Lovenox (Former Muslim)
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Testimony of Leaving Islam
I was born and raised in Pakistan. We moved to America when I was 12 years old. My parents are very religious, they had both of my younger brothers enrolled in hafiz (to memorize Quran by heart) school. In high school biology class was the first time I heard about natural selection and evolution. Before that class I was taught that Allah made everything the way it was today. At first I had a really hard time understanding and integrating everything with my religious beliefs. I tired to talk to my parents about it but they just got upset and had fights about how they should not have come to America and now their children are going to be Christian. The more I learned in school and compared it to my religious teaching the more contradictions I found. At that point I think I found the idea of God unlikely but I was in denial. In college a friend recommended The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I read the book cover to cover in 2 days. After that it was like a whole new world had opened for me. Before this point I did not really know that there were other people who did not believe in God; I thought I was the weird one. I was also afraid what my parents would do if they found out because they are very religious and punishment for leaving Islam is death. It took me a long to admit my believes to myself and even longer to admit them to others. In second year of college I joined a lot of Muslim clubs and started hanging out with the Muslim people here because I thought that maybe if I surrounded myself with the Muslim community I might start believing again and avoid this whole issue altogether. I grew up in Pakistan, the culture is obviously a part of me and it was not hard to fake my believes. I knew I had made a mistake because one time in a weekly club meeting they showed a documentary about scientific miracles in Islam and being a science major and having researched those "miracles" extensively I just could not sit there and pretend that they were miracles.
I was in my last semester of college when my parents started talking about arranging my marriage and I realized that I could not lie to them for the rest of my life. If I got married to a Muslim man without telling him first I would have to fake it for rest of my life. If I were to have children they would be raised Muslim with believes I don't agree with and some of which I find appalling. So I went home and tried to tell my parents but obviously they did not listen to me. It was causing all of this drama at my home and my mom kept crying. She even tried to commit suicide because her children were no longer Muslim (it did not help that my brother who was in hafiz school in Pakistan decided to take this time to tell them that he no longer believed in Islam or Allah anymore either).
In conclusion my fiance and my brothers, and my friends know that I am not Muslim but my parents don't know. I know I am lying to them and I feel really bad about it. I feel like I can't be myself around them and when I go home I do have to listen to hours of Quran and pretend like it is the greatest thing on the planet but at least I admitted it to myself and people are closest to me (besides my parents of course). I just can't bring them anymore grief, they work so hard for us, they came to USA so me and my brothers can have a better future, they just don't want to understand. My mom literally believes that if anything is written against Islam it should just be burned (she found some of my books arguing against religion and burned them in the backyard.) I just can't compete with that even though it makes me a liar. My brother is opposite, he tells them multiple times a day that he is not Muslim and points all the contradictions in Quran to our parents on daily bases.
Although I don't believe in a God, if I did believe in a God I still would have left Islam after I read the Quran with translation during college hoping that it would somehow reconnect me to Allah.
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