What the testimonies actually do

This claim comes from our own side of the argument, and it does not survive contact with the evidence. We retire it here, because an apologetics that keeps a comfortable falsehood about its opponents has no standing to correct anyone else’s.

What was claimed

Older apologetic writing on apostasy from Islam, this author’s included, characterised those who left as psychologically insecure, described their public statements as projection, and at one point prescribed a psychological examination for them. That is a diagnosis offered by people with no standing to make one, about people they had never met. It also functions as an excuse: if the testimony is a symptom, nobody has to answer it.

What the measurement shows

Hashmi and colleagues examined 291 postings by five former Malaysian Muslims across Facebook and Twitter, between October 2019 and March 2020, coding every utterance against Searle’s taxonomy of speech acts and van Dijk’s distinction between the act performed in a sentence and the act performed by a whole posting.

At the level of the whole posting, the most common thing these writers did was argue — roughly a quarter of all postings. Rejection followed at about a fifth, then denial, warning, assertion, and persuasion. At sentence level the ranking was the same: argument first, denial second. Whatever else is going on in this discourse, its dominant activity is the construction of arguments intended to be answered.

So the insecurity framing is not merely uncharitable. It is inaccurate, and measurably so. It should be dropped, and this site does not use it.

What the data does support

Two of the study’s categories are worth keeping in view, because they are not the same as argument and the study counts them separately. Denial — the second most frequent act — objects to something previously said; an objection is not yet a case, and a discourse can be dense with denial while establishing very little. Assertion, in that study’s coding, means a positive statement offered without evidence for it. Both appear alongside genuine argument, and telling the three apart is the whole work of reading such a testimony carefully.

That is the honest position: these are people arguing, sometimes well and sometimes by assertion, and the reply owed to them is a reply to the arguments. Every other entry on this site is an attempt at that reply.

A note on the source

The study describes the discourse it examined as derogatory, and closes by suggesting its findings could help authorities in Muslim-majority countries identify such discourse. We cite it for what it measured and not for that application. Identifying people so that they can be pursued is not what this site is for, and a reader who has arrived here uncertain is not a target of anything. The participants in that study had masked their identities so that they could speak at all, which is a fact worth sitting with before treating their words as a specimen.