Apostatization process...

1« Previous thread | Next thread »
- Alecto
- Goddess of Unceasing Anger
- Ex-Muslim
- offline
Apostatization process...
OP - December 10, 2009, 03:06 AM

Apostatization probably isnt a word but whatever.

How many stages did you go through to get to your current belief system? Was it straight from Islam to atheism or were there steps in between? I know some went through liberal Islam. I considered Bahaiism, simply because they only prayed three times a day. But no still to regimented. Then liberal Christianity so I wouldn't have to be a trinitarian, cuz there's no explaining that shit. Judaism was pretty much out of the question, cuz I believe they dont really see you as Jewish unless your mother is. Then agnosticism to deism to agnostic deism.

My outlook has changed so much in 5 months- at first I didnt understand why you would go from a religion to atheism. Leaving a religion doesnt mean leaving god, but now, obviously its the other way around- leaving one delusion/stupidity/dogma for another is nonsensical. How you can see the flaws in one religion but not see the same shit in another religion I have no clue. (That goes to the boys at Answering Islam/Christianity).

The dumbest thing though is probably converting to a liberal strain of a religion. Thats like saying "Yes,my former religion is bullshit, and yes, I know this religion is bullshit too, but it can be reformed! It would still be bullshit, but it's my bullshit!" I dunno man...wake up and smell the coffee- age-old dogma will always be age-old dogma.

"We were married by a Reform rabbi in Long Island. A very Reform rabbi. A Nazi."-- Woody Allen
- _truth_
- Ex-Muslim
- offline
Re: Apostatization process...
Reply #1 - December 10, 2009, 04:34 AM

i went from Sunni Salafi Muslim to Deist to Atheist
- Iblis
- Ex-Muslim
- betta rekognize
- offline
Re: Apostatization process...
Reply #2 - December 10, 2009, 04:57 AM

For a while I was a traditional sunni Muslim, from the ages of 14-21. As I learnt more about Islam and Muhammad I started moving towards "Liberal Islam". This was my most transformative period as the foundations of critical attitudes towards Islam were being laid though I didn't realise it. I'd say I was a pretty doubtful liberal and confused Muslim for about 4-6 months. I recall I sort of truly "left" the faith in my heart at the end of Ramadan on precisely Eid in 2004. It was winter. After that I started to distance myself from Muslims but I actually continued practice for about 2 months. In the begining of the winter semester of my 3rd year in engineering I decided to end this story and stopped practicing altogether. So in january 2005 was when I became a murtad both in theory and practice.

Due to social disconnection and the fact that 2005 was my last year in uni without any Muslim community I went through about a year of just isolation, focusing on my studies and avoiding Muslims (where have you been akhi??!). I would say at this point I was just a kinda depressed and dissillusioned and really not sure what I believed. I was not really atheist at all, in fact the very notion repulsed me - as we've been brainwashed to loathe them. I was in between deism and agnosticism I'd say. Then in about early 2005 I decided to buy this hot new book everybody was talking about called "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris. I read it within a few days, it was exactly what I needed to put me on some intellectual solid ground. I didn't become an atheist right away but that book would start a process of critical thinking about both god and religion that would end up in me officialy considering myself a disbeliever in God or Gods or any supernatural things by the end of 2005 - not sure when.

So to sum up, the "apostisaztion" process went.

1) Traditional Sunni Muslim. Fully practicing, fully open to brainwashing, totally ignorant of the spiritual texts. 9/11 occurs, active campus Muslim determined to learn more about Islam to defend it from it's detractors. Typically young, zealous, naive and completely ignorant.
2) Doubting/Liberal Muslim. Fully practicing but studies into the Quran and the hadiths to defend Islam ironically backfires as it only confuses me and causes a crisis of faith. I recover from the initial dissillusionment and settle on liberal Islam seeing questionable verses being metaphorical and downplaying the importance of hadiths.
3) Dissillusioned/Faithless Muslim. I still continue practicing however I my faith in Islam is severely damaged and eventually reached a point when I continue the motions of the deen but have no faith or belief whatsoever. I still belief in god, but in a deistic manner.
4) Agnostic/Deist. I admit to myself I cannot live a lie and much to my relief openly admit to myself that I'm no longer a believer. I stop all practice and am rather nebulous and unsure of what I am and what I actually believe. I am not at all interested or even consider other religions as a conversion option.
5) Atheist/Secular Humanist. Further readings and opening of my mind to all the questions of religion in general begin a process whereby I fully accept there is no god and that secular humanistic and liberal values make the most sense to me and agree with my rational reasoning.

I just want to make clear that in periods 1, 2, 3, my main doubts were with Islam, not God. I was a deep believer in Allah and a higher power. Doubts and disbelief in Allah himself was demolished later by reading into atheistic arguments and using the same critical thinking that I had used on Islam the religion.

Quote from: thinkfree on September 28, 2010, 07:58 PM
Iblis has mad debaterin' skillz. Best not step up unless you're prepared to recieve da pain.
- Manat
- Great googa mooga!
- Ex-Muslim
- offline
Re: Apostatization process...
Reply #3 - December 10, 2009, 05:32 AM

Quote from: Angel54 on December 10, 2009, 03:06 AM
Apostatization probably isnt a word but whatever.

How many stages did you go through to get to your current belief system? Was it straight from Islam to atheism or were there steps in between?

I went from a solitary, free Islam to a mashup of salafee and mainstreamy type of things to orthodox sufism to orthodox agnosticism to agnosticism to atheism.

Solitary free -- I didn't go to the masjid, I didn't follow the rules and rituals, I dressed and ate as I pleased. I did not really associate with Muslims at all. Yet it was at this stage that I had the strongest faith in allah and a pure conception of Muhammad (mainly because I didn't know the details of his life and all that).

Mashup Islam -- This is when I thought I needed to get more serious, "give more to allah" that sort of thing. I associated it a bit with growing up. The main form of Islam that was around was salafee Islam, but I also had some conception of both liberal / quran only Islam through friends and the sort of Islam that is mainstream, like that you see at the conventions (isna, that sort of thing). I didn't have any judgments about salafee methods, etc but I knew that I didn't like what I was seeing as the result of salafism in people's attitudes and lifestyles. I saw some horrible things that happened to women and children and at this stage my lifelong belief in allah started to falter a bit.

Orthodox sufism -- This is obvious. I dabbled a bit in progressive / no-hadith Islam, but the people's personalities were so obnoxious that I was turned off from learning more about the ideas themselves. I thought sufism might give me back to that pure, strong faith in allah, but instead it was more rules and if you aren't 'feeling' allah then it is your fault for not following all the rules 100%. This was the stage, I think, where my goose was cooked. There was not going back to "solitary free" or anything like that, b/c I had been educated - or indoctrinated - so strongly against any unorthodox form of Islam, and against 'ecstatic sufism'.

Orthodox agnosticism -- At this stage, I really questioned the existence of allah. I was not sure that I believed he was there at all - and if I'd thought about it at any great length, I would have realized that I don't. However, embarrassingly, I still believed that Islam was the 'best system for society'. This is because I was a bigger asshole then than I am today. I thought that if people would follow 'the rules', then the horrible things I saw in my mashup period would not happen. But then I came to realize that this was not the case - Islam is so stacked against women, it wouldn't improve what I saw. I also began to conceive of the rules as having no divine origin - the obsession with the right side and 3, 33, 99 all sound like OCD to me - very human.

Agnosticism & atheism -- Getting away from Islam and all these other things was such an effort that I couldn't even think about do I think there is a higher power or not. That lasted about ... maybe a few months. Then I realized that no, I really don't see the evidence for one at this time.

[this space for rent]
- Omaar Khayaam
- Ex-Muslim
- offline
Re: Apostatization process...
Reply #4 - December 10, 2009, 10:30 AM

Hmm..

Where do I start?

I went from a traditional sunni muslim -> deist -> agnostic/pantheist -> atheist.

It wasn't an easy journey and I wish I had done it earlier, especially before I got married.

Anyway, as a kid I never doubted the existence of God. It wasn't a thought that ever occurred to me, at least till I was fourteen. When I asked a common brushed aside question, "who created god?" The question was brushed aside swiftly by those older than me, stating that the question was incorrect and that God has always existed. I didn't ask that question again till I was eighteen, I only wish I'd nipped it in the bud then, rather than waiting till I was thrity four!

What did I dabble in on my road to apostacy? Well, my childhood was the run of the mill learning to read Quran and salah from various "aunties" and "uncles". I finished learning to read the Quran when I was 9 or 10. It wasn't difficult, but I got the regular beatings in the process. Which in no way contributed to my thinking. All I put that down to, is that they have no idea on how to discipline a child and only dish out what they themselves have been dealt.

My father was an atheist so religion wasn't a big thing at home. My mother was a believer, but never prayed nor fasted, which I have noticed amongst most women who were born in the fifties and were first generation immigrants to the west. Nevertheless she did her "cultural" duty (which is what I think it is) and sent me to learn Quran etc etc.

My parents got divorced when I was nine and my mother was awarded custody, being a single mother of Pakistani origin in the early eighties was a huge taboo and I was insulted at school for it. Mum tried her best, fitting in work and looking after us, teaching us islam was the last thing on her mind.

I was fairly inclined towards religion at an early age because of the sense of community and solidarity it fostered amongst the community. But I needed some sort of outlet in which to let this grow and develop, so at the age of thirteen I came across the Young Muslims UK. They had weekly meetings and national camps etc. The good thing about it was, was that it housed educated individuals and not stupid village mullah's. I remained a rather inactive member till I was about eighteen. It was during my time at YM that I asked the question I stated above.

I married young and had kids young, my attention turned towards them and my prayers etc suffered. I started practising again when I was twenty four, this is when I started to take religion seriously and started to grow a beard and followed the sunnah's. But I always carried the doubt of the existence of God in my mind. I used to put it down to "wasswassa" or "baseless misgivings". It was here that I came across the famous names of Hamza Yusuf, Abdal Hakim Murad, Nuh Keller and Muhammad Al-Yaqoobi. These guys and traditional islam had just burst on the scene, after a period of salafi and HT domination.

I remained a follower of traditional islam and even had a "shaykh", who used to give me "wirds" to recite after fajr and maghrib. I asked every shaykh I came across about my doubt, but I was never intellectually satisfied with any of the answers. I just couldn't make that "leap of faith" and thought that it really was intellectual suicide.

I had a few friends who introduced me to Hizb-ut-Tahrir and their rational argument for the existence of God. I thought that they would surely have the answer to my intellectual thirst. I read some of the arguments that they advanced and they were absolutely riddled with fallacies and assumptions. What they were following just seemed like a marriage of Trotsky thought with sunni islam. The language they used was so far removed from what the prophet and sahabah had introduced. It made the Prophet sound like Che Guevara and the sahabah like a group of cadre's!

I carried on with traditional Islam and took a trip to Istanbul in early 2005 in the hope that some iman would develop and penetrate my heart. I have to admit, that I was awe struck by the devotion the Turks showed towards the love for the prophet and the great buildings and masjids I saw in there. But that didn't make the whole thing true. Coptic christians and followers of other faiths also showed the same amount of devotion to their respective faiths, that didn't make any of it true. It just showed the dedication of the followers and nothing more.

The last straw as far as intellectual satisfaction came to me during ramadan 2006 when I went to see Abdal Hakim Murad at Cambridge Uni, at his invitation. Again, there was just a blank stare on my face when he gave me the answers to my questions. I had heard all these answers before. I honestly thought they were attempts to dress up islam in sophistry and western philosophy. I really wasn't going to be overthrown by names like Aristotle and Plato being thrown into the mix.

I came away from that meeting still wanting islam and God to be true, but admitting that the intellectual arguments just fell short and were full of holes. I admitted that it was a leap of faith and it was the quality of my practise which would determine my iman. But that seemed like making an assumption first and making a leap of faith.

Anyhow I officially apostated early this year after reading those books which I avoided most of the time like Dawkins and Hitchens and could see right through the arguments and intellectual bancruptcy that the theologians presented.
- Rubaiyat
- Ex-Muslim
- offline
Re: Apostatization process...
Reply #5 - December 11, 2009, 12:08 AM

As I said before.

I went from a Devout Believer in Islam....to a Devout Skeptic.....to an Atheist.

The process was a long process.

It was an evolution of both spiritual and intellectual progress of an individual towards non-belief.

Challenge All Ideologies but don't Hate People.
1« Previous thread | Next thread »