Why We Left Islam (11 page)

For the first time, the Internet has changed the balance of power. Now the brutal force of the guns, prisons, and death squads is helpless and the pen is almighty. For the first time, Muslims cannot stop the truth by killing its messenger. Now a great number of them are coming in contact with the truth and they feel helpless. They want to silence this voice, but they cannot. They want to kill the messenger, but they cannot. They try to ban the sites exposing their cherished beliefs; sometimes they succeed momentarily, but most of the time they don’t. I created a site to educate Muslims about true Islam. I hosted it at
Tripod.com
. The Islamists forced Tripod to shut it down and the cowardly Tripod executives complied to appease those Muslims. I got my domain and the site was back again in a couple of weeks. Therefore, the old way of killing the apostates, burning their books, and silencing them by terror does not work. They cannot stop people from reading. Even though my site is banned in Saudi Arabia, Emirates, and many other Islamic countries, a great number of Muslims who never knew the truth about Islam are being exposed to the truth for the first time, and are shocked.

I met a lady on the Internet who converted to Islam and started to wear the Islamic veil. She had a Web site with her picture completely covered in a black veil along with her story of how she became a Muslim. She was very active and she used to advise others not to read my writings. However, when she read the story of Safiyah, the Jewish woman that Mohammad captured
and raped after killing her father, husband, and many of her relatives, she was shocked. She questioned other Muslims about this in vain. Then the door was open and she was cast out of the paradise of ignorance. She kept writing to me and asking questions. Finally, she passed through the other stages from blind faith to enlightenment very quickly and wrote thanking me for guiding her through this arduous path. She withdrew from the Yahoo! Islamic clubs altogether.

When people learn about the unholy life of Mohammad and the absurdities of the Qur’an, they are shocked. I want to expose Islam; write the truth about Mohammad’s unholy life, his hateful words, his senseless assertions; and bombard Muslims with facts. They will be angry. They will curse me, insult me, and tell me that after reading my articles their faith in Islam is “strengthened.” But that is when I know that I have sown the seed of doubt in their mind. They say all this because they are shocked and have entered the stage of denial. The seed of doubt is planted and it will germinate. In some people it takes years, but given the chance it will eventually bloom.

Doubt is the greatest gift we can give to each other. It is the gift of enlightenment. Doubt will set us free, will advance knowledge, and will unravel the mysteries of this universe.

One of the hurdles to overcome is the tradition and false values imposed on us by thousands of years of religious upbringing. The world still values faith and considers doubt a sign of weakness. People talk of men of faith with respect and disdain men of little faith. We are screwed up in our values.

Doubt, on the other hand, means the reverse of the above. It means being capable of thinking independently, of questioning, and of being a skeptic. We owe our science and our modern civilization to men and women who doubted—not to those who believed. Those who doubted were the pioneers; they were the leaders of thought. They were philosophers, inventors, and discoverers. Those who believed lived and died as followers, and made little or no contribution to the advancement of science and human understanding.

After being shocked, or maybe simultaneously, one denies. The majority of Muslims are trapped in denial. They are unable and unwilling to admit the Qur’an is a hoax. They desperately try to explain the unexplainable, find miracles in it, and would willingly bend all the rules of logic to prove that the Qur’an is right. Each time they are exposed to a shocking statement in the Qur’an or a reprehensible act performed by Mohammad, they retreat in denial. This is what I did in the first phase of my journey. Denial is a safe place. It is the unwillingness to admit that you have been kicked out of the paradise of ignorance. You try to go back, reluctant to take the next step forward. In denial you find your comfort zone. In denial you are not going to be hurt, everything is okay; everything is fine.

Truth is extremely painful, especially if one has been accustomed to lies all his life. It is not easy for a Muslim to see Mohammad for who he was. It is like telling a child that his father is a murderer, a rapist, and a thief. A child who adulates his father will not be able to accept it even if all the proofs in the world are shown to him. The shock is so great that all he can do is deny it. He will call you a liar, hate you for hurting him, curse you, consider you his enemy, and may even explode in anger and physically attack you.

This is the stage of denial. It is a self-defense mechanism. If pain is too great, denial will take that pain away. If a mother is informed that her child has died in an accident, her first reaction is often denial. At the moment of great catastrophes, one is usually overwhelmed by a weary sense that this is all a bad dream and that eventually you’ll wake up and everything will be okay. Unfortunately, facts are stubborn and will not go away. One can live in denial for a while, but sooner or later the truth must be accepted.

Muslims are cocooned in lies. Because speaking against Islam is a crime punishable by death, no one dares to tell the truth. Those who do, do not live long. They are quickly silenced. So how would you know the truth if all you hear are lies? On one hand the Qur’an claims to be a miracle and challenges anyone to produce a
Surah
like it:

And if you are in doubt as to which we have revealed to our servant, then produce a
Surah
like it, and call on your helper, besides Allah, if you are truthful.
Qur’an 2:23

Then it instructs its followers to kill anyone who dares to criticize it or challenge it. If you ever dare to take up the challenge and produce a
Surah
as poorly written as the Qur’an, you will be accused of mocking Islam, for which the punishment is death. In this atmosphere of insincerity and deceit, truth is the casualty.

The pain of coming face-to-face with the truth and realizing all that we believed were lies is extremely agonizing. The only mechanism and natural way to deal with it is denial. Denial takes away the pain. It is a soothing bliss, even though it is hiding one’s head in the sand.

One cannot stay in denial forever. Soon the night will fall and the cold shivering reality freezes one’s bones, and you realize that you are out of the paradise of ignorance. That door is closed and the key has been thrown away. You know too much. You are an outcast. Fearfully you look at the dark and twining road barely visible in the twilight of your uncertainties, and gingerly you take your first steps towards an unknown destiny. You grapple and fumble, reluctantly trying to stay focused. But fear overwhelms you and each time you try to run back to the garden you once again face the closed door.

The great majority of Muslims live in denial. They stay behind the closed door. They cannot go back nor do they dare to walk away from it. Those who are inside the garden are those who never left it. This door will only let you out. You cannot get in. That blissful garden is the garden of certitude. It is reserved for the faithful, for those who do not doubt, for those who do not think. They believe anything. They would believe that night is day and day is night. They would believe that Mohammad climbed to the seventh heaven, met with God, split the moon, and conversed with
jinns
.

These believers will never see the truth if they are permanently kept cocooned in lies. All they have heard so far is the lie that Islam is good and if only Muslims practiced true Islam, the world would become a paradise; that the problems of Islam are all the fault of
Muslims. This is a lie. Most Muslims are good people. They are no worse and no better than others. It’s Islam that makes them commit atrocities. Those Muslims who do bad things are those who follow Islam. Islam rears the criminal instinct in people. The more a person is Islamist, the more bloodthirsty, hate mongering, and the more of a zombie she or he becomes.

I wanted to deny what I was reading. I wanted to believe that the real meaning of the Qur’an is something else, but I could not. I could no longer fool myself by saying these inhumane verses were taken out of context. The Qur’an does not have a context. Verses are jammed together at random, often lacking any coherence.

Those who read my articles and are hurt by what I say about the Qur’an and Islam are lucky. They have me to blame. They can hate me, curse me, and direct all their anger at me. However, when I read the Qur’an and learned about its content, I could not blame anyone. After going through the stages of shock and denial, I was confused and blamed myself. I hated myself for thinking, for doubting and for finding fault with what I regarded to be the words of God.

Like all other Muslims, I was exposed to and accepted all the many lies, absurdities, and inhumanities. I was brought up as a religious person. I believed in whatever I was told. These lies were given to me in small doses, gradually, since my childhood. I was never given an alternative to compare. It is like vaccination. I was immune to the truth. But when I started to read the Qur’an seriously from cover to cover and understood what this book is saying, I felt nauseated. All those lies suddenly appeared in front of me.

I had heard them all and had accepted them. My rational thinking was numbed. I had become insensitive to the absurdities of the Qur’an. When I found something that did not make sense, I brushed it off and said to myself that one has to look at the “big picture.” That idyllic big picture, however, was nowhere to be found except in my own mind. I pictured a perfect Islam; so all those absurdities did not bother me because I paid no attention to them. When I read the whole Qur’an, I discovered a distinctly different picture than the one in my mind. The new picture of
Islam emerging from the pages of the Qur’an was violent, intolerant, irrational, arrogant; a far cry from Islam as a religion of peace, equality, and tolerance.

In the face of this much absurdity, I had to deny it to keep my sanity. Nevertheless, how long could I keep denying the truth when it was out like the sun right in front of me? I was reading the Qur’an in Arabic so I could not blame a bad translation. Later I read other translations. I realized many translations in English are not entirely reliable. The translators had tried very hard to hide the inhumanity and the violence in the Qur’an by twisting the words and adding their own words sometimes in parenthesis or brackets to soften its harsh tone. The Arabic Qur’an is more shocking than its English translations.

I was confused and I did not know where to turn. My faith had been shaken and my world had crumbled. I could no longer deny what I was reading. However, I could not accept the possibility that this was all a huge lie.
How could it be,
I kept asking myself,
that so many people have not seen the truth and I could see it? How could great seers like Jalaleddin Rumi not see that Mohammad was an impostor and that the Qur’an is a hoax, and I see it?
It was then that I entered the stage of guilt.

The guilt lasted for many months. I hated myself for having these thoughts. I felt God was testing my faith. I felt ashamed. I spoke with learned people whom I trusted, people who were not only knowledgeable but whom I thought were wise. I heard very little that could quench the burning fire within me. One of these learned men told me not to read the Qur’an for a while. He told me to pray and read only books that would strengthen my faith. I did that, but it did not help. The thoughts about the absurd, sometimes ruthless, ridiculous verses of the Qur’an kept throbbing in my head. Each time I looked at my bookshelf and saw that book, I felt pain. I took it and hid it behind the other books. I thought if I did not think about it for a while, my negative thoughts would go away and I would regain my faith once again. They didn’t go away. I denied as much as I could, until I could no longer. I was shocked, confused, felt guilty, and it was painful.

This period of guilt lasted too long. One day I decided enough is enough. I told myself that it is not my fault.
I am not going to carry this guilt forever, thinking about things that make no sense to me. If God gave me a brain, it is because he wants me to use it. If what I perceive as right and wrong is skewed, then it is not my fault.

He tells me killing is bad and I know it is bad because I do not want to be killed. Then why did his messenger kill so many innocent people and order his followers to kill those who do not believe? If rape is bad, and I know it is bad because I do not want it to happen to people I love, why did Allah’s Prophet rape the women he captured in war? If slavery is bad, and I know it is bad because I hate to lose my freedom and become a slave, why has the Prophet of God enslaved so many people and made himself rich by selling them? If imposition of religion is bad, and I know that it is bad because I do not like another person to force on me a religion that I don’t want, then why did the Prophet eulogize
jihad
and exhort his followers to kill unbelievers, take their booty, and distribute their women and children as spoils of war? If God tells me something is good, and I know that it is good because it feels good to me, then why did his Prophet do the opposite of that thing?

When this guilt was lifted off my shoulders, dismay, disillusionment, or cynicism followed. I felt sorry for having wasted so many years of my life, and for all the Muslims who are still trapped in these foolish beliefs, for all those who lost their lives in the name of these false doctrines, for all the women in virtually all the Islamic countries who suffer all sorts of abuses and oppressions. They do not even know they are being abused.

I thought of all the wars waged in the name of religion—so many people died for nothing. Millions of believers left their homes and families to wage war in the name of God, never to return, thinking they are spreading faith in God. They massacred millions of innocent people. Civilizations destroyed, libraries burned, and so much knowledge lost—for nothing. I recalled my father waking up in the early hours of the morning and in the icy water of the winter performing voodoo. I recalled him coming home hungry and thirsty during the month of fasting, and I thought of the billions of people who torture themselves in this way for nothing. The realization that all that I believed was a lie
and all that I did was a waste of my life, and the fact that a billion other people are still lost in this arid desert of ignorance chasing a mirage that to them appears to be water was disappointing.