465 Growing Up With Radical Islam with Işık Abla
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In this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we sit down with Işık Abla, a Turkish-born Christian minister and broadcaster.
Işık grew up in Istanbul in a home full of tension, in a city shaken by political violence. She left an abusive marriage and came to the United States in 1996. In the late 1990s, after a spiritual turning point, she converted from Islam to Christianity.
The conversation moves between her memories and her opinions on religious extremism, women’s rights, and political responsibility. Her life story is her own testimony. Her wider views on religious communities and countries are her perspective, and nothing in the conversation sets them out as settled fact.
You’re listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let’s go.
A Childhood Shaped by Fear
Işık describes a devout Muslim household where things were rarely calm. Her father was often away, and her mother battled depression and difficult pregnancies. Because of that, Işık was sometimes the only one with her mother during medical emergencies, even as a small child. She also remembers feeling unwanted simply for being a girl.
Outside the home, Istanbul was unsettled and often violent. She says she saw people hurt and killed, and fear became an ordinary part of life. At religious courses, she was taught that Christians, Jews, Israel, and the United States were enemies. By the time she was 12, she says, she’d been convinced that becoming a suicide bomber could be a holy calling.
From Questions of Faith to a New Life
Işık talks about how religious law shaped what was expected of families and of women, even where the country’s official laws said something different. She argues that some interpretations of Sharia put religious rules above civil law and restrict women’s rights. These are her views, grounded in how she lived and understood what she was taught.
After leaving her marriage, she came to the U.S. looking for safety and independence. Depression and trauma followed, and then her conversion to Christianity. That faith became the center of her work as an ordained minister and broadcaster. She also shares a moving detail: her mother eventually converted too, after moving to the U.S. and watching Işık’s broadcasts.
Extremism, Freedom, and Personal Responsibility
Işık draws a line between Muslims who practice their faith peacefully and what she calls radical Islam, which she links to political rule under Sharia. She warns that this kind of ideology can clash with constitutional protections and with the rights of women and LGBTQ people. Again, this is her interpretation and experience, not a full picture of Islam or of Muslim communities.
Christopher adds something personal: a close friend of his was murdered by men raised in a Christian community, which is why he believes violence and hatred can take root in any religious setting. Işık agrees that evil can wear any religious label. The two also touch on Afghanistan and what followed from the political decisions made there.
To hear more from Işık Abla and her thoughts on religious extremism, women’s rights, and political responsibility, download and listen to this episode.
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