A furtive, fearful group -- Muslim unbelievers -- gets a massive, 3,200-word spotlight in The Guardian, with however mixed effectiveness. The indepth details the plight of people who are rejected by their families and communities, and sometimes threatened with death.

“If someone found out where I lived,” one Sulaiman Vali says, “they could burn my house down.” A woman, who gives only the pseudonym of Nasreen, adds that "it's almost normal now to get threats." And when a Kenya-born Muslim abandoned his faith, one of his brothers told him that "the penalty sharia law stipulates for apostasy is capital punishment," the Guardian says.

The process of radicalization has been studied extensively, the newspaper says, but it adds that those who leave Islam itself are hardly noticed:

Although it is fraught with human drama – existential crisis, philosophical doubt, family rupture, violent threats, communal expulsion, depression, and all manner of other problems – the apostate’s journey elicits remarkably little media interest or civic concern.

No one knows what numbers are involved, few understand the psychological difficulties individuals confront, or the social pressures they are compelled to resist. As with many other areas of communal discourse, insiders are reluctant to talk about it, and outsiders are either too incurious or sensitive to ask.

Actually, the Guardian does get a rough estimate of numbers with the Council of ex-Muslims of Britain, which says it advocates for some 350 people a year. The newspaper also interviews the leader of Faith to Faithless, a joint voice for former believers.

Although the Guardian doesn't try to say that every Muslim would kill someone who left the faith, it does bring up the hacking murder of a secular blogger in Bangladesh last week, the third in that nation thus far this year. "And in an era in which British Islamic extremists travel thousands of miles to kill those they deem unbelievers, an apostate’s concern for his or her security at home is perhaps understandable."

The the newspaper gives lots of room to the fears and accusations of its interviewees -- some of them fresh insights, some rather stale. Much of them -- a whopping 17 paragraphs! -- come from Nasreen, probably because she did an anthropological dissertation on "the ex-Muslim reality" for the University of London.