Betty Lachgar Is Still in Prison. London Will Say Her Name | Voices

Ex-Muslim Voices column. Betty Lachgar has now spent more than a year in a Moroccan prison for wearing a T-shirt. On Saturday, 26 September, campaigners in London will honour her at a one-day conference called “Leaving to Live: Women’s Blasphemy, Apostasy and Freedom”.

Ibtissame “Betty” Lachgar is a psychologist, feminist and freethinker. She co-founded the Alternative Movement for Individual Freedoms. The group campaigns for abortion access, same-sex marriage and the right not to believe.

Why Betty Lachgar was jailed

She was photographed in London wearing a shirt that read “Allah is lesbian”. According to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, she wore it to protest against death sentences handed to two lesbian women in Iran.

Moroccan authorities arrested her on 11 August 2025. On 3 September 2025 she was convicted of insulting Islam and sentenced to 30 months. A photograph taken abroad became a crime at home.

As of 8 September 2026, she had served a full year, with about 18 months to go. FFRF reports that her health is deteriorating and that she has been unable to get urgently needed surgery. Amnesty International’s German section has made her its letter-writing case for September.

Leaving to Live

The London conference brings together women’s rights, secular and ex-Muslim campaigners. It will focus on blasphemy, apostasy and transgression as forms of resistance. It will also remember the Algerian sociologist Marieme Helie Lucas, who died in August.

Lachgar has also been named the 2026 recipient of FFRF’s Avijit Roy Courage Award. The prize carries the name of the Bangladeshi-American writer murdered in Dhaka in 2015 for his secular writing. The link is painfully apt.

What her case asks of us

Many of us who left Islam know the calculation Lachgar refused to make. Speak, and risk everything. Stay silent, and survive. She chose to speak.

A free society does not have to like her slogan. It does have to defend her right to wear it. Offence is not harm. Prison for a T-shirt is.

We explored this struggle in our earlier column on women and the right to leave. On Saturday, London will say her name. Governments should say it too, loudly, to Rabat. Read FFRF’s award announcement.

This is an opinion column. Fact basis: Freedom From Religion Foundation releases (2026), National Secular Society event listing, Amnesty International Germany, and Wikipedia’s biography of Ibtissame Lachgar.