Armin Navabi

Armin Navabi (; born 25 December 1983) is an Iranian-Canadian ex-Muslim atheist, author and podcaster, currently living in Vancouver, Canada. In 2012, he founded the online freethought community Atheist Republic, a Canada-based non-profit organisation enabling non-believers to interact in societies where irreligion, apostasy, and blasphemy are often criminalised and repressed. As an author, he debuted with the book Why There Is No God, and in 2017 he became a co-host of the Secular Jihadists from the Middle East podcast with Ali A. Rizvi, Yasmine Mohammad and Faisal Saeed Al Mutar.

Biography Youth Navabi was born in 1983 and raised as a Shia Muslim in Tehran. He briefly moved to Germany in 1985 and London in 1986, before returning to Tehran in 1988. His family was liberal and not particularly devout, but in school he was taught to believe in a literal hell and that committing even the smallest sin would get him there. Navabi reasoned that if the afterlife was supposed to last for eternity, then this should be everyone's top priority while alive on Earth. Yet he found that most of those around him, though claiming to believe this, did not act like it was of the utmost importance. To avoid hell at all costs before reaching the "age of reason" at the onset of puberty, he considered suicide, since any sin (including suicide) committed before then supposedly did not 'count', even if this would only take him to the lowest part of heaven. At age 12, Navabi attempted suicide by jumping out of his school window, but was unsuccessful. It left him in a wheelchair for 7 months, and he missed one year in school. When in college, Navabi was initially the only atheist he knew. However, when he confided in two university friends, revealing his atheism, they became skeptical about religion within weeks. This encouraged Navabi to look for fellow atheists on the internet. He obtained a student visa for the University of British Columbia to study finance, and left Tehran.

In March 2019, Mount Royal University in the Canadian city of Calgary cancelled a scheduled speaking event featuring Navabi, organised by the Atheist Society of Calgary. The university stated that it was unwilling to host the event after the Christchurch mosque shootings, but "would absolutely have the speaker come to our campus at another time". In August, Alberta Minister of Advanced Education Demetrios Nicolaides (UCP) said Navabi's deplatforming and similar incidents should have been prevented, and that Nicolaides was working on a stronger academic free speech policy.

Atheist Republic

Foundation While still living in Iran, Navabi founded the group "Iranian Atheists" on Orkut around 2003, to connect with other nonbelievers in his country. He was shocked, surprised and delighted there were so many others like him, and those feelings were mutual: "It felt like coming home to a family you didn't even know you had." After some time, Navabi decided to try to reach atheists beyond the Islamic Republic of Iran, and created the contrastingly named page "Atheist Republic" on Facebook in January 2012. It was followed by the Facebook Group in February 2012, and the website www.atheistrepublic.com later in 2012, which as of July 2017 received approximately 5 million views per week. According to Navabi, these liberation values, that AR seeks to spread, are under attack from Islamism, the alt-right and the regressive left.

Growth

In 2014, Syrian ex-Muslim Rana Ahmad was having trouble in her family, so she sought and found the help of Atheist Republic as well as other similar organisations online. When her family forced her to come along with the hajj, she took a picture of herself holding a piece of paper with "Atheist Republic" written on it, while standing inside the Great Mosque of Mecca, the holiest site of Islam. She subsequently fled to Germany, aided by Atheist Republic and Faith to Faithless.

As of May 2017, Atheist Republic's Facebook page had 1.6 million followers;

Atheist Republic was not the only victim; there were coordinated Islamist campaigns using the slogan "Report Anti-Islamic Pages" targeting similar atheist, secularist and ex-Muslim pages and groups on Facebook such as Ex-Muslims of North America (which had a group with 24,000 members at the time) and 10 other groups. Atheist Republic's CEO Allie Jackson and Ex-Muslims of North America's president Muhammad Syed made joint efforts to get the pages and groups back online, and launched a Change.org petition (which gathered over 8,000 signatures). On 10 May 2017, Atheist Republic and nearly 40 other secular, atheist and ex-Muslim organisations wrote an open letter to the Facebook administrators to request an improvement to its reporting system to protect "vulnerable groups" against religious fundamentalists' abuse of the reporting function. The next day a Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Shahidan Kassim went as far to say that atheists should be "hunted down" as there was no place for groups like this under the Federal Constitution. Atheist Republic members present at the gathering who received death threats on social media were being investigated about whether they had 'spread atheism to Muslims', which has also been outlawed in the country.

Under the pseudonym of "Michael" one of the Kuala Lumpur AR Consulate admins told BBC OS that meetings occur about two or three times a year between people who normally only communicate on the internet: When we meet, we just sit down, we get to know each other (...), we have drinks, we eat a bit, and we just talk about our lives, that's it. (...) Of course, it will involve people who are legally Muslims, atheists and people from other religions as well. Basically we want to get to know each other better and we want to be friends. (...) And so we took a group picture and asked Atheist Republic to post it. Next thing you know, some Malaysian Muslim groups got hold of the picture (...) and made assumptions about Muslims being among those in the picture. [Through the media] it lands at the government, who then act surprised at the existence of ex-Muslims in Malaysia and that something needs to be done. (...) A lot of people, especially those involved in the photos, are now going into hiding because we don't know what's gonna happen. (...) Of course [I'm afraid too]." Several accounts reported him, and the Universal Hindu Council filed a complaint against him for "hate speech". After that, Facebook blocked Atheist Republic page in India following orders from the Indian government.

Works