Because on the one hand, one cannot expect a healthy relationship with someone who despises our faith, and the Muslim that I am cannot bear to live with the idea that the woman who occupies my heart and mother of my children be doomed to a grave punishment because of his disbelief.

But it remains that in my opinion, the explicit divine prohibition in the Koran may have other reasons that I do not know.

Nothing forbids it. To my knowledge (albeit limited) there is no tradition that prohibits a Muslim from marrying an unbeliever. The reciprocal is not, according to tradition, not allowed: a non-believer cannot marry a Muslim if he does not convert to Islam.

The reasons are essentially historical: in the early days of Islam, Arab society was tribal and patriarchal. Men were the mainstay of the family and their allegiance was often followed and respected by their offspring. So a non-Muslim wishing to marry a Muslim, seeing himself forced to embrace Islam, became de facto an additional ally to defend the Islamic faith when it was still very much in the minority. The reciprocal was of little importance since women did not have a dominant role in Arab society at that time.

Let us return to our time, which no longer has much to do with the first centuries of the Hegira. For a Muslim or a practicing religious, whatever his faith, it will quickly become difficult to build a family project with a person who does not share his faith, or even who does not understand it. Not all atheists are anti-religious, far from it, but it sometimes takes a particularly consistent open-mindedness to accept practices that may at first glance seem irrational or insane (such as for example depriving yourself of water and food from dawn to dusk for a month, or make a pilgrimage to a country where it is between 30 and 50 degrees).

In this context, the right is given by the laws of the Republic, which laws take no account of the religions or non-religions of one or the other.

And that is why, listening only to the amorous impulses that nature unleashes in them, many mixed Muslim-atheist couples marry together.

I read here and there that the Koran expressly forbids the marriage of a Muslim and an atheist (atheist really ????). The Quran (like the Old Testament) also says that humans were created by God at the same time as the Universe and the World, which scientific knowledge today contradicts! It would be inconsistent to follow him in one case and not in the other!

There are many ways to be a Muslim, or a Christian, or a Jew, etc. :

Either one considers religion as a spiritual experience, even mystical, or as a moral ethics, and the sacred texts are taken only in their philosophical sense and with a certain freedom (the freedom which God gave to the human being of after the same texts!).

Either we conform to the letter to texts more than 1,500 years old, born in societies and environments very far from our own, written elsewhere in an ancient language with multiple interpretations. Fundamentalism that will not fail to pose problems in living together