About

Murtadd answers doubts about Islam and the claims that circulate against it. It is written for one reader in particular: someone who arrived carrying a question, who may be frightened, and who has not decided anything yet.

Who it is for

Most readers come here alone, often late at night, with a question they have not been able to ask anyone. Some have read an argument against Islam and cannot answer it. Some were taught something as religion that does not survive a close look. For some the trouble is grief, loneliness, or the way they were treated by people who spoke in the religion’s name.

The site is also written for the people around them: a parent whose child has stopped praying, a husband or wife who no longer shares a belief, a friend who has been told something in confidence. And it is written for those who have already left, and who would like to see the arguments they left over stated fairly and answered on the evidence.

No one needs to have decided anything to read here, and nothing here asks them to.

What is here

Doubts are short answers to a question as a person would put it, in their own words. Each is kept to a length that can be read in a few minutes, because the reader is often reading late and alone, and a finite page is a kindness. They are grouped into four kinds: intellectual, scriptural, emotional and identity. The emotional and identity doubts are written care-first. They do not argue with a grief, and they carry no verdict.

Rebuttals take a claim as it circulates, state it fairly, and answer it from its primary evidence. Each one cites its sources and ends with a verdict.

The Fatwa index summarises scholarly positions in our own words, each linked to its primary source. It is a reference, and it issues no rulings.

Letters are correspondence published elsewhere, archived in their original form and dated. They record a position taken at a fixed moment, and they are kept apart from the answers for that reason.

If you do not know where to begin, Start Here offers three routes in, and the Irtidad page explains what leaving Islam means in the classical sources, and what does not take a person out of it.

How it is written

The register is forensic. An entry names the fallacy, cites scripture as evidence, with grades and numbers, and reaches a verdict. Where the honest answer is a concession, the entry concedes, and several entries retire arguments made on Islam’s own side because the evidence does not support them.

Arguments are answered as claims. No individual is named, described or profiled, and source material is used only to identify which arguments are in circulation.

The ground is comparative. Malaysia is the site’s home and it is not its frame: Malaysian law or usage may appear as one example among several, because the reader may be in Cairo, Jakarta, Lahore or London.

Some entries point to a longer treatment of the same question elsewhere. Those links are offered because the question deserves the longer treatment, and they state no relationship.

What it does not do

It does not collect people. There are no testimonials here, and no wall of accounts from people who doubted, left or stayed. It does not use mood photography. It does not give personal religious rulings: a question about your own situation deserves a scholar who can hear the whole of it.

And it does not track you. The share buttons are plain links, and nothing on the site tells anyone what you read. The Privacy page sets out what the site stores.

Corrections

An entry that misstates a claim, a ruling or a source should be corrected, and a reader who notices is doing the site a service. The Contact page has a form for that, and for questions the site has not yet answered.