Reflections from a conference on women’s apostasy, resistance, mental health and the campaign for Ibtissame “Betty” Lachgar

By Veiled Rose

I went to the Leaving to Live: Women’s Blasphemy, Apostasy and Freedom conference in London expecting to listen, learn and reconnect with the wider ex-Muslim and secular community.

I came home thinking about something much bigger: how extraordinarily grateful I am to be alive, free and surrounded by love — and how easy it can be to forget just how much fighting has gone into making lives like mine possible.

The conference was organised by the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) and sponsored by the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) and the National Secular Society (NSS). It brought together ex-Muslims, feminists, secularists, lawyers, psychologists, artists and human-rights campaigners to discuss apostasy, blasphemy, asylum, religious trauma, women’s rights and freedom of conscience.

Unsurprisingly, there was a great deal of pain in the room.

But there was also resistance, humour, solidarity and an enormous amount of life.

Betty was never far from the room

At the centre of much of the day was Ibtissame “Betty” Lachgar, the Moroccan feminist, atheist, psychologist and human-rights activist who remains imprisoned in Morocco following her conviction after posting an image of herself wearing an “Allah is lesbian” T-shirt.

We heard about the fear that has spread among activists in Morocco since Betty’s arrest, and about the wider implications of laws being used to punish expression and dissent.

But we also heard about the extraordinary international campaign that has grown around her.

More than 380,000 people have signed the Avaaz petition, organised by Shelley Segal and her colleagues in the Free Betty campaign, and more than 150 organisations have become involved in the international coalition supporting Betty.

That international pressure has mattered.

Campaigning has helped improve aspects of Betty’s treatment and conditions in prison compared with the beginning of her imprisonment. She has gained greater access to some rights and privileges, and international attention has made it much harder for what happens to her to disappear quietly from view.

That matters because Betty’s health situation remains frighteningly serious.

Betty needs urgent specialist medical treatment

Betty is a survivor of bone cancer and has lived since 1996 with a total humeral prosthesis in her left arm.

Her prosthesis has reportedly become dangerously loose. At the conference we heard descriptions of the metal protruding visibly beneath her clothing and of her body effectively rejecting or ejecting the prosthesis.

This is not simply discomfort.

Specialists have warned that without appropriate treatment she faces potentially catastrophic complications, including severe infection, sepsis, permanent damage, possible amputation and even death.

She requires highly specialised orthopaedic treatment and appropriate follow-up care.

Yet despite experiencing severe and persistent pain, campaigners have reported that she has at times had access to little more than paracetamol for pain relief.

That detail stayed with me.

We use phrases such as “freedom of expression” and “freedom of conscience” very easily.

For Betty, those freedoms are being paid for physically.

With pain.

With imprisonment.

With her health.

Possibly with her life.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation has awarded Betty its 2026 Avijit Roy Courage Award, named after the Bangladeshi-American atheist writer Avijit Roy, who was murdered in Dhaka in 2015.

It felt painfully fitting.

I warned everyone I was about to be disgustingly optimistic

During one of the Q&A sessions, I found myself putting my hand up.

I started by warning everyone that I was about to be disgustingly optimistic.

There was understandably a lot of despair in that room, and I absolutely feel that despair too.

I have been an atheist since I was 15 and was awkwardly questioning religion from around the age of eight.

But when you have been involved in apostate and secular activism for years, I think it can become strangely easy to forget just how hard and painful apostasy actually is.

When I realised I was a lesbian at 21, I genuinely believed I might eventually be killed through so-called “honour”-based violence.

That seemed like a plausible ending to my life.

So obviously I got drunk and found myself a girlfriend.

And decades later, we are still together — and more and more in love today.

We now have this ridiculously happy little family unit with her dad too, surrounded by so much love.

My life is almost sickeningly full of joy, love, life and energy.

I am grateful for it to the bottom of my bones, my soul and my whole being.

Religious people often pray to God when they feel thankful.

I don’t pray to a God.

But I am incredibly mindful of the people who fought for the freedoms I now enjoy — and of people like Betty who are still paying an enormous price for those same freedoms.

My joy did not simply appear from nowhere.

People fought for this.

People are still fighting for it now.

And fighting is hard.

It is really, really hard.

There are times when I despair too. There are times when activism feels exhausting and pointless.

But then I look at my own life.

I look at the frightened young woman who once thought being herself might literally get her killed, and I look at the woman I am now: openly atheist, openly lesbian, loved, surrounded by family, standing up in a room full of apostate women and speaking freely.

And I know why people keep fighting.

Leaving is not only about changing what you believe

One of the most useful parts of the conference for me — and particularly relevant to Faithless Hijabi’s work around mental health — was the psychological side of leaving religion.

Counselling psychologist Dr Savin Bapir-Tardy introduced her book, Leaving to Live: A Psychoeducational Guide for Ex-Muslims.

The book draws on therapeutic work, research and experience supporting ex-Muslims and looks at the psychological, social and emotional realities of leaving Islam: family conflict, loss of community, shame, anxiety, identity reconstruction and rebuilding a sense of self.

There are practical exercises too, including work around boundaries and giving ourselves permission to live differently.

That matters enormously.

Apostasy is sometimes spoken about as though it were simply an intellectual discovery:

I stopped believing.

Done.

But leaving can mean losing family, financial security, housing, culture, community and physical safety.

For women in particular, financial dependence and threats to physical safety can make leaving considerably more complicated.

One idea from the day particularly stayed with me:

Be careful not to leave one high-control group only to enter another.

Freedom has to mean more than exchanging one authority for another.

It means gradually learning autonomy.

Learning boundaries.

Learning that our lives belong to us.

We are not responsible for how others misuse our apostasy

Another discussion I found particularly important concerned the way the far right increasingly attempts to appropriate atheist and ex-Muslim criticisms of religion.

This can create an impossible burden if we allow it to.

Ex-Muslims can find ourselves expected either to remain silent about religious misogyny, homophobia, coercion and fundamentalism — or somehow accept responsibility when racists appropriate our words.

One message from the conference stayed with me:

We are not responsible for how other people choose to frame our apostasy.

For me, that means refusing the false choice.

I can oppose religious fundamentalism and misogyny.

I can oppose homophobia and so-called “honour”-based abuse.

And I can simultaneously oppose racism and anti-Muslim bigotry.

I do not have to surrender one set of human beings in order to defend another.

Faithless Hijabi in the room

There were lovely personal moments too.

I finally got to meet fellow Faithless Hijabi Writers’ Club writers Hamna and Thorn of Rage in person.

There is something quite wonderful about knowing somebody through their writing and online conversations and then suddenly finding yourself standing together in the same room.

One of the speakers, Haram Doodles, talked about how grateful she is to be alive at a point in history when technology allows apostates to find one another and speak.

I kept thinking about that throughout the day.

For people raised in environments where questioning may have to remain secret, simply discovering “I am not the only one” can be transformative.

The ex-Muslim movement exists partly because people who were once isolated are now capable of finding one another.

Connection is not trivial.

Sometimes connection itself is resistance.

And then someone told me Faithless Hijabi had helped save her life

Probably one of the moments I will remember longest happened during an ordinary conversation.

I had the pleasure of meeting a beneficiary of Faithless Hijabi’s mental-health programme.

She told me that Faithless Hijabi had helped connect her with therapy — and that the support she received had saved her life.

I immediately wanted the people at FH who work so hard behind the scenes to know.

That encounter felt particularly significant at an event talking so much about mental health, recovery and what happens after leaving.

So much activist work is invisible.

Somebody sends an email.

Somebody finds a therapist.

Somebody manages a programme.

Somebody answers a frightened woman.

Somebody connects two people who otherwise might never have found each other.

Most of the time, the people doing that work never know what happens next.

Then occasionally someone stands in front of you and effectively says:

That intervention mattered. I’m still here.

For me, that was Faithless Hijabi’s work made suddenly tangible.

Secularism is about people, not simply atheism

Another recurring point throughout the day was something I think we still struggle to communicate effectively in Britain:

Secularism is not the same thing as atheism.

Secularism is about creating the conditions in which people of different religions and none can live alongside one another without one religious authority controlling everybody else’s life.

That means freedom of religion.

Freedom from religion.

Freedom to change your beliefs.

Freedom to leave.

Freedom to criticise.

And the protection of people whose conscience puts them in conflict with the religion they inherited.

For apostate women, that distinction is not philosophical trivia.

It can determine whether we are treated as independent human beings.

Then we took the conference onto the streets

One of my favourite moments came when we stopped sitting around talking and got out of the venue and onto the streets together.

We collectively filmed part of the music video for the upcoming Huriya song in support of the Free Betty campaign, which is available to pre-order on iTunes.

I absolutely loved it.

After spending the day discussing women being silenced, imprisoned, controlled, threatened and told what they are permitted to believe, a group of us walked outside and collectively made ourselves visible.

There was music.

There was laughter.

There were apostates standing together publicly.

There was something wonderfully defiant about it.

Not everything about resistance has to look miserable.

Sometimes resistance looks like people who were supposed to remain silent making art together in the street.

The joy was not separate from the politics.

The joy was political.

Just telling your story can be resistance

Haram Doodles said something else that stayed with me:

Sometimes telling your story is resistance.

I think that is true.

Not everybody can be Betty.

Not everybody can campaign publicly.

Not everybody can attend protests, confront governments or speak under their own name.

Resistance can look much smaller.

It can mean privately saying, I don’t believe anymore.

It can mean establishing one boundary.

It can mean finding therapy.

It can mean helping another apostate find support.

It can mean writing anonymously.

It can mean finding another person and realising you are no longer alone.

And sometimes it can mean standing up during a Q&A and being just a little bit disgustingly optimistic.

Because despair is real.

Fear is real.

The price some people pay is horrifyingly real.

But so is the life that can exist on the other side.

I know because I am living one.

I once thought being myself might get me killed.

Today I have a life surrounded by love.

I am still atheist.

I am still lesbian.

I am still awkward.

I am still questioning.

I am still fighting when I can.

But most importantly, I am living.

And perhaps that is why the title Leaving to Live stayed with me so much.

Leaving is not the destination.

Living is.

Free Betty.

What you can do for Betty

Betty’s case is urgent, and international pressure has already made a difference to aspects of her treatment in prison.

The Free Betty campaign is asking people to keep that pressure going.

1. Sign and share the Free Betty petition

More than 380,000 people have already signed the Avaaz campaign. Adding your name and sharing the petition helps demonstrate the scale of international concern.

Sign the Free Betty petition on Avaaz

2. Follow the campaign and share updates

Ex-Muslims International provides campaign information, petitions and resources. Follow the campaign to stay informed about current actions and developments.

Ex-Muslims International – Free Betty

3. Write to your elected representatives

Contact your MP or other elected representatives and ask them to:

  • Raise Betty’s case with the relevant authorities.
  • Call for her immediate release.
  • Press for urgent access to the specialist medical treatment she needs.

Campaign information and suggested actions can also be found through the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.

4. Contact Moroccan diplomatic representatives

Write respectfully but firmly to Moroccan diplomatic representatives to call for Betty’s release, humane treatment and access to appropriate specialist healthcare.

5. Keep Betty visible

Share verified updates, photographs, campaign graphics, art and messages of solidarity.

Use the hashtags #FreeBetty and #الحرية_لإبتسام to help keep attention on her case.

6. Support events, demonstrations and creative campaigning

Public pressure matters. International campaigning has already contributed to improvements in aspects of Betty’s treatment and conditions, even though she remains imprisoned.

At Leaving to Live, we went out onto the streets together to film footage for the forthcoming Huriya song supporting the Free Betty campaign.

If you are able to pre-order, stream and share it, that is another way to keep Betty’s name and case visible.

Organisations and campaign resources

Please don’t assume somebody else will speak

Betty’s imprisonment has already shown why international attention matters.

Pressure has helped improve aspects of her conditions, but she remains imprisoned and her health remains dangerously fragile.

A petition signature takes moments.

An email to an MP takes minutes.

A post keeps her name circulating.

A protest makes her visible.

And collectively, those small actions become pressure.

Free Betty.