So a lot of people have been messaging me asking me for my story and why I left Islam. This thread will be dedicated to that. Also, here is just a general TW of instances of grooming and assault, so please proceed with caution:

When I was 15 I became friends with a bunch of people from Egypt after commenting on an Amr Diab post on Facebook. I was excited to learn more about Egypt and its culture as I was learning Arabic. There were two prominent "friends", let's call them Mohammed and Gamal...

who always told me I was "very beautiful" and "mature" for my age. They were 28 and 24 respectively. As I spoke with both of them more and more over MSN and through texting, they became very obsessive over who I was friends with and what I did after school.

While Mohammed stopped talking to me after a year, Gamal and I continued to be friends. He would refer to me as his girlfriend, which I assumed to be because of a language barrier until he started talking about spending our lives together. Not having boys in my...

school pay attention to me, I was excited to have someone pay attention to me. He told me it would only be acceptable if I converted to Islam, so I did. The relationship continued until my freshman year of college when I went away to school but still practiced Islam.

My connection with Islam continued as I denied all the negative aspects of the faith and pretended they didn't exist. I experimented with hijab and going to a local masjid, but instantly feeling uncomfortable being paraded around as a white convert.

I took two years off of school to work and came to find a new Muslim community outside Philadelphia that I came to know and love. I still experienced the same problems of Muslim men following me around and being verbally abusive, so I withdrew from the community briefly

After I went back to school, I became heavily involved with my new university's Arabic program. In the summer of 2018, I took a study abroad trip to Morocco with some other students and our faculty. At this time, I was enamored with Sufism and got along well with my faculty who

was also Sufi. About a week and a half into the trip, I fell and hurt my knee, which landed me in the hospital. My faculty, let's call him Abdul, took me to all of my physical therapy appointments and helped me navigate Fes in an isolation brace that covered most of my leg.

One night, he decided to take advantage of me and my situation (being unable to move and on painkillers that made me tired), he assaulted me. The assault continued for about a week and justified it by saying "it's okay, we can repent and no one has to know".

When I regained mobility, I requested to be moved to a different building away from him. I never reported what happened in Morocco with my professor. Because of the shame I felt with my body being violated, I took to wearing a hijab as a safety blanket for a Muslim woman.

After that trip was over, I immediately went on a solo trip through Turkey and, to my surprise, was groped leaving Sultan Ahmet in Istanbul following midday prayers. I was shocked that as a fully veiled woman, I was still experiencing an assault on the grounds of a mosque.

Returning to the US, I struggled with myself whether I should wear the hijab or not. Between angry right-wingers calling me unAmerican for how I dressed and for Muslim men who still found me "indecent" and felt the need to grope me, I decided that it was time for me to take the

hijab off for good. I also decided that it would be best for me to leave a faith that was introduced and rooted in grooming and assault against my own body.

While there were moments in Islam I did feel bliss, the majority of the time I felt nothing but shame, fear, and disgust.