Campus Apostate: Former UC Irvine Muslim Student Union Member — and Former Muslim — Speaks Out

pajamas media ^ | 8/1/10 | Aaron Elias

[Nachum]

The following is an interview with “OC Apostate,” a former UC Irvine student who made the decision to leave Islam and the Muslim Student Union at UCI. Though as OC Apostate describes it, the two decisions were not related.

This interview provides a unique firsthand description of the MSU from an insider’s perspective, something usually unavailable to the outside community. As readers will see, OC Apostate did not have an easy time disengaging from the MSU.

Why did you decide to leave Islam and the Muslim Student Union? Were the two decisions related?

My parents were not religious before; they kept the bare minimum. When I was 5, my mother became more religious after meeting a religious teacher. We moved to London to get a better religious education for a year. The Muslim community there is a lot more fundamentalist. No music, avoid non-Muslims, no assimilation, women can’t cut their hair, all kinds of rules. That’s the brand of Islam that influenced me. We came back; I became very active in the Muslim community. I became involved with my high school MSA.

[freeangel]

I’m sure she has a target on her back now and the first people to watch out for will be her family.

[Finny]

Very interesting, informative, and enlightening interview. Gives insight into the other side, the lives of all those Muslims and women in hijabs I see around So Cal., announcing their presence.

Disturbing too that the matter of loans paid for going through college enters into the issue at all, and where finding ways to borrow money to go through school, to find a support system for it, is somehow construed to be among the casualties. What ever happened to college students working their ways through school? Remember when that's how most folks did it, and the U.S. prospered? College and university educations are inflated to the extreme and instead of treating the cause, here's a mindset that addresses the symptom -- how to finegle and get "entitlement" loans for college educations, and how it affects "community" and a disturbing purpose of student unions.

If I were a kid today, I'd resent like hell that "the system" had put a regular college education too financially expensive and costly to pursue. That's BS.