Thanks. The word articulate reminded me, oddly enough as the English say without sufficient oddity, of a deliciously delicious book called The Articulate Mammal.
Suppose you had a sportive father who one day took you to one side and told you with all the seriousness, all the tonal sobriety and measured cadence capable of expressing the gravity of the situation that you were in fact adopted, and he had kept hush-hush all these years the fact of you coming to being as a result of acute sexual madness in which a ham-fisted man bedded a teenage girl (who shortly after giving birth to you passed away) against her will.
Quite apart from the cruelty of this April Fool exercise, you'd do a double take. And again. And again. And would go on doing it for sometime because your portion of reality has been thrown out of focus. Everything - I mean everything - and everybody you thought you knew and related to suddenly fell prey to dubiety, to unshakable doubt. All the familial ties, the affective inner things from whose meaningful minutiae you have individuated, all the communalities and recollective shared memories you have over the years had and taken proprietorial interest in were - whilst things were out of focus for you for a few moments - floating in air.
This is what happened to me, not for a few moments but for five years and is going to continue happening to me for the rest of my life. Simply nothing to anchor me, no magnetic north to my affective earth.
I appreciate I might not be, as it were, the only pebble on this beach but I think I had lost and still have a lot to lose; I have an 11 year-old son from an islamic marriage who thinks me with faith and tells me about all the surats that he's learning and has an all consuming interest in becoming, like his father he said, a reciter of the Koran and knowledge seeker. If I come out to my family I'd lose my islamic marriage and my biological son for good. So I'm doing with him what my father did with or to me (albeit unwittingly for him) ie lie to him. And since Islam effectively goes into everything, I'm lying to him about everything.
I hear the hours are really long in Europe, he says. Did I find it difficult to fast? I must be leading the prayers where I am -- would I care to send him a picture of my local mosque and maybe a selfie too with my undoubtedly bright new Koranic students? What happened to my beard, it looked shorter in the last picture though? Oh for medical reasons! Well well, when I, your son, get old enough to grew some, I'd not even trim it -- incidentally, would we be doing Umra together this time, and it's true isn't it, that I haven't brought them to the UK because I am fearful for their spiritual well-being etc etc etc.
To protect him from my truth, the negative taunting and the predictably banal reaction of those around him, I have been pretending to be somebody I'm completely not to this little boy who is absolutely everything to me and whom I'm trying to shield from the distressing social reality of my disbelief (disbelief is the single undisputed worst thing in the world for my people). Of late, the more I try to divert the course of our Skype chats away from Islam it somehow finds its way back to us like a homing pigeon.
As for the hapless wife, my meagre income won't allow me to bring a wife and child to the UK in the foreseeable future. Only a week before Ramadan I met some relatives of this wife in Hounslow who shoved me forward asking me to lead the prayer and I duly did because I had no excuse not to. Now, for how long would I be keeping up the act?? But then I know full well she in all probability would divorce me if she had been in the know. Sleeping dogs etc. I came out to the muslim friends as a daft experiment of containable results and the consequences were very very nasty ( I got a death threat from a bearded buffoon whom I had taught the Koran and was very disappointed in me - I reported him to the police before moving home alright) so I won't repeat it on or with my kido, his mummy and the blissful clan. Thus I'm rent and torn asunder between all this because I had the temerity to want to be genuine.
I'm not asking for advice by sharing all this. Just dumping some light on the emotionally costly price some disbelievers would pay if they wanted to just be and live according to what they (dis)believe; and, just questioning whether it is at all advisable for anyone to come out if losing hearth and home were at stake.
Asibe, I hope I'm not intruding on a tete-a-tete here, but if Islam shaped us as individuals is it ever possible to completely escape its shadowy presence and, well, tenacious influence? The experiential slate is not wiped clean merely because I had intellectually crossed swords with Islam. Eid, for example, is now coming apace, so is my festive past in it. Associative foolery no doubt but the falsity of everything islamic had endured long enough that even now, very now that I am many things except Muslim I feel this new me has been a drug induced hallucination or a kafkaesque nightmare from which I'd soon be shaken into wholesome consciousness. I mean, me? an Ex Muslim? Why don't I feel it thus? What does it actually feel like to be an Ex muslim? Why was I never depressed or rather, was able to cope better with life whilst a Muslim? Why this glum don't-get-involved attitude when I had always been a public spirited chap when there existed life after death for me? Why do I still eat with my right hand, say alhamdulillah when I sneeze occasionally if under my breath? Why every now and again I keep to the lavatorial habit of washing with water? Refrain from gossiping on something I'm unwilling to characterise as a religious reason? I cannot unknow what I experientially know to have been (sour-)sweet for years just because I now am at liberty to construct my own meaning with limited conscious interference from it. Even this process of having a worked-out opinion on everything Islam didn't permit fullest analysis of, by having the final say on it, is practically very tiresome and frankly exacting. I mean, good luck trying to consciously reinvent the world around you, the big massive world inside you, shunning passed on wisdom and handed down conventions of all sorts unless absolutely necessary. I understand the usually uncomfortable feeling one gets when others start to heap positivity on Islam but I equally understand the propensity of Ex muslims to readily limit or dismiss Islam's influence on anyone (for whom it was very deeply the absolute truth) as merely the shaper that was and no more. Humility alone poses the question, can we really escape nurture and primary socialisation in any meaningful way?
I personally cannot quantify what Islam has been so as to be able to say with confidence this much was good and this much was bad and that's that of the whole concluded thing. This is because I am inescapably biased and for another fact related to the nature of things past -- the very act of remembering events and states of mind for me is necessarily reconstructive and cannot be reducible to mechanical retrieval akin to that found in computing. Memory is an unreliable witness and in portraiture, is not above the vagaries of mood swings and topographical happenstance.
So, what was it for me? Well, folks, it was in a transient way where the most basic (thus meaningful) lines met and still on some levels meet.
I'm referring to His Nabs in The Gift as he went about trying to describe something not very dissimilar in its ephemerality "... as he looked back at her and caught her long familiar, golden, fugitive outline that promptly vanished forever, he felt for a moment the impact of a hopeless desire, whose whole charm and richness was in its unquenchability. Oh trite demon of cheap thrills, do not tempt me with the catchword "my type." Not that, not that, but something beyond that. Definition is always finite, but I keep straining for the faraway; I search beyond the barricades (of words, of senses, of the world) for infinity, where all, all the lines meet".
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