Apostasy and asylum in the United Kingdom

Abstract

This thesis, which is based on 13 months of multi-sited research, explores the trajectories of atheist, humanist, and other non-religious asylum seekers and refugees as they navigate the United Kingdom’s asylum field. I examine the ways in which this hitherto neglected category of asylees experience key aspects of the asylum application process, including credibility assessments, discretion tests, and knowledge or ‘belief’ tests. While all categories of claimants are liable to be subjected to such assessments and tests, non-religious refugees stand out as a particularly striking category in part because institutional actors such as immigration officers and judges routinely fail to understand or comprehend them. As a result, it is not uncommon for such claimants to receive initial refusal decisions that are based on reasoning that is so expressive of an absence of knowledge that the official refusal letters themselves can play a key part in appeals that generally end with non-religious asylum seekers gaining refugee status. On the basis of the decisive role played by ignorance and non-knowledge in decision-making at the Home Office, I argue that the United Kingdom’s asylum field must be understood as partly ‘agnotological’ in nature: this field not only operates in the absence of knowledge, it is also inimical to the relevance of accurate knowledge due to related institutional conditions. This analytical approach represents a significant departure from anthropological and other social scientific work that has heavily emphasised the role of knowledge and epistemic logics in the practice of asylum screening.

This thesis is also about two non-religious organisations that have become highly active in providing social and legal support to this category of claimants: Humanists UK and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB). A majority of non-religious refugees in the United Kingdom are former Muslims, which has brought the two organisations into a tense relationship as they espouse opposed discursive framings of non-religious refugees—framings that inform their public advocacy work. In part due to the fact that the asylum application process often takes years to complete, non-religious refugees have—since at least 2017—become members of both organisations. I argue that this has led to new organisational and dispositional shifts in these two organisations and the wider movements that they purport to speak for: humanists and ex-Muslim atheists. I describe these shifts as the ‘apostate turn,’ a conceptualisation that advances a growing but nascent focus on the positive or distinctive content of non-religious formations, while also foregrounding contestations within them.