The movement and its self-description

The self-description is worth checking against the record, and there is now a record to check it against. A study of 291 postings by former Malaysian Muslims coded what those postings actually do, and the results do not describe people asking to be left alone.

What the discourse does

Argument is the single most common act, at roughly a quarter of postings. That is a movement making a case to an audience. Persuasion appears as a category in its own right. So does warning. So do directives: requests for the reader to act, sign, join, denounce. One posting in the study urges former Muslims to unite so as to display their strength to Muslims and to assist those still inside the community who have not declared themselves, and promises those people that they will not be left alone.

Read that last promise as generously as it will bear, and it is solidarity offered to the frightened. It is still, unmistakably, organised outreach directed at people who are currently inside Islam. Whatever else that is, it is not a request for privacy.

Name it accurately

A movement that argues, persuades, warns, recruits, and coordinates is a missionary movement. There is nothing scandalous in the description and no reason for anyone to resent it. It is entitled to exist, to publish, and to make its case, and this site answers that case rather than asking for it to be silenced.

What it is not entitled to is the double posture: presenting as a support group for the wounded while conducting proselytisation, and then treating any reply as persecution. If the case is good, it can be argued in the open under its own name. If it can only be defended once described as merely wanting to be left alone, that tells you the arguer expects the description to do work the arguments cannot.

The reciprocity question

There is a version of freedom of conscience worth having, and it runs in both directions. It protects the person who leaves and the person who stays. A movement that will “not leave alone” those who have chosen to remain has adopted, in its own words, precisely the posture it condemns in the Muslims it left: an unwillingness to let the other side simply be. That contradiction is not fatal to their arguments, which we answer one by one elsewhere. It is fatal to the claim that they are only asking for quiet.