An atheist activist and founder of the Liberals Network of Mauritania, Yahya Ekhou was forced to flee Mauritania to Germany following demonstrations and a fatwa demanding and threatening his death.
founding the Liberals Network of Mauritania; having a fatwa issued for his death
Yahya Mustafa Ekhou is a Mauritanian atheist who founded the Liberals Network of Mauritania, an organization dedicated to Enlightenment principles, in 2014. Four years later, he fled Mauritania for Germany.
Because Mauritania is an Islamic republic where blasphemy and apostasy carry the death penalty, it was a highly repressive environment, and for this reason Yahya initially had not revealed his atheism in connection with his work on the Liberals Network. He kept his advocacy limited to the values of free expression—including the freedom to choose, change, or not practice religion.
This alone made him a lightning rod for zealous anger, and by 2018, he found it unsafe to remain in Mauritania. Since arriving in Germany, he has been subject to continued online—and still occasional physical—harassment. Now open about his atheism, he has received death threats, including from his own family. By his own claim, he has been assaulted for bearing a Muslim name as an atheist.
“If freedom of choice is limited only to one choice, it is worthless. It has then become only a selective freedom. And one cannot call it freedom of choice, because there is only the one choice which is forced on society.” - Yahya Ekhou
Additionally, a post Yahya made online in February 2019 sparked a new wave of outrage in his home country: in response to a train accident in Egypt which claimed the lives of several people, he asked how a just God could allow such a tragedy to befall so many of his own believers. In response, calls for his execution circulated online and in extremist groups’ demonstrations—calls which soon came to be parroted by religious authorities in Mauritania, who issued a fatwa calling for his death. His Mauritanian citizenship has also been revoked, and the country has demanded Germany extradite him so that he can face charges for his apostasy.
Yahya is still in Germany, where he has faced an arduous legal process attempting to acquire asylum. After an initial denial of his application, he began an appeals process, which is ongoing.
Mauritania: Muslims demand death of atheist blogger - Atheist Refugee Relief
Yahya Ekhou is fighting for his life against the toughest blasphemy law in the world - Jan-Christian Petersen [in German]
Free people cannot be tamed - Richard Dawkins Foundation [in German]
Anyone who induces disbelief will be killed - Humanistischer Pressedienst [in German]
Call for the execution of the Mauritanian apostate "Yahya Mustafa" - El-Ilami [in Arabic]
Mauritania is an explicitly Islamic state, and its citizens are essentially required to be Muslim, though a small number of foreigners practice other faiths. Blasphemy and apostasy are both punishable by death, though less severe instances of blasphemy may result in imprisonment only. Actual instances of prosecutions of these crimes, while not nonexistent, are rare—due perhaps in part to the fact that nearly all residents are Muslim, and perhaps in part due to the stifling effect that such draconian legislation has on the willingness of dissenters to speak.