Lol @ you two!
continuesTo be fair, we were only homeless for about 2 months and a good part of that was spent sleeping in a friend's used car dealership office, which was sort of like a parking lot that had a little box office that had a sofa in it. We slept on that sofa. For about a week before that though, we slept in the stairwells of buildings or, if we were lucky, at a friend's place. It sounds kind of despondent, but it was awesome. It was a rough way of life, yet it was a hundred times better than living at home.
Home was constant torture, mental torture. If it wasn't our father threatening some violent punishment for not doing as he said, it was watching his broken mind at work. I mean it when I say that just watching his mind work in the way it did was painful. You actually learn new ways a person can be wrong. It's not a mind that has a bad system of verifying whether they're right or wrong, it's a mind that has no system of verifying that at all. For my father it's, "This makes me feel good, therefore it's obviously true".
Despite knowing he was wrong about a number of things in the weeks before I left home, I doubted myself from time to time. There's always that chance, that possibility, you're incorrect about any particular thing; that element of uncertainty I'd be afraid of. While my father would proudly attest his beliefs without a fraction of doubt, I would wonder what it was that gave him confidence. Why couldn't I be that way? It strikes me now that I actually do appear that way myself. Whenever I argue, I appear confident, strident, bold, even in the face of the deepest innermost doubt and fear. Now I see that confidence is neither virtue, nor vice, it's irrelevant.
I got further confirmation of my father's inability to see his own faults one day when he challenged me on the meaning of a word.
"Impertinent means rude!" he exclaimed.
"That's one meaning of the word," I replied, "but it can also mean irrelevant". He disagreed, so I opened the dictionary and showed him the meaning of the word. He still disagreed. I wrote him off on the spot. Sure, his pride was hurt, which was what really led him to disagree, but ignoring words that lay in front of you because of pride was going way too far for me. That incident had depleted the respect I had for any opinion he could possibly form either then or in the future to come. See, I could understand having religious differences with someone because of the way you wanted to interpret something, but the dictionary is about as clear cut as it gets.
"It only has one meaning," is not something you say after reading 2 meanings for a word in the dictionary, not without a good excuse at least.
Back to dah streetz, my brother and I are walking around the city of Sharjah and Ajman, feeling slight pangs of guilt, but bursting with exuberance in seeing what we had just achieved. We escaped, we left, we were out there in the real world on our own. I was 21 years old, but I had rarely ever stepped outside my own yard without asking my father's permission. Whenever I went out, which was rare, I'd have to tell him where I was going and why, lest the freemason assassins find and torture us.
Leaving like we did was the best way to give the middle finger to that rule.
I think I spent an entire year inside our home once. Never leaving much further past the front gate. I had little to no clue what the outside world was like. Sure I spent a few years in school, which was a bad experience overall, and yes, I went out on a few business deals with my dad holding my hand the whole way, but I never really got unmitigated interaction with other humans like I was about to. I never really got to interact with people.
Throughout my life, I'd been constantly told how bad the world was, how selfish and horrible people could be. That I wouldn't be able to imagine how evil people were, that the only thing I had was family, everything else was meaningless, self-centered and whimsical. That couldn't have been more wrong. People don't go out of their way to hurt each other, they don't constantly look for ways to harm one another and when they actually do harm it's often accidental or out of neglect. It turns out that in a co-operative society, there was a plethora of reasons for humans to work together.
As I had much more time to myself in the outside world, I found myself enveloped by deeper philosophical thoughts than ever before. At one point I sat down by a traffic light and saw a very usual occurrence in a completely different way. Every car that'd arrive at that point would stop when the traffic light changed red. It would probably do no harm, I thought, for one person to break the light at the last point, allowing them to get to their destination faster, but the majority of people didn't do it. This didn't seem to be a thing they actively considered and chose to avoid, they just fell into place, doing as they would like others to do. The traffic light was a pact, a way men said to each other "Hey, this will benefit us all, but in order for it to work, we must all follow". Nearly everyone followed that rule, and many other rules, blindly.
Yes, I've been cheated, robbed and abused. I've suffered racism for the colour of my skin and been offended for the jew in my blood, but for the most part these appear to be exceptions, not the rule. Cultures can grow out of bigotry, but a society can not survive without something good in their ethics, because in the end we are good not just because it's good to be good, but because it is selfish to be good. Perhaps helping a blind man cross the road will never do you any benefit, but living in a society where these things are the norm has already helped you endlessly. The idea that one good action will not change society is akin to the notion that laying a single brick will not help build a tower, nor taking a single step will help further your position in a thousand mile journey. Societies that do not have people laying bricks or taking steps, do not have towers and do not move.
Morality is inevitable.
Within a month of being homeless I'd land a job with a retouching studio called "The Refinery". It was here I got in touch with my first in-the-flesh non-Muslim I'd consider a friend, Dan. I may have been uneducated, out of touch with society and penniless, but I was not without some talent to present. The past 8 years at home, I had spent studying in my own way.
Recently, my brother showed me some pictures of me back at home, half of the pictures of me have a certain theme to them.
Life was so tough, I had to make a cool pose for this picture.
I'm at a computer in all of those. I was nearly never not tapping away at some code I had written or learning something new. In 2003, I found an e-book about programming in VBScript and a few weeks down the line I was building an e-commerce website which still stands to this day (although it was recently re-written in PHP by my brother). Programming was my thing, I can wrap my mind around a new language or framework in days. I love it. I'd challenge myself to something new everyday. Whenever I'd see something new, I'd break down the programming in my mind and think about how I'd go about putting it together myself. Since I was out of touch with programming communities or any standards I had taken to programming everything bespoke. This was both a curse and a blessing.
Today, anyone can be a programmer. All you need to do is download a bunch of programs, have a tiny understanding of what variables do what and then edit them a bit getting the program to do what you want. What happens because of this, however, is that most "programmers" don't actually know how to program. They just edit code; they can't build components on their own. It's because of this it is said that only 1 in 200 programmers can actually program. The rest can not even write a single line of code.
In my case, I spent the first 6-7 years programming, not knowing that there was code online that I could actually download and have do what I needed. This meant that I ended up re-inventing the wheel over and over, but also it sharpened my skills. I programmed shopping carts, CRMs, integrated APIs, made chat rooms, built multiplayer online games and did all that mundane client-side validation code too. So in my own mind, when it came to web development, I was a god. Finding a job wasn't hard.
Eventually, we decided we wanted to renew our old passports. They had been expired for about 5 years and were pretty much useless, but we thought we'd try anyway. A family friend, the guy that owned the dealership, nick-named "Blade" for how sharp he was, gave us the money we needed and we went ahead with it. The new passports came back in a month. We finally had an identity. It felt as though things were finally working, we were going somewhere, we were making something of ourselves. Still though, we also had about £2000 in fines to pay to the UAE government for staying without a visa for X amount of years. Blade and a few of his friends paid that too. I owe so much to Blade, if it weren't for him I wouldn't be where I am today. I probably would have stayed on the streets, I would have never gone back home. Sometimes I'm not sure how to show my gratitude, so stupidly I remain in silence. What can you ever say or do to repay someone that gave you a chance at life?
To make matters worse, our father hated Blade. His hatred for Blade knows no bounds. Blade tried really hard to help our family. He saw a lot of what was wrong and instead of telling my father that he was insane, he tried to pass on some advice, my father always took it the wrong way. Hearing that Blade's wife had said something about him that sullied his name, my father resolved never to speak to Blade ever again. Let me tell you a few ways Blade responded to my father's irrational behaviour.
1) Loaning him 20,000 AED (around 3500 GBP).
2) Finding one of our stranded sisters at a super market and bringing her home.
3) Buying lots of groceries and turning up at our door when we were broke and hungry, only to be refused by my father and turned away.
4) Turning up to help out whenever he was needed.
I asked Blade, once, why he did these things when our father was quite clearly belligerent to him. He said it was because he watched us grow up, his younger brother was one of our childhood friends. He said he saw us as his own.
Our father responded to all this by hating him more. In my father's mind Blade was a monster that was doing his utmost to disgrace and sully his name. Blade was an enemy of the family.
The fact that we turned to Blade for help after leaving home was just another middle finger to our father's thoughts. A well deserved one.
It was around that time, Tianna and I decided that our relationship could probably work afterall and we started referring to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend.
A few months down the line, Bilal and I moved into a place in Sharjah. It was a small box room in an apartment we shared with some Somali women, but it worked for us. Tianna and I took to speaking 6+ hours a day again, however, becuase of my previous erratic behaviour Tianna hadn't quite found a way to trust me yet. Also I wasn't ready to talk about my life. I hadn't shared much of this with anyone. It would take a good year and a half before I opened up about what had happened to us. Tianna tells me now that I still had missed out many details I've written here. I honestly don't know any other way to get all of this out.
A few months down the line, Bilal landed a job with an internet cafe and begun talking to someone online that he was falling for. We were talking to a variety of girls in person around that time, but I couldn't find someone that would stimulate me mentally in the way Tianna would. That, coupled with the fact that she was one of my major inspirations for leaving home, led me to believe we were destined to be together, but she was still Wiccan. She had gone as far as using tarrot cards to answer certain questions around that time too. It wasn't bad actually, it guessed a few things correctly. Mostly by coincidence, but otherwise it was because the cards were vague enough to allow the user to make an educated guess. I didn't really believe they worked at the time, but figured that if they did it was probably by using Jinns (demons). We had that confirmed once when she decided to ask the tarrot cards how they worked, the devil card dropped out.
Coincidence? Yeah, coincidence, I'll go with that.
To be fair, the system of Tarrot is made in a way where it can only give right answers or vague answers. The right answers are not as common as the vague ones and are purely co-incidental, probably as common as 1 in 10 chance if there's more than one card that can answer it right. The vague answers are actually the wrong answers that you're reading into too much.
I avoided the topic of religion with her. It felt cheap to try and pawn off ideology on her, despite how important it seemed to me, but I'd approach the subject whenever I had a good excuse to. She must've caught on to this at some point because she said:
"I know Islam's very important to you, so you should convince me of it," She gave me the ticket I wanted. So I did what I was best at, feigning confidence and arguing for an idea. I frequented sceptical forums around then, so I had gotten pretty good at addressing all the points people made. That said, Tianna still managed to make some fierce penetrating points of her own.
"Why does the religion elevate men over women?", she asked.
"Why does it seem limited to the Middle East region, I would expect god to reveal his message to the world." she added.
"Why do you have to be Muslim to get into heaven, what about people that do good things in their life and aren't Muslim or people that don't know about Islam." These were some questions I had asked myself afore, but hadn't quite gotten round to finding answers. For me, god may have been what we understood to be evil, I was comfortable with that, but we had to obey to avoid an eternity of torment.
"It's not that Allah elevates men over women, it's that we just have different roles. Who is to take care of the pregnant woman when she's at her weakest? When she's raising children? The natural way is for men to do this. This is the way god has made it." I failed to address why god created us with such disparity and such justification does not justify the Quran's mandate for men to beat women in any way, but equating god's will with nature gave me a get-out-of-jail-free card. She protested a bit longer on that point, but my appeals to nature were hard for her to overcome.
"Islam wasn't limited to the Middle East region," I began, "As a matter of fact, Allah sent warners to every nation and they responded to that in various ways, but Islam was the one that was responded to best ." I nicely tucked away her second complaint with a bare faced assertion.
"Well, if you can prove to me that Allah sent a warner to the Inuit, I'll believe you" she gave me the worst challenge. A challenge that would put to test my own faith in my excuses, after a bit of reading and research I responded with.
"It's hard to find out information on Inuit history because they didn't really keep a written record for everything, to further my point, it's true that Muslims actually spread the good news of the religion to American Indians before Christian Europe had gotten there, but most of this knowledge has been wiped out by the European invasion of that continent. If they could do this to Islam that was spread in the last century, then doing so to any other unwritten message that came before would be much much easier." I stumbled upon a few essays and documents that had suggested that Islamic explorers had found the Americas before the Europeans had and spread Islam to a few of the Indian tribes, I'm not sure of the exact truth of that, but it made a fine excuse. She begrudgingly accepted.
I countered all of her points like this and then went on to challenge her own beliefs, which we both agreed she had only accepted because it sounded nice, not because they seemed true at all. Eventually she embraced Islam. I wasn't sure how I felt about that, because along with accepting Islam, she wasn't so keen on practising the obsessive rituals that came part and parcel with the religion. She'd have bouts of religious fervency from time to time, coupled with doubts and open questioning of various tenets. She soon became the first person I openly confessed my own doubts to.
"To be honest, emotionally I'm an atheist. I'm only Muslim because I'm trapped by it." Those were, pretty much, my exact words. I knew I was trapped because I couldn't disprove the concept of god. God, I thought, did a good job of making himself undisprovable. Now, I think, if he did that, he also did a good job of making the flying spaghetti monster and invisible pink unicorns undisprovable. He also did a good job of making conspiracy theories undisprovable, to the point that I wasn't completely sure that MI5 or the CIA wasn't actually after my father. Perhaps they are, if so, they're good...
It was then I actually came to terms with the idea that I had my own doubts and tried to make sense of them. There were a number of things that had always bothered me about Islam, or maybe god in general. Namely, if god is all powerful and all knowing, why would he choose to create the universe? What would that benefit him at all? What point is there to it? Did he just feel like being creative? That was too anthropomorphic for my likings... Did he do it out of love? Well then why do humans suffer so much? There was no love in having blind spots, cancer, influenza, small pox, pain and death. Was there love in down syndrome and autism? Perhaps good things could come out of things such as those, but the majority of times it resulted in unnecessary suffering and death. What about that woman that was raped in front of her children and then made to watch as her babies were slain, where was god in that scenario? The argument that he valued free will above the torment of others did not satisfy the question, because he didn't have to interfere with free-will to show that he disapproved of the deeds committed, as much as a booming voice from the clouds would suffice "Hey, you guys, I don't like that". Especially when the guys doing the raping and killing are doing so in his fucking name!
As much as I bounced these ideas around in my mind, as much as I toyed with them, the best I could prove was an evil god, not a non-existent god.
Okay, so I couldn't quite grasp why he created anything or why he allowed evil to occur, but that didn't mean he didn't exist. Besides, this evil god would only be happier tormenting me after death than a good one would.
Although I had done away with Jihad and hating Kafirs, I hadn't gotten rid of the real problem, God with a capital G.
"So be it," I thought, "I guess there's no harm in believing, there's a bigger risk not believing." and I left it at that.
For now, then.
Topic: Deconverting From Radical Islam