Recently, a member of the ex-Muslim community expressed a profound sense of frustration and bewilderment that resonates with many:
"Why is Islam still going so strong? ... There are so many ridiculous things about this religion if you just look and think about it for more than 2 minutes, yet it holds about 2 billion people... How come so many are still so devoted?"
To an atheist (especially ex-Muslim atheist) who has already deconstructed his faith, the persistence of such a system seems like a paradox. How can a 1,400-year-old ideology maintain such a massive, devoted following in the age of information and modern science?
It seems that the situation exists mainly for the following reasons:
1. The Question of a Creator
For most of human history, believing in a Creator felt like the most natural and logical thing in the world. Before Darwin, before modern science, before we had proper explanations for how life and the universe came to exist, it was genuinely very hard for ordinary people to imagine that everything could exist without someone making it. The idea of a Creator was not just a religious feeling. For most people, it felt like simple common sense.
This is why atheism (or non-religionism i.e., atheism+agnosticism+deism) was extremely rare throughout most of history. It was not that people were stupid or incapable of thinking. It was that a satisfying alternative explanation simply did not exist yet. When you cannot explain where everything came from without a Creator, believing in one feels like the only reasonable option.
Because of this, religion had a massive head start.
2. Islam never had to compete with Atheism, but only against other Religions
And importantly, the competition that religion faced for centuries was not from atheism. It was from other religions. Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism and others were all arguing against each other. The real question in most people's minds was never "does a Creator exist?" That was taken for granted. The real question was "which religion correctly represents that Creator?"
This changed the entire nature of the debate. Islam developed and strengthened itself within this specific competition:
- Islam built a preserved text,
- a detailed legal system,
- a strong sense of community,
- and a confident theological identity.
It was very good at competing against other religions, because that was the competition it faced.
3. Non-Religionism Has Already Won the Argument Against Islam
The challenge from atheism and secular thinking is actually quite new for most Muslim communities. For most of Islamic history, Islam never really had to face this kind of challenge seriously. It was prepared to argue against other religions, but not against the idea of "no religion at all." In that sense, it entered a fight it was never trained for.
And yet, even without any organized atheist movement, even without any state support, even without any open preaching of atheism in Muslim-majority countries, hundreds of thousands of Muslims are quietly leaving Islam on their own. Secretly, privately, but steadily. No other religion or ideology in history has managed to pull people away from Islam at this scale or speed. Not Christianity, not Hinduism, not any other competing religion. But secular thinking is doing it, even without an army, without funding, and without a single mosque or temple.
Why is non-religionism so effective where everything else failed?
Because it carries two weapons that are simply impossible to defeat honestly.
The first is modern science. Certain scientific discoveries, like the Theory of Evolution, or the well-documented scientific errors found in the Quran, are not matters of opinion. They are not arguments that can be smoothly talked around forever. They are facts. And Islam, like every other religion, has no real answer to them. Apologists can create confusion and buy time, but they cannot make the facts go away.
The second weapon is human moral progress. Over the last few centuries, humanity has built a system of ethics and morality that is, by any honest measure, far more humane than what religious texts prescribe. We abolished slavery. We gave women equal rights as full human beings. We gave minorities the same dignity and legal protections as everyone else. We are now even beginning to extend basic rights and protections to animals. None of this came from religion. Most of it happened in direct opposition to religious tradition.
When ordinary people, including ordinary Muslims, compare these two systems of morality side by side, the gap is hard to ignore forever.
These two forces, science and human moral development, are not going away. They are growing stronger with every generation. And sooner or later, they will continue to erode the foundations of all religions, including Islam. Not through force, not through argument alone, but simply through the quiet and unstoppable spread of knowledge and human empathy.
Why Does the Islamic System Still Look Unbroken?
First, let's be clear about one thing. Non-religionism has already won the argument against Islam on an intellectual level. That is not in doubt. But winning an argument and actually changing a billion people's minds are two very different things. To understand why the Islamic system still looks strong on the surface, we need to look at the bigger picture.
1. The Unfair Information Battle
The first and most important reason is that most ordinary Muslims have simply never had a fair chance to hear the other side.
In many Muslim-majority countries, the average person has had almost no real exposure to atheist thinking at all. It is mostly university professors, scientists, and highly educated people who are quietly leaving Islam. Many common people have barely even heard the word "atheism." For them, the question of leaving Islam has never seriously come up, not because they thought about it and rejected it, but because they were never really exposed to it in the first place.
And even in places where some exposure does happen, it is never a fair or balanced exposure. Because surrounding that one atheist argument the person stumbles across, there are a hundred Islamic responses already waiting. The person has already been prepared, from childhood, to dismiss exactly this kind of thinking.
The volume of anti-atheism content inside Islamic circles is genuinely enormous. Sermons, Friday prayers, religious books, YouTube channels, WhatsApp forwards, mosque discussions, all of them constantly hammer the same message: atheism is foolish, immoral, and spiritually empty. This is not occasional. It is daily, organized, and deliberate. So when an ordinary Muslim finally hears an atheist argument, their first reaction is almost always already programmed. They have heard it "refuted" many times before, often without even knowing it.
And here is the most important point: these refutations do not need to be honest or correct. They only need to sound convincing to someone without specialist knowledge. Islamic apologists have spent decades building a huge library of responses to atheist and secular criticism. These responses borrow the language of science and logic. They sound serious and well-researched. But for an ordinary person with no background in philosophy, biology, or history, it is almost impossible to see that these responses are actually hollow and misleading. The trick works precisely because it does not look like a trick.
This is not something that happened by accident. It is a deeply organized system with a long history behind it. Islamic scholarly tradition has an entire formal field of study built specifically for this purpose. It is called Ilm al-Kalam, sometimes translated as Islamic dialectical theology. This discipline exists for one reason: to defend Islamic beliefs against criticism and to attack competing ideas. Scholars who master Kalam are not just memorizing religious texts. They are being trained in the art of argument itself. They learn how to reframe uncomfortable questions. They learn how to make genuinely problematic parts of Islam sound either perfectly reasonable or so complicated that an ordinary person feels unqualified to judge.
Modern Islamic preachers and apologists have taken this old tradition and rebuilt it for the internet age. They produce polished videos and well-written articles that appear to engage seriously with evolution, cosmology, and historical criticism of Islamic texts. But this is not a genuine search for truth. The conclusion was decided before the first word was written. The entire exercise is about protecting belief, not examining it.
The result is a situation that is deeply and fundamentally unfair. An ordinary Muslim who begins asking honest questions is not standing between two equal sides, calmly weighing the evidence. They are standing inside a system that was carefully built, over many centuries, with the single purpose of making sure they always come back to the same answer. Describing this as indoctrination is not an attack or an exaggeration. It is simply the most accurate word for what is actually happening.
2. The Real Cost of Leaving Islam
One of the most powerful reasons Islam retains so many of its followers has very little to do with theology. It has to do with what happens to you if you leave.
Research from organizations like Pew has shown that in many Muslim-majority countries, over 90% of people who are born into Muslim families continue to identify as Muslim throughout their lives. On the surface, this looks like extraordinary devotion. But when you look more carefully, a significant part of this number is not really about belief at all. It is about survival, social and sometimes physical.
In most Muslim families and communities, leaving Islam is not treated as a personal choice. It is treated as a betrayal. Not just of God, but of your parents, your family, your community, and everything they stand for. The consequences can be severe. Families disown their children. Marriages fall apart. People lose their inheritance. Mothers and fathers cut off all contact. Friends disappear overnight. In tightly knit communities, the person who leaves Islam can find themselves suddenly and completely alone, with no social support of any kind.
In around a dozen countries, the situation is even more extreme. Apostasy, which simply means leaving your religion, is legally punishable by death. In several more countries, blasphemy laws are used to punish, imprison, or silence anyone who criticizes Islam or expresses doubt publicly. The details of enforcement vary from place to place, but the message is the same everywhere: leaving or criticizing Islam comes with a price.
Even in countries where there is no legal punishment, the threat of social violence or so-called "honor-based" pressure is very real for many people. Someone might not be arrested, but they might be threatened, attacked, or simply made to feel that their life as they know it is over.
The natural result of all this is that enormous numbers of people who have privately stopped believing in Islam continue to live as if they still do. They pray, they fast, they attend mosque, they say the right things in public, all while believing none of it in private. Social scientists call this a "chilling effect." When the cost of honesty is too high, people go silent. And when doubters go silent, the community looks more unified and more believing than it actually is.
This is very different from the situation in most Western societies, where leaving Christianity might cause some family tension or awkwardness, but rarely destroys a person's entire life. When leaving is relatively safe, people leave openly. When leaving is dangerous, they stay quietly. The difference in what we observe between these two worlds is not mainly a difference in belief. It is a difference in the cost of honesty.
3. Who Is Criticizing Islam Matters More Than What They Say
Here is something that many people outside Muslim communities do not fully understand. It is often not enough to have the right argument. It also matters enormously who is making that argument.
Most criticism of Islam that ordinary Muslims encounter comes from outside. It comes from non-Muslims, from Western voices, from people who are seen as having a political agenda or a cultural bias against Islam. And because of this, the criticism is very easy to dismiss. It does not matter how logically correct the argument is. If the person making it is seen as an enemy, or as someone who simply does not like Islam or Muslims, then the argument is filed away as an attack, not as an honest intellectual challenge. The walls go up, and the criticism actually makes people hold on to their faith more tightly, not less.
Now compare this to what happens when someone from inside the community raises the same doubts. A family member, a close friend, a respected scholar, someone the person already loves and trusts. Suddenly the same argument lands completely differently. It cannot be dismissed as bias or hostility. It has to be taken seriously. This is how belief actually changes in real life, not through debates on the internet, but through trusted personal relationships.
But here is the problem. In most Muslim communities, this kind of internal criticism is almost completely absent, at least in public. And the reason goes back to everything discussed in the previous section. The cost of openly leaving Islam or expressing doubt is so high that the people who do have doubts simply stay quiet. They do not tell their families. They do not speak openly in their communities. They live a double life, believing one thing privately and performing something completely different in public.
This is sometimes called "private deconversion." A person has already left Islam in their heart and mind, but nobody around them knows it. They still attend prayers. They still fast during Ramadan. They still say the right words. Because the alternative, being honest, means potentially losing their family, their friends, their marriage, and their place in the community.
The result of all this silence is that the Muslim community, from the inside, appears far more united and certain than it actually is. The doubters are invisible. And because they are invisible, other people who are beginning to have doubts look around and see nobody like themselves. They feel alone. They assume they must be the only one. And so they too stay silent.
This creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Silence produces more silence. The absence of visible internal criticism makes genuine internal debate almost impossible. And without internal debate, the only criticism that is visible is the external kind, which is easy to dismiss as hostility.
In this way, the social system protects itself very effectively. Not through honest argument, but through making honesty too expensive for most people to afford.
4. Change Takes Time
Real change in how large groups of people think and believe does not happen fast. This is simply how human societies work.
Look at Western countries. Atheist and secular movements have existed there for well over a hundred years. Brilliant philosophers, scientists, and writers have been openly criticizing religion for generations. And yet, even today, a very large number of people in these countries still identify as Christian, or at least as "something religious," even if they rarely go to church or follow strict religious rules. The belief faded gradually, over many decades, across multiple generations. It did not collapse overnight.
The same will be true for Islam. The seeds of doubt are already planted. Hundreds of thousands of people are already quietly leaving. The process has already begun. But it will take time, probably a long time, before the full scale of this change becomes visible to the outside world.
This is not a reason for despair. It is simply a reason for patience and for thinking long term.
Ideas spread through conversations, through education, through one person sharing something honest with another person they trust. Each generation grows up with slightly more access to information than the one before it. Each generation asks slightly harder questions. This is how change actually moves in the real world. Slowly, quietly, and then all at once.
What We Can Do
Understanding all of this, we created our website:
The goal is simple: to give ordinary Muslims a fair chance to hear the other side, many of them for the very first time in their lives.
But there is an honest problem we have to face. This website has already been banned in many Muslim-majority countries. The people who need it most are often the ones who cannot access it. A website, no matter how good its content is, cannot help someone who is blocked from reaching it.
This means that simply building a good website is not enough. The much harder and much more important challenge is finding real ways to get this message to ordinary Muslim people, especially those living inside closed information environments where every door to outside thinking has already been shut. Until we solve that problem, our reach will remain limited. And that is a challenge worth taking seriously.
Hassan Radwan