Sarah Haider
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Sarah Haider’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
My name is Sarah Hayter. I am a former activist turned podcaster turned former podcaster.
I was born a Muslim. I was raised a Muslim, I should say, in the United States for the most part, but I was born in Pakistan. And I decided that religion was not for me. It stopped making sense in a lot of important ways. It's not a terribly interesting deconversion story, if you're familiar with that at all.
But there's a whole genre of people leaving religion for, you know, kind of standard reasons like this. I was reading the Quran and this such and such thing didn't make sense or there was a contradiction there. A similar set of things happened to me. And I left the religion when I was a teenager.
I was fairly lucky in that my parents are liberal for Muslims, which is to say they're pretty conservative as far as what Western Christians understand to be the spectrum of religiosity. But Relative to other Muslims, I think they were fairly liberal.
So I was allowed to leave unmolested, save for some very interesting conversations with my parents, some of them getting to be quite heavy at times, and some tears from my mom here and there. But as I grew a little bit older, I started to meet other ex-Muslims.
I realized how my experience was actually different than what many other Muslims, even in America, experience when they start questioning religion or leaving religion. And so I found myself in this place where I felt like, okay, I can really do something here.
I can help a group of people whose struggles I understand intimately, but I am lucky enough not to face them with the same kind of severity as they do.
Yeah, I mean, it was like a hurricane. It completely tore apart aspects. Some parts of my family, extended family, they just don't talk to me much anymore. They don't want anything to do with me. They don't even want anything to do with my parents because they tolerate me.
It caused an enormous amount of, I think, stress for everybody because they had to individually make that choice of whether or not they wanted to associate with me now that I have done this terrible thing. And I'm speaking up very openly, and it's bringing a lot of shame and dishonor to my
My family and then my community, the Muslim community that I used to be in touch with when I was religious, they, you know, don't want anything to do with me. I understand that. I lost many Muslim friends. I think the majority of them, I lost them. And it was kind of like they just sort of ghosted me. You know, it wasn't like a big argument.
Like it was just suddenly I found myself blocked on Facebook back when that used to be a thing.
Megan invited me on to her podcast, The Unspeakable, which she had been hosting for several years, and it's an interview-style podcast where she just invites people she finds interesting or, you know, thinkers who are in the heterodox world. And she invited me on to talk about a few things, and it was an interesting conversation. I had a good time with her. I felt like it was easy to talk to her.
She's a great interviewer, so... The interview went along very smoothly, and we found that we were both very interested in a few topics, like culture-warrior topics, and we had a similar perspective on them as well, but we were coming at them from very different starting points. You know, Megan has lived a very different life than I have. She continues to live a very different life than I do.
So our focuses, even in the issues that we shared political opinions on, our focuses tended to be very different. It was a unique opportunity to talk to somebody like that. But I didn't know that that would lead to a podcast.
Whatever it is, the cult hacking, mental hacking... I think of Greta Thunberg. I think of the environmental activists throwing shit on art, you know, and I'm disgusted by them. And I think of... Bella was a DEI candidate. She didn't deserve to be there. Nobody wanted her to be there. She got in because the Democrats and the left have these differences.
She starts with a story about how she's pregnant, like crazy pregnant, and she's swollen, and she's gained all this weight, and she has to make it to this meeting because the CFO quit or something, and now she has to raise funds.
And I'm thinking, I don't want this. If this is success... I feel like my life is precious and my days are important and how I live them is important and I don't want to live that way.
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the best of what the culture war can give you. It can lead to some really interesting discussions, but those are usually deeper down into the comments or replies somewhere or threads of threads, quote tweets of quote tweets, and then somebody writes an article and then there's more discussion based on that. So I think there is something interesting there.
It's just hard to find unless you're deeply online like we are.
It was, yeah. Most of the time it was enjoyable.
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