Conventional wisdom goes that the children of immigrants will become more

naturally integrated into their societies than their parents. Exposed to their
country’s culture from birth, second-generation individuals will not experience
the same culture shock. Though still negotiating between their home
environments and wider society, they will usually identify less with the culture
and traditions of their parents’ home countries. In many cases, this
assumption holds true. In some, it does not.

American Muslims who were born in the United States are slightly less devout
than immigrant Muslims. They pray and attend mosque slightly less often. Yet
in some key ways, US-born Muslims seem to embrace their identities as
Muslims to a greater extent than immigrants. They identify more with the
global Muslim community, they take slightly more pride in their Muslim
identities, and slightly more US-born Muslim women wear head coverings.
The patterns tell a story of a population embedding itself more, not less, in the
cultural markers of its international roots, undermining conventional wisdom.

The respondents in our survey were mostly first-generation immigrants. They

outnumbered native-born respondents (second-generation and later) roughly
two to one, and almost all native-born respondents were second-generation.
Such a population provides an ideal point of reference to American Muslims.
And just the same as American Muslims, the divisions (or lack thereof)
between our immigrant and native-born respondents can be puzzling,
peculiar, and unexpected.
No matter the tradition,  religious
oppression always seems to weigh heaviest on women. The burdens of male
guardianship, clothing regulations, and modesty culture cast a shadow over
the lives of countless women in Muslim-majority countries—and even in
Muslim communities in the West. Ex-Muslim men and women do not
experience their departures from Islam in the same ways, nor are their
experiences with the faith identical. Gleanings from our survey make this
reality evident.
The clearest example is the concept of “awrah,” or private body parts. The
Islamic obsession with reining in women’s sexuality is evident in the term
itself: in Pakistan, in fact, women are referred to by the closely-related Urdu
term aurat, which literally means “defect” or “genitalia.”

To put it mildly, dressing immodestly is one of the worst taboos a Muslim

woman can breach. What happens, then, when a woman in a repressive
environment frees herself from these shackles, newly aware that she can, in
fact, wear shorts without risking eternal damnation?

Unsurprisingly, the answer is that, almost always—86% of the time for our
female respondents—she has a difficult time adjusting. Men, who are
unburdened by the shackles of modesty culture, can look forward to a much
easier time: 74% of our male respondents had no trouble with the transition at
all.

It is not shocking in this light that more women had trouble adjusting to
premarital sex once they left Islam. This difference is modest—4%—but the
wide gap in former behavior is undeniable. Far more women than men
abstained altogether, 50% to 38%.
This dynamic was present in dating behavior, too. More women than men—
10% to 6%—said they did not or could not date before marriage while they
were practicing. Women were also less likely to say that their practice of Islam
had not factored into their decisions on who to date or marry (19%) than men
(29%). A majority of women (51%) had dated and planned to marry within the
faith while only a plurality of men (46%) said the same, reflecting another
patriarchal standard: if a man takes a non-Muslim wife, it may not be as
serious a transgression as it would be if the roles were reversed. Men take
brides of other faiths; women marry into other faiths.

Indeed, in all things, it seems women bore the burden of Islam’s restrictions
more heavily than men. They felt it concerning alcohol consumption, which a
majority of men participated in and a majority of women abstained from before
apostatizing. They felt it even after they broke ties with Islam, when 62% felt
pressure from their families to “keep quiet” about their apostasy, as opposed
to 50% of men. Women were also significantly more likely to experience

difficulty adjusting  to alcohol

consumption (68%) than men (60%).
Our female respondents also said they thought of themselves as less devout
than their male counterparts, and they did not pray as often. But this is no
isolated result: Islam holds a unique distinction as one of the only world
religions whose women are not generally more devout than its men.
Our respondents took this tendency further: men reported greater levels of
devoutness while they were religious. They were slightly more likely to report
praying “as often as possible” or “all the time” (47%) than women (43%).
Conversely, women were significantly more likely to say that while they were
practicing, they considered themselves less devout than the rest of their family
(42% to men’s 31%).

In case after case, women are born on the wrong side of God’s affection and
then find it difficult to dispel that burden, even as they come to recognize God
does not exist. Is it any surprise that they find themselves less engaged with
Islam?

The sexism revealed here likely has real implications on who stays in Islam,
who leaves it, and why. Among the women who told their stories in the survey,
a recurrent theme emerged: the realization that they did not need to feel guilt
for their sex, that they could live as freely as men without being treated like
children. But the feelings of inferiority, the inhibitions so often inculcated in
women but spared to men, the psychological struggle merely to exist as an
autonomous human being—these can and do linger even after women leave
their religious lives behind.