Famous Moroccan writer, Mohamed Choukri, is one of the most controversial contemporary writers in the Arabic-speaking world. At first seen as pornography, only to be reevaluated as social criticism, his oeuvre continues to spark tremendous international public debate and get professors who choose to include him in their curriculum fired. One powerful aspect of his prose is his atheist stance in a culture where the religious echelon and conservative Muslims find open atheism offensive to religious-based morality. Yet, Choukri’s atheism has been neglected by academic studies. In this paper, I argue that Choukri attacks the idea that religion (and god) is the source of human morality. His literary work galvanizes the creation of a personal morality derived from critical thinking, empathy, and a sense of justice and equality in human experience. I provide an analysis of three aspects of the atheist morality that permeate Choukri’s oeuvre, which I call pre-Islamic, non-Islamic, and anti-Islamic poetics, or literary devices that place the narrator before, outside, and in opposition to Islam. I argue that Choukri’s atheist morality explains the continuous outrage against his work among the religious establishment and vocal conservative Muslims, rather than simply explicit scenes of sex and poverty in his writing, as has been alleged. Revealing Choukri’s atheist morality is important for two reasons. First, it shows his own understanding of his worldview and his resistance to be mislabeled as a Muslim believer. Second, it shows the evolution in the public proclamation of atheism: from a subtler, poetic form in Choukri’s case to the open public atheism we see in North African and other Arabic-speaking countries since the 2011 uprisings.