Science and the road to reason: an ex-Muslim’s journey

Aliyah Saleem

I was born in London into a Pakistani Muslim family. Like most kids from Muslim families I knew I was Muslim, although I didn’t know why. I did know I had to go to madrassas on the weekends or after school, and that I had to follow some rules that my friends didn’t. My mum moved me around because I used to get into arguments with teachers. When I was about 5 or 6-years-old a teacher slapped me at our local madrassa. I wasn’t wearing my head scarf properly so she pulled me by my ear and slapped me with her massive hand. Mum removed me as soon as she heard. After this incident I went to another madrassa.

Still, my mum wasn’t strict with me. I used to go to the park with my cousins, fall in love with travelling boys, and dance with the music channels on full blast. My life consisted of ignoring family drama, skateboarding, roller-skating and convincing the boys at school to let me play football. I loved extreme sports and watched as much as I could while dreaming of being able to do motor cycle tricks as soon as I was old enough. Then my parents dropped a bombshell on me when I was ten: I was to be whisked off to an Islamic boarding school. I cried, and begged them to not send me away. My mum cried with me and I know she has always felt guilty about it. She believed that getting me out of the turbulent family home would be good for me. Being devoutly religious herself, she wasn’t able to see how disastrous this decision would turn out to be. I have spoken elsewhere about the school in some detail, but now would like to focus on what led me to finally abandoning the Islamic faith all together.

Al-Hudaa college in Lahore, Pakistan

I found myself aged 17 back in the UK from my year in Pakistan studying the Quran. Out there I had become completely dedicated to Islam; I took on the veil and cried in the night about all the people who would burn in hell. Back in the UK, my heart was filled with religious zeal. I had started college, and was teaching Quranic interpretation in the prayer room of the college. I was also teaching young children Islamic studies and Arabic. But now I found myself with full access to the internet, which I hadn’t had in years. At the school in Pakistan we had online access during class time, but that was about it. Newspapers and novels deemed inappropriate, like Harry Potter, were banned or simply not provided. Although they like to deny it, television was also banned. Back home I was able to browse the internet with ease. My parents were fairly strict with me but they always encouraged me to read and go to the library, and in the end, it was the acquisition of knowledge that crushed my belief in Islam.

During our studies, we also looked at religion from a sociological perspective. I was introduced to feminism and Marxism, and for the first time in my life I learned that some people view religion as an apparatus for social control. I began to think about religion through a feminist perspective, as an apparatus to control the bodies, sexuality and lives of women. I had always been taught that Islam gave women all their rights. For instance, Muhammad stopped the practice of female infanticide and Aisha his wife had been a scholar after his death. Before I began studying feminism I thought the hijab was there to benefit women as it protected them. I hadn’t thought of the way it could be used to control them instead.

I found myself thinking about Islam and women in a way that I had never dared to before. I did not like wearing the hijab as a young teen; I never wanted to wear it in the first place. But by the time I was approaching my late teens I would have felt naked without it. I became fully conscious of the suffocation that had followed me for years. I reflected on how my own submission to Islam took place after years of sometimes silent, and sometimes open rebellion. I remembered how I had said I didn’t want to wear hijab even though I was going to this school. So when did wearing it full-time, without complaint, become a reality? When did I stop resisting?

I was in the library one day, caressing the edges of books with the tips of my fingers. Then a title jumped out at me and my jaw dropped. The God Delusion was staring at me. I had never imagined that belief in God could be a delusion. I genuinely believed that people who did not accept Islam knew it was the truth, but that they were rebelling because of their desires. I know, because that’s how I saw it. I grabbed this book, and took it out, feeling a mixture of excitement and fear. I had heard of evolution before reading it, but we certainly didn’t learn about it at Islamic school. In Pakistan, I read Harun Yahya’s excuse for a textbook where he tries to pin Nazism and Stalin’s actions on Darwin. Now I began reading about it in a different way. A lot of what Dawkins said didn’t slot into place because I didn’t really get evolution at all. I put The God Delusion down and decided to just focus on evolution for a bit. I looked up the library catalogue and was amazed at how many titles came up. Here I was thinking it was a tiny fringe theory. I absorbed myself with this for a while, and was convinced by all the evidence laid out before me.

I moved on from evolution to cosmology. At this point I was beginning to show cracks but I still clung onto God. I mean it could have been God who actually did evolution right? I tried to ignore Adam and Eve. I came across Carl Sagan’s The Pale Blue Dot. I confess I could only take in chunks of it. My science education was lacking, but one thing that did penetrate my brain was how tiny we are. In the book, I saw a picture that changed my life forever. It was a picture of a beam of light with a tiny blue dot, and that was Earth. My heart stopped for a second when I saw that picture, and for that moment, my fear of hell, dying, God, the hijab all vanished. I stopped thinking about whether Islam was true or not, and just sat in awe of the magnitude of the universe we live in. I reasoned, and continue to reason that even if God exists, he/she/it would be magnificent enough to not care which foot I put in the bathroom first, or whether a drop of urine caught on my clothes, which I was taught could lead to punishment in the grave. He/she/it couldn’t possibly be so petty as to punish us forever just because we didn’t worship correctly or were born into the wrong religion.

I know many believers are not convinced by the reasons I give as to why I don’t believe in God, which is fair enough. They can believe whatever they like, and if they were convinced by the arguments against God’s existence then they would be sceptics also. Many will say that instructions on entering the bathroom in a certain way is not really what religion is about, or that I have misunderstood religion. Perhaps I have done so after many years of studying it, but I doubt it. It’s all well and good to speak about religion and God in the abstract, but this is what religion is about to millions of people; little instructions on how to live, eat, marry and so on. Eat with your right hand, say bismillah before mealtimes, make sure to clean with your left hand and if you laugh during prayer, start all over again.

I used to sit on the roof of our conservatory with my Spider-Man blanket watching the stars. When I realised the possibility that God might not exist I felt a lightness the like of which I have never experienced again. I was finally content realising that no one was reading my thoughts, deciphering my dreams or measuring the width of blackness in my heart. There was so much else which made me reject Islam, including the rampant homophobia, the half testimony of women, the legitimisation of wife beating in the Quran, and the enslavement of non-Muslim women after war.

I accept that some people are willing to ‘contextualise’ the wife-beating verse, but I’m sorry, if the Quran is the last guide for all of mankind to follow don’t you think Allah could have put a note in saying that women should not be beaten in any context, at any time? Also the Quran refers to itself as being clear, which doesn’t seem true to me. This is not to suggest that I am not aware that there are so many interpretations of Islam, and that it means different things to millions of people. This only suggests to me that Islam is a product of human invention and creativity and not from a Creator. That Islam and the other religions in the world have come from us does not in anyway demean them for me. Rather I see religion as the end result of humanity’s need to understand the world around it. Now, with science, the enlightenment and philosophy, I don’t feel that belief in the supernatural is necessary to explain the world around us. However I do respect people’s right to believe whatever they like, and to practice however they like, as long as it does not harm others.

I have now been Godless for around six years. I now dance, listen to music, go out at night, wear whatever the fuck I like and do as I please. I spent all of my teen years in a mental cage, and I have done my best to burst free from that. I have never regretted the decision to leave Islam, and to choose my own path.  As an ex-Muslim I have dealt with a lot of difficulties. My immediate family knew from the start. At first they did not understand, but as time has gone on they have respected who I am even if they don’t agree with me. As my mother told an extended family member recently, “all my daughter is saying is that she wants proof.”

I have spent years alone as an ex-Muslim feeling isolated, guilty and ashamed because of prejudice within the Muslim community towards ex-Muslims. I had to re-wire my brain, and unlearn the misogyny that was ingrained in me. I have now found others out there, and I know that things are changing for us. Sometimes we need to be told that not only are we not alone, but that there is nothing to be ashamed of. Being faithless is becoming reality even in conservative Muslim communities. No matter how much religious leaders bleat on that we are misinformed, our numbers are growing. Prepare for the storm within.