The interview below was originally published in Arabic in the Arab Atheists Magazine (Majalla al-Mulhidin al-Arab) – issue 36, November 2015.

Brian Whitaker is a British journalist who worked for the British newspaper the Guardian from 1987 to 2012 and was its Middle East reporter between 2000 and 2007. He has a degree in Arabic Studies from Westminster University in London. He still writes occasionally for the Guardian and also has his own website specializing in Middle Eastern affairs called al-Bab, "an open door at the Arab world".

Whitaker’s career in covering the Middle East is wide and multi-faceted; he wrote about many social issues that do not find a voice in mainstream Western media, which typically focuses on military and political news and neglects everyday aspects of Arab life. Whitaker wrote about corruption, bureaucracy, freedom of speech, persecution of journalists, education and more.

In addition to Whitaker being a reporter and editor, he has written several books that delivered in-depth analysis and critique of Arab life. Some of his books are "Unspeakable Love: Gay & Lesbian Life in the Middle East", published by al-Saqi in 2007 and subsequently translated into Arabic. He also wrote "What's Really Wrong with the Middle East" in 2009, also published by al-Saqi Publishers. Last year he wrote a book called "Arabs without God" which has been translated into Arabic recently. In that book he documents details of what atheists and apostates have to endure in Arab countries, he also surveys laws pertaining to apostasy in these countries, along with reference to studies and statistics relevant to atheism amongst Arabs, and a historical overview that helps put the current situation in perspective.

Q1: We thank you for accepting our invitation to do this interview. Is there something we have missed in this introduction you would like to add about yourself?

It’s good to have the opportunity to talk to you, and I’m glad that you mentioned my efforts to report diverse voices. People usually assume that journalists covering the Middle East are basically war reporters – and I have been trying to do something a bit different.

It’s probably worth mentioning that I became Middle East correspondent for the Guardian at a time when the internet was just beginning to become a useful source of information and email was developing as a way of communication. This opened up a lot of possibilities in terms of new ways of reporting about the region. To give one very simple example, Arabic news media had started to become available online. Previously they were inaccessible unless you were actually in the country where they were published.

Q2: The Magazine and our community wish to congratulate you on the recent publication of the Arabic edition of your book, Arabs without God. This is a very unique book in its boldness, comprehensiveness and depth of analysis of a taboo subject rarely discussed with such openness, can you please tell us a bit about how you decided to write it? How long did the process of research and writing last?

I had read about a few isolated cases of Arab atheists getting into trouble – people like Alber Saber in Egypt and Waleed al-Husseini in Palestine – and then in August 2013 I saw a news report about atheists in the region becoming more visible. I wrote a blog post about that and invited any atheist readers to come forward with their stories. Several of them sent me emails which I posted on my blog, and that gave me the idea for writing a book.

I then spent several months collecting articles and information about atheists in a fairly random way and thinking about how it might be shaped into a book. Once I had a workable plan I decided to stop all my other work and spent an intensive three months interviewing and writing. So the whole thing, from the initial idea to the completed book took about a year.

Q3: It is clear your interest in Arab affairs goes back a long way, what attracted you first to that area, and how did you come to be a journalist specializing in the Middle East?

I have always been interested in languages and after leaving school I studied Latin at Birmingham University. In 1980 I started working for the Sunday Times business section and the paper sent me on a short trip to Tunisia to report about foreign investment there. It wasn’t very exciting and mostly involved tours of factories but it was my first visit to an Arab country and it aroused my interest in learning some Arabic.

Eventually I signed up for a degree course in Arabic at what is now Westminster University. At the time it was possible to do this by attending classes in the evenings, after work.

The topic of my dissertation at Westminster was the diplomatic performance of the PLO but I soon realised that if I wanted to write about the Middle East professionally, writing about Israel-Palestine would probably not be a good way to break into it, because there are so many people writing about it and most of the things that can be said about it have already been said. 

That’s probably what started me looking for less obvious things to write about and in 1991, when I was working at the Guardian, I persuaded the editor to send me on a trip to Yemen. This was at a time when the northern and southern states had just been unified and the country was embarking on an experiment in multi-party democracy. It was a very interesting period (which shortly turned sour) but it had got very little attention from western media.

After that I continued following events in Yemen and over the next few years I wrote about it regularly for Middle East International magazine, since there weren’t many opportunities to write about it in the Guardian.

In the meantime I was spending most of my holidays travelling around Arab countries – Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt and Jordan. This allowed me to observe things at leisure and have lots of conversations with ordinary people – in a way that doesn’t happen much if you are there as a working journalist with deadlines to meet.

In 2000 the post of Middle East correspondent for the Guardian became vacant and I was offered it, probably because of my knowledge of Arabic.

Q4: To tie up with the previous question, what personal views did you have that changed since you started your work on Middle Eastern affairs, and what do you think of the typical view forged by orientalists about the Middle East; has it radically changed over the past century?

Like many westerners who become interested in the Middle East, I think it began with a kind of fascination – wanting to explore the cultural differences and understand them. Over time I have become a lot more critical but I try to criticise from an Arab perspective – listening to the complaints that Arabs make about their own societies rather than those coming from westerners. Sometimes I think it’s easier for a foreigner to express these criticisms: Arabs may voice their frustrations very strongly in private conversations but they often feel inhibited when it comes to saying the same things publicly.

As far as orientalism is concerned, I would make a distinction between the older kind of orientalism that Edward Said wrote about and the kind we see today. Even though it’s partly based on fantasy, I’m not sure the older kind is as harmful as people often imagine. For example, the sort of orientalist paintings that Said criticised are popular nowadays with Gulf Arabs – so clearly they don’t regard them as objectionable. In some places, Arabs have adopted orientalism and turned it into a heritage industry.In Marrakesh, for example, thousands of people earn a decent living from selling orientalism to tourists – and good luck to them.

But there’s a more dangerous – modern – kind of orientalism that views Arab societies as having certain cultural “traditions” (some of them invented quite recently) which should not be changed. I’m talking about a kind of orientalism that is popular among some western leftists and which views dictatorship or religious rule as somehow authentically Arab.

Q5: As a veteran journalist covering the Middle East, was atheism amongst Arab a phenomenon that manifested itself to you in your work before you considered writing the book, or is it something that would require a journalist to dig deep to unearth it? What made Arab atheism an appealing phenomenon to study for you personally?

What interested me initially was the fact that people were being punished for atheism, or at least for expressing their atheism on the internet. Something similar happened with Unspeakable Love, my book about homosexuality. I began by investigating the Queen Boat case in Egypt but the more I looked into it the more I realised there were many other issues to explore.

There are similarities between my book on homosexuality and my book on atheism. They both fit the general approach that I mentioned earlier of focusing on less obvious topics and especially those that many Arabs are reluctant to talk about. They are also a way of raising important questions about the rights of individuals and the way Arab society responds to non-conformist behaviour and “deviant” ideas.

In general, journalists covering the Middle East an under pressure to write about more obvious – and in some ways more urgent – topics but I was fortunate in having time to explore other things.

Q6: Your book contains many interviews with Arab atheists and apostates, did you conduct some or all of the interviews personally? And while writing this book and conducting other similar activities what kind of reaction do you typically receive from Arab officials, do they try to restrict your activities, or are they indifferent?

I did some of the interviews face to face but I mostly used Skype – which allowed me to include people from a variety of countries without requiring a lot of travel. I tracked down some of the interviewees through the internet and others by asking my less religious contacts if they knew any atheists.

As far as Arab officials are concerned, I try to have as little contact with them as possible. When writing my book What’s Really Wrong with the Middle East, I made a conscious decision not to interview any officials at all. I think it helped to give the book a different kind of flavour.

Q7: Arabs without God has been translated into Italian, and not long ago it finally came out in Arabic, could you please inform our readers on how they could obtain the book?

The Arabic edition can be read as HTML pages or downloaded free of charge as a Word file or PDF from my website. The English edition can be purchased from Amazon as a printed book or e-book. For the Italian edition, Google "Arabi Senza Dio" and you can order it online.

Q8: Based on your research, what do you think are the reasons behind the recent surge of Arab atheist activity in the media? Would you say there is an actual increase in the numbers of atheists, or is it perhaps an increase in the level of freedom of speech afforded by social media where it’s possible for them to find relative safety to say what they want?

Atheists have certainly become more visible, mainly because of social media. In Egypt there is probably also more awareness of the existence of atheists as a result of some sensationalist (and very hostile) TV programmes.

It’s reasonable to suppose that the number of Arab atheists may be growing, simply because it is now easier to find atheistic writing and discussion on the internet. There’s no real evidence, though, and in any case the numbers are still very small. There may have been more Arab atheists around in the 1950s and 1960s when Marxism was popular in the region.

Q9: In post Arab-Spring reality in the Arab World and the rise of ISIS, what sort of role could atheism play in society? Could they assume some active role instead of their traditional passiveness? Could the persecution change into an integration of some sort allowing atheist to play a constructive role in society?

To be realistic, I can’t see atheists playing a big role any time soon. That’s not to say atheists are unimportant, but they are more like the salt in a meal than the meat.

In terms of strategy, there are probably some lessons to be learned from LGBT activism. It is vital to have some degree of visibility and to show that atheism can’t be abolished or eliminated (as the Egyptian and Saudi authorities have talked of doing). Without visibility there’s no hope of achieving more rights or becoming accepted as normal human beings.

Atheists also have an obvious role in campaigns for freedom of thought and working towards the establishment of secular states. One of my arguments in the book is that in order to achieve these goals atheists will have to work in alliance with religious people – the kind of religious people who see benefits for themselves in having freedom of thought and a secular state.

Q10: You include in your book statistics about atheists in Arab countries, could you please summarize the gist of these statistics? What sources did you use for these numbers, and how accurate do you think they are?

In 2012, WIN/Gallup International conducted a poll of religiosity and atheism in 57 countries worldwide. It included some of the Arab countries but not all of them. In general, the percentage of Arabs willing to declare themselves as atheists was extremely low (0% in Tunisia and Iraq) but significantly larger proportions said they were “not religious” (29% in Palestine and 22% in Tunisia, for example). 

I’m not sure what to make of these results. The survey actually asked people if they were a “convinced” atheist, which may have made some difference to the replies. Also, we should probably keep in mind that the word “atheist” has strongly negative connotations for many people.

Q11: Perhaps an especially striking figure you quote is the number of non-religious people in Saudi Arabia. How much is it, and how do we understand this number? Why has the official KSA accepted that number instead of questioning it or simply ignoring it?

Saudi Arabia was very surprising considering that it’s supposed to be such a holy country. Of those interviewed in the kingdom, 19% said they were not religious and 5% described themselves as convinced atheists. The percentage of self-declared atheists was higher in Saudi Arabia than in any other predominantly Muslim country covered by the survey. 

One caveat is that the poll was conducted only in the cities, and another is that it’s not clear if the interviewees were all Saudi citizens or whether foreigners living in the kingdom were also included.

What’s interesting, though, is that the Saudis didn’t dispute the figures but instead started discussing ways of discouraging people from leaving Islam.

Q12: One idea that has been commonly floating recently is an alleged correlation between the rise of ISIS and the increase in the number of atheists. How strongly are these two related? And in general, from you own research, what are the main factors that typically cause Arabs to leave their religion today?

Typically, the first step towards atheism is when Arabs start questioning some aspect of religious teaching which they see as illogical. For example, why would God want to punish non-believers if their behaviour shows them to be decent people? Many start off sincerely looking for answers but fail to find answers and then start asking more questions.

In that sense, the journey towards atheism is basically an intellectual process. None of those I spoke to mentioned ISIS or Islamist terorrism as a factor. However, it’s possible that fanaticism makes some people less religious in the sense of not wanting to spend much time in their local mosque.

Q13: In your book you single out Arabs from the rest of the Middle East, what distinguishes Arab atheism from atheism in Shiite Iran or Sunni Turkey, why have you excluded these two cases, and what distinguishes the Arab case from them, and do you have any future plans to study atheism in non-Arab Muslim countries?

The book includes interviews with atheists from Sunni, Shia and Christian backgrounds. “Middle East” is a fairly arbitrary term as far as boundaries are concerned and focusing on the Arab countries was mainly a matter of practicality. It helped to keep the research to manageable proportions and I feel more confident writing about the Arab countries than Turkey or Iran. 

Personally, I’m not planning to look beyond that area but I hope the book might encourage others to do so.

Q14: Social media have played a key role in the recent political upheavals that the region has been undergoing in recent years, could we expect a similar path for Arab atheism starting from the internet and then manifesting itself on the ground?

This is a very interesting question: how, exactly, do you manifest atheism? But living as an atheist basically means NOT doing things – not praying, not going to the mosque or church, etc. So for some people there may be no need to manifest it; it can be something that stays inside their head. Of course, they may want to share your thoughts with others and in that case the internet is a very obvious place to do it. 

However, there is also the question of atheists’ rights. In the Arab countries especially it can be difficult to have nothing to do with religion and this could lead to activism on the ground – for example over the compulsory elements of religion, ranging from laws against apostasy and blasphemy at one extreme to compulsory fasting during Ramadan and the insistence on religious marriages at a more everyday level. We have already seen a few protests against compulsory fasting in Morocco and Algeria, and in Lebanon people have been campaigning for civil marriage.

Q15: If you wanted to summarize the message of your book in a few brief sentences, what would you say?

The book looks at atheism as a phenomenon in the Arab countries and uses that to build a general case for freedom of thought and belief. It is not trying to convert anyone to atheism. 

Q16: Without any spoilers, could you point out one or two facts that the book mentioned that are likely to shock an Arab reader?

Among the top 25 countries in the UN’s Human Development Index, all but one (Ireland) have very high percentages of atheism, while the bottom 50 countries have very low levels of atheism. 

Of the 40 poorest countries, all but one (Vietnam) are highly religious.

Of the 35 countries with the highest youth illiteracy rates, all are highly religious.

Q17: It could be too early to ask about this, but have you received any reactions to your book from official or religious Arab authorities? How do you expect the book is going to be received?

No reaction so far. If they are sensible they will ignore it.

Q18: Your research into Arab atheism is perhaps part of a bigger issue you have been interested in, and that's the lack of religious tolerance in Muslim countries, which typically results in the persecution of minorities. You have said in an article last year that Arab countries share with ISIS a great deal of its ideology, including the punishment for apostasy. How do you expect the rise of ISIS might affect so-called moderate Muslims who condemn the actions of ISIS in applying Islamic shari'a in issues like apostasy, if at all?

Intolerance is the real issue. At some point Arabs will have to recognise that no one – government, community or individual – is entitled to impose their religious rules on others. It’s the only way the region’s religious conflicts can ever be resolved but I think a lot of people, including those you call moderate Muslims, still feel it’s too difficult to grapple with.

The difference between ISIS and most of the Arab countries is one of degree rather than principle. Many Muslims are appalled by ISIS’s punishments but at the same time we don’t find many Arabs who say states should do nothing to protect or promote religion.

In fact, the behaviour of ISIS tends to make the religious policies of Arab governments look less unreasonable. If you break the fast during Ramadan ISIS will kill you but the Emirates will “only” fine you or lock you up for a while.

Q19: One can observe from the nature of your books and journalistic activities that your focus on marginalized groups and how they get represented in English speaking media, and that's something clearly seen in your interest in Arab everyday life, but also in Arab atheists and homosexuals. Do you think that the importance of such coverage lies in the absence of a voice for these groups, or is there some latent roles played by them that need to be brought into light?

It’s not only a question of having a voice. Writing about LGBT people and atheists in the Arab countries, and humanising them, is a powerful way to confront popular stereotypes in the west.

But perhaps more important is the challenge these groups pose for the established political and social order. In 2009 – more than a year before the Arab Spring – I wrote an article arguing that change in the region is not driven by "reformist" politicians and opposition parties but by feminists, gay men, lesbians, bloggers, etc – and I would also include atheists among them.

Q20: As a follow up to the previous question, how do you define your career as a journalist in terms of those interests?

To the extent that journalism is about asking questions, I hope that the questions I am asking are the right ones.

Q21: Some of your books are available in Arabic and in English, naturally the audience is different in each case. How do you expect Arabs without God to be received by each of these groups? Is there any special significance in telling the story of Arab atheism to readers in the West?

I’m conscious of writing for different types of readers, inside and outside the Middle East. For readers in the west, the book is an antidote to the stereotype that all Arabs are Muslims and, very probably, religious fanatics too. But I also wanted to show how laws protecting and promoting religion infringe people’s human rights in the region – especially because I feel it’s an issue that doesn’t get enough attention from western governments or rights organisations.

For Arab readers, I hope it will help any who find it difficult to accept religious belief – to make them feel less isolated and perhaps introduce them to a few ideas they haven’t already thought of. I hope it will also make them aware of the likely difficulties if they take the atheist route. Finally, I think the book identifies quite a lot of issues that could be taken up by activists.

Q22: The West's interest in the East has had a long history that passed through many stages. Today we see that interest has become more reciprocal, deeper and far more intricate, and the interaction has been made easier through communication technologies, but from your own unique perspective, are there important insights about the East that mainstream Western media misses? And conversely, are there things about the West that the typical Arab doesn't know but you wish he/she would?

A lot of the western media seem incapable of reporting events in the Middle East as news in its own right. In the US media particularly, coverage is overwhelmingly framed in terms of foreign policy interests: “What does this mean for America?” and “What is America doing about it?”

So on one hand there’s this sense that many of the region’s problems are really America’s problem – which of course discourages Arabs from trying to solve these things themselves. It’s worth remembering that the most successful of the Arab Spring revolutions, in Tunisia, was the one where the US and other foreign powers had the least involvement.

On the other hand, developments that are not seen as immediately affecting American security or American foreign policy concerns tend not to appear on the radar. A classic example is Yemen, where the US became obsessed with carrying out drone strikes against al-Qaeda while scarcely noticing that the entire country was falling apart.

As for Arab perceptions of the west, many are surprised when I tell them about the long battles that were fought in western countries for freedom of expression, sexual freedoms and so on – in some cases quite recently. It wasn’t until 1928 that British women acquired the same voting rights as men. In Britain, you could be executed for homosexuality (at least in theory) until 1861 and it was only in 1967 that private consensual sex between men became legal. The last prosecution for blasphemy in Britain was in 1977, and the blasphemy law itself wasn’t formally abolished until 2008.

Q23: Media on both sides have lots of misinformation and some disinformation. You personally have criticized more than once the activities of The Middle East Media Research Institute MEMRI in covering the Middle East. Given that some Arabs, including atheists, use their productions, we're interested to know briefly about what your think regarding their content.

MEMRI serves Israel’s propaganda effort. Making uncritical use of its output to support an argument is likely to be counter-productive, in my view.

Q24: Tell us a bit about your website al-Bab. What type of content does it publish and who does it typically target, and what are its goals.

I started al-bab in 1998, in the early days of the internet. Originally it was a website about Yemen. “Al-Bab” is how Yemenis refer to the main gateway into the old city of Sana’a and the website was intended to provide a sort of electronic gateway. I had collected quite a lot of documents and obscure bits of information during visits to Yemen and thought it would be a good idea to make them available on the internet.

Shortly afterwards I decided to expand al-bab to include the other Arab countries. It was mainly intended as an information resource for journalists, students and others with a special interest in the region. That was before the arrival of Google and today a lot of the information is more easily accessible that it was when the website started. The site probably needs an overhaul but it has more than 1,400 pages and it’s difficult to keep them all up to date.

Even so, it does have a lot of documents that are of historical interest and today I use the site mainly for blogging.

Q25: In your book What's Really Wrong with the Middle East you say that many problems Arabs have are reducible to issues related to lack of freedom and education and the acceptance of the other. In your opinion, are these issues addressable in any meaningful way in the foreseeable future, and under what circumstances? Do you see any role played by the activism of atheists coming out in that regard, in as far as they are critics not bound by many of the restrictions religious people have?

It’s going to take a long time. The need is to have lots of different people constantly pushing at the boundaries, but it’s difficult to generalise because local conditions vary so much: activists can do things in Beirut, for example, that they can’t do in Riyadh. 

Atheists can have an important role in pushing the boundaries because their non-belief provides one of the most extreme tests of society’s tolerance.

As I said earlier, atheists have to be visible in order to press for their rights – and that does require some of them to come out. But the coming-out process also needs to be survivable – which means having adequate support and being able to live a fairly normal life as a known atheist. There’s not much point in doing it if you are immediately going to be locked up or forced into exile.

Q26: Arab identity is inextricably linked to religion, which alongside tribalism represent two important pillars of that identity. Amongst Muslims, apostasy is viewed as a form of treason. Based on this reality, do you expect that a uniquely Arab atheist identity would form that could blend more naturally with Arab society, or could it be that no matter what identity atheists assume, they won't be accepted as part of society without society itself changing?

Currently, for vast numbers of people, Islam is a major component of the Arab identity. It’s very difficult to get away from that, though conceivably it could shift towards becoming part of a historical heritage rather than an identity (as has happened with Christianity in large parts of Europe).

Ultimately, though, acceptance of atheists does require social change and the establishment of secular states.

Q27: There is an inevitable parallel that can be drawn between the situation of Arab atheists and Arab homosexuals. Despite the differences, and based on your study of both groups, do you think there are lessons that can be learned from the activism of homosexuals in the West that could benefit Arab atheists in their struggle for recognition?

Up to a point, yes. But I think it’s important to draw lessons rather than simply trying to copy, and to relate those lessons to conditions locally. I think the most useful lessons are more likely to be found in the early history of LGBT (and atheist) activism in the west than in the contemporary activism. You will find a series of fairly small struggles – some of them successful – which gradually began to have a cumulative effect.

There are probably also lessons to be learned from Helem, the LGBT organisation in Lebanon which has survived now for more than 12 years. From an early stage, Helem had support from gay Lebanese living abroad and it also made a conscious effort to cultivate allies among the non-LGBT community in Lebanon – organisations working on sexual and reproductive rights, human rights, and so on, as well as sympathetic professionals such as lawyers, doctors and teachers. This helped to give HELEM more protection. Atheist groups trying to establish themselves in Arab countries probably need to do something similar. It would mean making alliances and working together with religious people who support freedom of belief (and disbelief).

Q28: President Sisi of Egypt has made several statements that appear to show tolerance for atheists and their cause. In light of that, and taking into account al-Azhar's campaign against atheism and the recent verdict against Islam Beheri, where do you think the situation is headed?

Almost all Arab regimes promote a version of Islam that suits their political needs, and Sisi’s regime is no exception. Doctrinally, Sisi’s version is quite bland and middle-of-the-road but can be used to stifle debate on either side of its centrist parameters, whether liberal or conservative. Moderate as it might be ideologically, it doesn’t actually enhance freedom of thought in Egypt or contribute towards solving the country’s religious and sectarian problems. The need is for more open debate about these things, not less. The way to defeat the Muslim Brotherhood is not through repression but through winning the argument.

There’s also the scapegoat syndrome where marginalised groups – Baha’is, LGBT people, atheists, etc – are picked on and blamed for Egypt’s problems. Such moves may be instigated by the regime itself, or by the media or religious elements. However, experience suggests the attacks can sometimes be fought off if enough people complain – see the two recent examples of Hossam Bahgat’s detention by the military and the much-criticised TV “exposé” of alleged gay activity in a hammam.

Q29: In an article you wrote in 2006 in the Guardian you talked about discrimination in Arab society towards non-Muslims, in which you explained how discussing this issue explicitly is taboo amongst Arabs. However, the situation is different when it comes to atheists and homosexuals, whose very existence is not even recognized. Could having members of both groups coming out and acting as groups change some of this in the typically tribal Arab environment?

The underlying issue is that Arab countries are not good at dealing with diversity. Diversity is seen as a problem or an embarrassment rather than a potential source of social enrichment. One response is to sweep differences under the carpet and not talk about them. Another is to reduce the possibility of conflict by keeping different ethnic and sectarian groups apart. It’s a knee-jerk reaction and it’s one of the reasons why we now hear so much talk about partitioning Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

There are very few efforts to work out better ways of living together. The regimes don’t have much incentive to tackle this because in the short term (on the “divide and rule” principle) it can help them to maintain control, even if it makes things worse in the long term.

We also often find notions of superiority among the dominant sectarian or ethnic groups which are then used to legitimise discrimination against others.

Related to this, in the places where democratic ideas have begun to take hold, the concepts of democracy are still rather immature. We saw some of this during the Morsi government in Egypt – a majoritarian winner-takes-all attitude. Of course, the basic element of democracy is the will of the majority but a more sophisticated understanding of it also requires protection for minorities.

Beyond that, I’m not sure that Arab societies view atheists and LGBT people in quite the same light as ethnic and sectarian minorities. Ethnicity is not something you choose – you are born into it – and in the Middle East the same also tends to apply to religious sects. On the other hand, homosexuality or atheism is often regarded (even by ethnic and sectarian minorities) as a personal choice and thus less deserving of respect or protection. Of course, LGBT people would dispute that and I think a lot of atheists would too. Most atheists have given serious thought to religion and, on the basis of logic and evidence, decided (sometimes reluctantly) that God does not exist. As one Arab atheist said to me in an interview, “Once you know something you can’t un-know it.”

The point I’m making here is that before LGBT people and atheists can work with other minorities they make have some work to do in persuading them that they are all on the same side.

Q30: Given the different themes you considered in your three books, Arabs without God, Unspeakable Love, and What's Really Wrong, is there a general conclusion you would want to share with us about diagnosing, and maybe even curing, what is wrong with the Arab world?

My books look at different aspects of live in Arab societies and the many ways their authoritarian nature restricts people’s freedom. I’m saying that “curing” the Middle East isn’t just a matter of toppling autocratic regimes and holding free elections. You can’t have political change without having social change too.

Q31: Brian Whitaker, thank you for dedicating the time to answer our questions. Is there something you would like to add, or a message you would like to send to the readers of the Arab Atheist magazine, both atheist and believers?

Thanks for some interesting questions. I do think change will come eventually, so don’t give up hope.