Asalaam u alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatu! Peace and blessings of the Lawd be upon you all!
Greetings ladies, gentlemen and gerbils!
I believe I have extended this greeting for so long that you have perhaps fallen asleep by now. SEEEEEX! Ha! That usually works to keep people alert. I meant the gender operational of course (keepin' it
halal real
)!
Okay so now that I got the initial madness (and kinky personality) out of the way, allow me to introduce myself beyond the eccentricity you would have deduced from the above message. I am a PhD research student (take a guess which fields from the username) attempting to find my way in life! I was born into the religion of Islam, and for years upon years I poured into the Quran and Hadith, absorbing it like a plant does water - getting my spiritual fix that no amount of pleasure filled activity seemed to fill. Except I never used to pray, but let's just place that teeeeeny detail aside. Hey, stop judging - if you have a building with four pillars and a fifth got knocked down the building can still stand right? Right!? It's all relative. Come to think of it most of you are ex-Muslims/pub regulars so perhaps you were like "heeeey he was a fifth of the way towards becoming one of us from the beginning!" Then of course grunting "one of us!" in a cultish style.
A turn of events came when I realised the Hadith were kinda written a thousand miles away from the source, a ridiculous number of years after the Prophet's death, and compiled in a manner only appropriate for a Chinese whispers 200 year competition (we
so need to get such a game running!) I felt cheated. I felt disgusted. I felt so unclean no amount of washing my hands could ever undo the damage. Which makes sense since the information was stored in my brain and not my hands. Feels kinda silly I spent an hour washing my hands now. Did someone say drama queen?
So there I was. Mr Quranist. Finding my way towards a reformed way of life. I soon realised a lot had not actually changed - I had already been doing what I was doing here. And this was a major realisation that shook me to the core. I had never actually been, beyond just by name, a practising Muslim. I had a fair amount of knowledge of the scripture yet never
truly implemented it beyond what I had wished to do. I would throw in the odd inshaAllah, subhanallah, mashaAllah, jazakallah khair/jazaki Allah khair into communication but it had never really spanned further than that. Yes, that was a party trick to say "hey I speak Arabic!" like that man who claimed he is the Mehdi before Dr Zakir Naik and read Surat al Fatiha (what a legend)! And a few further crises hit me, like I was having to take entirely upon faith some of the most legitimately unphysical notions such as a sea splitting, a bird fashioned from clay coming to life, a bird chopped to bits returning to life, a baby speaking in its cradle, a man living in the belly of a whale without asphixiating, or God simply picking and choosing when to implement his justice upon men. Then further ideas like heaven being designed to please desert Arabs. Then the idea the Quran, a book for all time, was written in a language that apparently a minority would ever speak and written so lack lustre that hardly anyone could ever interpret it unless they choose to learn the divinely chosen language. I was an agnostic who happened to be born into Islam, I realised!
And here I am now, acknowledging the fact that there are things I will never know. The more I learn the more I realise I don't know. I never did this for my desires as some come to think, I simply did it because of what is most intellectually honest. I couldn't live in a state of cognitive dissonance for the entirety of my life.
I am free.
Topic: Muslim by name (or shame?)