Ezekiel Murtaduddin (Former Muslim)
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Testimony of Leaving Islam
I was born into a moderate but modern Sunni Muslim family in Karachi, Pakistan. Unlike most Muslims my parents were fairly pragmatic and always sought to understand and question every aspect of life and religion. My family was not one of those blind followers but we were focused on not just understanding the Quran but also judging the text of this book honestly without any prejudice or preconceived notions of its divine origins.
My family's journey out of Islam started as soon as we started reading the translations of Quran. Though myself and my siblings had a religious teacher who came to our house to teach us Quran in Arabic, my parents never believed that learning the Quran in Arabic was of any use to a person unaware of the language itself. They sought to introduce myself and my siblings to the translation of the Quran but much to our dismay the religious teacher opposed it vehemently.
So this raised further curiosity in myself and my siblings as well my parents. In Pakistan we did not have access to books and libraries so we could not do much, if any research on the prophet. But we had plenty of doubts starting to creep in as soon as we read and reread and then reread the variety of translations of the Quran.
We were starting to question the need to immortalize the chastisement of consorts of Mohammed in the Quran by threatening them with divorce or punishment. We were questioning the need for Allah to step into the personal life of Mohammed to resolve trivial issues like his annoyance of visitors or the fact that he had fallen in love with his adopted son's wife.
We even began questioning the concept of divine justice in the religion where Allah who claims that he is the Most Merciful and even more merciful than one's own mortal mother was willing to punish people who committed finite sins in a finite lifetime with finite knowledge with an eternal punishment, and if not an eternal punishment then a punishment completely disproportionate to the actual transgressions themselves. It baffled us that how one could call such a god the Most Merciful and at the same time be able to conceive greater mercy than him.
We could not understand why the Muslims claimed that Quran was a beautiful text with a miraculous nature, because upon reading the Quran we found it disorderly and often contradictory of its own claims. We could not see it as a book worthy of being called a book even, because it lacked basic organization required of a book. For instance the chapters in this book are totally unrelated to their headings and more often than not do not even stick to a single topic. My family left for Canada when I was 14 years old. Once we got here we found our relatives to be extremely religious yet totally unaware of the basic gripes we had of the Quran. Upon further query we realized that they had never actually bothered reading the book attentively enough to be able to grasp the magnitude of errors in it. It was not a big shock for us to learn this as we were aware that the majority of Muslims were uneducated and had never read the translation of the Quran, but we did find it strange that the educated people have not read its translation either.
We experienced for the first time as a family kindness and generosity of non-Muslims that Quran blamed for so much. It intrigued us that people who were following the so-called god's complete religion and way of life everywhere were totally oblivious to the how to live their lives. I for one wanted to seek the answers to why Quran was the way it was and its followers such a bunch of brutes.
For a brief period of time I got involved in religious polemics trying to understand what the other people believed while attempting to defend Islamic beliefs in debates with believers of a variety of other religions. This allowed me to learn greatly about what others thought of Islam as well as what my co-believers believed and what my co-believers were enraged or ashamed by. It gave me a chance to learn intricate details about Mohammed's actual life and persona, and to give myself enough knowledge to judge Mohammed pragmatically.
At the age of 26, I left Islam after judging Mohammed to have lied for personal gain. I continued to strive to convince the rest of my family for a few more years, eventually succeeding in convincing them that all religions were manmade. My family left Islam three years later.
Now we are happy and feel secure about our future and have no guilt nor fear on account of us not believing in Allah and his self-proclaimed prophet. We believe that one who claims all the paradoxical superlative traits to himself or his god cannot possibly be a sane person worthy of following. It feels great to be liberated from the burden of following a man with questionable morals and ethics.
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