Her book, Hiding in the Light: Why I Risked Everything to Leave Islam and Follow Jesus, was released today by the WaterBrook Press division of Penguin Random House.
By leaving Islam, Bary writes, she shamed her family in a way many people unfamiliar with strict Muslim law and culture cannot relate to.
“Those who do understand it, and understand it very well, are those who have wanted me dead. That’s why I have taken, and continue to take, precautions to protect my life and safety.”
Bary was 12 when she began practicing Christianity and 16 when she left her parents; home near New Albany, boarding a Greyhound bus to take a two-day trip to Florida. There, she was taken in by a woman she had communicated with via Facebook and the woman’s husband.
She said her father had threatened to kill her upon discovering her conversion and that her mother threatened to send her to an asylum in her native Sri Lanka. She eventually was returned to Ohio, where she stayed in foster homes as her case was handled by a juvenile court judge. That case ended when she turned 18.
The book is an indictment of both Islam and the Bary family. She accuses her parents and older brother of routine physical abuse and says she was forbidden from spending time at the homes of friends.
“The place for women was at home close to their families, close to Allah,” she writes. “Close to suffocating.”
She largely blames the family’s faith and mosque, which she does not name, saying rules imposed by the leaders there created a “whiplash of abuse” at her home. She describes lying to attend Christian services and hiding her Bible at home.
Bary’s parents have said that they did not abuse her and that they allowed her to practice Christianity.
The allegations against the family were looked into and found to be uncorroborated by law enforcement in both Florida and Ohio, said Shayan Elahi, a Florida attorney who represented Mohamed Bary, Rifqa’s father.
“The family is still very heartbroken over the loss of their child and the way they were treated by the judicial system,” Elahi said. “They still miss her and love her and they wish she would reconcile and talk to them.
“She was the apple of the eye of her father.”
He said the 16-year-old Bary was a minor lured away from her family and used for political pursuits. Her parents, he said, were discriminated against because they practice Islam. He called some of Bary’s claims lies and said she still is living under delusions planted in her head by others.
“She was a child being supported by Islamophobes. They were putting things in her head, and she was mimicking them,” Elahi said. “Rifqa became an exploited teen, exploited by these adults for their political and religious agendas.”
The mosque the Barys attended, Noor Islamic Cultural Center in Hilliard, was not involved in the matter, said Imran Malik the chairman of the board that oversees the mosque. He called it a “ personal family issue that got escalated and blown out of proportion on many fronts.”
“There’s no compulsion in the Islamic faith tradition, so people are allowed to practice the values according to their own willpower and their own interests,” he said. “We don’t interact with people’s private lives and how they follow their faith.”
In the book, Bary said she was first attracted to Christianity when she learned that she could pray in a way that was different from what she considered the obligatory prayers of Islam in Arabic, words she did not understand.
“To think that someone could pray in English about whatever they wanted to was both scandalous and fascinating to me,” she writes.
She recalls breaking down and sobbing during her first experience at a church service, with a Korean friend from school.
Describing the cross she saw that evening, she writes, “It meant freedom. It meant hope. It meant forgiveness, joy, and unbreakable promises. … It meant unyielding love.”
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