Why We Left Islam (12 page)

Prior to that God was always in the back of my mind. I used to talk to him in my imagination and those conversations seemed real to me. I thought God was watching and taking account of every good act that I did. The feeling that someone was watching over me, guiding my steps, and protecting me was very comforting. It was difficult to accept that there is no such thing as Allah and even if there is a God, it is not Allah. I did not give up the belief in God, but by then I knew for sure that if this universe has a maker, it couldn’t be the deity that Mohammad had envisioned. Allah was ignorant to the core. The Qur’an is full of errors. No Creator of this universe could be as stupid as the god of the Qur’an appeared to be. Allah could not have existed anywhere else except in the mind of a sick man. I understood that he was but a figment of Mohammad’s imagination and nothing more. How disappointed I was when I realized all these years I had been praying to a fantasy.

This feeling of loss and disappointment was accompanied by a sense of sadness, or some kind of depression. It was as if my whole world had fallen apart. I felt like the ground I was standing on was no longer there and I was falling into a bottomless pit. Without exaggerating, it felt like I was in hell.

I was bewildered, pleading for help, and no one could. I felt ashamed of my thoughts and hated myself for having such thoughts. The guilt was accompanied by a profound sense of loss and depression. As a rule, I am a positive thinker. I see the good side of everything. I always think tomorrow is going to be better than today. I am not the kind of person who is easily depressed. However, this feeling of loss was overwhelming. I still recall that weight in my heart. I thought God has forsaken me and I did not know why.
“Is that God’s punishment?”
I kept asking myself. I do not remember hurting anyone ever. I went out of my way to help anyone whose life crossed mine and asked me for help.
So, why does God want to punish me in this way? Why is he not answering my prayers? Why has he left me to myself and these thoughts I can find no
answers to? Does he want to test me? Then where are the answers to my prayers? Will I pass this test if I become stupid and stop using my brain? If so, why did he give me a brain? Would only dumb people pass the test of faith?

I felt betrayed and violated. I cannot say which feeling was predominant. At times I was disillusioned, sad, or dismayed. Even if faith is false, it is still sweet. It is very comforting to believe.

Juxtaposing my feelings of sadness and loss, I felt liberated. Curiously I no longer felt confused or guilty. I knew for sure the Qur’an was a hoax and Mohammad was an impostor.

To overcome this sadness I tried to keep myself busy with other activities. I even took dancing lessons and experienced what it means to be alive, to be free of guilt, to enjoy life and to be normal. I realized how much I had missed and how foolishly I deprived myself of the simple pleasures of life. Of course, denial is how cults exert their control over their believers. I denied myself the simplest pleasures of life, was living in constant fear of God, and I thought this was normal. I am talking of pleasures like sleeping in in the morning, dancing, dating, or sipping a glass of fine wine.

At this time, I entered another stage of my spiritual journey to enlightenment. I became angry. Angry for having believed those lies for so many years, for wasting so many years of my life chasing a wild goose. Angry at my culture for betraying me, for the wrong values it gave me; with my parents for teaching me a lie; with myself for not thinking before, for believing in lies, trusting an impostor; with God for letting me down, for not intervening and stopping the lies that were being disseminated in his name.

When I saw pictures of millions of Muslims who, with so much devotion, went to Saudi Arabia, many of them spending their life’s savings to perform
hajj
, I became angry at the lies these people were brought up with. When I read someone had converted to Islam, something Muslims love to advertise and make a big issue of, I became saddened and angry. I was sad for that poor soul and angry with the lies.

I was angry at the whole world that tries to protect this lie, that defends it and even abuses you if you raise your voice to
try to tell them what you know. It is not just Muslims, but even Westerners who do not believe in Islam. It’s okay to criticize anything but Islam. What amazed me and made me even angrier was the resistance I faced when I tried to tell others that Islam is not the truth.

Fortunately, this anger did not last long. I knew that Mohammad was no messenger of God but a charlatan, a demagogue whose only intention was to beguile people and satisfy his own narcissistic ambitions. I knew all those childish stories of a hell with scorching fire and a heaven with rivers of wine, milk, and honey were the figments of a sick, wild, insecure, and bullying mind of a man in desperate need to dominate and affirm his own authority.

I realized I could not be angry with my parents; for they did their best and taught me what they thought to be the best. I could not be angry at my society or culture because my people were just as misinformed as my parents and myself. After some thought, I realized everyone was a victim. There are one billion or more victims. Even those who have become victimizers are victims of Islam, too. How could I blame Muslims if they do not know what Islam stands for and honestly, though erroneously, believe that it is a religion of peace?

What about Mohammad? Should I be angry with him for lying, deceiving, and misleading people? How could I be angry with a dead person? Mohammad was an emotionally sick man who was not in control of himself. He grew up as an orphan in the care of five different foster parents before he reached the age of eight. As soon as he became attached to someone, he was snatched away and given to someone else. This must have been hard on him and was detrimental to his emotional health. As a child, deprived of love and a sense of belonging, he grew with deep feelings of fear and lack of self-confidence. He became a narcissist. A narcissist is a person who has not received enough love in his childhood, who is incapable of loving, but instead craves attention, respect, and recognition. He sees his own worth in the way others view him. Without that recognition he is nobody. He becomes a manipulater and a pathetic liar.

Narcissists are grandiose dreamers. They want to conquer the world and dominate everyone. Only in their megalomaniac reveries is their narcissism satisfied. Some famous narcissists are Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and Mao. Narcissists are intelligent, yet emotional wrecks. They are deeply disturbed people. They set themselves extremely high goals. Their goals always have to do with domination, power, and respect. They are nobody if they are neglected. Narcissists often seek justification to impose their control over their unwary victims. For Hitler it was the party and race. For Mussolini it was fascism or the unity of the nation against others. For Mohammad it was religion.

These causes are just tools in their quest for power. Instead of promoting themselves, the narcissists promote a cause, an ideology, or a religion while presenting themselves as the only authority and the representative of these causes. Hitler did not call the Germans to love him as a person but to love and respect him because he was the
Führer
. Mohammad could not ask anyone to obey him. However, he could easily demand his followers obey Allah and his messenger. Of course, Allah was Mohammad’s own alter ego, so all the obedience was to him in the final account. In this way Mohammad could wield control over everyone’s life by telling him or her he is the representative of God and what he says is what God has ordained.

Mohammad was a ruthless man with no feelings. When he decided the Jews were of no use to him, he stopped kowtowing to them and eliminated them all. He massacred all the men of Bani Qurayza and banished or murdered every other Jew and Christian from Arabia. Surely if God wanted to destroy these people he would not have needed the help of his messenger.

Therefore, I found there was no reason to be angry with an emotionally sick man who died a long time ago. Mohammad was a victim himself of the stupid culture of his people, of the ignorance of his mother who, instead of keeping him during the first years of his life when he needed her love most, entrusted him to a Bedouin woman to raise him so she could find a new husband.

I could not criticize or blame the ignorant Arabs of the seventh century for not being able to discern that Mohammad was
sick and not a prophet, that his outlandish promises, his impressive dreams of conquering and subduing the great nations when he was just a pauper, were caused by his pathological emotional complications and were not due to a divine power. How could I blame those ignorant Arabs for falling prey to a man like Mohammad when only in the last century, millions of Germans fell prey to the charisma of another narcissist who, just as Mohammad, made big promises and was as ruthless, as manipulative, and as ambitious as he was?

After serious thought, I realized there is not a single person I could be angry with. I realized we are all victims and victimizers at the same time. The culprit is ignorance. Because of our ignorance we believe in charlatans and their lies, allowing them to disseminate hate among us in the name of false deities, ideologies, or religions. This hate separates us from each other, and prevents us from seeing our oneness and understanding that we are all members of the human race, related to each other and interdependent.

It was then that my anger gave way to a profound feeling of empathy, compassion, and love. I made a promise to myself to fight this ignorance that divides the human race. We paid, and are paying, dearly for our disunity. This disunity is caused by ignorance and the ignorance is the result of false beliefs and pernicious ideologies that are concocted by emotionally unhealthy individuals for self-serving purposes.

Ideologies separate us. Religions cause disunity, hate, fighting, killing, and antagonism. As members of the human race, we need no ideology, cause, or religion to be united.

I realized that the purpose of life is not to believe, but to doubt. I realized that no one can teach us the truth because truth cannot be taught. It can only be experienced. No religion, philosophy, or doctrine can teach you the truth. Truth is in the love we have for our fellow human beings, in the laughter of a child, in friendship, in companionship, in the love of a parent and a child, and in our relationships with others. Truth is not in ideologies. The only thing that is real is love.

The process of going from faith to enlightenment is an arduous and painful process. Let us borrow a term from Sufism and call that the seven “valleys” of enlightenment.

Faith is the state of being confirmed in ignorance. You will continue to stay in that state of blissful ignorance until you are shocked and forced out of it. This shock is the first valley.

The natural first reaction to shock is denial. Denial acts like a shield. It buffers the pain and protects you from the agony of going out of your comfort zone. The comfort zone is where we feel at ease, where we find everything familiar, where we don’t face new challenges or the unknown. This is the second valley.

Growth doesn’t take place in comfort zones. In order to go forward and evolve we need to get out of our comfort zones. We won’t do that unless we are shocked. It is also natural to buffer the pain of shock by denial. At this moment we need another shock, and we may decide to shield ourselves again with another denial. The more a person is exposed to facts and the more he is shocked, the more he tries to protect himself with more denials. However, denials do not eliminate the facts. They just shield us momentarily. When we are exposed to facts, at a certain point we will be unable to continue denying. Suddenly we won’t be able to keep our defenses up and the wall of denials will come down. We can’t keep hiding our heads in the sand perpetually. Once doubt sets in, it will have a domino effect and we find ourselves hit from all directions by facts that up until now we avoided and denied. Suddenly all those absurdities that we accepted and even defended are no longer logical and we reject them.

We are then driven into the painful stage of confusion and that is the third valley. The old beliefs seem unreasonable, foolish, and unacceptable, yet we have nothing to cling to. This valley, I believe, is the most dreadful stage in the passage from faith to enlightenment. In this valley we lose our faith without having found the enlightenment. We are standing in nowhere. We experience a free fall. We ask for help but all we get is a rehashing of some nonsensical clichés. It seems that those who try to help us are lost themselves, yet they are so convinced. They believe in what they don’t know. The arguments they present are not logical at all. They expect
us to believe without questioning. They bring the example of the faith of others. But the intensity of the faith of other people does not prove the truth of what they believe in.

This confusion eventually gives way to the fourth valley, guilt. You feel guilty for thinking. You feel guilty for doubting, for questioning, for not understanding. You feel naked, and ashamed of your thoughts. You think it is your fault if the absurdities mentioned in your holy books make no sense to you. You think that God has abandoned you or that he is testing your faith. In this valley you are torn apart by your emotions and your intellect. Emotions are not rational, but they are extremely powerful. You want to go back to the paradise of ignorance; you desperately want to believe, but you simply can’t. You have committed the sin of thinking. You have eaten the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. You have angered the god of your imaginations.

Finally you decide there is no need to feel guilty for the understanding. That guilt does not belong to you. You feel liberated but at the same time dismayed for all those lies that kept you in ignorance and the time wasted. This is the valley of disillusionment. At the same time you are overtaken by sadness. You feel liberated, yet like coming out of prison after spending a lifetime there, you are overtaken by a deep sense of depression. You feel lonely and, despite your freedom, you miss something. You ponder the time lost. You think of the many people who believed in this nonsense and foolishly sacrificed everything for it, including their lives. The pages of history are written with the blood of people who were killed in the name of Yahweh, Allah, or other gods. All for nothing! All for a lie!