6 Horrors of Being an Atheist in a Fundamentalist Country

In theory, things have gotten better since then -- the supreme court of Bangladesh upheld religious freedom in 2010. But it's also a country that is nearly 90 percent Muslim, and Islamic studies courses are very much mandatory. (Strangely, we were taught evolution in school, from sixth grade biology on. So there's that, I guess.)

I had come out as an atheist to some friends before the laws changed, but I kept that fact secret because did you read that thing about the pigeons? But being a teenager, what I couldn't avoid was getting into an argument with my teacher. It didn't take long for one of my classmates to blab that I was a non-believer. That was the beginning of a sequence of events that would lead to the whole "getting shot and fleeing the country" thing a few years down the line.

But at the time, I just had to settle for a good beating. Teachers could cane the shit out of students in Bangladesh until 2010, and he did just that, for like 15 minutes straight. And that wasn't the end of it. We got death threats. I have a little brother, and someone sent a letter to my dad saying they knew when he got off from school and they'd be coming after him for the crime of being related to me. My dad had to hire bodyguards for three months. And I felt terrible, because this was all my fault.

And if you think that classmate of mine was a jerk for ratting me out, you have to understand ...

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You've probably heard about revenge porn, where jilted exes post compromising nude pics of their former lovers to be gawked at in the worst parts of the Internet. This happens in Bangladesh, too, only replace the naked pictures with pictures of women wearing jeans and suits, or even just not wearing hijabs. If someone shares a photo of a woman who isn't covered from head to toe, she'll be shamed as a slut. And while "slut" is a nasty word everywhere, there it's a prelude to straight-up violence -- our extremists consider things like this to be stoneable offenses. I should note that a picture of the health minister's daughter ended up on one of these sites, and that time it was the photographers who went to jail. Funny how that works.

Once, a friend of mine was driving a scooter past a madrassa with a bunch of kids out in front of it. As she passed, they pelted her with bricks and stones, calling her a slut. We came out there and asked what the hell they were doing, and they told us this was all part of comedic play, intended to teach proper values via hitting people with stones. We called the cops, and they told us the kids would probably stop on their own, eventually. We just needed to give it a few hours.

And that's the thing -- once the extremists know the police won't respond to their craziness (or might even back it up), all sense of proportion vanishes. In 2012, a single Buddhist man insulting Islam was enough to get hundreds of people rioting and burning temples in the street. Living in the shadow of religious extremism is like having an invisible beehive hovering above your bed, and also being the kid from My Girl.

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See, it doesn't matter if your family shares any of your beliefs (or lack thereof); being associated with you can be enough to screw up their lives, too. My dad was an army officer. Word got out that I was a kafir, and immediately there was a neighborhood meeting, where I kept getting grilled on why I didn't believe. My dad's boss strongly suggested that I be sent to a madrassa, and I went there for three months.

I hated it, as you can imagine, and eventually I ran the hell away. At that point my dad said it was OK -- I could quit and he wouldn't force me to go back. That was the end for me, but not for my dad, and after another month or so he quit the army. We were lucky that he'd saved up enough money to start his own business, but even though he was his own boss, I still had to attend mosque every week so my family wouldn't be shunned.

At one point I did stop going to services, and my dad immediately started getting harassed. He actually asked me to tell people I wasn't living at home anymore. See, the theory was that if I was an infidel at home, he was failing as a father. But if I did my consorting with devilishly bejeaned women in the hidden opium dens of Dhaka, then that was on me.

But I wouldn't keep quiet, and things kept escalating.

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But there was a massive Islamic uprising late in 2012, and they came after my friend Thaba Baba and beheaded him in his own house -- he was the second blogger killed that month. We'd had a meeting just two days earlier saying we needed to deactivate our blogs. We didn't act fast enough. Most of my co-bloggers left the country after that, and now I live somewhere free enough that no one cares when atheists complain on the Internet. We don't blog in Bangladesh anymore, though.

See, it's easy to be ballsy and provocative when your friends aren't literally losing their heads over it. We'd all like to think we'd stick around and make a stand for what we believe in were it ever threatened. But think real hard: What do you believe in hard enough to have your goddamn head severed over it? My guess is "Not much, and even less with the actual saw in front of you."

Not that any of this stopped me from throwing a concert.

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I was in a black metal band as a kid, and when I was 16 we did underground shows. The whole country was under a curfew at that point, which basically meant "If extremists blow up your party, it's on you." We gathered money, rented an auditorium, and sent out the invitations via private Facebook messages. One dumbass printed posters once, and someone in the printing company blabbed and brought down enough heat that the guy had to pull out of music entirely.

The show I got shot for was supposed to be just 20 to 30 people, and we had a no-camera policy. It was us and one other band, and we trusted everybody in the audience ... but of course word still got out. Blame the fact that we were teenagers. You want people bragging about your concerts in America. That's ... not the case there.

Somebody videotaped me holding a goat head and saying some pretty negative stuff about the local extremists. It was metal as fuck. But the day after that, we were stuck in traffic and this guy walked up to our car, knocked on the window, and told me to get out or he'd shoot me in the face. That's the kind of request you listen to. So I got out of the car and he shot me in the knee instead. That part was also metal as fuck, come to think of it.

My dad called the cops, but they were like, "There's not much we can do about it." They said they couldn't find a "motive" behind it. My dad didn't want this to get out and lead to more people shooting at us, so he hushed it all up. You have to cut your losses at some point, and that point is the tip of a bullet entering your kneecap.

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I got a student visa and moved to America. It's a wonderful place. You've got freedom of speech here. That is the most wonderful thing you can have as a human being. I think the rest of the world sees things like the Duck Dynasty guys as a portrayal of America, but it's not like that at all -- some of the population is backward, but you can argue with them. They don't shoot you in the knee (and I lived in Oklahoma for a while). TV censorship is rampant in Bangladesh. Throughout the '90s, we had lots of TV, but after the conservatives won in the 2000s, they blocked HBO and banned the American shows. The Internet is heavily censored, too. Porn is pretty well blocked unless you use a proxy. So, yeah ... I love being in America (and Canada).

But I might not get to stay much longer. As I said, I'm on a student visa right now. Those don't last forever, and I'm already feeling pressure to return. The most extreme party in the country was just banned, which you might take as a sign of hope, but 18 people died at polling stations this January alone, and that's almost never the sign of an improving political climate.

For now, I'm going to enjoy my unfiltered Internet, hope no one deports me, and try to appreciate the fact that my local pigeons can poop in utter freedom.

Robert Evans listens to people with interesting lives and helps them tell their stories. You can reach him with YOUR story here.

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