Another Fake Ex-Muslim? You Decide1. Fake former Muslims are used to deceive unsuspecting Muslims who are not knowledgeable about Islam. It is a tactic that makes Muslims more open to the proselytizing efforts of Missionaries, thus making them prime for conversion. Dramatizations using actors pretending to be ex-Muslims are used as authorities on Islam. Anyone with a cursory familiarity recognizes the deceptiveness of this tactic.
2. Muslims who are either very secular and not very knowledgeable or are non-practicing/cultural Muslims, meaning Muslims in name only, are propped up as experts on Islam. Further scrutiny reveals their “criticism” of Islam to be lifted, sometimes verbatim, from anti-Muslim ideologues, websites, books , and other materials.
3. Obvious frauds who were never Muslim are trotted out as experts on Islam, ostensibly providing the audience with an insider’s view of the reality of Islam. Further investigation reveals the falsity of their claims. Islamophobia seems to be big business on the way to being socially mainstream, yet time and time again we have seen these so-called Muslims exposed as frauds, so-called experts who can’t even get fundamental facts about Islam straight. Examples include atheist Wafa Sultan who is an atheist raised as an Alawi, pretending to be Muslim; Mehmet Ergun Caner trying to pretend to speak Arabic to unsuspecting American audiences, deceiving them to the contents of Qur’an, hadith, and bungling simple details that a 3-year-old Muslim child would get right; Walid Shoebat pretending to be a former terrorist, exposed as a liar about his extremist past; and Mark A. Gabriel, a supposed former Al-Azhar scholar and imam, who lifts Orientalist and Christian Missionary polemics and misinformation almost verbatim.
4. In an ongoing effort to present Extremist Muslims as representative of normative Islam, we are presented with former extremists, who all of a sudden are to be considered ‘alim. Since when is extremism(ghuluw) Islam?
5. Anonymous supposed ex-Muslims such as “Ibn Warraq” and “Dr” “Ali Sina” are presented as experts on Islam. The dangers of steeping outside the tradition of Islam in order to understand it are well-known, as it invariably leads to extremism of many types, but how are we really sure that anonymous people claiming to be former Muslims, displaying a serious lack of knowledge of Islam and scholarly credentials, were really ever Muslims?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPjVCwec6oQ