page_title: Rana Ahmad
section_title: Family troubles
hierarchical_section_title: Rana Ahmad / Biography / Family troubles
caption_attribution_description: English: In 2014, Saudi ex-Muslim Rana Ahmad was having trouble in her family, and sought and found the help of Atheist Republic and other similar organisations online. When her family forced her to come along with the hajj, she took this picture of herself holding a piece of paper with "Atheist Republic" inside the Great Mosque of Mecca, the holiest site of Islam. She subsequently fled to Germany, aided by Faith to Faithless.
context_page_description: Rana Ahmad or Rana Ahmad Hamd is the pseudonym of a Syrian women's rights activist and ex-Muslim born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, who fled to Germany in 2015, where she currently resides. Her flight, assisted by Atheist Republic and Faith to Faithless, was partially documented in the Vice News documentary Leaving Islam: Rescuing Ex-Muslims. Her 2018 German-language autobiography Frauen dürfen hier nicht träumen, also translated into French, and became a Spiegel Top-10-best-seller. In 2017, Ahmad founded the Cologne-based Atheist Refugee Relief with the goal of providing 'practical assistance to refugees without religion and to improve their living conditions through political work.'
context_section_description: Ahmad's older brother began to suspect she was secretly seeing men, and placed a covert listening device in her room. Catching her calling with a male friend, he stormed her room and tried to kill her, but their father heard her screams for help and intervened. After this incident, Ahmad tried to commit suicide by cutting her wrists, but again her father found her in time to take her to the hospital and save her life. Ahmad got a new job as secretary at a school for mentally disabled children. Meanwhile, she took on English studies.
  When her mother discovered Ahmad's tweets about religious doubts, she was furious and put Ahmad under house arrest for a month without access to her laptop or smartphone. Her mother forced her to pray and recite the Quran. In 2014, she was forced by her family to participate in the hajj. She sought and found the help of Atheist Republic as well as other similar organisations online. While on hajj, she took a picture of herself holding a piece of paper with "Atheist Republic" written on it, while standing inside the Great Mosque of Mecca facing the Kaaba, the holiest site of Islam. She was extremely frightened because she knew she would be killed if the people around her saw the paper and discovered her nonbelief, but she wanted to tell the internet that she existed as an atheist in Mecca and, like many nonbelievers in Saudi Arabia, was not here by her own choice. It was also the first time she decided she had to leave the country quickly, or otherwise end her life. She requested Atheist Republic to upload the photo to Facebook after she left Mecca, and they did so on 3 August 2014; a few days later she was overwhelmed to find it had gone viral.
caption: Rana held this Atheist Republic paper in the Great Mosque of Mecca.[11]
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