“I Didn’t Know You Could Leave”

Nuriyah Khan grew up in a British-Pakistani Sunni Muslim family. Her grandfather was an imam, she attended mosque after school and, as a child, memorised the Quran in Arabic.

She took the faith seriously enough to begin wearing the hijab voluntarily at nine. Her parents had not forced her. Instead, she says, the pressure came from religious instruction and a child’s fear of being denied heaven.

Years later, she finally read the Quran in English. Understanding its teachings directly, rather than simply reciting them in Arabic, transformed her relationship with Islam.

“I didn’t even know you could leave Islam,” she told me during our interview in London.

Online ex-Muslim communities gave her a language for what she was experiencing. When her father discovered “Ex-Muslim” written on one of her profiles, she defended her decision simply: her parents had raised her to think for herself, and this was the conclusion she had reached.

Her parents ultimately accepted her choice. Others were less forgiving.

Leaving Islam did not merely change Khan’s religious identity. It changed how she viewed politics, Britain and the controversies her former community preferred not to discuss. Friends disappeared. Publicly questioning Islam made her socially “radioactive.”

That experience exposes a freedom Britain frequently claims to defend but rarely discusses: the freedom to leave a religion without intimidation, ostracism or violence.

When Silence Abandons Women

Khan now works in women’s rights, supporting victims of domestic and culturally specific abuse. Her experience has convinced her that Britain’s institutions remain reluctant to examine how ideology can be used to justify violence.

She describes Muslim women reporting that their abusers quoted religious scripture while attacking them. Yet organisations tasked with protecting victims often discuss abuse without confronting the beliefs invoked by the perpetrators.

This hesitation is particularly visible around female genital mutilation and so-called honour-based violence. Britain has created protection orders and trained officials to recognise warning signs. A girl suddenly being removed from school for an extended trip abroad, for example, can indicate that she is at risk of being subjected to FGM.

But legal mechanisms are only effective when authorities are prepared to act. Families and communities can police themselves through silence, while officials, frightened of appearing culturally insensitive, may fail to investigate until it is too late.

The same pattern appeared in Britain’s most horrifying honour-killing cases. Women warned the police that relatives intended to murder them, only to find that officers did not understand the danger. What appeared to outsiders as an ordinary domestic dispute could actually involve an entire family enforcing its conception of shame and honour.

Britain has improved its response, but only after women were abandoned and killed. Respecting individuals from minority backgrounds cannot mean treating every cultural or religious practice as beyond scrutiny. A society that values women’s freedom must be willing to identify the ideas used to deny it.

The Grooming-Gang Reckoning

The exploitation of vulnerable girls by organised groups of men in numerous English towns represents another catastrophic failure of institutional courage.

Khan stresses that abuse exists across every ethnicity and religion. But she also argues that the particular characteristics of these networks, including the disproportionate involvement of men from certain Pakistani backgrounds, cannot be understood if identity is excluded from the discussion.

Victim testimony repeatedly described white girls being treated as outsiders: sexually available, morally inferior and unworthy of the protections afforded to women within the perpetrators’ own communities.

This did not absolve individual criminals by reducing their actions to “culture.” It revealed the environment in which they rationalised their crimes. The greater scandal was that British institutions often appeared more frightened of recognising a pattern than of failing the children within it.

Safeguarding collapsed when concern over accusations of racism became stronger than the determination to protect victims. Vulnerable working-class girls were ignored, dismissed or treated as willing participants in their own exploitation. Acknowledging the ethnic, religious or cultural dimension of a crime is not collective punishment. It is a prerequisite for understanding how perpetrators operated, recruited accomplices and silenced those around them.

No community should be condemned collectively. No community should be protected collectively from legitimate scrutiny either.

Citizenship Must Mean More Than a Passport

Khan believes some second- and third-generation Muslims have become more religiously assertive than their parents.

Earlier generations often combined inherited customs with an increasingly British way of life. Among parts of the younger generation, however, she sees a harder identity emerging - one reinforced by mosques, political grievances, online radicalisation and a perpetual distinction between Muslims and the surrounding society.

Integration cannot be measured only by citizenship, employment or fluency in English. It must also involve a genuine acceptance of the principles that sustain a free society: equality before the law, freedom of conscience, freedom of expression and the equal dignity of women.

People cannot be forced to feel British. But Britain can insist that its laws take precedence over religious commands, that apostates have the right to speak and that no belief system receives immunity from criticism.

Khan’s own story contains an important distinction. She says many Muslims - including her parents - are “better than Islam”: more compassionate and tolerant than the harshest teachings attributed to their faith. That is precisely why criticism of an ideology should never be confused with hostility towards people.

European governments have spent decades blurring that distinction. They have too often treated scrutiny of Islam as an attack on Muslims, empowering extremists while abandoning reformers, dissidents, apostates and victims.

Nuriyah Khan does not need Britain to rescue her from her heritage. She needs Britain to defend the freedoms that allowed her to question it. A confident country should be able to do that without apology.