Ex-mohammedan (former Muslim)
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Testimony of Leaving Islam
Well I was born a Muslim (yes, I know such a thing doesn't technically exist but you know what I mean) and was raised in a Muslim household.
At first Islam was a minor force in our household, but then it started to take a vile hold on the mindset of my parents. I think this was because my older brother developed schizophrenia and made life for all of us pretty difficult. As a reaction to these difficult events, my parents started to become more religious. We started to go the Mosque a lot more and I started attending classes. What put me off religion at first was my teacher; he was a very ignorant and vindictive person. For example he hit a younger class member (I think the boy was seven) for attending his sisters wedding which, oh the shame, was a mixed 'western' type marriage. According to him these events, i.e. the mixing of the sexes, were Un-Islamic and warranted severe punishing. This and many other things that he did, like condemning the west as being dirty and that we as Muslim youth were strangers in this 'kufr' land, despite the fact that he was claiming benefits and living in a council house made me angry at his ignorance.
Luckily for me, however, I only started to attend these schools when I was 14 and when I was 16 I left (indeed most Muslim youth leave madrassas when they are of the age when parents can not force them to go which is usually at the age of 16). I still attended the Mosque every Friday and still considered myself a Muslim. However my parents were getting even more strict with religion - with the inevitable consequence of them criticizing me for my 'un-Islamic' lifestyle. This irritated me greatly but I generally just accepted conditions the way they were. At the time I considered myself a Muslim but had a number of problems with religion which included:
- Too many hideously objectionable teachings e.g. the damnation of unbelievers.
- I discovered the word "obedience" was used in khutbahs too often, but what price critical thought.
- I met some Muslims whose fanatical obsession with the Allah left them empty unthinking shells of human beings, devoid of personality.
- Too much literalism in Islam. What a small, petty tribal god these people have conceived! I thought to myself.
- Islams fixation with sex.
Academically I did very well (in hindsight I think that excellence in my studies saved me from the wrath of my parents) which led me to getting a place at a good/prestigious university away from home. At university one of my tutors (in fact he was a post-graduate ex-Muslim student) gave me a copy of Ibn Warraq's "Why I am not a Muslim" after a lengthy conversation/debate I had with him where I argued why I believed that Islam was not only a noble, pure and virtuous faith, but also the truth. I hesitated reading it at first, but I had always prided myself on my individualism so I decided to read it. When I did, I was taken by his clarity of thought and purpose in writing. I know its a cliche, but I could relate to his writings as both Ibn and I were from traditional Islamic backgrounds. This led me to search for other works critical of Islam and the concept of God such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell and many others. I also studied the historical period of the Renaissance which seemed to me to encapsulate why the West had made a great leap forward and the rest of the world hadn't.
I now had to decide whether I was a Muslim; and in my heart I knew that I was having difficulties accepting Islam. This scared me as Islam was still wedded to my mind. The final push for me into rejecting Islam as a religion came in the form of reading of the ahadith, which confirmed that Mohammad was actually a bad person; i.e. a bandit, thief, paedeophile, etc. I decided to leave Islam in December 2003 after a year of critical analysis and intense thought. At first I was scared, depressed, angry and fearful of what may happen to me - but after a few months I totally forgot about religion.
I am now a secular humanist who enjoys reading, writing, watching films and taking note of current affairs.
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