Your parents made you learn the quran off by heart?? It took me long enough to read it! Tell us a little about your road to apostacy.. Have you visited FFI?
yup. may parents did make me learn the quran off by heart. i started this when i started high school, and so because i was learning the quraan by heart, i had to go to mosque from 5:30-7:30 in the morning and then 5:00-7:30 in the evening everyday for 6 straight years. it took me 3 years and 3 months to complete learning it off by heart.
my road to apostasy started very very early and slow. because i come from a very hardcore muslim famiy, with my brother being one of those people who go door to door preaching islam, or more commonly termed as people may recognize it as 'tablighi'. and so is my dad. both of them also know the quran off by memory. as for my mum and my two sisters, they might not wear those black cloaks or burkha as it's more commonly known, but they're also very hardcore. and, since i can remember, i've been going to the mosque five times a day for all five prayers.
i have a tendency to digress. well, my 'evil thoughts' started when i was very young, around 6-7 years old when i had just start mosque, and wondering on the most basic level, if god had brothers and sisters. and this notions of god having brothers and sisters developed until i was around 14 years old. it developed from knowing that i'm not suppose to think that but still thinking these thoughts, because they were questions out of curiosities and the needed to be answered. at the time, my idea of god having brothers and sisters developed into if if god created another god once he died, and thought that's how god worked, he just created another one. so i naturally wondered if there was a first one if you trace the line far back enough, and so doing this with all kinds of things meant none of my questions were answered.
hand in hand with these thoughts, or maybe even the cause of them, was that i use to see 'white' (sorry for using a crass and derogatory term) people as having a so much better life than me, and naturally i use to look up to them, even though i was told by my parents that 'white' (sorry again) people were inhumane, dirty, disgusting, and devoid of all human qualities. i'd see the kind of love their parents showed them when they were picked up from school as i was growing up and i felt as if i wanted some of that too. and i was also very jealous how they would play after school but me and my friends had no chance of doing so because we had to go to mosque.
my thoughts stirred some more when i was around 14-15 year old, but when i hit 16 and joined my sixth form, it's when the real fireworks started. i started a friendship with an english girl who was my first 'real' friend ever, and who to this day is my best friend, and i remember it being the month of ramadaan and i was fasting, and she's very very intelligent and curious, so she'd ask me all these questions to why i'd fast and so on (i was still a muslim then but slightly unsure), so i'd give her all these elaborate explanations of how it helps you feel for the poor and so on, and she'd counter everything i'd say with something much cleverer and what made more sense. after a few months of these questions about what i believed in, i completely rejected the religion.
this is how it'd exactly happened. i'd been thinking a lot about what i'd believed in this particular week in early 2005, and on this one night, before i went to sleep, i was thinking in bed of contradictory everything in religion was and so on. and then i thought, what would happen if i said 'i'm not a muslim', thinking i'd die instantly or something insane like that, but nothing happened, and having nothing happened to me felt like the most liberating thing on earth, and it was very much like as if everything was different now. everything looked different, because you weren't perceiving everything from 'god created it' point of view. so i went to sleep that night having told myself i wasn't a muslim, and since i haven't been.
for a year after that period, i had doubts about whether god existed, i knew all religions were rubbish just wasn't sure if god was. so i thought deep, separated the arguments into 'for' and ' against' and realized that for every 'for' argument i had, there was a better 'against' argument which nullified the 'for' argument.
oh, and since the day i rejected islam, a few months later was my onset of major depression which lasted around 2 and a half years. this was because of all the things my mind wanted to see and explore and which was obviously rejected by my family.
i've never had the nerve to tell them i'm not a muslim, so i keep leading the main ramadaan prayer every year,when i say lead, i mean i pray four of the rakaats out of the twenty, some other three people lead the other sixteen.
my depression was severe and i was in constant thoughts of committing suicide, which was never going to actually happen, but it was one way of telling myself of doing something about the shit life i lead then as i do now at home. my only consolation now is that i'm rarely at home, because i go to a university away from where i live, but periods like the summer holidays are depressing since i'm back at home.
oh, and i've ran away from home twice, the second time being last year, when i ran away for a week, it was going to be a permanent move away but this certain 'friend' of mine convinced me to go back home. i left a note before i ran away that day saying how i wan't a muslim and i was bisexual, i had feelings for guys too. my sister found it once i'd ran away, she showed my other sister and my brother but never my parents. i think they think that my rejection of the religion was because i was stuck at home, but it's because i rejected my religion i feel stuck at home.
oh. random information to know about me, i want to be neuroscientist, i want to live in london and then move to new york, i don't want to get married nor want any kids, and i want to know as much about how things work as i can.
i don't expect anyone to read till the end because it's a rubbish story.