A woman whose mother married a fundamentalist Muslim when she was just six years old has candidly revealed how her childhood was destroyed by the heinous sexual abuse she endured at his hands – all while her mom turned a blind eye.
When she was 13, Yasmine Mohammed told Canadian authorities that she was being abused by her fundamentalist Muslim stepfather – only to be told that how he chose to punish her was his decision to make.
‘That’s your culture, that’s how your family chooses to discipline you,’ Yasmine said the judge told her some time after a teacher had discovered visible welts across her arms, instigating an investigation.
‘So had I been in court, sitting there, blond-haired, blue-eyed girl with family from like you know Denmark or Sweden or something, then he would have protected me. But because my family came from Egypt, it’s like, “Well, that’s your culture. That’s just how they are,”‘ Yasmine explained on the podcast Cults To Consciousness.
Up until age six, Yasmine had had a relatively fun and peaceful childhood growing up in Vancouver despite her biological father leaving her mother when she was just two.
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But she’d been able to play with the neighbor’s kids and mess around at the pool at their apartment complex, and was looking forward to getting her own two-wheel bike.
That is, until her mother, severely depressed after Yasmine’s father took off, joined a local mosque.
Yasmine’s mother was born to an elite political family in Egypt, and enjoyed a lavish upbringing. Her family had been Muslim, but didn’t rigorously follow the religion’s every rule.
In adulthood, newly single and feeling lost, her mother turned to the mosque for a sense of community and stability.
It was there that she would meet her second husband – and become his second simultaneous wife.
For a then six-year-old Yasmine, ‘everything changed’ practically overnight as her stepfather forced her mom, her two siblings and her to adhere to fundamentalist Islamic principles, which included eliminating everything ‘haram’ – i.e., sinful.
Any ‘non-Muslim’ friends of Yasmine’s were now off-limits, including her down-the-hall neighbors, with whom she used to play Barbies with everyday after school.
‘Now, it’s like, you cannot see your best friends anymore,’ she said.
Also banned: bicycles, birthday parties, swimming and music.
‘Everything. Haram, haram, haram,’ Yasmine said. ‘You’re not allowed to have anything of these fun things that you had in your life before. I hated everything about him.’
Any transgressions would warrant violent beating at her stepdad’s hands.
‘I was so incensed about that. So infuriated. Because I felt like I had all these things on the horizon.
‘I was just about to ride a two-wheeler; I was going to go to a sleepover. I didn’t get to go to a sleepover yet, I didn’t get to do this, I didn’t get to do that. All of these things that I watched my sister do, and that I was hoping that I was going to get to do, and then he came along and he was like, “None of these things are going to happen,”‘ she said.
Yasmine also described how he took away her mom’s records.
‘My mom had always been a fan of country music. We always had like Dolly Parton or Hank Williams or Kenny Rogers playing in the house. He came, grabbed her records, started breaking them. Sat us down on the carpet in front of him. And my mom stood right next to him, handed shards of records to us, and said, “Break these … because this is from the devil,”‘ she recalled.
From there on out, Yasmine’s childhood became one of regular beatings and, eventually, sexual abuse at the hands of her mom’s new husband.
The family had to start praying five times daily – ‘and if you miss a prayer, you’re going to get beaten,’ she said.
To top it all off, he moved the family into the basement of his house and started going to Islamic schools.
‘It just kept getting worse, and worse, and worse, and worse. So… that was my childhood,’ Yasmine said.
Behind the scenes, her stepfather was physically and sexually abusive. In her book, Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam, Yasmine described how her own mother would brush off her accounts of how he’d sexually abuse her.
As for physical abuse, in one of the more egregious incidences, Yasmine was once hung upside down on a hook his garage, and beaten by him until she lost consciousness, all because she’d written her named in the Westernized spelling of ‘Jasmine.’
If you missed a prayer, you were going to get beaten… it just kept getting worse, and worse, and worse, and worse
At age nine, she was forced to start wearing the hijab, leaving only her hands and face exposed.
She found similarly dissatisfied girls when she began attending an all-Muslim school, with her peers, for a brief time, becoming a respite from her family life.
By the time Yasmine was 18, her mom was pressuring her to marry her cousin in Egypt.
Shortly after Yasmine completed high school, she, her mom and siblings went on a vacation to visit family in Egypt.
To Yasmine’s horror, her mom ended up leaving her behind in the country for a whole two years, ‘hoping that I would give up on this idea of being a full independent human being and that I would just give in,’ she explained.
But it didn’t work. Instead, Yasmine thrived on her own, before managing to talk her mom into buying her a ticket back to Vancouver.
‘She tried everything to try and control me. And I just kept on being annoyingly critical,’ she said.
Still, back in Vancouver. the pressure was on Yasmine to marry a devout Muslim man.
When the ultra-orthodox Essam Marzouk came into the picture, Yasmine’s mother was smitten. Yasmine wasn’t exactly aware of his extremist affiliations, but she’d ascertained that her mother was.
‘To her, a member of Al-Qaeda was like the ultimate purist example of a Muslim man. Because he wasn’t just like talking the talk, like the Muslim Brotherhood, or any of the other Islamists. He was walking the walk. Like he was in Afghanistan with Bin Laden, do you know what I mean? Like he was actually involved in terrorism.
‘So she thought, “Wow, what a wonderful human being,”‘ Yasmine said.
‘And also, she thought, “Finally someone who is strong enough to control her.”‘
In order to push her daughter into the arrangement, Yasmine’s mother invoked an religious rule that decrees access to heaven is only possible with one’s mother’s permission.
‘If your mother does not agree for you to go to heaven, you will never even smell a whiff of the air of Heaven,’ Yasmine paraphrased.
‘When I say she forced me, that was one of the coercive methods that she used: was telling me that I would never go to heaven. And obviously that means I’m going to burn in hell. Because there’s no purgatory in Islam, it’s one or the other.’
Yasmine added that her mom had ‘hated’ her since the incident from when she was 13 that resulted in the authorities scrutinizing the family, investigating her allegations of abuse at the hands of her stepfather.
At the time, Yasmine had been ecstatic at the possibility of getting into foster care, but saw her hopes crushed when the judge deemed her abuse a matter of her family’s cultural norms.
‘She felt like I had shamed her when I did that. It was just like this constant, you know your mom doesn’t love you. And so you’re trying to do anything you possibly can to get her to finally love you back,’ she said.
In the bigger pictured, being a devout Muslim, Yasmine described, meant living in ‘panic mode.’
‘I was controlled by fear. I was afraid of Allah, I was afraid of displeasing him, and doing the wrong thing, and ending up in hell. That’s what it comes down to.’
The image often invoked is a Muslim walking on a tight rope, ‘and below the tight rope are the fires of hell.’
‘And so as a Muslim you are genuinely walking so carefully, one foot in front of the other, trying your best not to misstep or you will fall down to the depths of hell. So that’s the visualization that they show you,’ she explained.
It was in this mindset of fear, she continued, that led her to finally agreed to the marriage.
‘I cried, I begged, I pleaded: “Please don’t make me marry this man.” I felt something so sinister about him, there was something so dark about him. His energy. I didn’t like him. I certainly didn’t want to be married to this person. My voice was not relevant in the conversation.’
In an Islamic marriage, she didn’t even have to be present to say ‘I do,’ she went on.
The marriage was made official in a mosque, with the man and Yasmine’s guardian present in front of the Iman – but not her.
‘That’s how irrelevant my voice is to the conversation,’ she emphasized.
She was hopeful that ‘all this fear, and all this panic, and all this anxiety that I’ve had all these years, maybe it’s because I’ve been fighting against all of these edicts that have been forced upon me since I was six years old.’
‘Maybe if I just let go and I just do everything that is demanded of me, and follow his religion to the end, and listen to everything that my mom demands of me, maybe then I’ll find peace,’ she recalled reasoning at the time.
In her book, Yasmine described bursting into tears at her own wedding ceremony, only to watch all the guests turn their backs on her.
At the time, she’d believed Essam was just five years older than her; years later, she learned he was in fact 34 to her then 20 years old.
In any case, Yasmine’s unsettling gut instinct about her husband turned out to be right on the money.
The first week of her marriage, she’d been walking through her 17th-floor apartment with the curtains open, sans a hair covering.
‘He started calling me “whore” for walking around the house without covering my hair, and saying “Everybody can see you.”
‘And so, I talked back. I said, “Who’s everybody? People in helicopters? Seagulls? Who are you afraid of?”
‘So that was the first time that he beat me up.’
Her mother’s answer after Yasmine told her what had happened: ‘Are you stupid? Do you not know your religion?’ Her mom then defended her new husband’s actions by citing a Qu’ran passage commonly interpreted as instructing men to beat their wives in response to ‘disobedience’ or ‘arrogance.’
‘”You are his property. You were being arrogant when you talked back to him. He had every right to beat you up,”‘ Yasmine said her mom told her.
Yasmine’s mother also lamented the embarrassing optics of a divorce so soon into the marriage. Her fear: that ‘”everybody”‘ would believe the divorced happened because Yasmine hadn’t been a virgin, and ‘”and that’s just going to dishonor me too much,”‘ Yasmine recounted her mom arguing.
After re-converting to Islam, her mom had become a teacher of Arab and Islamic studies, thus putting the stakes of her reputation on her children’s’ continued obedience within the religion.
‘You can’t say no to him,’ her mom reminded her of her role as a wife: namely, as a ‘thing that he owns.’
‘So basically, she’s telling me, “You have to allow this man to beat you, and you have to allow this man to rape you,”‘ Yasmine summarized of the conversation with her mother about her still week-old, but already physically abusive, marriage to the Al Qaeda member.
As for the local authorities in Vancouver, Yasmine already had good reason not to trust given her experience in the Canadian court system at age 13.
As a young adult in an arranged, abusive marriage, she was barely allowed outside her home, and forced to wear the full-coverage niqab when she was.
Essam would also regularly beat her over minor things, such as his meals being prepared incorrectly.
Falling pregnant, Yasmine was only taken to see female doctors.
Eventually, she welcomed a daughter of her own with her Al Qaeda husband.
‘I was overcome with love for my little baby, but in almost equal amount I was overcome with this heavy sense of responsibility,’ Yasmine wrote in her book.
To her horror, with her daughter barely out of diapers, Yasmine’s mom and the husband already were discussing taking her to Egypt to undergo female genital mutilation.
‘In my head, I was like, “I need to get my daughter out of this house before that can happen.” I thought that was my timeline to save my daughter,’ Yasmine said.
She ultimately spent five years in the marriage before getting away, which, a friend later pointed out, was ‘really quickly’ in the ‘grand scheme of things.’
‘The catalyst was wanting to get my daughter out of that house, and hoping that she might know freedom, hoping that she wouldn’t have the same childhood that I had, or even worse,’ Yasmine said.
‘Long story short, I get away from him first, and then I get away from my mom.’
In her book, she described sneaking out of the house around 1998 while he was away to file for a legal divorce, which she did, successfully.
He would not grant her a religious divorce, however.
Under Islam, a divorce can only be initiated by the man, who must say ‘I divorce you’ to his wife three times.
He refused to do this, and reminded her that, after death, he would force her to remain by his side in heaven for eternity.
Essam was ultimately arrested in 1999 by authorities and deported to Egypt, where he was tortured and eventually sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. It’s unclear what has since become of him.
Yasmine, meanwhile, was still tethered to her mother thanks to financial constraints, but was hopeful as she pursed a higher education.
At one point, she enrolled in a History of Religions course, which, she admitted, shook up her whole world view as never before.
‘In that course, I was able to critically examine Islam for the first time in my life,’ she said.
‘Everything I knew about everything slowly unraveled. I had never looked at Islam from an objective perspective before. I could now see the absurdities in it just as clearly as I could see the absurdities in other religions,’ Yasmine reflected in her book.
She began to wear the hijab less and less, including on nightlife outings with her friends.
As she was attending college, 9/11 happened, and she was outed in the media as the ex-wife of Essam.
By the end of the year, disgusted at seeing the ‘jubilation at was happening in the Islamic community and within my family over 9/11,’ Yasmine decided that she was done with the religion for good – for her daughter’s sake, as well.
In her words, she became ‘determined that my daughter was never going to be part of a group that took joy in the lives of innocent people being exterminated.’
From there, she went about extricating herself from the religion, despite it being her entire identity, she described.
‘There’s not just all the emotional and psychological layers, but there was like physical layers,’ Yasmine said, further referring to how she’d grown accustomed to wearing head-to-toe coverings.
One day, she wrote in her book, she showed up to her mother’s place to take her to a doctor’s appointment – having made the conscious choice to not wear her hijab.
Her mother hurled abuse at her, but Yasmine stayed strong. Eventually, the two all but completely cut contact with one another.
Yasmine would go on to remarry around 2007 as well, to a man she truly loved.
Still, she admits, giving up a set of strict rules dictating how life should be lived was daunting.
‘It takes a lot of courage to say, “I don’t know,”‘ Yasmine admitted of religion’s existential assurances.
‘Because you go from order to chaos … We had all the answers in the one book, right? Now I go to say, “I don’t know.” And it’s terrifying.’
As host Shelise, who left her family religion of Mormonism, chimed in: ‘Just being able to have choices is terrifying. When you have someone telling you, “This is your checklist, and this is how you get to heaven,” it’s comforting to not have to guess, or figure anything out.
‘And then when that checklist goes away, you’re left with all of the options. It’s like, “Where do I go? What’s my baseline? What’s normal? What do other people do? What do I want to believe? Who am I? What are my morals? Where is my moral compass?”‘ Shelise described of the questions she grappled with on leaving Mormonism.
And sometimes, Shalise continued, ‘Saying “I don’t know” is the most empowered place to be, because it leaves you open to options. It leaves your mind open to possibilities. It leaves you open to accepting new information that otherwise you would have shut down immediately and said, “No, that’s not how it is, because this is how it is.”
‘And so it allows you to grow and learn and become more empathetic to other people and more compassionate and wanting to genuinely know about someone else’s beliefs and thoughts and opinions and perspectives.’
As Yasmine navigated her world upon leaving Islam, her toddler-aged daughter, she said, became her ‘north star.’
‘Because I rebuilt [my world view] with the image that I wanted her to see. So I thought: “What kind of mom do I want her to have? What kind of person will be her mentor? What kind of person do I want her to look up to?”‘
Yasmine went on to describe that her feeling for her daughter were her first experience of ‘unconditional love.’
Her daughter being born a girl plus Yasmine’s fraught relationship with her own mother, were two factors that ‘really helped to have that ability in the middle of all of this to think, “I need to get my daughter out of here.”
Since the release of her first book, Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam – a half-memoir, half socio-political analysis – in 2019, Yasmine has been ramping up her activism.
She’s co-founded an organization called the Clarity Coalition, a multi-denominational group ‘who stand for peace, democracy, liberty, and secular governance and who are deeply concerned by the continuing threat posed to these values by the actions and demands of Islamists in various places around the world,’ per its website.
She’s also launched Free Hearts, Free Minds, a nonprofit meant to help ex-Muslims navigate the world outside the religion.
‘When people have come out of a high control group, and they have renounced what they’ve been indoctrinated in, and they’re finally able to be their true authentic selves, then those people deserve to be celebrated for what they have overcome regardless of the group that they have escaped from,’ Yasmine said.
As a final note, she encouraged viewers to support ex-Muslims in the same way they would throw their support behind someone who’s renounced, say, Scientology, or the Westboro Baptist Church.
‘We’re demonized for telling our stories. Nobody wants to hear it. We feel incredibly betrayed,’ she said.
‘I cannot express to you how painful that it. So listen, remember we’re all human beings … and we’re all deserving of the same empathy and love.’
