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Minorities Within Minorities: The Power of Dissent in Confronting Religious and Spiritual Abuse
- Global Voices Fellow
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
By Ayesha Ibrahim, Global Voices Fellow, Commission on the Status of Women, 2025.
“Girls don’t dress like that”.
“Girls don’t talk like that”.
“Girls don’t think like that”.
For most of my life, religion was used as a tool to dictate and control my every step. I was told I would never leave my family home until I found a husband. Like many women from my community, the concept of “honour” was our burden to bear. We carried its weight in our ability to toe the line; to obey, to submit, to conform.
But all of that changed in my early 20s as I confronted a terrifying reality I didn’t know was possible: I no longer believed. Despite fighting for years to quash my questions and doubts, I had somehow drifted away from everything I once knew. I became the worst thing a good Muslim girl could possibly be: an apostate.
In 2025, apostatising from Islam is punishable by death in 12 countries.
Naturally, when news of my dissent broke to my community, I became an overnight pariah. Everyone and everything I had known and loved was gone in an instant.
This was the catalyst for my advocacy on religious and spiritual abuse (R/SA), where religious doctrine is used as a tool to cause and justify harm. Through my work, I began to uncover just how widespread and underacknowledged R/SA is—particularly its disproportionate impact on women.
I never intended to become an “activist”. In all honesty, the awkward taste of the word in my mouth still makes me cringe. But once I started speaking up, I realised just how important my voice was in this space. It wasn’t long before apostates from various religions across the globe were reaching out to me. We found solidarity in our shared struggles. Despite my initial resistance, my drive and passion only grew stronger.
Eventually, I found myself hitting “submit” on an application to Global Voices, certain I would never hear back. After all, if my experience had taught me anything, it was that R/SA is an inconvenient truth that most are unwilling to acknowledge.
Imagine my shock when I heard the news…
“Congratulations! You will be attending the 69th Commission on the Status of Women in New York City as a Global Voices Fellow”.
Sorry… What?
I spent weeks waiting for a call to say, “oops, never mind. Turns out your policy proposal is just too contentious for us”. It wasn’t until I walked through the doors of the United Nations Headquarters in NYC that I truly believed it.
Here’s a (not so fun) fact: did you know that Saudi Arabia was appointed the Chair of the CSW69? I mean, who better to chair the biggest multilateral event on women’s rights than the country who had just sentenced a 29-year-old Saudi woman, Manahel al-Otaibi, to 11 years in prison for (*checks notes*) supporting women’s rights?
Unfortunately, Manahel is just one of many countless Saudi women who have been persecuted by their government for refusing to comply with the nation’s gendered religious norms, including male guardianship laws.
As a theocracy, religion is enshrined in Saudi Arabia’s legislative framework, allowing state-sanctioned R/SA to occur nationwide. With a proven track record of systemic discrimination and repression against women, the state’s commitment to gender equality remains widely questioned—if not outright dismissed—by the international community. And yet, on March 29, 2024, not a single member state opposed their appointment as chair of the CSW69.
As an Ex-Muslim woman and an advocate for R/SA survivors, the irony of this was not lost on me. In fact, it proved the urgent need for dissenting voices like mine in multilateral spaces. Voices that challenge the status quo and bring lived experience into policy discussions.
I will never forget sitting in the ECOSOC chamber for a discussion on intersectional feminism, chaired by the President of the ECOSOC, Bob Rae. When the opportunity for questions arose, my hand shot up before I even knew what to ask.
After fumbling with my microphone for what was allegedly 10 seconds (though no one can convince me it was any less than 100 years), I finally found my voice:
“Today, the chamber has spoken extensively about the rise of hard-right fascism and authoritarianism. I am a woman from an intersectional background; an immigrant, a woman of colour from a Muslim family, and the cherry on top, an Ex-Muslim. A minority within a minority, if you will. How can someone like me talk about the issues in our communities, such as the denial of basic rights and freedoms under the guise of religion, without being tokenised by hard-right groups to justify anti-Muslim bigotry?”.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but a fellow delegate would later tell me there was a resounding “oooh” heard across the chamber in response.
Unfortunately, the panel largely failed to address my question. In retrospect, it was obvious why: they had no lived experience of my reality. They weren’t the ones stuck between a rock (the secularists who refuse to acknowledge R/SA outside Western religions) and a hard place (the hard-right nefarious actors who weaponise our voices to sow division and hatred). Women like me, the minorities within minorities who fall outside mainstream narratives, are the only ones who can speak for us in this space. We are the ones who must lead the way forward with tolerance, mutually respectful dialogue, and an unwavering commitment to being our true selves.
And maybe, just maybe, having our voices finally recognised on the international stage all starts with a very loud, unapologetic Ex-Muslim woman from Australia attending the CSW69.
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The views and opinions expressed by Global Voices Fellows do not necessarily reflect those of the organisation or its staff.