It amazes me how much people hold on to their religion, even after it makes their lives miserable. Sofia Hayat is an actress singer and model who grew up in an extremely religious family. She was routinely beaten and tortured for having a free spirit, and when she left home, she began to live a life her mother and father disapproved of. They kidnapped her, threatened to kill her, and eventually the police had to be involved.

And despite everything, she still believes the problem is not her religion, but rather the fact her parents never read the Koran properly. If they did, she argues, they would have realized it preaches peace and understanding.

Hardly. Yes, I’m sure some people can interpret the text to mean that, but I think by now it should be plainly obvious that the book merely reinforces what you already believe. She likes Western values, so for her, the Koran reflects these values. For her conservative parents and siblings, the book has a completely different meaning. This is the inherent problem of all religions: because they are all ambiguous, inexact, and deeply reflective of their primitive origins, they are completely out of their depth in our modern age. She can ignore the elephant in the room, but the real problem here is that her religion encourages its followers to be submissive, ignorant, stupid and proud of it. You can try placing the blame somewhere else, but you’ll be hard pressed to find any valid reasons why parents should be so cruel and violent towards their own children. Their first love is God, and everything else takes a back seat.