Why I Am Not a Muslim

Title: Following Bertrand Russel’s “Why I am not a Christian” who proves to be a constant source of inspiration here and there

I have been devout of my Islamic faith for as long as I can remember. An ardent believer and a practitioner saying the daily prayers in congregation. I suppose my parents and peers could attest in the way of dispelling any rhetorical exaggeration. If my belief waned or practice wavered, I remained passionately religious- incredibly, scepticism only intensified my sincerity in belief and actions. I was shy and reserved, had little to no friends, but diametrically opposed was my unbridled curiosity. And today as I have resigned the last vestiges of the faith I have wondered if it was a natural progression to my being. My feelings perhaps can be summed up with an analogy, sensing that the cloak of dogma I once wore became increasingly prickled with the thorns of miracles, believing in superstition or religious casuistry– until at last I could not bear its weight and cast it off entirely. At any rate being who I am I have thought of sitting down and penning a colloquy between my head and my beliefs, if not for anyone just for myself (maybe to avoid a feckless attitude to any nostalgic sentimentality).

And so here I am. But before I begin, I have to say I intend to write something wherein I have no theory to support, none to controvert. It is a deliberate choice to give a perspective rather than run a polemical defence. Vast amount of ink has been spilled on these issues already and even if I had much to argue- it is banal. Imagine the infinite regress of a Cosmological argument for god or I run a passionate defence against morality derived from superstition. Perhaps proclaiming that I cannot prove or disprove God's existence would be better, but at the same time, the groundwork of all organized religion is rooted in fiction. These things are like a double-edged sword because alternately the believers cannot prove or disprove the gods of Babylon, Olympus or whatever of their forefathers. Also, in these affairs the words of certain comedian ring true, “Criticism is easily construed as insult and ridicule easily as insult”, so I rest my case. And finally, I add that at the time of writing (21 years of age) I do not hold any presumptions of capital truth, acknowledge the nature of ever-changing beliefs and my cordial attitude towards it. As John Maynard Keynes said, “When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, Sir?”

The seeds of my disbelief were first sown when I found myself in Mecca, the purported birthplace of Islam. I was 17 or 18 and in the holy month of Ramadan I was there in the holiest of places with my dad for a ritual pilgrimage. It is worthwhile adding that it was out of my own prompting and insistence that this came to fruition. Soon I found myself, for a lack of better word, with troops of idolators just like in any other temples or Pagodas (or wherever) circumambulating a purported housing of God. I was well-aware of the practices, history and significance of everything I was supposed to do- but to be in person and experience the egregious display of mechanistic piety assailed any sense of numinous in me. How could my eyes and ears be insensible to everything happening? Someone had affixed a magical number of 7 to circle around the Kaaba or to run between the mountains of Safa and Marwa_._ The absurdity of the rituals overwhelmed me. I was no different than the pagan Arabs, thousands of years ago mindlessly circumambulating (supposedly the same building now emptied of the idols) or running between these two hills to touch and kiss the idols for acquiring luck and good fortune. It was the first assault against my deeply held convictions of pure monotheism hitherto unquestioned. At any rate I travelled the whole length of religious places and sites across different cities of Saudi Arabia. My disillusionment only grew stronger. In Mina pilgrims must throw stones at three different pillars who are purportedly the devil-I will not elaborate on the different sorts of questions it evokes in my mind(immediately). But there were even bigger ontological quandaries -why an omnipotent god would desire these practices?

Perhaps my discomfort could be explained by the seemingly expedient compromise between Arabic paganism and whatever monotheistic principles I believed? Would it help if I were an Arab? I know not. But what I viscerally felt was that the rites of the pilgrimage, and indeed of Islam as a whole, could not be understood as the dictates of a supreme being. These were human constructs, shaped by the cultural and historical context of 7th century Arabia. Perhaps what I witnessed was not the pure expression of divine law, but simply a human attempt to domesticate the ineffable within the bounds of human imagination.

Importantly what was made apparent to me was that there is an exceedingly thin line between the true religion and paganism (I do not use the word derogatorily). Muslims may fashion all sorts of explanations as to why the black stone in the Kaaba (which is kissed and venerated, as was done by the prophet and his “pagan” ancestors before) is not a deviation from the strict monotheism it claims to espouse. Take the Yazidis for example whom the orthodox mainstream Muslims will not hesitate to call disbelievers/heretics- who claim to only venerate the peacock but not worship it(see the parallel between Muslims and the black stone). Muslims may retort that its not obligatory to kiss the stone or regard it in any fashion except that now I was enlightened of a more subtle point. One cannot selectively pick and choose some abstract practice and claim its validity under the broad auspices of an otherwise(assuming) truthful religion that is representation of objective nature of reality. I will give a coarse example, during Hajj it is obligatory for the pilgrims to the stone the devil at Mina (as mentioned before) how is it distinguishable from another primitive heathen practice and belief wherein stones are thrown to absolve the sins of past year or as a sort of charm against punishment and misfortune??

C. S. Lewis famously argued that a man claiming to be God must be either a lunatic, a liar, or truly the Lord (he was passionately Christian, so we know what he believed). If I likewise extended this argument to a man claiming to be a messenger of God, here I was believing that he was neither insane nor dishonest. Had I lent the same leniency to those who made different choices? Why shouldn’t Guru Nanak or Joseph Smith who came after Muhammad share his claims of divine inspiration?

In any case, I returned home but the sights and experiences of the pilgrimage revolved around my head. I coped my vitiated belief by trying to be more steadfast. But the single biggest obstacle, then and now, was never a philosophical argument nor some abstract reasoning-it was believing in miracles. Believing in miracles, I never could- how could there be a virgin birth?? Where did the Y chromosome of Jesus come from if he did not have a father?? -I simply swallowed and ignored. It would however come to an inflection point when the pandemic appeared, and I chanced upon a book (whose title I cannot remember now) dealing with the seminal work of western philosophers. I read on David Hume and his work on miracles. Effectively it took a clear argument propounded by logic to rethink the foundations of my faith:

‘No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.’

Now…to talk about miracles in earnest is to peel away the sacrosanct layers of the onion(religion). The more I thought or searched (not so much to do since there is no evidence literally) it became painstakingly clear that there was no probative value in the whole exercise (There is also none to bear the probative burden – ridiculously one takes it at face value). The story of my childhood comes irresistibly to mind- my father by the way of conquering my fear of ghosts/poltergeists/supernatural/dark- told me if I could show him a ghost, he would grant me anything!! It is perhaps an illustrative lesson: nowhere in life I accept and conduct myself so blindly.

At the time there were “gradations” (for a lack of better word) to how I processed everything. At one extreme of the spectrum are those would-be events that we call impossible. By definition, miracles are events that are extremely improbable nevertheless I would not classify - that the Omnipotent God talked to Moses directly or took Abraham as His friend, together with a claim that Noah took all species of the animal kingdom (in pairs!) in a large boat or to say Jesus rose the dead. As ridiculous as it sounds, some were more dubious than others. Muslims for example believe and celebrate that Muhammad went to the seven heavens on a beast called Burak and returned (from Jerusalem!) the same night to Mecca. I say these because everything was a matter of shifting questions ….. but also, emerging ones. To give another example, Muslims are ordained to believe that Muhammad was chosen to be the last prophet. “I was a Prophet when Adam was yet between water and clay.” But who could provoke a ridiculous question such as there were different species of humans living before and during the period of our ancient ancestors (homo sapiens)! A trivial example, perhaps, but I could hardly sustain the multitude of disbelief that crowded in my mind.

Finding religious miracles (by extension other dogmas) contrary to reason I wholesale found my organized religion to be rejectable. One is simply unable to believe the truth by revelation. There are also other avenues of authenticity of religious texts and history and philosophical argument that I have ventured into since then, in my leisure, but I will not list them here. Relatedly on the topic of miracles, I cannot resist but mention how in my petulant reasoning of a teenager I had taken issue with revelation_. How the omnipotent God reveals the divine truth to a singular person and any reasonable being familiar with real life optimization problems will take issue with how inefficient and wrong this approach is_. If I am going against an Omniscient entity perhaps any reasoning will fall short!

And thus, the spectre of disbelief consumed everything else-my prayers became perfunctory and soon grinded to a halt. Who knows if the lockdowns from the pandemic exacerbated it? I am of the opinion that it expedited it at most. The lockdowns have since been lifted; I have also found myself in a foreign land- where despite frequenting the mosque several times my convictions have only grown more resolute. I mention this because the congregation always appealed to me- the sense of community to a shy and socially starved kid but I also appreciated how people of different socio-economic backgrounds came together. In a foreign land it was even more pronounced- people of different races and ethnicities coming together but I turned away my face the same . It is perhaps in my nature that no matter how much I am cajoled I cannot hold those objectively implausible facts and belief to be incontrovertible and make my life act on it.

I am not however satisfied with a blunt “it is in my nature to be thus and thus…” and for that in solitary life abroad, I readily gave up on a community for solace, comfort and companionship. There are other avenues to pick my brain and I will talk of some of them and then end. I realize long before I had creeping disbelief, I had deep seated issues with the morality and ethics within the faith. I can never in good conscience support lapidation (stoning, if I am being more crude) sanctioned by an all merciful and compassionate god. I never for once believed that Muhammad was a paragon of virtue and excellence and that his life to be emulated (although by doctrine all Muslim is, and on top love him more than anything else). The god in Quran to put it sensitively - is like a tyrant and the narrative is that of an impotent one- evoking wrath, vanity, and envy at every turn- completely inconsistent with my conception of a perfect being. I will not give any more particular examples but return to the larger point of morality and ethics. Islam, as like most religions, use fear as the basis of dogma for faith and it is faith that dictates all laws. In essence Quranic ethical system is based entirely on fear. Muhammad uses God’s wrath-to-come as a weapon with which to threaten his opponents, and to terrorize his own followers into pious acts and total obedience to himself.

I am not certain if fear would have worked for me had I not been born in a post-scarcity era of 21st century but in any case, this system of ethics is not at all reconcilable with me. At the top of my head, I will try to exemplify how spurious and random I find the whole thing. Bizarrely Muhammad abolishes the arrow game as superstition, and yet he seems to have kept the superstitions of his ancestors—attaching great importance to omens, especially those connected with names (There are Islamic rulings on naming children). I will give a less abstract example… many of us in touch with contemporary affairs will know of the tension between women and permissible clothing as ordained by Islam. Imagine my surprise when I got to be in Mecca and was made aware of the fact that Burqa is forbidden during Hajj. What an affront it is to the pious women who adheres to this divine doctrine of wearing Burqa (by her own volition or not) and must show her face in the holiest of holy places! Ethics is just reduced to obeying god’s ruling. It confounds me to imagine that there is an abstruse entity whom we know absolutely nothing of and our precepts are to be divined from this nebulous source. It would also be remiss of me to not say that Islam is unique in a sense that it tries to legislate every single aspect of an individual’s life. And these all are removing the Prophet and messenger out of the picture- the prophet Muhammad for example proscribed entering the bathroom using the right foot (I have deliberately chosen an egregious case here). Following the practices of the prophet, however absurd they seem, makes one more virtuous!

I have now arrived to my input on this matter, although marginal to the essay. Morality and ethics should be based on principles of utilitarianism- I am open to other paradigm of thinking- but least of all, on any basis to superstitious beliefs and practices. And unless I am grossly mistaken, for me (I speak for myself) to live life as a Muslim would be to live a life deaf to practicalities and rationality. There are other things I could have argued such as the idea that Islamic law and regulation are inimical to human progress but doing so will have defeated the purpose of the essay. I will however mention something that has bothered me long since I was believing… that there is a dense mass of ignorance (by design) in the Muslim population which disbelieves in modern progress and neutralizes all attempt to co-opt or improve the lives of them and other Muslims. It is as if the religious crowd are like the avowed paladins of regression- and why wouldn’t they- because thrusting the society back into the primitiveness of the time of Prophet Muhammad is a virtuous ideal. It is very much intrinsic- Muhammad never sat on a table or used a chair and that by dint of emulation anyone eating with their hands is earning more virtue. And these, by no means, are exaggeration. As of writing this, I remember of a time my mom took me to the cinema to watch a movie she was interested in. Interestingly, the movie (in Bengali) titled ‘Television’ dealt with a water-locked rural village where the elected leader of that area bans every kind of image (on the grounds of being sinful). Being very young (most of it went over my head) I would not be able to pull a generalizable parallel here except say that these ‘retrogression-ist’ attitudes are timeless and ubiquitous. Let’s say superstition has a twin brother- ignorance: a companion as constant as a shadow. If I were perhaps a medieval voyager from distant lands I would comment ‘Ignorant they are and ignorant they desire to remain’.

Lastly, I would write here an imaginative exercise that I have often put before myself. If I believed with all the defects- the doctrine of Islam and comported accordingly, the ultimate reward- the heaven- would be before me. I say this with no duplicity in my heart that the crass descriptions of heaven (in the Quran)- with the voluptuous houris or the flowing rivers of milk and honey or young boys with wine- do not appeal to me. If the licentious pleasures of heaven are not for me then an eternity of pathological torment awaits me (if I also take the descriptions of hell to be literally true). It is in the end a puerile argument, live slavishly to the dictums of a patently false/antiquated belief system for no reward that incentivize me or (for whatever reason) convinced of the utility to be Muslim keep up with false pretences publicly. I need not say how anyone with a same conclusion would choose differently.

I believe those who preach God, need God. It is much more fulfilling to cloak myself in humility and compassion and curiosity, to do the best of my abilities, and perhaps leave a legacy (however trivial) of helping humans around me. But what of my conscious? The sentient experience, built of however many years I live, will die with me. What was there before I was born? nothing- and what will be there when I die? nothing. Is it not much more comforting?

“Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us”

-James Madison