https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15350/zayn-malik-non-event
The hope of most of us in a country such as Britain is not that everybody leaves their faith, but simply that people have religious freedom and that this should include the freedom to leave a faith if you wish to do so with no repercussions against your person.
It is, in short, the essence of that Enlightenment which Europe gave the world three centuries ago. We hear plenty of news of assaults on that Enlightenment. But this story of a non-event suggests that aspects of that Enlightenment may be more solid — and attractive — than we are sometimes given to think.
This has been a year filled with bad news. It is a season that cries out for good news. So perhaps I could end the year with a reflection on something that for me has provided — in a difficult and contested era — a small source for optimism. It is really a story of something that didn’t happen. A story, as Sherlock Holmes would put it, of the dog that did not bark.
It is now more than a year since Zayn Malik revealed that he no longer considers himself a Muslim. Some readers will wonder who Malik is. He is not a religious scholar, or a leading clerical authority of any kind. For young people around the world, however, he is far more famous. Malik is a young British man, now in his twenties, of Muslim parentage who came to fame as a member of the British boyband ‘One Direction’. When the group met — in the talent show ‘X Factor’ in 2010 — the group was hailed, among other things, for its diversity. However, this was obviously not the primary reason why stadiums full of largely young women screamed themselves hoarse as the band’s members sang and danced on stage around the world.
Malik never especially pushed his faith, but there were occasional glimpses of it. As I mentioned here in 2014, during the Israel-Gaza conflict of that year, Malik sent a Tweet saying, ‘Free Palestine’ to his 13 million Twitter followers. Now of course one may be a non-Muslim and start pushing ‘Free Palestine’ messages around the web. Britain was only recently saved from having a Prime Minister who indulges in such pseudo-simplistic yet actively bigoted rhetoric. But it did seem to be pushing a religious viewpoint from someone who had — by then — considerable cultural reach.