Rana Ahmad

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Ahmad 2017 on the anniversary of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims in Cologne

Rana Ahmad or Rana Ahmad Hamd (* 1985 in Riyadh ) is the pseudonym of a Saudi Arabian- born women's rights activist, atheist and ex-Muslim who fled to Germany in autumn 2015 . Since 2017 she has been the chairwoman of the association for secular refugee aid, which she co-founded in the same year . Her autobiography Women Must Not Dream Here reached the top 10 of the Spiegel bestseller list in 2018 and was also translated into French.

Author Rana Ahmad Reading in Oberwesel 2018 with Mina Ahadi, Dr. Michael Schmidt-Salomon
Author Rana Ahmad reading in Oberwesel 2018 with Mina Ahadi and Michael Schmidt-Salomon

biography

youth

Rana Ahmad's father came from Syria in the mid-1970s to work as a construction manager in Saudi Arabia. Four years later, he married Rana's mother in Syria and brought her to Riyadh. Rana was born there in 1985. Rana has an older and a younger brother and an older sister. Her family was deeply religious, "from her point of view" an extremist family compared to other families in our society "; she and her siblings learned the Koran from the age of 4 .

Author Rana Ahmad reading in Oberwesel 2018
Author Rana Ahmad reading in Oberwesel 2018

Ahmad went to a state girls' school where more than a quarter of all education was devoted to religion. She was taught that all non-Muslims would go to Hell and that hating Christians and Jews was a religious duty. She was allowed to ride around on her bike, for example to buy groceries when the family was on vacation with her father's parents in Syria. But at the age of 10 her grandfather took her bike away and said she was "too old for that now"; she felt deprived of her most important freedom. Ahmad did not understand why it should be considered haraam for "big girls" like her to ride bicycles, but not for boys to do the same. The very next day, Ahmad was forced to wear an abaya and a black hijab . Although Saudi law does not require women to wear headgear that is more restrictive than the hijab, at the age of 13, Ahmad was forced by her family and school to wear an even more facial niqab that only left her eyes uncovered . Although she did not understand the religious rules that were consecutively imposed on her, she accepted and followed them. She had never had contact with any boy or man who was not related to her until she reached adulthood.

Education

At the age of 19, Ahmad was due to be married and an engagement ceremony was held in Syria, but because her fiancé refused to move to Saudi Arabia and she refused to move to Syria, the plans did not materialize. In the meantime, her husband had become abusive and left her. She divorced and moved back in with her parents, which rubbed off on her reputation in society. She turned down three more marriage proposals from Saudi men in the years that followed, arguing that she wanted to advance her education first. Ahmad attended vocational training courses in English and IT , then worked as a receptionist and office worker in various medical practices and hospitals. However, due to the Saudi male guardianship system, she could hardly leave the house and if she wanted to travel by car her male relatives had to drive her; she was not allowed to travel alone.

The limitations and obligations of married life made her question her role and religion, and created in her a desire for freedom. In search of answers to her questions, she turned to the Internet and discovered philosophy (which Ahmad says is banned in Saudi Arabia) and atheism at the age of 25. This happened in 2011 when she came across a tweet from someone who was using the Twitter handle “Arab Atheist”, which she only understood through Google Translate . Shocked, Ahmad contacted “Arab Atheist”, who recommended several documentaries (e.g. on the theory of evolution and the Big Bang ) as well as books by Richard Dawkins , Friedrich Nietzsche , Voltaire and Charles Darwin translated into Arabic . “I cried when I found out what I hadn't learned, what was withheld from me,” said Ahmad in a 2016 interview. After about a year she came to the conclusion that she could no longer believe because of all the contradictions in the Quran . It brought her even more fear and sadness to realize that atheism and apostasy were the death penalty in Saudi Arabia , and that she would likely have to leave the country and all that she had to survive. She hid her reflections from her family and continued to pray five times a day while looking online for help from various groups such as Faith to Faithless, Ex-Muslims of North America, and Atheist Republic. She lived in secret as an atheist in Saudi Arabia for five years, fearing that if her disbelief were discovered, her family would kill her or the state would execute her.

Family problems

Rana held this Atheist Republic note in al-Masjid al-Haram .

Ahmad's older brother began to suspect that she was secretly meeting men and hid a bugging device in her room. When he caught her talking to a male friend on the phone, he stormed into her room and tried to kill her, but her father heard her cries for help and intervened. After this incident, Ahmad tried to kill himself by cutting the veins on her wrists, but again her father found her in time to take her to the hospital and save her life. Ahmad got a new job as a secretary at a school for mentally handicapped children. In the meantime she began studying English .

When her mother discovered Ahmad's tweets about religious doubts, she was furious and placed Ahmad under house arrest for a month with no access to her laptop or smartphone . Her mother forced her to pray and recite the Koran. In 2014, her family forced her to take part in the Hajj . She sought and found help from Atheist Republic and other similar organizations online. While on the Hajj, she took a picture of herself holding a slip of paper that read "Atheist Republic" while inside al-Masjid al-Haram , the holiest place in Islam . She was very scared because she knew that she would be killed if the people around her saw the note and discovered their disbelief, but she wanted to make it clear via the Internet that she was an atheist in Mecca and how many unbelievers there were Saudi Arabia, was not here voluntarily. It was also the first time that she decided to leave the country quickly or to end her life. She asked Atheist Republic to upload the photo to Facebook after leaving Mecca, which happened on August 3, 2014; a few days later she was overwhelmed that it had gone viral.

Escape

The Vice News film Rescuing Ex-Muslims: Leaving Islam (2016) tells about Ahmad's flight to Germany.

Ahmad made plans to flee the country, supported by Faith to Faithless. At first Ahmad tried to flee to the Netherlands , but the embassy refused to grant her a visa. After that, she thought of marrying a like-minded person with whom she would leave the country, but couldn't find a candidate. Because her Syrian passport would expire by the end of 2015 and the Syrian embassy in Saudi Arabia was closed (since 2012 because of the Syrian civil war ), Ahmad had to hurry and could only flee to a country without a visa requirement, such as Turkey . As a foreigner from Syria, it was not her father who had to give permission to travel abroad, but her employer, and she was able to convince him that she is going on family vacation, so he signed the papers for her.

On May 26, 2015, she took a plane from Riyadh via Dubai to Istanbul Ataturk Airport , just with her laptop, documents (including her Syrian passport) and $ 200. She took off her hijab and abaya when she first arrived in public as an adult and henceforth adopted the pseudonym "Rana Ahmad (Hamd)" to prevent her family from trying to track her down. After four days, she took the bus to a friend (another ex-Muslim from Syria) in Izmir who offered her a small house to rent. For the first time in her life, Ahmad danced and drank in the street. However, she received word that her family had discovered she had fled to Turkey and feared that they would be after her. She cut her hair short, dyed it blonde, and wore colored contact lenses as a disguise. Next, Armin Navabi, the founder of the Atheist Republic, started a crowdfunding campaign for her to finance her stay and further trip to the European Union , which raised $ 5,000. In August 2015, Imtiaz Shams from Faith to Faithless, together with a camera team from Vice News , visited her in Izmir to discuss solutions. After trying unsuccessfully to obtain a visa to enter the EU for five months, Ahmad decided to illegally cross the border with Greece by boat , which she succeeded on the third attempt.

From Greece she traveled through North Macedonia , Serbia , Hungary , Slovakia , Austria and reached Germany in November 2015. On the way, she stayed in various refugee camps for some time. She gave up on going to Sweden because she ran out of money, was tired of traveling and had heard that the German education system was good.

live in Germany

After arriving in Germany in November 2015, Ahmad spent a year in a refugee camp about an hour from Cologne before she was assigned a house of her own. On December 31, 2015, the Vice News camera team visited her again in Cologne. She spent much of her first year reading ( physics ) books and intended to study nuclear physics or engineering . But she felt threatened by Muslim refugees in the camp because many of them considered apostasy to be a death-worthy crime. After writing to Maryam Namazie , she discovered that the Central Council of Ex-Muslims happened to be based in Cologne as well, and after consulting Mina Ahadi , the Central Council and the Giordano Bruno Foundation were able to help her find a house of her own .

After 20 years, at the age of 30, she was finally able to buy and ride a bicycle again in Germany, which she viewed as an important restoration of her freedom. A photo of her with her new bike in Cologne was used for a brochure about refugee aid.

In March 2018 she declared: "I love Germany, I love my free life in Germany". She wanted to adapt quickly, acquire German citizenship, improve her German and support the activities of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims. Ahmad has been studying physics in Cologne since the end of 2018.

Activism in Germany

Maryam Namazie interviewed Rana Ahmad in Cologne 2017.
Secular Refugee Aid e. V. - Atheists help
Atheist Refugee Relief Germany
(SF-AH (German) , ARR (English) )
logo
purpose Support non-religious refugees through practical offers of help
Chair: Rana Ahmad, Mahmudul Haque Munshi and Stefan Paintner
Establishment date: March 2017
Seat : Cologne
Website: atheist-refugees.com

In the years that followed, Ahmad conducted numerous interviews with several media outlets, mainly German and French , about her experiences and her political and religious views. In particular with regard to the politics of Saudi Arabia and its Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the dissident Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated in October 2018 . Ahmad commented that the Saudi authorities had failed to promote the emancipation of women , for which many activists fought; instead, they have often imprisoned the activists. This has given the women the message that they have no future in Saudi Arabia and has pushed them to flee the country.

The Vice News documentary Leaving Islam: Rescuing Ex-Muslims , which narrated part of Ahmad's life journey from Saudi Arabia to Germany, was broadcast on February 10, 2016. On March 5, 2016, three months after her arrival in Germany, Ahmad gave her first public speech in Cologne at a meeting organized by the Central Council of Ex-Muslims. She spoke in Arabic about her life in Saudi Arabia, her flight and her opinion on how western countries should treat refugees like themselves, with the Lebanese-German television journalist Imad Karim doing the German translation.

Ahmad gave her first big interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in June 2016. At that time she was still in a refugee camp, where she was waiting to get her own house and felt threatened by Muslim refugees in this camp. “I don't hate Muslims. I also have very good Muslim friends who accept me for who I am. What I hate is that our rights are being stolen from us in the name of religion, especially women, ”she said. Although she has no problem with people who hold Islamic beliefs, she was furious to see a 6 or 8 year old girl forced to wear the veil in Germany, which is more German law, not Sharia law applies. It also annoys them that some Muslims do not accept Jews.

On August 15, 2016, Ahmad was interviewed for the first time on television by journalist Jaafar Abdul Karim of Deutsche Welle in Arabic, and extracts from the interview were translated into English and other languages. Three million people saw her on television saying she had left Islam, and extracts from it went viral on the internet, resulting in Muslims from around the world sending her numerous threats and insults.

In 2017, Ahmad and other activists from the secular scene founded the Säkulare Refugee Aid e.V. and has been on the board since then. The association was presented to the public as part of the celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims on November 17, 2017 in Cologne. He received start-up funding of 10,000 euros from the Giordano Bruno Foundation . The statutory aim of the association is to "support refugees who are discriminated against due to their atheistic convictions or their attitude critical of religion or are even threatened with life and limb." The association offers those affected practical help in their contacts with authorities, doctors and lawyers, and accompanies them when they take up language and integration courses. In addition, according to its own information, the association supports refugees in participating in events and appearing in the press, radio and television in order to clarify the situation in their communities of origin. In July 2019, the association announced a cooperation with Humanist Global Charity (formerly Brighter Brains Institute, USA). This is intended to support humanitarian aid centers, schools, kindergartens and hospitals in the countries of origin. Doris Schröder-Köpf praised her "courageous commitment" as an important contribution to the protection of human rights.

On January 15, 2018, her autobiography Women are not allowed to dream here: My escape from Saudi Arabia, my way to freedom in Germany was published. The book reached the top 10 of the Spiegel bestseller list in 2018. A French translation was published in Paris in October 2018 under the name Ici, les femmes ne rêvent pas: Récit d'une évasion (“Women don't dream here: the story of an escape”). Ahmad emphasizes: “We, the women, can change our lives, be free. We think we are weak, but that is wrong; we are strong and this book proves it. "

On November 12, 2018, she met Richard Dawkins in Berlin and was interviewed by him. The video has been viewed over 300,000 times on YouTube. Before her escape, she was one of millions of anonymous readers in Islamic countries who could only secretly download books such as Dawkins “ Der Gotteswahn ” from the Internet in an unofficially translated version. Today she works for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science. The foundation has now set up a translation project with which professionally translated versions of groundbreaking books on science and nature are offered free of charge in Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and Indonesian on the Internet.

book

Web links

Commons : Rana Ahmad  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao ap Charlotte Sophie Meyn: Flucht vor der Religion . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , June 16, 2016. Retrieved February 20, 2019. 
  2. ↑ a b c Celine Lussato: Rana Ahmad, athée en exile: "Une Saoudienne agressée qui appelle la police se fera embarquer" (fr) . In: L'Obs , November 10, 2018. Retrieved February 22, 2019. 
  3. ↑ Charlotte Sophie Meyn: Saudi Arabia: Escape from religion . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed April 3, 2020]).
  4. ↑ a b Rana Ahmad, Sarah Borufk: Women are not allowed to dream here. My breakout from Saudi Arabia, my way to freedom . btb, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-442-75748-0 , p. 320 .
  5. ↑ a b SPIEGEL bestseller paperback non-fiction books. Book report, accessed on April 3, 2020 .
  6. ↑ a b Rana Ahmad, Olivier Mannoni (translator): Ici, les femmes ne rêvent pas . Editeur Globe, 2018, ISBN 978-2-211-23771-0 , pp. 304 .
  7. ↑ a b c d e Jaafar Abdul Karim: Saudi-born atheist Rana Ahmad: my family or the state would have killed me if I hadn't fled; the hijab robbed me of my childhood ( en, ar ) Middle East Media Research Institute. August 15, 2016. Retrieved March 4, 2019.
  8. ↑ With the exception of a few international schools, all schools in Saudi Arabia from the age of 6 or 7 are strictly segregated according to gender.
  9. ↑ a b c d e f g Rana Ahmad: Women are not allowed to dream here (reading - book premiere) . Giordano Bruno Foundation. January 30, 2018. Retrieved February 26, 2019.
  10. ↑ a b c d Anne-Marie Bissada: Female and atheist in Saudi Arabia . In: Radio France Internationale , France Médias Monde, October 27, 2018. Accessed February 20, 2019. 
  11. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Maximilian Weigl: "In Saudi Arabia you are a second class woman as a woman" . In: Jetzt , Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 15, 2018. Retrieved February 21, 2019. 
  12. ↑ a b Sarah Elzas: Live on Live - Saudi author in exile, Ahmad Rana . In: RFI English , France Médias Monde, October 18, 2018. Accessed February 20, 2019. 
  13. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Poppy Begum: Rescuing Ex-Muslims: Leaving Islam . In: Vice News . February 10, 2016. Retrieved November 26, 2017.
  14. ↑ a b c d The founding story: Ranas Escape . Secular refugee aid. Retrieved February 22, 2019.
  15. ↑ a b c Heidi Ossenberg: "I love Germany" . In: Badische Zeitung , March 5, 2018. Accessed February 21, 2019. 
  16. ↑ Self- image and practical work . Secular refugee aid. Retrieved February 26, 2019.
  17. ↑ a b Statute of the Secular Refugee Aid eV - Atheists help . Secular refugee aid. March 2017. Retrieved February 22, 2019.
  18. ↑ Rana Ahmad, opposante saoudienne "Khashoggi a été tué parce qu'il décrivait la réalité en Arabie saoudite" (fr) . In: Le Dauphiné libéré , October 19, 2018. Retrieved February 22, 2019. 
  19. ↑ Antoine Malo: Arabie saoudite: “Mohammed ben Salman n'a rien changé au système”, selon l'exilée Rana Ahmad (fr) . In: Le Journal du Dimanche , October 21, 2018. Accessed February 22, 2019. 
  20. ↑ Rana Ahmad on the results of the investigation in the Khashoggi case on October 23, 2018 . In: Der Tag , Phoenix , October 23, 2018. Retrieved February 22, 2019. 
  21. ^ Hilary Whiteman, Ivan Watson and Sandi Sidhu: Desperate and alone, Saudi sisters risk everything to flee oppression . In: CNN International , February 21, 2019. Retrieved February 23, 2019. 
  22. ↑ Rana Ahmad & Imad Karim: Speech by ex-Muslim Rana in Cologne - March 5, 2016 ( ar, de ) Strong Shadow Media. November 15, 2016. Retrieved February 25, 2019.
  23. ^ Marie Wildermann: From Saudi Arabia to Germany: The flight of an atheist . In: Deutschlandfunk , January 24, 2018. Retrieved March 4, 2019. 
  24. ↑ "One of the most important political movements in the world". Retrieved April 3, 2020 .
  25. ^ Self- Image and Practical Work - Atheist Refugee Relief. Retrieved on April 3, 2020 (German).
  26. ^ Social work free from religion - collaboration with the Brighter Brains Institute - Atheist Refugee Relief. Retrieved on April 3, 2020 (German).
  27. ^ Voices on secular refugee aid - Atheist Refugee Relief. Retrieved on May 28, 2020 (German).
  28. ↑ Floriane Valdayron: Rana Ahmad a risqué sa vie pour fuir l'Arabie saoudite et vivre libre (fr) . In: Cheek Magazine , October 26, 2018. Retrieved February 23, 2019. 
  29. ^ Richard Dawkins, Rana Ahmad: Richard Dawkins interviews Saudi Arabian atheist author Rana Ahmad. In: YouTube. Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, November 12, 2018, accessed April 3, 2020 .
  30. ^ Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Retrieved April 3, 2020 .
  31. ↑ Richard Dawkins in conversation with Rana Ahmad - Richard Dawkins Foundation. Retrieved April 3, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Ahmad, Rana
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ahmad Hamd, Rana
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Suffragette, atheist and ex-Muslim
DATE OF BIRTH 1985
PLACE OF BIRTH Riad