neither apostate nor angel: the myth of the “perfect muslim girl”

learning religion like it was a language i was supposed to know

my upbringing was deeply muslim and also equally confusing. i would describe it in the way water is wet: inescapable, all-consuming, but never bothered to question why. i wasn’t taught belief but i was trained into obedience. i memorised surahs before i ever understood the words, fasted before i understood the hunger for a god. but absorption isn’t understanding. by eight, i could recite surah al fatiha flawlessly, but if you’d asked me what the english translation of “iyyaaka na’budu” (“you alone we worship”) meant, i’d have stared blankly.

my mosque teacher and my schoolteachers spoke entirely different languages. sometimes literally, but always ideologically. i became fluent in two languages: one that warned of the inevitable day of judgement, the other of secular smugness.

at home, doubt was dangerous, it was a slippery slope towards disgrace. your thoughts weren’t private; they were recorded. your actions weren’t just choices, they were evidence, judged by an all seeing god. i was taught that there was a right and wrong for everything, even if the criteria were rarely explained beyond shame, fear, or silence.

but outside those spaces, especially in school, the atmosphere was different. secular and skeptical. belief was often treated as a relic of the uneducated, the overly emotional, or the oppressed. disbelief, in those settings, was not just allowed, it was fashionable. and so i was caught in a strange in between: too religious to fit in with the secular crowd, too questioning to be seen as pious in my own community.

the western secular world treated religion like an embarrassing superstition, something you outgrow. my muslim world treated it like a birthright you must never outgrow even if it was never really taught to you, just imposed.

i wasn’t given tools to navigate either system. so when i did begin to ask questions, not to disprove faith, but to finally understand, it i didn’t know where to go. i had no script for what it meant to learn a religion you were already expected to embody. no guide for unearthing the guilt that came with loving parts of your faith and being alienated by others. no community that would let me be muslim on my own terms, without demanding a performance.

even before i had access to the internet or the vocabulary of an atheist, i knew something didn’t sit right. in primary school, i’d listen to my classmates talk about religion with this strange, unquestioning confidence. the way they talked about hell and brutal punishment was so casual, matter of fact like these were obvious, objective truths. but to me, even then, it sounded dystopian. unfair. cruel, even. and yet, i couldn’t say anything. questioning them felt like blasphemy, even if all i wanted was to understand why. so i nodded along, agree with what i was told, and kept my doubts quiet. at that age, i didn’t know what belief even meant. i just knew that if there was a god, surely he couldn’t be that vindictive.

and quietly, even then, i wondered if any of it was real. in my teens, that wondering turned into full blown disbelief. i spent most of my nights staring at my bedroom ceiling and thought: “if god is love, why does this feel like hate?” or just simply “this doesn’t add up”.

to me, atheism, back then, felt like honesty. no mental gymnastics to justify eternal hellfire or sexism, or homophobia. no guilt. just cold, clean cut freedom: the universe owed me nothing, and i owed it no devotion. but freedom, i’d learn, can be lonely. and the thing about burning down the prison of dogma is that you still need shelter and now you have to build it yourself.

i swung from atheism to agnosticism, and then to something more open: believing in a god, but resenting the rules and structures built in his name. i didn’t reject faith; i rejected the parts that felt man made and weaponised. it took years to reach a point of peace, where i could come to terms with the fact that fear shouldn’t be the price of belief. and maybe that’s where free will comes in. maybe god gave me the tools to choose, and maybe choosing not perfectly, but intentionally is enough. i don’t think i need to live without flaw to be worthy of a good “afterlife”. i think i just need to live without cruelty.

but that clarity didn’t come easily for me. islam, for me, was never inherited. it had to be reclaimed. but that reclamation was never simple, because by the time i started engaging with my religion on my own terms, i was already burdened by how often it had been used against me.

especially as a girl.

god’s gaze, i was told, was omnipresent. but it wasn’t god watching. it was people.

as a muslim girl, i learned early that my body carried the weight of other people’s expectations. i wasn’t just representing myself. i was representing family, faith, community. the rules weren’t written in my favour, but i was expected to follow them perfectly. meanwhile, boys were granted leniency. our sins were never equal. i couldn’t separate my religion from the feeling of being constantly watched, corrected, or shamed and that made intimacy with god feel impossible.

growing up, i was haunted by a girl i was supposed to become. she was quiet, modest, unshakeable in her faith. she was apolitical, obedient, and untouched. the “perfect muslim girl.” we all knew her. we were all compared to her. and when we fell short (which we always did), we were warned about what came next: a slippery slope into (god forbid, ironically) a westernised soul. the binary was clear: if you wore too much makeup or talked to boys or spoke too loudly about how things felt unfair, you were already being mourned.

but that “the perfect muslim girl” never existed. she was a fantasy crafted by communities that feared change, feared nuance, feared women with voices. and i spent years trying to be her before realising she wasn’t even real. i am not an apostate. i am not an angel. i am not a cautionary tale or a community mascot.

the internet also made it harder. it tends to flatten everything. it paints women like me as either oppressed or rebellious, never simply learning. there’s no room for contradiction, no space for nuance. and what’s worse is that the internet didn’t create these binaries, it just amplified them. my own father, like many men i grew up around both on the internet and in real life, only seemed to engage with religion when it was about us about women. he’d go quiet during conversations about justice, compassion, or accountability, but suddenly become a scholar when the topic was tabarruj (the idea that a woman beautifying herself is sinful) or fitnah (temptation, often conveniently blamed on women’s existence). he’d lecture about not being a dayouth (a man who doesn’t control the women in his family, seen as weak or dishonorable) or defend the “right” to four wives but never mention self restraint.

i spent so long confusing god with the people who spoke on his behalf that i didn’t know where divinity ended and control began. when adults told me to fear god, what they really meant was: fear us. fear what we’ll say about you, fear what we’ll assume, fear the social death that comes with deviating from the norm. but it wasn’t god who humiliated girls in mosque classrooms, or punished them for asking questions. that was humans. it was grown adults mistaking their preferences for morality and their biases for divine law. and i internalised it. i thought disappointing people meant disappointing god. it took years to realise that much of what i feared wasn’t faith it was authority.

a selective islam that hyper fixated on policing women while excusing everything else. the same men who raised their voices about hijab stayed silent about gossip, arrogance, or injustice. they could recite every hadith about modesty but forgot the ones about character. and somehow, their sins (lying, cruelty, emotional neglect) were always seen as mistakes. while ours? proof of corruption. signs of the west rotting us from the inside. it’s no wonder i felt distanced from religion when it was used as a surveillance tool instead of a source of solace. when spiritual conversations began and ended at who she was texting, or how loudly she laughed in public. the rules were never about closeness to god they were about proximity to shame. about keeping women small enough to manage, silent enough to avoid scrutiny.

but it was never just online. that angel or apostate existed long before social media. it was in our homes, our mosques, our dinner tables. it’s just louder now.

learning religion later, as a girl who was supposed to already belong to it, is alienating. you’re seen as too late to be pure, too early to be forgiven. there’s no patience for your uncertainty. it took years to admit that i didn’t understand what i was saying to god and even longer to give myself permission to ask.

i spent years reading into other religious texts, convinced that maybe my faith was uniquely complicated, that perhaps it was only in my tradition where things seemed tangled and elusive. i thought maybe the clarity of other religions would offer me a simpler path. but what i found instead were striking parallels to universal struggles, shared moral dilemmas, and similar approaches to the questions of suffering, purpose, and redemption. to seek understanding in other texts, to question the narratives handed down to me, felt disloyal, like i was turning my back on the heritage that shaped me.

it became clear to me that the real challenge wasn’t that my religion was inherently more complicated than others. the problem was navigating my own moral compass in a world full of opinions on how one should live life.

yet, in that exploration, i found something indispensable: the ability to think critically. i began asking the hard questions about why i believe what i do, about the reasons behind my opinions, and about the assumptions that had been passed down to me as truths. i realised that by confronting these questions, i was learning to separate inherited beliefs from personal conviction.

i used to believe that my questions were evidence of my failure to be a “good muslim” that i was somehow unworthy of belonging of grace. in time, i realised that part of faith isn’t about blind obedience it’s about the capacity to question, to wrestle with the divine and with oneself. and in that wrestling, i began to forgive myself. forgiving myself for the years spent in shame, for the guilt that was imposed on me, for the times i felt like i was failing at something i never truly understood. in the same way that a child doesn’t learn a language by mimicking the sounds without understanding them, i couldn’t claim to be at peace with my faith if i didn’t first understand it for myself.

i don’t worry about being a “good” muslim or a “bad” one; that’s not a question for me to answer. my secular upbringing and my conservative roots are not opposing forces; they are dialects in the same language of identity, sometimes clashing, sometimes complementing. both have failed me in different ways, and both have offered me tools: one to question, the other to anchor. the secular side taught me to question everything, dismantling systems of thought and challenging beliefs, but often left me without a solid foundation. my conservative upbringing, on the other hand, provided structure and certainty, yet its rigidity stifled growth and left little room for nuance.

today, my islam is messy. some days i pray five times; other days, i argue with god.

now, i just want to be faithful to myself, however imperfect that might look.