Hi again, it's only me.

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Reply #30 - July 17, 2015, 12:52 PM

Quote from: Hassan on July 17, 2015, 08:40 AM
Really great to see you back habibi.

Btw we've finished the my ordeal book and I just need to go through it.

I'd love you to take a look and offer suggestions if you don't mind?

Lua please could you send Wahabist a copy?

Of course. Whabbist, could you PM me an email address where you'd like to get the final draft when you get the chance?
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Reply #31 - July 17, 2015, 04:34 PM

Quote from: asbie on July 16, 2015, 11:43 PM
You can do all of that without calling any of it Islam. I'm not really sure we're you were trying to go with that...

And to your last question, yes. It's a slow, arduous process but still no less rewarding for it.

I am am even less sure about my understanding of the aforementioned, but goddamn it I tried!

asbie, sorry I didn't get your name right earlier. Also, I didn't mean to confuse or tire you out by speaking in a general, possibly rebarbative, probably foolish, definitely pompous way. What I meant and failed to elucidate in so many words is that it is doubtful that anyone of us can meaningfully transcend Islam, our Shaper. This, in no way, is me freely admitting the recrudescence of irreason nor am I being altogether deterministic. All I am saying is that a lot of transference -- "the inappropriate repetition in the present of a relationship that was important in a person's childhood" Wiki -- occurs. Whatever conscious choice we make today, go on making it for the rest of our lives cannot change or meaningfully escape our firs and important Shaper and its indelible psychological marks on us. Those born in Islam, I should like to imagine, would have it more difficult than those who though became Muslim after their formative years, Islam's ravenously cancerous reach would make it very difficult for them to meaningfully build their lives, their sense of identity, taste, verbal habits, propriety, worth and self all over again. Given the difficulty at hand, which I think hardly surmountable, I do not find it utterly inconceivable that since we are not only and merely rational beings, that there's no conscious rational reason behind everything we say and do, I say that at least during moments of weakness and, well, intellectual detumescence, Islam in one way or another would darken our doors and manifest itself within us. A Hamletian ghost, if there ever existed one, that has been killed many times but is refusing to die.

If this notion can be remotely true, wouldn't it be wise, begs the question, to not engage in extreme disassociation with Islam and to try to come to terms with some of the 'good' and innocuous mannerisms and habits that are ingrained on one through Islam? I personally do not think it is realistic or honest for anyone to say that an experience which spun throughout their childhood and even decades of their adulthood can be completely shrugged off -- completely being the operative word. Indeed, trying to do so would amount to something like giving birth to oneself or rearing oneself. Being the object and subject at the same time. No? Take the case of language and you'd find that one can only shape very little of it while one is being shaped and conditioned by it as a youngster. Thus, abstract thinking cannot be meaningfully carried out outside the scope of language (though mentalese says otherwise). So, I'm all for building where Islam left off and only espousing to change that which is manifestly 'bad' of action and speech in Islam. I too have read Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance in those exhilarating days and got rat-arsed on individualism (and secular ambivalence). But there are, are there not, limits to it whether we actively engaged in a self re-branding, re-launching exercise or not ( i.e. by mentally considering how we live or what we do now - of what we've always done and said for Islamic reasons - as having newer or different arriere-pensee, ulterior motives).

Please forgive me if by saying all this I further muddied the waters for you. Consider it fool me talking for talking, talking to a larger unseen audience. Or just talking a lot saying nothing. And maybe when I'm back later on to reply to the other posts I would be a tad better at disambiguating and expressing myself. I'm going for a run now.
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Reply #32 - July 17, 2015, 05:16 PM

But my first shaper wasn't Islam. It was the love and joy of two people making their way in a strange, oftentimes frightening world. Islam of course was thrust into the mix, as is the case for many of us, but I don't malign it for the innocuous ways in which it shaped my life. Whether I'm particularly good at eating with my hands (I'm not), or have a bit more patience than most others due to spending formative moments in taraweeh (I do), ultimately these aren't things to get bent out of shape whether they stick or not, because honestly, who the fuck cares?

Enjoy your run mate.

Quote from: yeezevee on February 11, 2016, 02:05 PM
how fuck works without shit??

Let's Play Chess!

harakaat, friend, RIP
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Reply #33 - July 17, 2015, 10:12 PM

Quote from: Quod Sum Eris on July 17, 2015, 12:26 AM
Welcome back. A very long and thoughtful thread.

Thanks, Quod Sum Eris. In the last couple of years I've packed it all in, retreated into myself. This is the only thread I opened anywhere on the internet for the purpose of sharing for sharing, for more than four years. This explains if not excuse my hopelessness at making things snappier, briefer.
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Reply #34 - July 17, 2015, 11:06 PM

What a gem of a person you are Whabbist. I remember you as an absolute hero. An articulate,, beautiful and sensitive hero, who expresses himself so achingly beautifully, that he sometimes makes you sit up and momentarily stop breathing.

But, it seems now, that I was wrong about you - you are much more than what I gave you credit for last time.

Quote from: Whabbist on July 16, 2015, 01:06 AM
....
Also, the excessive verbal liberality and easy reference to explicit sex and porn on the forum had the effect of me thinking that some of those who left Islam left it because of fleshly desires. I know I know. This was wrong of me but my former indoctrinated in Islam self thought less of such 'base' reasons and shameful inability to delay gratification;
.......

Let's fuck already. I'm game if you are.

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Reply #35 - July 18, 2015, 06:23 AM

Quote from: spare parts on July 17, 2015, 02:35 AM
Hi Whabbist,
I like your turn of phrase, I should quote you, but this is my first post here, and I'm not sure how to do that yet.
You're a really funny writer, you had me in stitches #
Anyway, some of the things you wrote really struck me: you hadn't listened to music before you left Islam - seriously?! I cannot imagine that! What was your experience of listening to music like? What music do you favour? (Assuming you're not one of that small percentage of people who suffer from amusia!) And most importantly, I'm assuming that you won't have lost your ability to dance...

Spare parts, thanks and glad you find me amusing.

Yes, I had never listened to music before even though I always heard it. Because of the involuntary nature of aural reception in comparison, say, to sight, I didn't do what Noah's people, according to the Koran, did - stuck their fingers into their ears whenever faced with his dawah-ganda. Nor did I consciously seek Allah's forgiveness on what I had no control over. Yet, my espousal to keeping to al-wara (الوَرَع) -- not doing something because it might transpire to be on the sinful side (inactive erring on the side of caution, to the layperson, but even this does not escape Islam's quixotic tyranny; not only you're ordered to not transgress but also are blackmailed to stop doing anything you suspect in the final analysis to being 'transgressive', thus, the letter as well as spirit of the command, in a totalising way, are adhered to) -- meant I physically avoided places of music and had always asked people to respect my wish turning it off in my presence. And turn it off they duly did because I knew how to morally trap them if they didn't; I'd close my eyes, take a deep breath and recite in the most moving way the Koranic verses about Jahamun and about the speedy excitability of Allah's anger. (Did I not just tell you I was a bullying clerical gangster?)

But that's not the point. Though it absolutely forbids mirth (الطَرَب) in surat Luqman (31:6), my version of Islam is, at least as a jurisprudential consensus, largely silent on any mirth come by from listening to mellifluous Muezzins. Indeed, Bilal Ibn Rabah was specifically chosen by the Prophet Moe to call for the prayers not exactly because Moe was ahead of the curve when it comes to affirmative action or positive discrimination - Bilal being a black person. But rather, because Bilal, according to Moe's very word in authentic Hadith, had a more beautiful voice than the companion in whose dream the calling, Azan, was 'revealed'. Now, I personally do not know why Bilal's services were not enlisted also in the recitation of the Koran on the same aesthetic grounds but in his capacity as a voice actor, Bilal's career, regrettably for him no doubt, stagnated.

Another more interesting yet rarely discussed topic in relation to mirth on the sly in this Islam, while absolutely forbidding music, is reciting the Koran on musical notes commonly known as Maqamat (plural). You, dear reader, are very welcome to waste your time reading up on it here¹. It is what it says on the tin; prosodic, musical notes. If you doubt the assertion that the most famous reciters of the Koran recite it on codified musical notes, then I substantiate it with this². The only prior knowledge required from you to take active participation in this otherwise fruitless experiment is you knowing surat al-Fatiha. If so, you'll see the name and hear the different Maqamat on whose rhythm this Imam faithfully recites.

What about beatboxing, surely that's permissible due to the absence of instruments? Well, dear reader, the former Grand Mufti of Saudi, Ibn Baz, strictly defined (as if it really needed to) what music is and beatboxing, though percussive, wasn't included in the literal prohibition. Therefore, I think it is safe to conclude Reggie Watts is halal. Even fanatical ISIS (aka die-ish) seem to not mind garnishing its gruesome video clips with so called Nasheed singing. Much of Nasheed singing, even when performed by famous reciters of the Koran - such as Mishary Al-Afasy - is accompanied by coraal³ (كورال) which in English is inescapably choir singing. Again, I really don't know about you but isn't emulating the Christians strictly forbidden and a grievous sin in Islam?

I can go on with this tedious theme and exegesis, exploring the myriad ways in which Islam and Muslims engage in double dealings. I know from experience that the careerist Sunni Muslim Brotherhood does it institutionally and so too, I was taught whilst Muslim, the quick to equivocate in peace time, millenarian Shia.

Personally, I've wasted precious brain blood on studying Arud (علم العَروض والقافية), Arabic prosody which deals with poetic metrical systems. Now that I'm thinking about it, I think I did tap my index and middle fingers on the back of my hand whilst trying to ascribe a verse or line to one of the sixteen classical Arabic metres. I wrote some poems on the Wafir metre but found myself more at home with composing doggerel.

No. I have never danced before leaving Islam and taking residence in the UK. I think this explains my studied avoidance of nightclubs and keeping when I really have to to Beethoven (nobody dances to him). Without first seeking professional advice, I recklessly had a go at extreme twerking in the shower of all places a few months ago, and ended up hurting my back really badly. I had supposed it came naturally to me, I said to my smiling GP, for being an African with a generous waistline.

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds ... The concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in smaller doses and flay me in larger ones, said Nabokov. I think he's being unreasonable here. For me, a few weeks would pass before I listen to music on my own. And that would take place when I declare total war on germs playing it whilst I do some cleaning and washing up as an escapist change from my usual piratebay downloaded audiobooks.

I love words. More precisely, I love speech sounds and the delicious allophonic surprises of connected speech. I spent 51 days of R&R at a psychiatric unit with only two books, one of which was a dictionary.

I do not know the lyrics of a single song in the three languages I speak.

-------------------------------------------
* I've broken the hyperlinks by spacing more or less in the same place as the first one:
1. http://www.maqa mworld.com/maqamat.html
2. https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=hKI7nnXsxN8
3. https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=HXHXPuF2894 (here, you can easily detect incredible likeness to percussive instruments)
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Reply #36 - July 18, 2015, 02:51 PM

Quote from: spare parts on July 17, 2015, 02:35 AM
And re the whole having to reinvent yourself thing: I guess coming from Saudi the culture shock must be so much greater. I mean, I think that muslims growing up in the west, even if they've been devout before they leave Islam, must still get to experience a secular society, and have some sort of a separate identity, where they interact with non-muslims, and form their opinions on all sorts of secular matters, albeit through a muslim lens.

Anyhow, I sympathise. Even though I left Islam a looong time ago, I still believed in some sort of a God, to whom I used to pray.
All my Gods are fallen, now, I do not believe in prayer anymore, or that there is a beneficent Being out there who listens to you. I was extremely invested in spiritual endeavours, and for it all to amount to nought is bitter. What a fricking waste of time and effort.
It's very hard to realise you're alone out there.

Just have to turn around and march up the mountain alone.

Absolutely. I think for those growing up in the West cognitive disequilibrium is acuter but in a completely different way. They, for example, are taught to appreciate the idealistic beauty of Islam and Muslims until they go and visit Saudi where Islam is practised not, like in the West, as minority faith tolerated -- not necessarily celebrated -- because of West's post WW II ethical guilt vis-a-vis minorities. Rather, the everyday geographically western Muslim who hasn't completely outsourced their critical faculties would be abruptly brought to the jarring realisation that the link between the Sahaba, the Best Three Centuries, and lived Islam is very tenuous. They would too often do what is known as 'confabulation' ie explain away contradictions and blame it all on the unsuitability of today's Muslims to embody the incorruptible letter and blessed spirit of Koranic teaching and Islamic ideology. It never is the ideology's fault, so they defer the reconstitution of civilisational Islam as it was revealed and ought to be to more suitable recipients who have yet to turn up but undoubtedly would. It's the recipients, yes yes all of the living ones since 1924. Not the message. But the sluggish and sedentary Ummah. This self-doubt, self-depreciation in the face of any Islamic opposition, active or dormant, is a powerful coping mechanism; how else can you plausibly account for western Muslims who hold the highest academic qualifications -- doctors, chemists, barristers, mathematicians, economic grads (I even once met a Muslim actuary!!) -- from the most prestigious secular universities? This surely isn't due to their lowered IQ and above average fertility.

I have, for example, never formally studied biology, chemistry, physics, maths etc. So, when I was faced with the scientific method, I moved the goalposts saying that the fickle nature of discoveries arrived at through this method meant that the possibility of future changing facts cannot be gainsaid. Truths are supposed to change, not facts -- was the particular logical syrup I licked in a ursine manner. Just like Queen Lizz II won't abdicate (notwithstanding gerontocratic monarchy is rapidly going out of fashion in Europe) for continuation reasons according to royal pundits, Islam has stubbornly withstood the test of time and this fact alone surely is, the ironic delusion goes, the survival of the fittest. It came, it conquered, it hasn't left. Therefore it is the true. But my excuse was I did not know what I did not know.

What's theirs or indeed yours - western grown Muslims - except for the weakness of trying to fit new and contradictory stuff into the already existing grid and cognitive infrastructure for unrelated reasons? I say unrelated because I increasingly get the impression from western Muslims I occasionally run into that Islam is not only theology. No, they seem to say. We do not know much about scriptural, theological precepts and if we really need to know, we ask our local Imam whose explanatory and moral quantitative easing reserves surpass that of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. We do not know Arabic, never attempted learning it for religious reasons - this is not because, like Latin, Qureshi Arabic is dialectologically dead. No. No. No. Islam for us is the only identity that sets us apart from the non-Muslim thereby making us special (and making us superior, but don't say this on camera like Mehdi Hassan). It's not in our selectively progressive pro-science minds, but rather profundity is in our hearts. And it is in the richness of our hearts that we are big. So, you clever clogs; and so, you trade reasonists, here's our simple unified response to all you have to say: do your worst reasoning out our subjective feeling that we alone are special, that we are not alone here and won't be alone when we've died.
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Reply #37 - July 18, 2015, 07:16 PM

Hi Whabbist,
Thanks for taking the time to reply with your very elaborate response!

Wow, I'm amazed at the lengths you went to to avoid music!
Yet I know there are many muslims who still listen to music, and debate how reliable/important the music prohibition is. Still I'm impressed by your determination to live with integrity.

And yet the human need for musical rhythm is there, as you note; muslims like to sneak it into whatever form they can. And I remember when I was a muslim how exquisitely melodically beautiful some recitations of the koran could be. (haven't yet listened to your you tube references). It was almost hypnotic.

And I had just thrown in the reference to amusia as a sort of joke. But your
assertion that music affects you as an" arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds" - wow, that is so unusual : I have never knowingly met anyone who feels that way! But I think apparently up to 1 in 25 people are wired that way; they just don't get music.
I suppose that would have been a blessing in a muslim country: you weren't missing out, and you didn't have to have it inflicted on you.

And even for Beyonce or Miley Cyrus - the shower isn't the place for twerking or dancing!
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Reply #38 - July 19, 2015, 12:44 AM

Quote from: three on July 17, 2015, 02:37 AM
I am glad you dropped back in, Whabbist.

I feel now, that while I was blissfully devout (high on Dhikr, Ramadhan and Fajr), that I was actually experiencing a delusion of grandeur. With a superiority complex, masquerading as dawah and charitable deeds. I was perfectly happy, and nothing much mattered to me but the next prayer. If it was long away, I had beads.
Every messy bit of living was wrapped up neatly in Islam, every answer accessible through Fiqh, Quran, Hadith. It was so clean, so tidy. No critical thought.
My purpose was clear. My reward was clear. My fate was certain, as long as I jumped through each hoop.
If I faltered in my convictions, I could brainwash myself, easily, and get back on track before I missed a prayer. There were the aforementioned sources, and my beloved Ummah, the history of which (I was sure) reached back through eons to a definitive Divine source. Everyone encouraged the practice of it, no one ever tells you to take a break from salaat, to leave off the dhikr. How could they? But I did not think of that, then.
The Sahaba were always in my mind, so real, I felt I knew them, as if they were media personalities. What Would the Ansar Do? It seems crazy to me now, but everyone I knew would tell Sahaba stories, too. How canny, to hand us a shared history, with heroes to emulate.
Disbelief crept up slowly on me, despite my reluctance, due to circumstances of life beyond my control. I had no choice but to see clearly that Islam left me without any recourse.
When I said I did not believe, I was not free. I was not free until I finally realized I did not have to practice anymore, it was part of me, like a second skin, holding me in. I shed it slowly, so slowly I did not realize I was looking up, standing straight, or walking noisily until I thought back to last year, six months ago, and recalled the changes. As it falls from me, I become myself, now.
I still do not know who that will be, only that it will be more me. More me now and less me then.
Life is harder without it. I have to do it all by myself. I haven't got any excuses for myself or any religion to blame. If I deny myself something, I cannot say "Sorry, I am Muslim, and my religion does not permit me to..." I have to admit it is me, robbing my own self of an experience, not for fear of Allah, or my husband, or my Wali. It is embarrassing, to wake up from the long sleep that came over me just before Shahada and find myself become an ardent feminist who is incapable of wearing short skirts. I was put off first by the freedom on the forum, too. I still steer clear of much of it. For residual reasons, I am sure, other than habit.

I think you spent enough time in introspection to understand exactly what I mean about the process. I am forever who I was and I will never be her again. But I feel kin with both those who remain where I was and with those who moved on from there. It is always nice to see someone else describe the internal process in detail. I had thought I was becoming insane, when I first went spinning, unmoored, into the unknown after having known it all.

The members of this forum helped me to right myself, by sharing their experiences as you have.

The amount of descriptive wisdom in this post can be diluted into a few books, for books have been known to begin life as essays and personal letters. There exists in its winning language the essence of liberating irresponsibility. You have captured the spirit and better expressed what I couldn't in fewer words. Transition to disbelief is incomplete in so many ways. The subtleties of such truth aren't necessarily beyond the appreciation of many on this forum who seem hellbent on suppressing it, as though they fear instant Islamic resurgence within their own hearts if they showed recollective fondness or, as in my particular case, said that I was more hopeful as a Muslim. On a very basic level, freedom for me remains conceptually negative in that it is the absence of coercion. Parallel to this is my trying very hard to remain practically agnostic (not just in my mind). Last year, I found myself in desperate need of toilet near Finsbury Park mosque so I unthinkingly went inside and used it. Normally I stick to McDonald's or pubs for emptying my bladder on the go. But I did not leave it straightaway and there was the rub. I sat in the mosque quietly and wa-alaikum-assalamed those I met. But interestingly I couldn't help weeping when I left, and found myself asking definitely not-there, uncaring, immutable forces from my Islamic past one impossible question: WHY?
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Reply #39 - July 19, 2015, 01:51 AM

Yes. Very exactly.
I felt, for a long time, that Frank Herbert's description of a "stamp of strangeness" would apply to my experience. But it does not, and it will not.
It is more cellular than that.

Don't let Hitler have the street.
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Reply #40 - July 19, 2015, 03:48 AM

THREE, I'm not proud to tell you I went away before finishing all I intended to say to you because I started weeping again on the impossible question. I'm really trying and failing to forget and at such moments I quote the masters (leaving you and others to make the connection yourself). Pnin is one of these comic books that makes you laugh at the misery of its protagonist and, for doing that you end up feeling ashamed of yourself. Vladimir Nabokov did not write a lot about the Holocaust in his neat, superior narrative magic. In Pnin, the unfortunate hero had lost his sweetheart to it, and as it usually happens, someone carelessly mentioned her in passing and, in doing so, cracked open for him an incredibly detailed pain that has hitherto been locked away:

"What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind (alas, recollections of his marriage to Lizz were imperious enough to crowd out any former romance) but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget ― because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past. And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one's mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower-bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood. According to the investigator Pnin had happened to talk to in Washington, the only certain thing was that being too weak to work (though still smiling, still able to help other Jewish women), she was selected to die and was cremated only a few days after her arrival in Buchenwald, in the beautifully wooded Grosser Ettersberg, as the region is resoundingly called. It is an hour's stroll from Weimar, where walked Geothe, Herder, Schiller, Wieland, the inimitable Kotzebue and others. 'Aber warum ― but why ―' Dr Hagen, the gentlest souls alive, would wail, 'why had one to put that horrid camp so near!' for indeed, it was near - only miles from the cultural heart of Germany - 'that nation of universities,' as the President of Waindell College, renowned for his use of the mot juste, had so elegantly phrased it when reviewing the European situation in a recent Commencement speech, along with the compliment he paid another torture house, 'Russia ― the country of Tolstoy, Stanislavski, Raskolnikov, and other great men.'”
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Reply #41 - July 19, 2015, 01:58 PM

Quote from: justperusing on July 17, 2015, 05:04 AM
I understand that you weren't looking for help or advice. It was solidarity I was attempting to offer, as that is one of the reasons I come to forums like this. And that was quite the tangent, albeit an amusing one that was well worth my while. I see you're someone who shys away from ingenuity and far from being offended, I appreciate the candid response.

And God it is annoying iwhen people must try to put a positive spin on everything. There's a reason why when we are in the throes of sadness or misery we do not reach for upbeat music to turn our mood around but instead appreciate the brooding melancholy of a song conveying deep loss and regret. It's just friends feel obliged to fix anything they can if they find you with anything less than a cheerful disposition.

Anyway, I can see your idealism shining through in the way you view people who are considered paragons of virtue or lesser mortals who are still regarded as people of upstanding moral character. Yes, it is true that ultimately everyone is self-interested. Pure altruism is a myth. The drive simply would not be there otherwise. The truth is that there is negligible difference between someone who is considered someone who is considered someone of great character and virtue and someone who is very wisely selfish. Our own happiness is intrinsically tied up with the well being of our fellow humans, how they perceive us, and how we perceive ourselves. I guess in the end to reap the most rewards from being a "selfless" public servant or outstanding parent you have to delude yourself that it is not about you at all. But I go on mission trips knowing full well that one of the main reasons I go there is that helping other people makes me feel good about myself, yet that doesn't take away from the fulfillment I get from it. If I did it without it making me any happier or satisfied with myself, it would probably just end up breeding contempt as most one sided relationships tend to.

I hope you stick around as you have some very interesting insights. As you are not looking for help or advice, I would bet you're using writing about your situation as more therapeutic than anything. But whether you want it or not I do feel for you man as a result of similar, yet milder, circumstances.

Yes, it was churlish of me to pooh pooh your solidarity. It's absolutely to do with me, my social anxiety and not you. You wouldn't believe the games people in my life play with me (and of course I find myself playing them or with them). This anxiety got me to not buy something from a Sunday market once because when I asked the seller about the price, he said that he was going to make me an offer and this offer was only for me. I raised an eyebrow and simply asked, why was this - why was he giving me a price much lower than what he set out to sell the damn thing at? I was a complete stranger to him and didn't even haggle with him - so what made me worthy of his favour? He said that we were all brothers, implying as I thought, Islamic kinship. I quickly corrected this impression, and then asked him if the reduced price was still on offer? I then moved on when he said we do not discriminate in Islam.

So as you can see, this private madness has nothing to do with you, justpersuing. I grew up with surat Assaf (61: 2-3) teaching us never to say what we do not mean and never to intentionally mean what we didn't say. But in the lived reality it was completely different, and I've always been contemptuous of indirect requests and thus was quick to clarify what I was doing here with you. I did my bit to embarrass people whom I believed to being disingenuous with me; I remember when I was in Saudi that I immediately accepted a passing invitation to lunch from a neighbour who, as it transpired, didn't really mean to invite me but was being polite in a risky way. He had some urgent stuff to attend to and knew there was no prepared lunch to which he could bid anyone -- his wife had been ill and nobody had cooked anything. But seeing me after Friday Prayer, he couldn't help offering me something nice, something he thought was going to be turned down by me. You should've seen the look of horror on his face when I said "yes! with pleasure" and "I know how generous you are, may Allah reward you for being such a nice Muslim and neighbour".

Quote
I guess in the end to reap the most rewards from being a "selfless" public servant or outstanding parent you have to delude yourself that it is not about you at all. But I go on mission trips knowing full well that one of the main reasons I go there is that helping other people makes me feel good about myself, yet that doesn't take away from the fulfillment I get from it. If I did it without it making me any happier or satisfied with myself, it would probably just end up breeding contempt as most one sided relationships tend to.

I rarely read or happen on something as honest and truthful as this in my real life. Most hurtful of all for me are the lies my parents intentionally told me, the non-verbal intimations, and when I confronted them with utmost respect, they chided and told me how ill mannered I was. Yes, tact in social experience is a finer thing than efficient rudeness but only just so for me -- what does too much tact amount to if not homeopathic truth? I really don't understand why people in my life are so afraid to generally say what they want and open themselves up to the possibilities of rejection, ridicule or being wrong? Much of our pleasantries and what we say to others is semantically redundant -- it's interactional, not transcational. I get tired trying to dissect what is being said, so before I verbally reply to anyone I developed the tedious habit of rephrasing what I'd heard and put it back to others as a yes-no question. "No, not exactly that" is what I get thus after dragging the artfully implied embarrassing for them things into the clear. Then spend some time working out with somebody on what they mean when all along it's theirs to do it unaided. it is as if by me participating in this it was I who meant at least some of the matter at hand!! Even the phone company tell me my contract is "unlimited" and then they turn around and say "subject to fair use". I also hate products that are £4.98 -- tell me it's a fiver and have it done with. (And no, I don't want to put the change in the charity box of your choosing. I take my copper money home, keep it in a jar and then use it at self check-out machines where I won't feel cheap or draw impatient looks from the queue for taking long to pay in a supermarket). In short, I hate obscurantism, social or religious, because I want to understand and want to be understood - why else say anything to anyone? I think I'm ranting now, so I should stop.
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Reply #42 - July 19, 2015, 09:06 PM

Quote from: Hassan on July 17, 2015, 08:36 AM
Speaking for myself, I'm doubtful. I've been through a very rough time these past few years since losing my faith. I've tried walking away and tried to build another me but it has only led to depression, complete loss of direction, meaning and a shitload of heartbreaking problems and confusions with my children, family etc...

I use the label Agnostic Muslim these days to help ease both this inner and outward turmoil. It seems to be working plus ironically it allows me to express my views with fellow Muslims without them immediately dropping the shutters.

But I'm an unusual case. So on a more posirive note I'm hopeful the younger generation will have more success In coping with this process.

Hassan, if you really knew anything, you'd be doubtful.
I believe it was young, fictional Jane Eyre who said that she would rather be happy than be dignified, in relation to her religious suitor cousin giving her the cold shoulder because she refused to become his missionary wife. She ran after him to ease things between them before he left on a voyage to Africa. This Victorian feminist, with her disarming moral courage, wanted someone to (love &) marry her primarily for her. (No, this was not earliest Sugar-Daddyism; this was not love me passively as many girls of today seem to be expecting.) Tenderness she seems to put first and everything else - children, money, 'obedience' etc - came after it. How-MADDENINGLY-ever, this didn't mean her denial and or dismissal of this die-hard religious man as a whole; he remained her cousin, her blood. Even though the setting of Jane Eyre is largely against religion, and religiously inspired pining --- Catholicism didn't do much harm, did it, to Charles Ryder's chiaroscuro chronicles in Brideshead Revisited --- it remains an impossibly powerful work of narrational art. Because you see, dear Hassan, for me, literature is truer than history and if you are as mad as to engage in a little bit of emotional archaeology in it, you'd find it to be of more edifying worth than any overrated, uncompromising commitment to the falsity of Islam you erect between you and your former worlds. Martyrdom to the truth is brave but that's not everything there is to affective experience. At the risk of sermonising here, surely we are better grounded in our disbeliefs (we do not need to proselytise Doubt to make Doubt stronger), so why not liberally concede the conducive in belief - the benefit of the doubt 'good' in belief - if it means less internecine conflict, familial estrangement?

I personally think that telling my kido the truth about me or making it known socially about me to have left Islam at this point of time, in that incredibly brutal of most countries is supreme cruelty, not kindness. And even truth-motivated cruelty cannot be ethical, thus, lying in this situation is the consequentialist ethical rectitude. I've never felt more appropriate to quote the famous saying that "the truth is a matter of circumstances, it's not all things to all people all the time".
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Reply #43 - July 19, 2015, 09:53 PM

Quote from: Hassan on July 17, 2015, 08:40 AM
Really great to see you back habibi.

Btw we've finished the my ordeal book and I just need to go through it.

I'd love you to take a look and offer suggestions if you don't mind?

Lua please could you send Wahabist a copy?

Hassan, you reminded of very old clannish cynicism and it made me laugh. This was when a person would always talk about how tough they have been financially having it and would go on and on ad nauseam in order to prevent anyone from even thinking about asking him or her to chip in in the endless fundraising clannish occasions: engagement parties, weddings, christenings, sickness cash, bailing out of prison cash, blood money, sending some for a private hospital money, clannish collective savings money, regular clannish gatherings food money, clannish funeral support etc. Chuggers have got nothing on my clan. It just struck that even my father once told me not to tell anyone that I had some spare cash lest they turn around check-mating me "well in that case, d'you mind lending me it?"

I seem to have inadvertently gave you the impression of my availability for (if not my ability to) book reviewing for pals, and something is telling me you asked me this reliant on that awkward Arab anecdote. Whatever your motives were, Hassan, I'm always very happy to oblige x

P.S. in a bit, Lua.
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Reply #44 - July 19, 2015, 09:58 PM

Quote from: lua on July 17, 2015, 12:52 PM
Of course. Whabbist, could you PM me an email address where you'd like to get the final draft when you get the chance?

But is it definitively the final draft and not the first attempt at publishing and thus should be accorded extra care and liberal critique? Smile.

P.P.S is it just me or does the title of the book really have a Hitlerian connotation?
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Reply #45 - July 19, 2015, 10:23 PM

Well, the lovely Zaotar and I have already gone through and made a ton of changes, and we're giving it back to Hassan now to review and check for unwelcome ones. It also helps to have fresh eyes looking at it again for silly things we may have overlooked, although I'm going to give it one more thorough read while I'm formatting it. After Hassan's approval, we're going to throw it out there for download.

I'm not sure how much Hassan is asking you to do or read (that's between you and him) but I'll send you a copy shortly.
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Reply #46 - July 19, 2015, 10:24 PM

Quote from: Whabbist on July 19, 2015, 03:48 AM
THREE, I'm not proud to tell you I went away before finishing all I intended to say to you because I started weeping again on the impossible question. I'm really trying and failing to forget and at such moments I quote the masters (leaving you and others to make the connection yourself). Pnin is one of these comic books that makes you laugh at the misery of its protagonist and, for doing that you end up feeling ashamed of yourself. Vladimir Nabokov did not write a lot about the Holocaust in his neat, superior narrative magic. In Pnin, the unfortunate hero had lost his sweetheart to it, and as it usually happens, someone carelessly mentioned her in passing and, in doing so, cracked open for him an incredibly detailed pain that has hitherto been locked away:

"What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind (alas, recollections of his marriage to Lizz were imperious enough to crowd out any former romance) but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget ― because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past. And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one's mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower-bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood. According to the investigator Pnin had happened to talk to in Washington, the only certain thing was that being too weak to work (though still smiling, still able to help other Jewish women), she was selected to die and was cremated only a few days after her arrival in Buchenwald, in the beautifully wooded Grosser Ettersberg, as the region is resoundingly called. It is an hour's stroll from Weimar, where walked Geothe, Herder, Schiller, Wieland, the inimitable Kotzebue and others. 'Aber warum ― but why ―' Dr Hagen, the gentlest souls alive, would wail, 'why had one to put that horrid camp so near!' for indeed, it was near - only miles from the cultural heart of Germany - 'that nation of universities,' as the President of Waindell College, renowned for his use of the mot juste, had so elegantly phrased it when reviewing the European situation in a recent Commencement speech, along with the compliment he paid another torture house, 'Russia ― the country of Tolstoy, Stanislavski, Raskolnikov, and other great men.'”

I have the benefit of PTSD, which initially blocked all recall from my mind for the first year after I abandoned my Ummah. When recall came back it often caught me unawares, sabotaging my efforts to maintain myself only in the present. I am sure weeping is to be expected, even years later.
I joined CEMB shortly after gaining recall, when my isolation and my inability to relate to Western culture and Westerners eclipsed the other concerns in my life.
Sometimes I manage to convince myself it was a chrysalis sort of experience, necessary for my development. That I am better for it, that perhaps my early years would have been wasted on something else or that religion preserved me from all danger in it's cocoon.
It works until I see a hijabi. Then I see the sister who will never be my sister and the chasm between us frightens me in it's finality. I remember the families I lost.
I have to remind myself that ties that use lies to bind are weak and not worth mourning.
One day it will hurt less, I am sure.
The best trick I have found is to be kind to myself. It means reading fiction when I need to read fiction and doing those little things that make me feel more me, more grounded. Hobby things, and activities during which I feel joy. I am still learning what I like to do, and still learning how to indulge in those things.
Guilt is the worst sort of enemy. You cannot thrust it away from you, you instead have to let it go free gently, with empathy.

Don't let Hitler have the street.
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Reply #47 - July 19, 2015, 11:29 PM

THREE, I don't know what I'm about to say is going to come from the right or the left side of my heart - I'm drunk now, have drunk myself silly after much Sabbatarian introspection - but it would be unethical if you and I didn't swear eternal friendship here and beyond this forum. We're so similar in this 'a lot of people are in a lot of pain a lot of the time' that if there were any justice, mercy, reconciliation in the world only one of us should really exist. The other ought to have been reprieved because of what economists call 'positive externalities'. Read in Yusuf (12:78). I share your illness but more acutely i.e. sorrowful past and uncertain tomorrow have the capacity to degenerate it into fully blown psychosis. But let me appreciate your post sober again.

Quote from: three on July 19, 2015, 10:24 PM
I have the benefit of PTSD, which initially blocked all recall from my mind for the first year after I abandoned my Ummah. When recall came back it often caught me unawares, sabotaging my efforts to maintain myself only in the present. I am sure weeping is to be expected, even years later.
I joined CEMB shortly after gaining recall, when my isolation and my inability to relate to Western culture and Westerners eclipsed the other concerns in my life.
Sometimes I manage to convince myself it was a chrysalis sort of experience, necessary for my development. That I am better for it, that perhaps my early years would have been wasted on something else or that religion preserved me from all danger in it's cocoon.
It works until I see a hijabi. Then I see the sister who will never be my sister and the chasm between us frightens me in it's finality. I remember the families I lost.
I have to remind myself that ties that use lies to bind are weak and not worth mourning.
One day it will hurt less, I am sure.
The best trick I have found is to be kind to myself. It means reading fiction when I need to read fiction and doing those little things that make me feel more me, more grounded. Hobby things, and activities during which I feel joy. I am still learning what I like to do, and still learning how to indulge in those things.
Guilt is the worst sort of enemy. You cannot thrust it away from you, you instead have to let it go free gently, with empathy.
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Reply #48 - July 20, 2015, 01:16 AM

I can use a friend, for certain. Friendships keep one sane through the ups and downs of all the other relationships that we find ourselves in.

Don't let Hitler have the street.
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Reply #49 - July 20, 2015, 01:42 AM

I love this place
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Reply #50 - July 20, 2015, 01:43 AM

Ditto. I swear by milk and cookies.

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Reply #51 - July 20, 2015, 01:57 AM

وإنه لقسم لو تعلمون عظيم
And indeed, that is an oath - if you could only know - most great. 56:76
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Reply #52 - July 20, 2015, 02:59 AM

Wahabist I would like you to make any suggestions for changes that you feel appropriate.

I won't be able to look through what Lua and Zaotar have done for two weeks as I'm in London visiting my children and don't have access to a computer. (I'm posting using my mobile)

So basically if you can use these two weeks to read through it and offer any suggestions you think necessary I would be most grateful.

I have absolute confidence in you so you have a free hand as far as I'm concerned.
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Reply #53 - July 20, 2015, 02:34 PM

Hassan, we are never completely done, are we, dealing with filial weakness; generously appeasing and negotiating within and outside ourselves something with merciless depth (and menacing complexity), whose irrational power over us can only be atavistic. Just like seduction is beyond our conscious resistance - we can do very little conscientiously. However mighty someone's truth, their cerebral integrity is, if they were parents - if they've experienced that delicious agony - then, they would give in to any regressive falsity. Religious, social, economic or political.

A fictional father called Krug, in a fictional book call Bend Sinister, spaciously reflected on this agony. What followed next, to me, is the single most moving truth in postmodernist prose on fatherhood and beyond. I was so stunned by it that I needed to lie down on my bed and tried to sleep it off. Even now, after all these years and countless re-readings, it still shatters me, still strikes me as nothing less than the Ayat Al-kursi of modern paragraphs. Professor Krug was being forced to give in to political tyranny and was prepared to lose everything over not endorsing governmental 'Ekwilism' and the political party of 'The Average Man'. As he put his child to bed, knowing he's being threatened with fatherly (de)privation, Krug did what came naturally to him. He thought to himself:

"And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all."
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Reply #54 - July 20, 2015, 06:32 PM

Amazing thread. Whabbist's extraordinary writing reminds me of the writing in My Ordeal with the Qur'an, and I can only assume this reflects a shared expertise in Arabic-language rhetoric, carried over into eloquent English.

I was reading Milan Kundera's newest novel yesterday, and this thread reminded me of some of his central subjects -- a contrast between the art of the European novel, an art which is premised on comic absurdity and insignificance (Don Quixote being the primal example), asserted against systems of total signification (in Kundera's case, totalitarian Marxist ideology, but you could just as easily substitute religious ideology). You can see why laughter is the inherent enemy of all such systems of total signification.

"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place."

Too many good quotes:

"It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch."
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Reply #55 - July 20, 2015, 09:02 PM

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Done, happymurtad.
My apologies to all concerned.
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Reply #56 - July 20, 2015, 11:04 PM

Quote from: suki on July 17, 2015, 10:07 AM
I had a nosey peek at your profile lol, surprised to hear that you are only 24 years old, you have wisdom beyond your years : )

Suki, I owe it to you to tell you the truth since you admiringly brought this personal detail here, and in the process I'm prepared to shock you and others. I'm not 24 years old. That's a deliberate lie. I'm 24 years of age only in the UK but factually I'm much older than that. My exact age is something my acrimoniously separated parents disputed for years, just as each had named me a different name, thus I have two names, neither of which is the one I'm using in the last 8 months. I was born at home and was christened after 21 days in lieu of 7 days, because my mother had waited until she gave birth to me before leaving my father. So, she left me with my paternal grandma who had lost her sight at the age of 3. Grandma didn't want to name me herself, that was for my father to do but he had more pressing things to attend to (whatever they were). I was left nameless for all this time which's at extreme odds with established tradition. (My cunning mother had, no doubt, wanted to maximise my father's tribal embarrassment by leaving us all, my older brothers and sisters, to him without any advance warning. As she was from a different tribe, his tribe got so incredibly incensed with my mother that they immediately married my father off to a 17 year old girl who was only 2 years older than my father's oldest child. My mother's people in turn refused to be out done and quickly married her off to a man that subsequently disappeared. It was as if a curse in the form of me had landed on my parents' unity so that within less than a year from my birth both were married to another person.) Grandma instead called me NuNu which translates in English to Babe -- this is still my nickname and is truer than all the others. Grandma knew my exact age but kept out of it. It's now berried with her. I think I'm on the cusp of thirty.

How come 24 here then? Well, folks, when I arrived in the UK in my early twenties, I didn't know anything about asylum or indeed about my country of birth where documentary evidence wasn't, still isn't treated as a matter of history and public record. I was given a stark choice by those who smuggled and facilitated my entry into the country, either to reduce my age and get an easy ride during screening and subsequent immigration interviews or tell the truth thereby risk getting my application rejected because I had spent more time in Saudi than in my country of origin and known very little about it. In fact, I deluded myself into believing I belonged to Saudi and learnt its culture and accent to perfection. It's not unknown of asylum seekers to claim to be from a warring country coterminous to theirs especially when the borders are porous, but that's a candle to another confessional cake.

Let me take a questioning break: Why should someone's right to adhere to a minority religion or participate in political life in their own country make them more worthy to come to Britain than another person's right to better themselves? The former is a refugee, the latter an economic migrant.

I chose the safer, easier option capitalising on my youthful looks and passing myself on as an unaccompanied minor. The burden of proof was much lower, they didn't ask for documents. I also wanted to be able to have formal education. So, I changed my age, I changed my name. Subsequently, I went through foster care and even five months of high school. The deracinated refugee cover must be maintained at all cost, the risk was and still is existential. So, I'm living another double identity, that of age with all its attendant troubling and comical possibilities.

I think I have already said more than what I should if I knew what was good for me. But one contextualising matter is that because it was my UK name -- which I changed again 8 moths ago -- which the Muslim 'friends' I came out to knew, they couldn't get to anyone related to me here or overseas to harm me. They did try it nevertheless. And to protect myself, my lies from ever being discovered, I don't use any social media and ask people to never take or share any pictures of me online due to my supposedly "well founded fear of political mistreatment" back home (this is of course half of the truth).
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Reply #57 - July 21, 2015, 12:58 AM

Edit
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Reply #58 - July 21, 2015, 03:27 AM

Quote from: musivore on July 17, 2015, 11:06 PM
What a gem of a person you are Whabbist. I remember you as an absolute hero. An articulate,, beautiful and sensitive hero, who expresses himself so achingly beautifully, that he sometimes makes you sit up and momentarily stop breathing.

But, it seems now, that I was wrong about you - you are much more than what I gave you credit for last time.
Let's fuck already. I'm game if you are.

musivore, this is the sort of whatchamacallit that brings the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty, according to Rupert Psmith who alone knew what was what. But on a serious note, it takes some focal adjustment to be suddenly thrust into the light after much darkness. I hadn't personally come to the forum to exactly pour polemical scorn on the Prophet, his nine wives and the Final Day. I knew other spiteful online places where that was offered, as it were, by the yardful. I'd come here, rather, seeking something that was nowhere else and nobody else was offering, something related directly to being an Ex Muslim. Of course I knew it was okay in my head to be the person I was becoming, even though I didn't know what that would amount to or whether being mindful of the foreseeable metamorphoses was enough to ease my trepidation. It was the floating in air I mentioned earlier but in relation to others. I needed to see what it meant to be as such in others who have been there (or here) before me; I needed to see who the Ex Muslims were, why and how. It's all very well reading Ibn Warraq and others but how about putting a human face to it? All these years and I still have not met a single Ex Muslim in real life for all the obvious reasons. So, I wasn't being unduly silly for thinking I shouldn't trust everyone who purported to be Ex Muslim here, they might well be Christian enemies of Allah and His messenger, might be orientalists or even MI5 operatives. If membership here was fettered so that bogus ones were booted out, I didn't know.

In the midst of such initial confusion and merciless doubting, I didn't mind the persiflage and the badinage. But it did jar with me when people confined themselves mainly to venting their spleens, profanity and pornographic references. Nothing positive to offer. I'm sure I did much of that too myself in that impressionable stage of my disbelief. We were a lot of people from a lot of different places and at different stages of our lives whose manifestly binding singularity was having said NO to Islam.

I don't mind using the word or actually fucking now. Indeed, my swing from strict no sex outside marriage to being not absolutely certain if consensual recreational incest is wrong is jaw-droppingly quite the swing. But it took time -- even as soon as a year and half ago, I still had residual uncomfortable feeling to imagine a sister of mine dating and fucking someone (what was this if not male double dealing that leaving Islam didn't cure?). It took time and took place not in its entirety here. If you check my older posts, you should find more than shaky grammar and bad spelling.
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Reply #59 - July 21, 2015, 02:07 PM

Quote from: spare parts on July 18, 2015, 07:16 PM
Hi Whabbist,
Thanks for taking the time to reply with your very elaborate response!

Wow, I'm amazed at the lengths you went to to avoid music!
Yet I know there are many muslims who still listen to music, and debate how reliable/important the music prohibition is. Still I'm impressed by your determination to live with integrity.

And yet the human need for musical rhythm is there, as you note; muslims like to sneak it into whatever form they can. And I remember when I was a muslim how exquisitely melodically beautiful some recitations of the koran could be. (haven't yet listened to your you tube references). It was almost hypnotic.

And I had just thrown in the reference to amusia as a sort of joke. But your
assertion that music affects you as an" arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds" - wow, that is so unusual : I have never knowingly met anyone who feels that way! But I think apparently up to 1 in 25 people are wired that way; they just don't get music.
I suppose that would have been a blessing in a muslim country: you weren't missing out, and you didn't have to have it inflicted on you.

And even for Beyonce or Miley Cyrus - the shower isn't the place for twerking or dancing!

spare parts, I think I misled you by not using quotation marks in relation to Nabokov's unreasonable aversion to music. I'm sorry for this. Though I'm not sure if this has anything to do with my otherwise old-fashioned punctuational as well as usage preferences i.e. no quotative 'like' or high-rising terminal for me. But I digress as I have been doing here all along when I have by my second reply said anything of teleological worth. It has been cathartic ( or did I really mean I cathected with the lovely, embarrassingly generous people here?) for me to share my meandering, unduly flowery confusion and so far, chaotic life story. I believe I have added some literary fluff to keep the punters impersonally interested -- I had to give Zakat on reading more than 60 books in two years, taking or making, as I do, copious mental notes.

spare parts, you started in this forum with me and this protracted thread in a befitting symmetry should for me end with you.

But not before raising a glass and maybe even a finger to Harakaat, for leaving us alone in the world.
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