to keep their marriage intact.
Yasmine Mohammed
Yasmine Mohammed
Canadian human rights campaigner, Yasmine Mohammed, advocates for the rights of women living within Muslim majority countries, as well as those who struggle under religious fundamentalism in general. She is the founder of Free Hearts Free Minds, an organization that provides mental health support for members of the LGBT community and freethinkers living within Muslim majority countries- where both 'crimes' can be punished by execution. Her book, Unveiled, is a memoir/polemic that recalls her experiences growing up in a fundamentalist Islamic household and her arranged marriage to a member of Al-Qaeda. In it, she sheds light on the religious trauma that so many women still today are unable to discuss. Yasmine works with the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation and is on the Board Directors for Humanist Global Charity and for Atheists for Liberty . As well, she's a member of the prestigious Center for Inquiry (CFI) Speaker’s Bureau.
Alice Greczyn
Alice Greczyn is an actress, writer, and the founder of Dare to Doubt. Midwest-raised and L.A.-based, the Eurasian performer is best known for her role as Mads Rybak on Freeform’s The Lying Game, and occasionally someone recognizes her from the Twitch-streamed all-girls Dungeons & Dragons group Girls, Guts, Glory. Alice is fascinated by the subjective experience of life which she explores through acting and storytelling. Her own story includes a painful but rewarding transition out of evangelical Christianity, a journey that inspired her to found DaretoDoubt.org, a resource site for people detaching from belief systems they come to find harmful. Encouraging people to trust themselves and live courageously in their own truth is what gives Alice a sense of purpose. She loves hiking, traveling, and pondering answerless questions.
Transcript:
Gita: I'm a documentary filmmaker and writer, and I founded many years ago in the wake of the Rushdie affair, an organization called Women against Fundamentalism. And after that, I went to work on issues of secularism. Having left Amnesty International because they threw me out for saying they shouldn't be treating a Taliban supporter who was actually running an Al-Qaida Network as a great hero and a defender of human rights.
And I'm an atheist. I came from a very progressive religious background, so I haven't faced the kinds of things that we're going to hear in this discussion but I am delighted to be talking with three women from different religious backgrounds who left those backgrounds and who are campaigners as well.
We start with Alice, Alice, could you introduce yourself? And. Just briefly, we'll go into it in more detail later, but just tell us what religious background you came from and why you left.
Alice: So my name is Alice Greczyn and I was raised as a nondenominational Christian and the specific type of nondenominational is in my family practice, the media would probably classify as evangelical and Christian media outlets would classify as Charismatic Vineyard Pentecostal. It kind of fell into that umbrella. And the nutshell version I always say is it's like the very holy roller, holy spirit slain sort of Christianity.
And then what made me leave?
Always such a big question to answer. I think ultimately for me, the turning point was I was 17 years old and I had been heavily indoctrinated in purity culture, what’s come to be known as purity culture in the sort of evangelical /post evangelical world. And basically for me, that meant I was saving myself for my future husband and body, heart, and mind.
I never dated, I never held hands with a boy. I never did anything. And then out of the blue, one day, a guy said that God had shown him that I was supposed to marry him. And he was just a friend of mine and that rocked my world and made me questioned my faith because I didn't love him romantically.
So then I found myself in a betrothal at 17 and it was the first time that I actually acknowledged how betrayed I felt by the God that I'd been so faithful to. And then from there, everything sort of unravelled.
Gita: Frimet, would you tell us something about yourself and which particular religious background, which denomination and so on and briefly why you left.
Frimet: I grew up Hasidic in an insular enclave in upstate New York. It belongs exclusively to one Hasidic sect, and it's the largest Hasidic Jewish sect in the world, very insular, very cut off from the rest of the world. I mean, cut off. I don't mean that we don't interact on a daily basis, but it's its own little world, little universe within a universe.
And the catalyst for me, you know, I was a good girl. I was a classically really good girl, a great catch for, you know, for a match for the matchmakers. I was around 15 or 16 when a friend and I discovered the Reader's Digest. So we were very sheltered. We didn't read any secular material. We didn't watch TV, we didn't read newspapers.
And she discovered the Reader's Digest and we were insatiable and we just carried on from there. We went to Walmart and we purchased trashy romance novels. I hid it under my mattress and then we got a DVD player and you know, my world unravelled from there. I didn’t immediately leave the community. I never left the religion.
I think Judaism is unique in the sense that you don't have to leave the religion to question the religion, to even be atheist. I don't identify as atheist, but you know, there is a robust atheist community within the Jewish religion. So Judaism is more of an ethnicity, ethnic ethnicity/ religion.
So I was married at 17. My husband, we're still married, was 21 at the time. So he was considered, considered an older boy. We were both Black sheep of the family. We both read books. We both watched movies. We, you know, we were rebels in our own way and things progressed from there.
But the one catalyst that took me out of that community, out of that restrictive community was that I refused to shave my head and married women in that particular Hasidic sects are required to shave their heads after marriage and to don either a turban or a wig and the hat.
And I refused to after I got pregnant with my daughter. I knew that I no longer wanted to shave my head. And the modesty committee, a group of eight middle-aged men, eventually got word of it. They summoned us and gave us an ultimatum. I either shaved my head or our son won't be accepted into the only boys’ school in town.
I had no choice, but I did shave my head that night. They said they might send someone to check because we denied it and they said they might send someone to check if I do have my hair and we left a couple months later. We decided to leave the community and we moved 30 minutes away. I still kept in touch with the family and no one ostracized us.
We slowly over the course of a decade slowly transitioned into a more modern Jewish lifestyle. We're still very traditional. We keep holidays and Shabbat, but not in a very restrictive way. Just what feels nice and wholesome to us. We're still very much in touch with our families.
This is, this is like a very shortened version of what happened. There were trials and tribulations along the way, but that's my introduction.
Gita: We'll get to some of the longer version. And of course we'll have all your writings and books and links at the end of this for anybody listening.
Yasmine, could you tell us something about your really shocking family history? We've heard two pretty shocking stories. Child marriage in Western countries. Could you tell us something about your background and why you left?
Yasmine: So I also grew up in a fundamentalist household.
My family were Muslim so much like Frimet’s, kind of a parallel universe, little bubble, separated world, I grew up in that as well, going to Islamic schools. My mother was the second wife, second concurrent wife. So, polygamy is practiced in Islam. A man can have up to four wives. I was put in a hijab at nine years old, forced into a marriage at 19, I had to wear a niqab, so that's covering everything, head to toe in black, including gloves.
The man who I was married off to is still alive. He's in prison in Egypt. He's a terrorist, a member of Al-Qaida. I had a daughter with him and then in order to prevent my daughter from living the same life I lived, I decided that I wanted to get away from him and to get away from my family, but I had not denounced Islam.
I still considered myself a Muslim.
But I was looking for personal freedom. So similarly to Alice being told who she's going to marry. And from that being told what she's gonna do with her hair, with her head, with her body, I also wanted to be able to control my life. and so I started to go to university, which was something that I never thought I would ever be able to do.
And while I was in university, I took a history of religions course, which covered the three monotheistic religions. And I thought, well, this is great, I'll ace this course because my mom was a student of Al-Azhar University. So it's the most prestigious Islamic university. She's the head of Islamic studies department at the Islamic school. As her daughter, I had to be a model student because it would reflect badly on her if I wasn't.
So I thought, well, I know a third of this curriculum inside out. So I'll take this course because it's easy. And while I was in that course, History of Religions learning, slowly being introduced to parts, being allowed to critically analyse the religion in a way that was never allowed before, because I was never allowed to question before. While that was happening 9/11 also happened.
So I was bombarded with both emotionally and intellectually with an attack on my belief system at the time. And it just, it unravelled very quickly. I was sick with seeing how my community responded to 9/11, how there was such excitement, jubilation, celebration and such a positive boost in morale.
I was horrified that I identified with the same group of people that would do this and the same group of people that would be excited about it. And like I said, in that course, I was also learning all sorts of things about the religion that we never really talked about before and so that's really how everything fell apart for me.
It was this mix of absolute fear because I'd lived my whole life with this one truth. And now I have nothing ahead of me, but then also absolute freedom.
Gita: Freedom can be scary counted. Did any of you feel scared. The thought of that stepping out?
Yasmine: Yes. Freedom means you have to take responsibility.
You're not just doing what you're told anymore and relying, blaming it on God or on a pastoral leadership type person. You have to be responsible for your choices, your wants, you can't either blame God or Satan. And I think that as exhilarating as freedom was for me, that was almost paralysing to feel the weight of that.
Frimet: It still is in many ways. I look at my sisters, I have four sisters and they're all, they all have a lot of children. My oldest sister has 13. The next sister has 10. They have these huge families, they’re grandparents by the time they're 40 and their lives are so circumscribed and they never have to make real decisions. It's all given to them. They have a blueprint for the rest of their lives. And I don't, and it's terrifying at times as much as it is freeing. And it's also terrifying that I have to make those decisions on my own and I have to own up to those decisions and own up to the failures of those decisions.
So choice is a great thing. I celebrate the fact that I have freedom to choose how I want to live my life. But in being in touch with my siblings, it is also really difficult to see the way they except their prescribed lives and whatever is happening and, and live, I guess, more at peace with themselves than I sometimes do.
Yasmine: I think that it's important to understand that nuance that, you know, even within those very restrictive lifestyles, they have something that perhaps we don't, I don't know. I'm not articulating it very well.
Frimet: My mom used to say, look at these non-Muslims with their libraries full of books. Look how many books they have to read. We just have to read one book. We have all the answers in one book. She would say it like, it was a positive thing. And I was horrified. I was just like – What? You are happy about having such a small life? I feel like I would have to be lobotomised before I found happiness or peace in being totally controlled by one book.
The whole time I was living like that, I was pushing against it. I was uncomfortable. I was unhappy, but I felt completely helpless at the time because I thought that the creator of the universe was going to burn me in hell for eternity if I pushed back against anything. So that fear kept me in line. But I certainly never felt the kind of peace that some people feel. Maybe some of us are just wired differently, but that was my experience anyway.
Gita: I think women who rebel probably are wired differently. that is my feeling.
I wanted to clarify something for our audience, which is that you are all north Americans. That's right. Two of you from the US, Alice and Frimet and Yasmine, you grew up in Canada? Is that right? That you actually grew up in Canada as well?
Yasmine: I was raised in Canada; my parents came to Canada.
Gita: So you're Canadian, but your mother, was she Egyptian? You said she was trained in a very famous Egyptian university and a famous place of Islamic studies and a big voice in Islamic theology worldwide. So your mother was trained there. And what about your father? Was he highly educated and educated in Islam? I mean, what was the role of education in your lives?
Yasmine: But both of my parents are educated and in fact, they met at university. My dad didn't go there. My mom went there afterwards when she became a born again Muslim.
So my parents grew up secular and when they got married, they were secular and they moved to San Francisco together. They were secular and then their marriage fell apart. After having three children. I was the third and that's when my mom turned to religion as a support at that point. For two reasons.
I think it's because they were living in San Francisco together, and then they moved to Canada and so she felt isolated in Canada. She didn't have a support system. She didn't have a community or friends because they just recently moved there. And so she turned to the mosque sort of as a place for community.
But at the time, you know, that's when the Islamists were there, uptick, you know, at the early eighties. And so there was a real surge of Saudi money and everything happening at that time. So she just got pulled into that tsunami that was happening. My father never, never switched. He stayed secular his whole life.
I never had any contact with him. I didn't grow up with him. He didn't raise me. He was never really a part of my life. I saw him on average, you know, once a decade, he's passed away now. I saw him on average probably once a decade in my life growing up. But yeah, he was completely, completely different from my mom.
Gita: Alice, what about you? In your corner of that particular form of charismatic, evangelical Christianity? What was education, was it seen as something alien and outside? What kind of education did you have? How you, how were you grown by your family?
Alice: So quite literally I was home-schooled my entire life until I went to college briefly.
Both of my parents are college educated. My dad used to be a police officer. My mom was a concert pianist and history major. They met at UC Berkeley, which is a very progressive university in the San Francisco bay area in California. And my dad had been raised Presbyterian, but like the type of Presbyterian that you just go to church on Sunday.
He describes it as he didn't really feel like he had a relationship with God. Growing up, my is half Asian. She was raised a Buddhist sort of by her mother, but her dad was an atheist. And I think my mom became born again in her early twenties. And by the time they had me, they were, they were pretty heavily involved in the Pentecostal thing.
People always ask if my parents home-schooled me and my four younger siblings because of their religious beliefs. And I don't, I honestly don't think so. My mom always wanted to be a stay at home mom and be heavily involved in her children's lives and she's also just a natural teacher. And so even though I was home-schooled, and even though it was from a Christian curriculum in large part, that was because in the nineties, there weren't very many secular home-schooling alternatives.
And now, especially post pandemic where we have like zoom school and things like that. There's a lot more structural support for families that want to home-school with secular or otherwise some sort of regulated extension of a regular public school. But back then, my mom kind of did it on her own.
Occasionally we would be part of different home-schooling groups that never quite worked out, probably mainly because of scheduling with so many kids, not as many as, as in your family. Where I grew up mostly in, in Rockford, Illinois of the Midwest, it wasn't uncommon to have large families of varying degrees of fundamentalist expression.
Like the church that we went to fellowship, rather, they preferred calling it a fellowship. The fellowship that we went to there would be families with like 10 to 12 kids. Some of the girls and the families weren't allowed to wear jeans. They had to wear long skirts or dresses. Me and my sisters were allowed to wear jeans.
So there was a lot of variation but ultimately home-schooling. I acknowledge that I had a very lucky Christian home-schooling experience. I've talked to many people since who did not, whose curriculums included beatings. And although my parents disciplined me and my siblings sometimes with like spanking or getting whipped with a belt, it wasn't part of the home-schooling curriculum.
So I always like to acknowledge that even though I had a relatively positive home-schooling experience, many Christians did not here in The States. I feel like it's important to clarify, because I think a lot of people can be confused about my sort of ambivalent support of a family's right to home-school and also like valid concerns over why that's problematic.
So that was my education. I started going to community college when I was 15, because being home-schooled, I learned at my own pace and got my GED and I was all set to be a missionary nurse. And then my life just took a major detour, but that's the basis of my education.
It was very creationism based. I thought the world was 6,000 years old. I thought women came from a rib. I was shocked that we have the same number of ribs. There were a lot of startling moments in my nursing courses, especially in the science department that I was like what? What?
Gita: So many of the ex-Muslims I've known said that it was science that got them thinking about whether religion was right. They did biology, it just didn't match. So I'll go to Frimet now, but come back to you again Alice.
Does anything that Alice or Yasmine say resonate with you about your school? Did you go to Hasidic school? I mean, you obviously lived in a large community, which it was very well structured in terms of its institutions.
Frimet: I think before I even go there, I just want to acknowledge that the entire Hasidic community is, its foundation is the Holocaust and persecution. We need to understand the isolation from that lens. We need to see it from that lens because the fact that their community is so isolated and so self-sufficient is because most of the grandparents of the Hasidic grandparents, my four grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Most of the communities, grandparents were Holocaust survivors. And so while in pre Holocaust Europe, many of the Hasidic population, many of the kids went to public schools where in post-Holocaust that does not exist.
And it's also because America is a prosperous country and wherever Jews settled that they managed to rebuild, and they created their own schools where they can teach the Torah and the Talmud all of that. But the fact that we are so isolated that we were so isolated is because of the Holocaust because of fear and guilt and fear of external forces and authority and whatnot.
So my schooling: I went to an all-girls school which was very segregated. The gender segregation was super strict. There was a boys school and a girls school and a boys’ Yeshiva. And we had 11 years of schooling. We did not graduate in the 12th grade. It was a non-accredited high school. This is not true for all Hasidic schools. Many Hasidic schools are accredited. They do take regions exams. My education was rudimentary, but it wasn't non-existent. It was a dual curriculum. So we have half the day was Judaic studies taught in Yiddish. In my particular Hasidic sect, we did not even study the Torah.
We didn't study the texts. We did not study the Torah, all of the canonical texts. We did not study those because the late rabbi deemed a woman's mind to be not sharp enough to study those texts.
The education was pretty much what you need when you get married and have children. So if there was no utility for advanced algebra or advanced math, then What's the utility of advanced math? What are you going to do with it when you get married and have children and need to raise a family?
That was pretty much my education. We have courses on current events and history and all of that but not algebra. We had algebra for one year and that was that. A non-accredited high school diploma. So when I started looking into community college, they did not even accept my high school diploma.
I had to get a GED and I think for me, going to community college, the culture shock, I had more of a culture shock than an academic shock if you will, because it was the first time I stepped out of my community, my people and seeing how others in my age group, even though I was a mature returning student and I already had two children, how secular kids, how kids from public schools, how even children from other Jewish schools, how they lived their lives. That was a huge culture shock for me.
Education wise, for women, the education is not terrible in the Hasidic community. They do get a pretty decent rudimentary education. The boys’ secular education is non-existent. And that to me is a tragedy. You know, the boys leave Yeshiva, not knowing how to write a proper English sentence.
And there was an organisation run by a close friend of mine who is trying to get the government involved because education is a human right. Education is the law of the land and they've been fighting for years. And they haven't made much progress to date. To me, that's a real travesty.
Alice: Do you think the girls are allowed a little bit more of a secular education than the boys is because the girls are so trapped by marriage that they're not worried about them? Or what is the reasoning for that?
Frimet: I don't think anyone can consciously articulate the reasoning for that, but the boys are raised to study Torah and anything outside of studying Torah is considered, I don't even know how to translate it, but you know, something that, takes you away from studying the texts.
So if you're going to study anything in the secular studies, then you are not available to study the Torah 24/7.
Gita: It's the only community that I've known all the religious community, where the women are more likely to be expected to go and get jobs in the secular world in order to support the men being religious scholars, continuing to study the Torah. And in Israel, for instance, I don't think they have to join the army. Is that right? There's an exemption for certain communities from the army.
Frimet: Yes. A really contentious issue. I mean, that has, you know, Israel is struggling with a serious problem right now because the ultra-Orthodox community is an exponentially growing community.
You know, they get married young, they have many children and especially in Israel, they will soon have a lot more power in government and they already do. They already have several seats in the Knesset. And, you know, although I think they should be represented, Israel has to face this reality that if the ultra-Orthodox, who don't serve in the army, who, you know, live very separate lives, if they do take over the government, what becomes of this secular democracy?
But that's not the issue so much in America because the Hasidic community, they tend to live their own lives. They tend to be self-sufficient. I mean, they do rely on government funding for many things for schools, many of the families are on Medicaid and food stamps, et cetera.
The community that I grew up in is according to the 2015 census, they are the poorest community in the United States. But I'm here to tell you that they're not necessarily poor. It's just the recorded income shows that they are the poorest, and of course there are poor families.
There are families in need of government assistance but overall as a community, I think they're doing quite well financially. They tend to live their own lifestyle and don't impose. And I think this is the key difference when it comes to Jewish fundamentalism. And I have a really hard time identifying my former community as a cult.
I do call them fundamentalist, but I have a hard time identifying them as a cult because, you know, personally I can’t acknowledge that my family lives in a cult. It's not comfortable. But I think the key difference between Jewish extremism and Islamic extremism or Muslim extremism, is that in Jewish extremism, they're not looking to impose their beliefs and their lifestyle on anyone.
They are living in their own bubble. There was no proselytizing, there was no, there's no real violence. I think it's important to keep that in mind. I might seem apologetic. I might, and I am not. I'm not. I just think it's when we talk about nuance this is part of that.
Yasmine: I think that with Islam, people pay attention to it when things like the Taliban are taking over Afghanistan and stuff like that, then people are like, wow, what's going on? But the true victims of Islam are the ones that we don't talk about. It's daily the women being raped by their husbands, the girls being forced into forced marriages, the girls having to undergo female genital mutilation.
The atrocities that happen in the communities in private, on their own has nothing to do with external communities. So, although I hear what you're saying about your community being self-contained, and they're not trying to proselytize to others. I get that. But that, you know, you yourself talked to us about how being within that community, there are victims within that community. There are people that are suffering for one reason or another. You know, I know some people who have left the communities, I don't know if it was the exact same one as yours, there's this one boy named Abi who I met, who wanted to get laser surgery to remove his beard, because even when his beard grows in, it causes him such anxiety and PTSD because he wasn't allowed to shave to cut his beard before. And so just having such control over his own body, they had control over his face. And so he's trying to regain that control over himself again. So, you know, we could go on and on about all the traumas of people in that community and what they're facing.
And, you know, even though it's not happening externally, I think it's important to acknowledge that fundamentalist religion is causing a lot of harm to a lot of people that we're unaware of. And, you know, we just, we go about our daily lives. The example that I give is North Korea, right? There's the most heinous things are happening in North Korea right now, but because it's not spilling out, we're just minding our own business. We're living our lives. We're paying attention to the atrocities that are spilling out. And the ones that are staying self-contained, we're essentially ignoring those victims.
Frimet: If I can just jump in here I am the first one to advocate for those who are discontented within my former community. I have advocated for them and I have spoken for them and written for them. I'm working on a book a non-fiction on sex and sexuality, and specifically Hasidic arranged marriages. I might broaden the scope to include arranged marriages outside of the Hasidic community. What I discovered is that so many women feel that they have been raped and although that wasn't my experience because I wanted to marry my husband, you know, they are forced into marriages, not with a whip, you know, but they are being forced and they do feel that they were raped on their wedding night and going forward.
And I think it's so important that we talk about them, that we advocate for them, for those who are voiceless. But I think it's also important to realize that to not get trapped in this. And I hate using that word, but you know, the saviour mentality of we need to go in there and save all of them because so many don't care to be saved.
And so I think it's important to advocate for those who are discontented for those who do want a way out, for those who are traumatised, like your friend you know, and so many of my fellow travellers have been severely traumatised by their experiences in trying to leave the community and just trying to live their own lives and be themselves in a community that prizes above all, conformity.
You know, obviously there are a lot of people that are happy in their community, clearly, but we're here to represent those who, you know, we are examples of people who were not happy in that highly conforming community.
Gita: Yasmin and Alice, you both had marriages that were imposed on you. I mean, you said you had an arranged marriage, but it was one you wanted, am I right about that?
Frimet: It was expected of me to get married when I turned 18. And so I chose a boy who I thought was more open-minded. I would've gotten married anyway at 18 to someone of my parent's choosing, you know, my mother was not on board with this Shidduch, with this match because she felt, why would my young really good girl want an older boy?
If you go past 19, something is wrong with you and what was wrong with this boy? And she did not want this match, but I pushed for it because I knew that he had a car, that he went to the theatre, that he wasn't at Yeshiva full-time. And I was like, perfect. In fact, I asked him during our half-hour together, the meeting of a prospective bride and groom, and usually ends in a match, you drink for the engagement. And, uh, I asked him, we had a brief, it was 20, 30 minutes. It was very awkward in my parents' home. And I asked him if he listened to the radio, he and I were into the same stuff and my mother poked her head in.
I was like, yeah, sure. Okay. Let's get married. Okay.
Gita: Well, that's an unusually happy story. That's sort of a chosen, arranged marriage, but Alice, you came from a religious community that as far as I understand it, don't do that. And yet somehow you got pushed into a marriage that sounds really traumatic.
Alice: It was. So firstly, to clarify, I was betrothed and our betrothal lasted two months. It never went all the way to marriage. It definitely felt like I was facing an arranged marriage because I had no say. For me, it's not like my parents and the guy's parents decided like this is a good match, this is what God wants. This is what's going to happen. The guy was 20 so three years older than I was, he told me that God had shown him I was his future wife. And that is a little bit unusual for sure. My circumstance is a subculture within a subculture within a subculture sort of happening.
I'm definitely not the only one though who this has happened to where someone declared that God showed them, God spoke to them. The spirit led them, whatever vernacular they might use, that someone else was their future spouse. Where it really cemented for me was, when he, a week later after telling me this, he came over to my place and he was like, I think the next step is to call your dad and ask for his blessing.
And that's when it became real to me, because it, when he first announced that God had shown him, I was his future wife. I definitely did believe him a hundred percent. There was never a flicker in my mind of - you just want me and you're using God as a way to get me - A lot of people assumed that about him. I did not. And I do not.
We were raised in the very same sort of purity culture where everything that happened for me and my story was exactly how it was supposed to. All of the courtship books, in evangelicalism, courtship is preferable to dating because it distinguishes biblically based romance from the worlds worldly, secular version. And the books like - I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris or When God Writes your Love Story by Eric and Leslie Ludy. These were like Christian dating Bibles basically. And my betrothal with this guy unfolded like textbook. God showed him.
I always say the reason I didn't question it was because by that point in my life, I had never heard from God personally, God never spoke to me. And I was so used to doing whatever God told other people I was supposed to do, whether it was my parents or my youth pastors. Like, that's why I didn't question it because I was so conditioned by that point to just take someone’s say so that God showed them something that was going to affect my life time mentally.
And also the man is the head of the household in Christianity and women just submit. And so it wasn't really a surprise to me either that God would show him before saying anything to me if he was going to at all. So the guy called my dad and my dad said that he had also heard from God that this was coming.
And then we call his mom and his mom had also heard from God that this was coming.
Frimet: So there was that external conference call, but they forgot to tell you!
Alice: Exactly, like, God, I didn't get the memo. And it was just all of that external confirmation validated that this was God's will.
And that's what the Christian courtship books said it should be. In order to discern your own fleshly desires from God's plan, you should check in with a Christian mentor in your life, whether it's your parent or a pastor. So just like have that sort of like accountability of am I acting in my flesh right now? Is this what my fleshly desire of my heart is? Or is this actually a desire from God that I need to follow through with, well, external confirmation from your spiritual elders will help you decide. And so we had all that external confirmation and I just felt completely trapped in it. So it wasn't like I was facing an arranged marriage where there was any sort of dowry discussion or our parents got together and talked about it and evaluated, like, is this a good match? It was nothing like that. It was basically just people saying stuff on God's say so, which was how my whole upbringing already was and God had like called my family to do some pretty outrageous things by that point already. So it just seemed like, of course. The catch for me though, the only thing that was not textbook was that I did not love him that way.
And I was told that if I was faithful to my future husband, before I met him, that God was going to reward my fidelity with this epic love story. This crazy and passionate romance that would of course have great sex once we were married, because God designed us to have romantic feelings. God designed us to have sexual satisfaction in our heterosexual singular spouse.
So that was the promise that I believed I had the purity ring and everything like I'd signed the vow. I wrote letters to my future husband. I had a whole journal and then that it was revealed to be this guy who I cared about as a friend, but never had a crush on. Never felt that way for just wrecked me and I went along with it because I was so scared that if I disobeyed God's will that I would give Satan a foothold to drag me to hell and that my life would be doomed. I was just so scared of going to hell which is why I went along with it, because again, God never talked to me anyway, so I could not lean on my own understanding, which the Bible teaches you not to anyway, like lean, not on your own understanding.
I forgot which, which Bible verse that is, but that was just drilled into me over and over. So it was like, of course I have to submit to God's will through primarily the male authority in my life, who's now going to be my future husband. But then also through our parents. So that was the distinction of the type of arranged marriage that I was facing.
And those two months were to this day, some of the most difficult and like devastating to look back on of, of my life. And I can only imagine what it'd be like to have to go through that. Especially in the way you did Yasmine and, and from it, like your stories, it is so unique. It makes sense to me, you went for like the bad boy of your options.
I definitely had like a lot of bad boys after I left Christianity because I had such an aversion to good guys. It put me in some not so great places, but I had such an aversion to good guys because they were who I was supposed to be with and they were who I felt so tricked by, but that's a different thing,
Gita: But how, how did you get out? Because I'm sure people are dying to know why this ended after two months and you weren’t actually in a long marriage.
Alice: Because God also did not tell my mother that I was supposed to marry this guy, my mom and I were the only ones who didn't hear from God about this whole situation.
I remember I was camping with my family. I was visiting them, plans for the marriage were full steam ahead. The guy's dad was going to pay for our engagement party. We'd been congratulated, things were progressing and my mom, I remember we were camping and she could just tell that I was deeply unhappy and she like sat me down and she was like do you want this?
And I was like, yeah of course I want it. You know, he's such a good guy and just totally lying my face off mainly to myself because I needed to, because I was so afraid because if I admitted that I didn't love him and I didn't want this, I would have to admit a lot of other up ending things about God, about purity culture, about my family, about myself.
And that was too terrifying to admit, but my mom just kept pushing. She could tell, moms usually can tell and she just kept pushing and pushing and I just kept lying and lying. And then she was like: You don't have to marry him - I just started crying and I still waffled for a few weeks after that point. I went back home to LA I put on a happy face in front of my fiancé and his family and friends. I was so chicken to break things off, even though I knew by that point, I wanted to.
But I thought my mom was being used by Satan to tell me what my flesh wanted to hear. So I didn't trust my mom. My mom was trying to say, you know, God wants you to make decisions based in love, not fear you're doing this because you're afraid of the consequences that God might allow if you don't obey his plan.
And I was like, yeah, because that's what I've been trained to do. By that point, my mom's faith had started to evolve into a more progressive open-minded expression of Christianity. And I was terrified of her because I thought she was a bad Christian just being used by the devil to fall off the wagon and drag me off with her.
So I kept thinking of the Bible story about Abraham and Isaac where God tells Abraham to kill his only son, because it's what he loves the most. And at the last minute, like Abraham like builds this alternate the last minute God's like, psyche, you followed through, you were about to do it. Actually here's a little lamb, go kill this lamb instead. And you know, poor Isaac. I always just felt like, no, one's talking about Isaac while heralding Abraham as this wonderful father of nations. But fuck, Isaac. I felt like Isaac, I felt like God wanted me to do this.
And I thought my mom was like telling me that I shouldn't do it. And I don't know. I hoped that my willingness to obey God would be enough, but it ultimately, I forget what exactly gave me the courage to finally call him. But I did call him, we met at a park and my memory blinked, honestly, I can't remember breaking it off.
I can remember a little bit leading up to it, it was the scariest thing I'd ever, ever done because I wasn't just ending a betrothal that I didn't want. I was disobeying God overtly for the first time in my life. This wasn't like a minor sin, like reading a romance novel. I shouldn't, you know, we're touching myself in a place I shouldn't, this was like disobeying a marital plan that God clearly evidently wanted for me. And so I felt like I was going to hell and I felt like I was just telling Satan, he could have me and that bad things were gonna happen. An earthquake would happen and I'd be swallowed whole. I would get a cancer diagnosis the next day. I would never be able to have children later on with any other partner. Like I just thought Satan was going to get me. And so I just blanked. I don't remember how we said goodbye. I don't remember his reaction. When my memory comes in, shaking and telling him don't ever call me and don't contact me ever again.
And that's the only part that I really clearly remember. And I did not plan to say that because that just would sound so angry and we are Christian women, probably many religious women are not supposed to be angry.
So that was how it ended. And that was the beginning of the unravelling of my faith.
I was still a Christian for a few years afterward, but that was really the turning point where I left evangelical Christianity with all of its purity culture, false promises and non-existence I just felt like I didn't exist there.
And I had a lot of liberty compared to a lot of other women in religious situations that were similar. It was a very weird thing to be in the world, but not of the world is how they put it.
As Christians we’re surrounded by it. I wore jeans, I drove a car, I was in the world, but the lens through which I saw it was so special. So God's called me to something higher. It was such an insulated mentality. That was all I'd known because again, being home-schooled, I was just extra. Evangelicalism was all that I knew. And even though I was in the world, it didn't feel like it. I was always imagining angels and demons everywhere because spiritual warfare that that's a whole other thing. We can come back to that anyway. That's, that's how it ended. And it was terrifying, but I'm so glad I did it.
Yasmin: I really want to commend you Alice for the way that you described that coercion, that internal struggle. Because I think that, so when we talk about forced marriages in the Islamic context, people automatically assume that the dad standing there with a gun, you know what I mean?
That this is something that there's a violent consequence to not following the demands that you marry this man, but the truth is much more like what you described. That's more the reality that the girl goes along with it, even though she's unhappy, but she's lying to herself and she is lying to everybody because she's so afraid of tugging on that string.
You felt like when you said - I felt like I was disobeying God and all the consequences that would happen for disobeying God. That's exactly it, that's it. in a nutshell, like you really feel like ‘who am I some lowly human girl to deny what the almighty creator of the universe is demanding.’
Like there's no way that you would even imagine that you had the ability to do that or the gall to do that. And you know, everything that could happen to you on this earth because of that decision, like you said, I'm letting Satan in and all that stuff. It's not surprised that you blanked, that must've been so traumatic for you.
And then knowing too, at that time you were so indoctrinated that you probably believe there is going to be some further consequence for that, you know, for eternity. It's really interesting.
I want to mention that when I was 14 years, old a man about 30 years old came to my mom and he said, I saw your daughter walking at the mosque. I'd had a dream about her, Allah told me to marry her.
And I immediately believed him because, My God, like a lot of us, I have to marry this guy. I'm 14 years old. I'm going to marry this 30-year-old guy. And my mom said, no, no, no, no, no, he's a liar. He's a creep. And I was like: what? It was so weird to me that she would say that. How could anybody lie about something that Allah has said.
Fast forward years, years later, when she was trying to get me to marry this Jihadi that she picked out for me. The Jihadi came and said - I had a dream - because I was of course resisting, this was the second forced marriage that they tried to get me in. The first one was with my second cousin. And so I'm resisting marrying this jihad. And so he says Allah has said that I'm to marry you. I had a dream that you and I were married and we were reading put on together. And my mom said I had the same dream, Allah told me that too. And I was like, y'all are all full of shit. Because I remember this from what I was 14. And my mom was like, no, no, no, no, no. That was different. That was different. That guy was lying. This time it’s true because this time I had the dream too. It wasn't just the man that had the dream. We had the exact same dream.
All of that really petrified me. I believed her. I mean, I know now of course, that they were lying or that they just really wanted this union to happen. And so maybe they just conjured up that image themselves or straight up lying. I don't know either way. There was no deity that came in.
How special am I? But if there is some deity that he's going to go and drop a dream into two random people out of the billions on this planet and say it's so important, but Yasmin marry this guy, honestly, and then again, I don't understand why God always loses the number of the girl.
Why are we never told in these scenarios? But anyway, I just wanted to commend you on how well you, you described that internal struggle. When we talk about forced marriages, that's what we're talking about. So many of us girls agreed to the wedding, in (language) silence is consent.
So if you sit there silently crying, cause your body knows. As soon as your mom said. You, you don't have to marry him if you don't want to, you burst out into tears because your body knows, even though your mind is trying to deny the truth, your body knows. And I did the same thing. I sat at my wedding and the tears would not stop flowing.
It was like, there was a tap on and the women would just come by and they just touch up my makeup. And they're so used to that. They're so used to that, you know, because that's what girls do. They just accept it. You feel like you're being crushed. If you could physically describe it, it's like an Indiana Jones thing where the walls are just crushing you and there's no point in trying to push back.
It's almost sounds stupid to talk about pushing back because you're being surrounded by these massive forces. And so you submit, you give in, you submit to the will of God, and once you've submitted, it's over, right? Because now you belong to him. Now the whole community knows that you belong to him. Now you're probably going to have his child. And now you're part of it.
Trying to unravel it after that. Oh my God. And then the whole thing about the dishonour that comes to the family, if a woman is divorced and blah, blah, like it's, it's like the whole system is rigged from the get go to that we feel coerced.
And then we don't even realize that that is actually not so bad. Those walls crushing us. We can still escape from that, you know, but once those walls get you, it's almost impossible to even try to escape at that point.
Gita: That is really fascinating. I think what's fascinating about this discussion:
Well, one is of course, the connections that you've established between Pentecostal Christianity, which I have to say most of us wouldn't know it operated in that in precisely that way. But also the connection between the social pressure from family and community, but it's that religious pressure as well.
The pressure that sits in the mind, that tells you all the things you've described Alice and that you described Yasmine and as you referred often, and I know your book talks about it, purity culture. So I'd like Yasmin actually you to address, because you briefly mentioned that at nine, you put in a hijab and then you will put in the most extreme forms of covering, by your mother who had experienced very, very different lifestyle, because a lot of people don't understand that these forms of hijab actually quite modern, to do with certain political religious practices and not actually what Muslims, in the countries they came from, wore traditionally.
So if you could just talk about that in relation to purity culture and how these things were imposed on you and lead that into your marriage, which was to an actual terrorist, that is extraordinary.
Yasmine: Yeah. So I think that the period of culture, the modesty culture, all of that control, this obsession with virginity, that's something that the three of us here share. It's very external. You can see the hijab that's being put on girls. I was nine years old, for other girls, they're much younger.
In countries like Iran, you can't go to school unless you're wearing it. You'll go to prison if you take it off. More commonly, there's family and social pressure. The common example that they give is of a lollipop.
Because you have to remember, you're trying to convince a little girl. So you're using little girl analogies. And so you show them a clean lollipop that's covered in its wrapper. And then another lollipop uncovered and it's covered in dirt and flies and bugs and filth.
And you say to the young girl, which lollipop would you prefer? And inevitably she says, I want the one that's still covered up. And then you say, you see, that's why you cover up so that you could be good and clean and pure and desired. whereas the filthy dirty girls are the ones that are uncovered.
And so those ideas of slut shaming are very, very early on put into your mind. And obviously the victim blaming that comes from that as well. You know, if you are uncovered and you tempt a man into fitna, you are responsible for that because you did that because you didn't keep yourself covered.
It’s like chaos, like something chaotic in the land, something anti Islam, you know, something against goodness or whatever. But what that also causes, and I think that the two ladies here will back me up on this too. Modesty culture encourages, it facilitates and perpetuates the abuse of girls.
So for example, in my experience, when I'm being you have to cover yourself. It's your responsibility. If a man does something wrong to you, it's because you somehow invited it because you didn't keep yourself protected from him. When I was being molested, I was very full of shame and I'm horrified at myself because I felt like I invited this. I did something.
That's why I didn't want to say anything. I didn't want to tell anybody because I was so ashamed that I did this. And so I wanted to hide my own sins. And that's what this does, you know? And I hear so often from girls and boys who grew up in these communities, you know, whether it's the communities that we're talking about here today, or whether it's Jehovah's Witness or whether it's Scientology, I mean, all, any kind of, sort of cult-like community.
They protect their own like this. And when you, the victim try to speak up, you are the one that's demonised because you are tarnishing the name of a good man, you know? And so, modesty culture, isn't just like the dangers of the fact that I have to wear this sensory deprivation unit on my body before I can leave the home. You know, I can't see properly. I can't hear properly. I can't smell properly. I can't touch properly. I can't interact with the world around me.
All of that stuff is true and it even goes deeper than that as well. And so when I fight so much against the hijab, it's because it really is the shackles. It is the physical representation of all of the things that, you know, even though Alice didn't have to wear the physical shackles around her body and same thing with Frimet, she didn't wear these physical clothings. They both have the same internal binding of their mind and of their body and the control.
I mean, to be told you must shave your head and I'm going to come to your house to check that you've shaved your head. It's hard to describe. That's your body, that's your body. Somebody else is coming to tell you what you're allowed to have on your head. Like, if you are nothing in this scenario. And you have to accept that you are nothing because otherwise, it would just seem like madness. Like, what are you talking about? You're going to come and check if I shaved my head fuck off, like, what is this? You don't have the strength of character or the understanding of yourself as an autonomous, independent human being enough to even push back against that.
Even though it looks different in the three of our communities, it, the coercive methods, the mind control, the indoctrination, the fear, the societal pressure, the policing of each other, all of that stuff is, is exactly the same. This is a purity. Yeah. As much.
Frimet: I want to add to all of the shaming. This is especially true for the community that I grew up in guilt. I mean, we all, we all know about Jewish guilt and Jewish guilt plays a huge role in any Jews life. but the guilt, the guilt that we are taught to feel, especially as women, if we don't dress modestly. modesty is called tznius and tznius was the be all and end all of a girl's life.
And it's true in most of Orthodox Judaism, but it's especially, especially rigid in the Hasidic community. Modesty is everything you are, from the age of three, you wear long sleeves and tights and closed collarbone. And it's gotten even more extreme over the years. The irony of it is that, you know, while more people are leaving that community, and there's more of an increased porousness of the outside world and the community, because more people are leaving, they are also tightening their control over the community.
And when I say ‘they’ it's usually middle-aged men who have ben tasked with maintaining the highest standards of modesty in these communities. And they will deny that they exist, but they exist. But in fact, I have a letter from them on their letterhead, summoning us to that meeting addressing my husband, saying that your wife is not dressing in accordance with the rules in this community.
What was I wearing? I was wearing a denim skirt and a Tommy Hilfiger ribbed sweater that was a little tighter than, you know, it was just these very small insignificant changes that they were keeping tabs on that were keeping tabs on me. They keep tabs on the women in the community.
And if you change ever so slightly in modesty, then you are a threat and then you are clearly on the slippery slope to full on secularism.
The irony of all this modesty culture in the community that I come from is that there, the Hasidic community is also a very materialistic community. You know Woodbury commons premium outlets is right outside of the community. And they have all these fancy shops and designer clothing, and, you know, my siblings shop there and they love to shop and they love to wear nice clothes, you know, within the confines of the modesty rules, but they do dress nicely. All mothers have bugaboos, these fancy carriages for their babies, you know, so, and they have nice homes and they like to furnish their homes nicely.
And it's just a little confusing, especially a young girl who's questioning what modesty means and why she has to dress modestly. I never really questioned it because it was so ingrained in the culture. It was everything, all the lessons included modesty.
There was a biblical story about a woman who bathed, who would pin the clothing to her flesh so that she wouldn't bathe naked and I'm not remembering all the details, and oh, the sacrifice and the rewards that she will receive in heaven. The second temple was destroyed because women wore their heels and wore eye shadow.
And I believed that and the guilt, oh, the guilt of not shaving my head and choosing to wear, more cut-out tops or lower cut tops and then eventually pants. I mean, pants are not allowed in the Orthodox community in general, although modern Orthodox women do wear pants, but, you know, especially in the Hasidic community, pants were off limits.
And when I started wearing pants, the guilt I felt. But for me, the biggest guilt that I experienced in transitioning from this highly modest lifestyle and culture was the head shaving. We were taught that, and this is true only for a couple of Hasidic sects. If you don't shave your head, you are bringing all sorts of diseases and ills upon your family, your future generations.
You cannot be buried in the cemetery where all of your family will be buried. If you don't shave your head. And I experienced tremendous guilt when I started growing my hair. And then when they discovered me that I wasn't shaving my head, I mean, that just really took me over the edge.
As much as I despise that last shave after the meeting it also felt good. It felt like I was purifying myself again, breaking free of the shackles of modesty culture. It lingers. It does it, it really does.
I think it's important that women be given the choice that those who choose to live differently, the clothes that men have chosen for you. You want to wear those modest clothes, go ahead. But those who choose to wear something else, they should be given that choice. They should be allowed to dress differently and break free of that rigidity.
Yasmine: Can I ask you some questions from it?
First of all it's so different I know when you're not born and raised in an environment, hearing the rules just sounds so ridiculously irrational. I know that when I talk about things that I used to believe as a Muslim, like if a fly lands in your drink, one of the wings has the disease and the other wing has the cure. So if fly, lands on your drink, you have to push them in to make sure that the wing with the cure gets in your drink. I mean, ridiculous stuff, right? Talking trees and rocks. And like, I could go on and on, but like, obviously when you're in it, it doesn't feel ridiculous. It feels so real. But the connection between shaving your head and all these curses on your family and not being buried in a cemetery, like, it just seems… It's hair this is not Sampson. why do we think this hair has so much power? and that's my first question. How do they rationalise that? Did you ask that? Why is the hair that grows out of my head so different than the hair that grows out of a man's head or out of a child or an unmarried woman's head? Like what, what is that? That's my first question.
Second question is, I know it's related to modesty, but the wigs are more beautiful than your natural hair. You know what I mean? Like you couldn't, you get wigs are gorgeous. So did you ever question sort of these irrationalities in the, the whole edict of shaving your head and wearing a wig?
Frimet: So I only questioned and I was only allowed to question. I only allowed myself to question when I was out of the community and transitioning to a more modern lifestyle. And again, that took 10 years. So it wasn't like I broke free and I removed my wig and grew my hair. I did start to grow my hair as soon as I left the community.
But you know, to your first question about head shaving the. the late Rabbi, the rabbi of the community, the one who I credit him for single handily rebuilding and creating a really extremist form of Hasidism in America, post Holocaust. It was all thanks to him.
I know that some others will take issue with my claim, but I think that he was the charismatic leader who managed to attract a vast following of people who were not Hasidic before the Holocaust, you know, many have lost their entire families, their entire livelihoods, they were lost. They were looking for a leader.
They were looking for a father figure and he stepped in and he filled those shoes quite spectacularly. I mean, he managed to create a very extremist, very rigid form of Hasidism that did not necessarily exist pre Holocaust. I mean, he was, he was a fringe figure before the Holocaust. He had his following, but it was small and he wasn't well liked in many of the religious Jewish communities in Europe.
He came in and he just tried to transform whatever community he was becoming rabbi of. And they did not like it. The townspeople did not like it, but anyway, he was obsessed with tznius I didn't know him personally, but I would think that he was a pervert to him tznius was everything.
And if women have to cover their hair, according to the Torah, then he took it a step further and made them shave their heads. Now, we don't know where the tradition of the custom of shaving one's head, where it originated from, but some women pre Holocaust shaved their heads, and it goes back to some sort of plague.
And this is. Something better. A friend of mine who was a historian, he discovered that there was a plague somewhere in, I can't remember where, but somewhere in Eastern Europe and everyone had to shave their head and so for some reason, this stayed with women that they continue, like even the secular women, the non-Jewish women were shaving their heads.
And so for some reason, this remained a custom in a couple of small Hasidic sects, and then it carried over post-Holocaust and he held onto that and he made that his entire foundation of tznius was based on a married woman shaving her head and we didn't question it.
Did any of you question anything when you were little? It's hard, it's really, really difficult to break free from that indoctrination that this is what you need to do when you are married. This is what you need to do to keep your family safe. I mean, women take on a lot in the Hasidic women take on a lot when it comes to the modesty.
When there was a tragedy in the community, a woman will look within of how she can improve on her modesty. It's usually either modesty or you know, gossiping because gossip is possibly the only form of entertainment for many women in that community.
So, you know, how can you gossip less what we call bad speech.
But it's mostly modesty and women take on to cover their shorn heads in the shower so that even the four walls don't see them. I heard that story from someone.
To your second question, I think it's cultural and if you talk to modern Orthodox women who cover their hair, and many of them feel they choose to do it, but they also feel kind of conflicted about it because in modern Orthodox communities, you're not required to cover your hair. You can wear pants. modesty is less of an issue in those communities.
And some women do cover their hair with these really voluminous, gorgeous wigs that look way better than hair. And they'll tell you that it's cultural, it's customary, it's cultural. It's what their mothers did, what their grandmothers did.
I personally couldn't really make peace with it. When I did I continued covering my hair when I left the community. And then one day I was like, this makes no sense to me. I just want to uncover my hair.
Yasmine: I mean, it is hard. It's a tough question. It was a tough question because there are so many ridiculous things that we just, we just accepted. It's like kids, right? Santa Claus. He gives everybody presents every night, you know, all the kids on the whole planet get presents in this one night. Sure. Sounds good. Reindeer flying. Yeah. Cool. You know, tooth fairy, Easter bunny, all sorts of ridiculous things. And we don't question it. And we are told these stories at that age, when we just accept everything. Cause we don't know how the world works. So we'll take any stories you give us and nothing really comes in to cause you to question those things. You know, until it does.
But for, for a lot of people, when that cognitive dissonance does eventually happen, sometimes the cost of even going with that thought is too high. So you just shut it down. Like my brain knows, like I did not allow it to grow. I did not allow myself to think I was too scared to question things.
Frimet: I think the difference between those who merely question who see a question they perceive have a question and then shut it down. And those of us who actually pursued those questions and we're not content with the answers that we weren't given. I think the difference is a determination and a lack of being passive to life.
I see myself that way where I am not a passive person and if something comes up, if a problem arises, I will try to fix it. If a question arises I will follow with and seek an answer to it. I don't think critical thinking is that popular anywhere to be honest, it's not popular in the secular world either.
Gita: You know, the secular world has its tribes and orthodoxies as well. So I think that one of the things that you've all pointed out or hinted at really is a sense in which the private terror that's imposed on people because of the way you are told to all these things are true, is also connected with public disgrace.
And it's not just the disgrace of the family, although that's there, like the disgrace down the generations, you can't be buried in the cemetery, or you might be excluded from the community, but also, and this has happened in with evangelicals as well: the disasters are blamed on women's lack of modesty.
So in Haiti, the natural earthquake is blamed by evangelicals on things women had done wrong and in Pakistan, earthquakes were caused by the fundamentalists, that women were not modest. And in fact at that time there was a big earthquake in Kashmir and the various terror groups that were backed by the Pakistan army had the access to area. So they went with a lot of aid, army backed aid because they knew the paths and they could take the donkeys up. Then of course the first thing they took was tents to put, well people needed tents, but basically they wanted to confine the women inside and give them Hijab.
You think at that point in time they needed fresh drinking water and injections all sorts of things to save their lives. So the Hijab was the first thing that was given to these women and told to get back out of sight. And they must've been managing everything because in a disaster, typically it's women who actually doing the labour of trying to find food for the family and firewood and cook and all of that.
So there is that huge connection with that huge outside world that you're responsible for. So it's the Satan in you or outside you talking to you that is pursuing you. But, and I think you're all right, that it is the people who question, and I've seen this when dealing with forced marriage and people who got out of forced marriages, or actually ran away from them with another, with a lover, as opposed to the person who their parents were choosing for them,
Typically, the ones who actually pulled it off were women who had huge aspirations for themselves. They wanted an education. They were questioning it. If they were just in love, they would quite often be crushed because they could be bullied, they could be pulled back. They could be kidnapped by their families and maybe not find a way out, but where they have this sense of themselves, that they wanted something bigger and that bigger could include a man of their own choice, but it could mean they had another vision for their future and that's how they managed.
So that girls who were kidnapped to another country and ended up in a village and somehow they managed to get themselves out, get to an embassy and of course we, as activists have to fight to get them back because the embassies had paid no attention to any of this.
But that drive from them, if it wasn't there from the girl, there's no way, if people start talking about saviours, there's no way you can save somebody who doesn't want to be saved. If that drive is in the person, you can reach out a hand and help them and stop them getting crushed. But if they don't want it, they're going to tell you to be off. They say, well, I've made this decision it's my decision.
And, and you do have to respect that you can only show a way out and give some help.
You've mentioned three attempts to marry. The third of which was successful. I mean, one was the 14-year-old, which your mother supported, then there was a cousin and you manage somehow to fight that off.
How did it happen that you were not able to resist this third marriage? And did you realize quite how serious it would be, or did you share the worldview of the person when you married him?
Yasmine: Well, I think that I was just worn down at that point, it was really my mother's love that I was after.
We had had a very contentious relationship. So this is all outlined in my book. I'll try to be as succinct as possible, but essentially she'd left me in Egypt. I didn't know. So I woke up in the morning, my family had all gone back to Canada and I was left in Egypt and I was left there because, this is a common thing unfortunately, this happens a lot with girls that are raised in Western societies, when their families start to feel that they're becoming too westernised, they take them back home to their home countries to marry them off.
So I was just one of numerous, who knows how many, girls this has happened to. So I was being pushed into a marriage with my second cousin and I was able to get away from that by convincing my mom, by lying basically, by telling her I just wanted to come home to say goodbye to Canada for the last time before I go back to live in Egypt and marry this man and that's the rest of my future.
And to be perfectly honest, it was my mom that gave me that idea because I initially said, I just want to come home one more time just to see Canada from one last time. And she said, oh, do you think I'm stupid? If I bring you back here to Canada, you're never going to go back. And I was like, huh. that's interesting. That's a good idea.
And so I ran with that. Once I did get back to Canada, I had been in Egypt for two years at this point and in those two years, my mom was the oldest of seven kids. There's 10 and total from the two marriages, but of the seven kids. She's the oldest, her and her twin. And so I was the oldest of the cousins. And so when I was in Egypt for those two years, because I was the oldest of the cousins, I was given a lot of - I'm the youngest of my family of the three, but in Egypt I was the oldest of the cousins. So I was given a position in the family that I wasn't used to.
So suddenly people were looking up to me and I was allowed to take my little cousin and go here. I was the one taking people, versus people taking me.
My aunt let me have a job. I was teaching. I was at an English school and I was teaching and I was making money and I had non-Muslim friends and I had strangely and ironically much more of a free life in Egypt than I did in Canada.
And so in those two years, my confidence built and grew and I started to see myself differently than I had seen myself all those years before, which was someone that needs to shut up because she's stupid. All of a sudden I was like the big cousin from Canada. And so it was like a different internal feeling.
And so when I went back to Canada for the last time, I said to my mom, unless you're willing to duct tape me kicking and screaming. I'm not going back on that airplane and there's nothing you can do about it. And She knew that she couldn't force me to go back to Egypt. But she was very angry at me for standing up to her like that.
And so it was a very difficult time. She hated me and she let me know that she hated me. And I've gone through this before because when I was 12 years old, I had gone to the authorities telling on the man that she married for abusing me. And it went to the courts and everything. And in the end they said, it's your culture, you have to stay with that family.
But she hated me so much at that time too, because she felt like I was ruining her relationship with this man, because I'm calling the cops on him. And it was that was being repeated again that hate. She'd spit in my face. She'd say I was her urine. She peed me out. You were just nothing, but my filth and it was just a very slow drip of poison, not that slow, but it was a constant drip of poison and. as I described before, my father was never in my life and it's really hard to describe, but when you are somebody who, you need the love of your mother, especially if I'm not getting it from anywhere else.
So just like it was important when I was 12 years old to get her to love me again. And I would do anything to get her to love me again. I was going through that again, but this time I knew what it was going to look like. Do you know what I mean? It was like, oh God, I can't do this again.
You know, I can't have her withdraw from like, basically pull, not just love, but any kind of positive human, gentle interaction. It was only me and her. And she wouldn't even buy groceries so that I wouldn't eat. Because you know, she was in control. I didn't have a job and I couldn't do anything without her.
So she basically was like wearing me down.
There's all of that sort of personal, emotional stuff. As well as the religious stuff. So all of that was together. So there's a saying that says: Heaven is at the feet of your mother. So your mother essentially gets to decide whether you're going to go to heaven or whether you're going to go to hell.
So she also held that over my head. If you don't agree to marry this, man, you will never smell heaven. You will never be close enough to it to smell it. I'm going to make sure that you burn in hell for eternity also here on earth, you're not my daughter. I don't want anything to do with you. I'm going to kick you out of the house. You're going to be homeless. I don't want you to come to my funeral. I'm going to make sure that your brother and your sister know that you're not my daughter.
So just it just came from all angles and eventually it wears you down. What she said to me was, I'm going to marry you off to this man, because he's someone who's strong enough to control you.
And she was tired of controlling me. And so she thought, well, what better than a terrorist to keep this girl in line? And so it was a choice that she made. She knew he was ruthless. She knew he had murdered people and that was a positive thing for her. And then also a positive thing because he's a Jihadi and he's gonna die for his faith and to her that’s like the most wonderful kind of human being that could possibly exist on the planet.
So, it was a win-win for her. He was about 15 years older than I was. He didn't speak a word of English, at this point I had been in Egypt for two years, so I was speaking Arabic pretty fluently.
I remember when I finally broke down and said, fine, I'll fucking do this because you want it so badly. Another thing that she would say to me is ‘I did so much for you. I raised you as a single mother, and this is all I ask of you’ So the guilt, I was talking about, like they used that guilt all the time.
I rationalised it in my head, which I've learned from so many people that I've interacted with since, that they've made this exact same rationalisation. That's pretty crazy that we all have the same thought, but in my head, I thought, well, there's an obsession with virginity and the Islamic culture. Obsession.
And so a girl is only so controlled until the seal is popped until the vitamin bottle seal has been popped. After that it's garbage. And so I knew that if I said to myself, I'll marry him, I'll do it her way. We'll see if it works. We'll see if she's right. And if things go wrong, I'll divorce him and then I'll be a divorced woman. And then they'll leave me alone. I'll have a sense of freedom after that because they won't be so controlling over me because they're not trying to protect my virginity.
It turns out a lot of us had that same thought. Of course you underestimate how difficult it will be to get away from him, especially since I got pregnant so quickly. but that was my thought process at the time.
I also really just felt like, what if she's right? All my life, I have been fighting. All my life I have been pushing. All my life I have been unhappy and resistant because this life, you know, I lived up until the age of 6 years old as a normal person.
I had non-Muslim friends, we listened to music. I played with Barbies. I went to birthday parties. I rode bikes. I went swimming. Then when she married that man that's when everything changed. And from the moment she brought that thing into our lives, I had been waiting for the day he would leave and thinking that I would bounce back and get my old life back.
I put it all on him. I wasn't really paying attention to the fact that my mom was getting pulled into this world as well. I was really pushing back against this constantly, my whole life, wanting my old life back that I had when I was a kid. And at that point I was so exhausted from pushing back and constantly being hated and being the black sheep of the family. When Frimet said that I felt that in my soul, my mom used to call me the black sheep.
I felt like the black sheep I knew I was the black sheep.
Everybody else is getting in line. What's wrong with you? It's like a big school of fish. Everybody's moving and I'm the one fish that's like, where are we going? Why are we going this way? I was annoying and I was hated for it. I hated myself. I thought it was the devil in my head asking these questions, like just shut up and get in line and just follow the school of fish.
And so that's what I did. And I said like, just let me just follow this school of fish and see where it leads. I will stop fighting. I will stop resisting. I will submit.
I will submit. And I will see how far this goes. And it went down the most, the darkest, most vicious possible hole you can imagine. And I outline it as much as I can in my book and I took it all the way, all the way, all the way, all the way until I had a daughter. And then they were asking me to agree that my daughter also live in this darkness.
And that's when I said no, because I always had a sense, this sense of you want something more for yourself. That was always there. That little spark was always there. It was dull, but it was there. But when you have a daughter, you want all of that for her. You want more for her than you ever wanted for yourself.
And so suddenly I knew that not only was I going to be extinguishing that teeny spark that was in my head, but that spark would never be in hers. She would never know it because he wanted to take us to Peshawar and he wanted to go fight with Al-Qaeda again.
And that was going to be her future. And so she gave me the courage to finally push back and fight and get myself out.
Frimet: That was, that was so powerful. Yasmine. I can hear your story over and over again, and it always just breaks me.
I think this is true for most parents who end up leaving a restrictive community, that it's the children who pushed them to the brink because when you have a child, whether you're a mother or a father, and I see this all the time with people who leave the Hasidic community. And it's, so much more difficult when you have a child, especially if your spouse is not on board and then you have the custody battle issue and all of that.
But it's the realisation that you are going to raise your child in the same system that you have fought against, or that you internally feel is not a satisfying, is not the way you want to live your life and having your child brought up in that system. That's what pushes you to the brink.
Gita: I think that's very true.
I think so many people have faced abuse had faced violence and then lived with it, but then the child starts being abused. Your mother didn't fight for you, Yasmine. There's so many stories also of mothers who didn't fight to actually blame their daughters. But your horror stories are extraordinarily powerful and you're all writers.
So we're going to have the links of memoirs and other writing. So we have been talking quite intensely for nearly two hours. and there's lots more to say, and we might do other podcasts where we talk about more issues or go more deeply into these issues. But, what I'd like all of you to do is to reflect on why it is that all of you went from leaving your religion, or at least the way that faith was practiced, to actually becoming campaigners of it.
Because not everybody does that. Many people leave and live privately, but you become very public. All of you. So I'd like to start with Alice and ask you about that process and how it ended with you starting or not ended, but how you did start Dare to Doubt and what you advise, and how you're able to advise people in the same situation.
Alice: So before I get to how I came to start Dare to Doubt and what propelled me to start Dare to Doubt, I would just like to acknowledge that I was very private for 12 years. I lost my faith at age 21 and then two years ago at age 33 is when I launched Dare to Doubt and began speaking publicly about my story for pretty much the first time. There were a few close friends that knew a little bit about my background, but I was very private.
I think most of it was because I was really embarrassed and ashamed of my past. I lived my entire adult life in Los Angeles and have been involved in the entertainment industry, which is very, very liberal, very progressive, very democratic leaning.
I used to want to be like a colonising missionary and I voted for George Bush the first time that I could vote that was out here in LA when I was still a Christian. My point in saying this is that I totally respect and have a lot of compassion for people who do choose to be quiet. We just want to put it all behind them. They don't want to think about it. The other aspect too, of why I wanted to be quiet was because I was so confused about my own past. Every time, my story with leak out a little bit, even just in common, small talk, like, oh, where did you grow up? Oh, I moved around a lot. Oh, why did you move around? Oh my, my parents were following God. Oh, what type of Christianity?
It was just never ending. It got weird because as soon as I try to talk about the type of Christianity, it was like, well, I'm a Christian and our Christianity wasn't like that.
It just brought on more questions that I didn't feel prepared to answer. Cause I didn't understand it myself. Like how did God talk to people? Why did my parents follow him? I didn't understand myself. So it was a lot of confusion. I think over times I became less confused about my own experience and that also lessened my shame for what I was involved in, because I could understand with more clarity, why I did what I did, why. you know why God never spoke to me, but seemed to speak to everyone else.
The more that I could scientifically understand my experience and contextualise it, the more comfortable I felt having compassion for myself and others, to be able to talk about these topics from a far more informed and also emotionally settled place.
It wasn't this shameful, confusing thing. And what compelled me to go public with my story and to start Dare to Doubt.org, which for anyone who doesn't know, it's a resource site for people in varying stages of doubting their belief system, it's not just Christianity. There's several different belief systems up there.
I wanted to give people a starting point to find help because when I left around 2007, 2008, I was not aware of any such support systems. There, I think myspace was still like the social media site of the time, maybe Facebook too, by then, for sure. But there were not the online resources that there are today and I really wanted to make it easier for other people because losing my faith was singularly the most life changing, devastating, liberating thing that's ever happened to me and that I've ever followed through with. I feel like both, my loss of faith is something that happened to me and something I chose. That's what it feels like inside me.
The short answer to all this would be: I went public with my story and started, Dare to Doubt because I knew other people were going through the same suffering that I was going through and they were lost. They were overwhelmed. It's very taboo in American society to, to critique religion.
Especially if it's evangelical Christianity, cause it's our most popular religion. It's a lot easier for us to critique Scientology, Mormonism, Islam, even ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Although the type of Christianity I was raised in was very closely tied with messianic Judaism, which is like its own different thing.
But, basically I wanted to help people as idealistic and cloying as that might sound like I really, I really just wanted to help other people who were going through something similar. And I felt emotionally, mentally informationally prepared to be able to share my story and hold space for other people and encourage other people to share theirs if they want, or to be private, but take whatever little steps that they want to, like we've said, you can't force someone. You can't help someone who doesn't want help, but for those who do want help, I wanted to just help them along and show them where they can keep helping themselves. Because I think that that's the most empowering thing is to realise how much agency you actually do have over your life and how many people want to support you in that and help you get it.
There's a lot of people, obviously that don't, literally, don't have that agency even under a threat to their to their life but if they can get out, I wanted to just show things that would help them get out. So that's what, that's what motivates me.
Gita: That's great. And from it you took a different route, you became a journalist, isn't that right? And so you, you write widely for all sorts of publications and from what I've seen of your work, and I know there's a lot more to read than I managed to read, but you very cleverly used some of your own experience, but you also use it analytically to talk about things going on in the community or to, to review books or TV programs.
So there's a lot in popular culture now that is managing to begin talking about the things that were, I think, much more taboo only a few years ago. So what led you down that path from the kind of education you received to becoming a journalist and, and are you writing a novel as well?
Alice: I'm probably the least known of the three women here because I've just been taking it very slow. I am working on a novel, I have in fact, the 600-page manuscript, that's sitting on my desk right now, it needs to be cut significantly. But, I've been working on this novel for a while and it's inspired by my own story.
And I'm also working on this nonfiction about sex and sexuality, in Hasidic arranged marriages. So I'm interviewing people who are still living very Hasidic lives. And I'm really excited about that project. I think it's important. Hopefully will be a widely read book and in the meantime I do some freelance journalism.
I'm also raising my children who are teenagers now and that's its own little war zone thing.
I found my voice, you know, I always had a very strong sense of justice, even though I didn't question the tenents that I was raised with. At an early age, I could never be silenced.
I never found my silence. There were troubles in my problems in my home growing up, I had a pretty tumultuous childhood and I was the only child who couldn't remain silent, who went to her friends and talked about it, who have to share it with others who have to try to fix the problem.
And I would go to my older brother, and beg him to intervene and all of that. So I was always that way. I'm just wired that way.
I married my husband and I think this is where I need to acknowledge my own faults in this finding your voice and being a voice for others, there was a great, great quote that I just read. He happens to be a theologian, a leading theologian. His name was Abraham Joshua rabbi, Abraham, Joshua Heschel and he's just brilliant. His work is eminently quotable.
I mean, of course he's, religious. He writes a lot about God. Anyway. He said, ‘wise criticism begins with self-criticism’ And I really feel that I need to be critical of myself here because my husband is a very private person.
We talk a lot about women finding their voice and everything, and I believe that strongly, but he is a private person. And in me finding my voice and speaking about the community that we come from and writing memoirs, writing personal essays, I kind of stepped on his privacy and his need for a more private life.
So I want to acknowledge that, but, you know, we've come a long way as a couple, he's come a long way and I see it all the time and I hear it all the time from women and men in the community who are discontented and looking for others to be a voice for them. And I feel that it's so important for all of us to continue listening to those who are still trapped in that community to speak from our own experiences, but also to speak for them if they want to be spoken for.
And I get messages all the time in my inbox, DMs about the struggles of those who are still in the community and are disillusioned. And that's really what drives me to continue my work, continue the journalistic work, the memoir work, as well as the non-fiction narrative, non-fiction that I am working on and the fiction that I'm working on.
And I've been just all over the place with this but I feel pretty satisfied with the work that I put out there. I fell into writing. I never thought of myself as a writer. I didn't have any aspirations. I wasn't allowed to really have aspirations outside of motherhood and raising children and being a good wife and all of that.
But when I did have the choice and I was given the opportunities, I didn't really know what I wanted to be. I fell into radio journalism, and then eventually I was looking for an internship to fill a summer fellowship that I had been granted by an organisation that helps people, individuals who leave the Hasidic community, they're called Footsteps.
And I did a fellowship for them. And then I have. Find an internship over the summer. And I just contacted a widely read Jewish newspaper. And I said, you know, I come from this background. I would like to write about it. I could do journalism. I could do personal essays. And, they said, well, we filled all of our positions. And I was like, well, just give me a chair. And, and that's how I fell into writing.
And people seem to enjoy my blogging. And so I carried on from there and journalism speaks to my strong sense of justice and investigating the truth, even though, you know, we all know that journalism has taken a different route right now, not everything is exactly the truth.
I'm not going to say fake media because I'm not. Anyway, this is that we can have a conversation of hours and hours about this. It's going in a totally different direction.
I mean, that's it, that's what I've been doing. And what has been driving me is really my own sense of, I want to share my story, but also I want to tell other people's stories and to give them some sense of justice and relief.
Gita: And that's wonderful. And I also have done some journalism and investigative documentaries and writing in my time. My mother's a novelist who is also a political writer. And I can tell you stand in a long line of women who are very apologetic about the toes they tread on to tell their story, you know, that a lot of women self-sensor, or have to curtail they're writing sometimes because people are violent and evil, but not necessarily it's because there are privacy issues. And, and that is a hard one, but that's something that we have to keep working with because those stories are really, really important. and generations of women have had exactly what you're facing now and your voice is wonderful. So I'm sure you will carry on and I'm looking forward to reading your next things and interviewing you again when both books come out.
Finally, I want to turn to you Yasmine. As the others have said your very well-known figure and public commentator in the US and way beyond.
You stand within a very controversial movement of ex Muslims. I say controversial because Muslims are not allowed to leave their religion in, in terms of the community, quite often, but it is illegal and punishable by death in about a dozen countries and many people still astonishingly don't realise that it's not just an individual choice. It is a choice to stand for and campaign for a number of people who are severely endangered in many parts of the world.
You described your early life, Both the rebellions and you're trying to please your mother and trying to do the right thing and marrying a violent man in one of the books that are notorious terror organizations in the world. and then finding your way out of all of that and finding yourself as well.
What's the link between those early struggles of that young woman and where you stand now?
Yasmine: So like Alice, I stayed quiet for 10 years. Part of the reason why I stayed quiet is what you mentioned. There is just the fear. People like Salman Rushdie, anybody who is going to publicly criticise the religion is putting their life in danger, even in a Western country. So both of them were in Western countries, obviously, forget it if you're in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia you can't speak.
But I stayed quiet for a long time because I was rebuilding myself. My entire foundation of who I was and what I believed had been demolished. And I had to rebuild it brick by brick. At that point, my mom had already threatened to kill me. So I had to keep myself and my daughter away from her, change our names and move away.
There was a lot of fear of my ex having connections. Al-Qaeda is a big organization, I don't know where his friends are and who he's going to send after me. So constantly looking over my shoulder.
So those 10 years were a really important time for me to just develop myself and that there is an infamous episode of Sam Harris when Ben Affleck were guests on the Bill Maher show where by Bill Maher and Sam Harris were talking about people who had left Islam, how they in Egypt, almost 90% of people in Egypt, which is my family's country believed that we should be executed.
And so it was this really strange and weird moment of two men on American television talking about standing up for the rights of what I felt like was they were speaking up for me at that point and saying, liberals are failing, liberal thinkers in the rest of the world. We should be standing up and supporting these people.
And it was this weird moment because I had never even thought of standing up for myself and here they were doing that for me. And then of course, Ben Affleck shuts them down. He calls them gross and racist. And then the next day on my Facebook, it's covered with people complimenting Ben Affleck and saying, he's such a great man.
He shut down these gross racists Sam Harris and Bill Maher. And that's when I kind of had this moment. It was like Elaine from Seinfeld, remember when everybody was eating chocolate bars with a knife and fork and stuff. And she was like ‘have you all gone mad?’ I really connect with Elaine because there's moments like the English Patient where she just stood up and she was like, ‘it's a terrible movie. And you all know it.’ So it was like that kind of moment where it was like, what is wrong with all of you people? Like what. How are you so on the wrong side of this, what perspective, what are you looking at? How can you disagree?
And it turns out that the criticism of Sam Harris and of Bill Maher had absolutely nothing to do with what they were saying, but the criticism was all in the fact that they were white American men. That was the problem. And so I thought to myself, well, I'll be a brown Arab woman and I'll speak up. And I'll say the exact same thing that these men are saying, and it will force people to engage with the argument.
But of course I was too scared to do that publicly. So I was writing my book and I started a blog, but I was doing it anonymously. Once I started to do that, Frimet said, I started to get inundated with messages from people all over the world who related to my story and who were grateful that I was in a safe country and that I could speak up for them.
And so that's when I started to feel ashamed that I was anonymous and I thought, well, for goodness sake, of course it's dangerous for me, it's dangerous for everybody, but it's a spectrum, you know, it's not, if I'm going to be forced into silence or scared into silence, then who's going to speak up?
You know, here I am in a free country, I have to speak up. I felt compelled to do it. And so I wrote my book and I started my campaigning and all of the messages that I was getting that I was trying to respond to all the time was, in all honesty, it took me out. It just pulled the rug out from under me.
I was suicidal. I was agoraphobic. I was in such a state of panic. My body was like electric. It was really, really bad. I had to take a year off work and I realised I can't, I can't do this. I'm writing my book. I have opened myself up raw and I haven't even really dealt with a lot of these issues in so long.] I just pushed them at the back of my mind and went forward.
And now here I am dealing with traumas of people from Somalia and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It was just too much. And so that's why I decided to start my organisation Free Hearts, Free Minds, which offers mental health support to people living in Muslim majority countries.
And what gave me the idea actually was Footsteps that Frimet mentioned the organisation Footsteps, which helps people who are leaving the Hasidic Jewish community the step by step. It gets them connected into the greater society.
Now I can't do that of course, because I'm dealing with people, not with people in New York, but people all over the world in countries where it's not safe for them to speak up and say who they are and what they believe.
So we do as much as we can with psychosocial support, to help people in the situations that they're in.
And to be perfectly honest, it's a lot of survivor's guilt is what compels me. I hear these stories, I hear my story, they hear my story, they hear their story. People tell me all the time, reading your book felt like reading my book.
We are so fully connected. And even with the women here, I'm so connected. So these traumas, we have that shared trauma and I know that I could have been one of the countless girls who are buried in the backyards of Michigan, or London, UK, or even here in Canada or the Muslim majority countries. Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, obviously, you know. So much honour violence and honour killings happen with families that are upset at girls like us girls that won't get in line girls that are becoming too westernised girls that are asking too many questions.
I'm compelled by wanting to speak up because I know that there are so many people that cannot. And so I feel like I have a duty to do that, a responsibility to do that, but it's also because it serves me in that it is healing to know that yes, I survived this and I will never not feel guilty about that.
But what I can do is help others who are also going through what I was going through because like Alice, when I went through this, there was no social media. I felt like it was the loneliest time of my life. I felt like the only person in the whole world who had ever denounced their faith of Islam and lived.
So all I can do is to reach out and try to help others. I can't turn around and just go on with my life because the guilt of surviving is bad enough, but the guilt of not helping, there's, there's no way that I would ever be able to do that. So this is, this is my life's work.
Gita: And on that note, I want to thank Alice and Frimet and Yasmine for this incredible conversation and urge people to check the links below for further information about their writing and their organisations. Thank you all so much.