Armin Navabi

Armin Navabi (born 25 December 1983) is an Iranian-Canadian ex-Muslim atheist, author and podcaster, currently living in Vancouver, Canada.

Navabi was born in 1983 and raised as a Shia Muslim in Tehran.

He briefly moved to Germany in 1985 and London in 1986, before returning to Tehran in 1988.

His family was liberal and not particularly devout but in school he was taught to believe in a literal hell and that committing even the smallest sin would get him there.

Navabi reasoned that if the afterlife was supposed to last for eternity then this should be everyone's top priority during their life on Earth.

Yet he found that most of those around him, though claiming to believe this, did not act like it was of the utmost importance.

To avoid hell at all costs before reaching the "age of reason" at 15 (age 9 for girls), he considered suicide, since any sin (including suicide) committed before then supposedly did not 'count', even if this would only take him to the lowest part of heaven.

At age 12, Navabi attempted suicide by jumping out of his school window, but was unsuccessful.

It left him in a wheelchair for 7 months, and he missed one year in school.

Recovering from his attempt and feeling bad about distressing his family, Navabi became an even more fervent Muslim, never missing a prayer, never even looking at girls lest he become tempted, and diligently studying Islam.

However, the more he learned the more doubts he developed as the religion appeared to make no sense to him, demanding an incredibly high toll on Muslims' everyday life and punishing all non-Muslims with eternal torture.

Studying other religions provoked his skepticism even further.

A milestone event was reading a book on the history of religion in college: "I saw how convenient it was to change the concept of God and what he wanted based on the politics of the time. Why do I even accept this as true? I'd never asked myself whether this could all just be made up."

In a desperate prayer and in great fear of hell, Navabi reached out to God to reveal himself and prove that he was real; however, he received no answer, lost his faith and eventually concluded God was imaginary.

Navabi attended the University of Tehran for about a year, studying molecular biology.

When in college, Navabi initially thought that he might be crazy, being the only atheist he knew.

However, when he confided in two of his university friends, revealing his newly developed ideas, they became skeptical about religion within weeks.

This encouraged him to look for fellow atheists on the internet.

He didn't want to stay in Tehran, and managed to obtain a student visa for the University of British Columbia to study finance.

While still living in Iran, Navabi founded the group "Iranian Atheists" on Orkut around 2003, to connect with other nonbelievers in his country.

He was shocked, surprised and delighted there were so many others like him, and those feelings were mutual: "It felt like coming home to a family you didn't even know you had."

He arrived in Vancouver on 10 October 2004, later becoming a permanent resident and eventually obtaining Canadian citizenship.

In 2012, he founded the online freethought community Atheist Republic, a Canada-based non-profit organisation which now has hundreds of branches called "consulates" in several countries around the world such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, enabling non-believers to interact in societies where irreligion, apostasy, and blasphemy are often criminalised and repressed.

There, he created Atheist Republic in 2012 to build a global atheist community and a platform for his activism.

After some time, Navabi decided to try and reach atheists beyond the Islamic Republic of Iran, and created the contrastingly named page "Atheist Republic" on Facebook in January 2012.

It was followed by the Facebook Group in February 2012 and the website www.atheistrepublic.com later in 2012 which as of July 2017 received approximately 5 million views per week.

Atheist Republic brings nonbelievers together from around the world, promotes LGBTQ and women's rights and fights against the persecution of atheists.

According to Navabi, these liberation values, that AR seeks to spread, are under attack from Islamism, the alt-right and the regressive left.

As an author, he debuted with the book Why There Is No God (2014), and in 2017 he became a co-host of the Secular Jihadists from the Middle East podcast with Ali A. Rizvi, Yasmine Mohammad and Faisal Saeed Al Mutar.

Speaking of the Atheist Republic community on BBC Trending in June 2014, Navabi said: "We want people to realise that they're not alone. We want people to realise they don't have to be ashamed of who they are."

In 2014, Syrian ex-Muslim Rana Ahmad was having trouble in her family, she sought and found the help of Atheist Republic as well as other similar organisations online.

When her family forced her to come along with the 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, the holiest site of Islam.

In January 2018, the show was renamed Secular Jihadists for a Muslim Enlightenment, with Rizvi and Navabi as co-hosts.

Navabi became a target of several deplatforming attempts in 2019.

In February 2019, Cherwell, a student newspaper at the University of Oxford, refused to publish an interview of Navabi in its online edition, on the grounds that it "may be considered offensive".

The interview was published in the newspaper's print edition.

The profile editor Freddie Hayward who conducted the interview resigned in protest.

In March 2019, Mount Royal University in the Canadian city of Calgary cancelled a scheduled speaking event featuring Navabi, organised by the Atheist Society of Calgary.

The university stated that it was unwilling to host the event after the Christchurch mosque shootings, but "would absolutely have the speaker come to our campus at another time".

In August, Alberta Minister of Advanced Education Demetrios Nicolaides (UCP) said Navabi's deplatforming and similar incidents should have been prevented, and that Nicolaides was working on a stronger academic free speech policy.