The messages were bizarre, incoherent and sometimes obscene. They landed in my inbox day and night, ranting about the West, ex-Muslim refugees and ex-Muslim women.
I didn’t know the man who sent them. He claimed to be a Saudi expatriate and an anti-Islamist activist, although most of what he sent was incoherent and offensive. Every time I saw his name in my inbox, I shuddered.
For the most part I haven’t read the messages and most of the time I just delete them unopened. But when I saw the news on Friday about the Christmas market massacre in Magdeburg, Germany, my blood ran cold.
I recognized the suspect’s name all too well. Taleb Al Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old man believed to be a psychiatrist, has been arrested over the deaths of four women and a nine-year-old boy after driving his BMW into a crowd of people on a busy street. More than 200 were injured.
Over the past eighteen months or more, Abdulmohsen has sent me numerous vile, threatening and intimidating messages. Nothing I saw in it ever led me to suspect that he intended to commit this terrible crime, otherwise I would of course have reported everything to the police.
But the stark truth is that women like me, who grew up in Muslim families and rejected Islam, are constantly subjected to online abuse. I’m pretty sure if I had reported Abdulmohsen’s emails and social media rants, I would have been ignored.
It’s terribly common to see hate directed at me online. The messages often start by calling me a ‘wh***’ or a ‘prostitute’, accusing me of ‘selling my body to white men’ before unleashing a barrage of threats about what my fate will be in this world and the next.
Abdulmohsen used a slightly different tactic, denouncing other women to me and urging me to “expose” them in the media. When I refused to deal with him, he redoubled his campaign and sent endless accusations.
Khadija Khan says she was targeted by Abdulmohsen with numerous vile, threatening and intimidating messages
People leave candles and floral tributes at the Alter Markt in Magdeburg, where a man drove a car into the crowd on Friday evening
Although he claimed to be a lapsed believer who came to Europe as a refugee because he was not safe as an atheist in Saudi Arabia, he seemed to despise former Muslim women in the West.
One of his targets, he wrote, “completed high school in Saudi Arabia and has no other qualifications to speak of. She works as a receptionist in a medical clinic.
“She spends much of her time selling access to her private stories on Snapchat, which she says mainly contain sexy photos and videos.”
I have no idea if any of that is true. What I do know is that every word of it stinks of misogyny – contempt for women who work, contempt for women who don’t have a degree (and no doubt those who do), contempt for women who have left Saudi Arabia like him. , contempt for women’s sexuality.
When I realized that the man railing against me online was the madman arrested for the Magdeburg murders, I reached out to other ex-Muslim women this weekend and discovered that I am far from alone.
Abdulmohsen has waged a long campaign of intimidation against people like me – while posing as a selfless volunteer and activist whose mission was to protect women and help those who wanted to escape oppression in the Middle East.
He sent me videos and images of a Saudi woman in the West, and then a disgusting and explicit message describing her breasts in detail and obsessing over their appearance in or out of a bra. It is clearly the product of a deeply disturbed mind. Some recipients reported their concerns to a support group, the ex-Muslims International coalition, which had him branded a stalker and cyber bully.
Police arrested an ‘unstable’ 50-year-old Saudi doctor, identified as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, after he allegedly rammed his SUV into a crowded market in the city of Magdeburg
This is the moment the 50-year-old suspect in the Magdeburg attack from Saudi Arabia is arrested by police
Yasmine Mohammed, an author and former Muslim activist born in Canada, says she has known Abdulmohsen for years through online exchanges and that he did not seem “stable” to her.
The BBC recorded an interview with him five years ago. We are told on the BBC News website that the purpose of the interview was to ‘discuss a website he designed to help ex-Muslims flee the Gulf region’.
In the 33-second clip, he can be seen working on his laptop. “My name is Taleb,” he announces. ‘I’m from Saudi Arabia. I am an activist. I created a website to help people seeking asylum, especially from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region. If I have time, I spend about 10 to 16 hours a day doing this… 90 percent of the people who approach me are women between 18 and 30 years old.’
It is very worrying that such a man gets publicity and credibility. The BBC has not explained what checks it carried out to establish that this man was who he said he was – but even a cursory background check would likely have yielded clues as to what he was really doing online.
I find it sickening that left-wing media seem so willing to accept that the atrocity in Magdeburg was fueled by Islamophobia and far-right propaganda, when we only have the alleged murderer’s social posts as proof of his motives.
My strong suspicion is that this was in fact an Islamic attack, by a lone wolf terrorist with a serious mental illness. This is based on the numerous messages I have received from Abdulmohsen.
But I can’t claim to have the full picture yet, so I’ll keep an open mind. If only BBC journalists would follow the same impartial line, instead of being so quick to believe that anti-Muslim hatred was behind the attack.
Now more than ever, with so much misinformation and false news on social media, our national broadcaster must be more careful than ever in drawing conclusions.
Instead, a narrative is already emerging that Abdulmohsen was motivated by the bile of ultranationalists.
It is simplistic to accept this explanation. But if I question it, I know I will be accused of spreading conspiracy theories and stirring up hatred against Muslims.
Should I say that I am not ‘Islamophobic’? Most of my beloved family in Pakistan are Muslim, and many of my friends are ex-Muslims. Of course, there aren’t many more. I unequivocally condemn extremism and violence, that’s all.
As an ex-Muslim, I understand the culture much better than most virtuous leftists in the media. For example, I know that Shia theology permits and even encourages a practice called “taqiyya,” which means hiding your true religious beliefs from non-Muslims. It literally means ‘to protect yourself’.
Despite insisting that he had renounced Islam, Abdulmohsen was originally a Shia Muslim and is said to have been familiar with the concept of taqiyya.
In all the messages he sent me, at least the ones I read before I deleted them, I never got the sense that this was a man angry at his former religion or the atrocities committed in his name.
His disgust and venom were directed at Westerners in general and women in particular. We may never understand what led to last week’s terrible attack in Magdeburg. But we have to be very careful and not believe what the suspect tells us.
- Khadija Khan is the politics and culture editor at A Further Inquiry magazine.