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Just when I thought I was out-they pull me back in
  
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virus: One Muslim's Journey to Reason(msg body fixed)
« on: 2004-03-21 21:55:48 » |
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From this month's Skeptic zine
From Muslim to Skeptic
---------------------------------------
Before I came across Skeptic and your
skeptical books, I was a practicing
Muslim, a self-taught student of classical
and mainstream Islamic jurisprudence
and theology. At the time, I tried to come
across as a fairly liberal propounder of
the faith, especially when I was at univer-
sity. It was shortly after getting heavily
involved with an Islamic website, my col-
leagues printed a special Q&A booklet
setting out the reasons why in fact God
must exist, and how we can reason our-
selves into absolute truth by accurately
reading the signs of Allah in nature.
The arguments presented in that
booklet, however, quietly perturbed me
somewhat. I wasn't able to place my
finger on the exact nature of the prob-
lem contained therein, but I remember
that I found them intuitively simplistic.
This troubled me a little. But it would
have been a weak reflection on my
level of faith had I then tumed tail and
ran, solely on the basis of such a "triv-
ial" issue. In any case, I contented
myself with the hope that, maybe,
stronger defenses of the faith were to
be found elsewhere, should these
somehow prove defective. I continued
to believe.
Well, almost. In retrospect, it was not
too difficult to dispose of Hizb-ut-Tahrir
central notion of the individual obligation
of re-installing a Khilafab, a universal
Islamic state, a common leadership for
all Muslims. But when I came across
their discussion of the God Question, I
was taken aback. Their arguments were
not dissimilar to the ones that my web-
savvy friends had published a little eadi-
er. In fact, if anything, Hizb-ut-Tahrir was
far more articulate and seemingly sophis-
ticated in their presentation.
By then, I must say that my difficult
experiences with Hizb-ut-Tahrir had
caused me to place a premium on refut-
ing their belief system from the ground
up. I took my faith too seriously to let
them think that they could hold a
monopoly on the truth, for if I capitulat-
ed without demonstrating the hollow-
ness of their political program, they
would hold nothing but contempt for
my 'weak and distilled" beliefs. So I
resolved to show myself how their
beliefs on the existence of God stood on
the grounds of logic. I came across a
review of the second edition of How We
Believe. Science, Skepticism, and the
Sea rch for God by Michael Shermer I
was particularly interested in the chapter
on proofs of God, seeing that this might
provide me with some much-needed
ammunition.
You can probably see where this is
heading. The chapter on proofs not only
changed my view of how to assess
arguments for the existence of God, but
also illustrated the weak levels of faith of
those who deployed them. The book
shook me to the core, and for a few
months, I thought I could try to see
myself as a fideist. I still thought of
myself as a Muslim, but I came to finally
face what I had known all along-that
the Qur'an's repeated exhortation to find
God though reading His signs in nature
is a feature of the Islamic canon that can
never rest easily with fideistic notions. I
went back to the book and read it
again, but this time slowly. For the first
time, I began to seriously ponder what
life would be like without God.
If How We Believe shook me up and
planted a "seed of doubt" in my mind,
then a second cataclysm came in the
shape of September 11. My deep
unhappiness at the Muslim world's
ambivalent reaction to the atrocity fur-
ther aggravated my increasing split from
Islam. (I even set up a personal weblog
a few months after the terrorists struck,
taklng a strong pro-American, pro-Israeli
approach, all the time writing as a
Muslim). By this time, however, I was
no longer fully practicing the faith, and
considered myself an agnostic of sorts.
But I was heavily interested in Muslim
issues, and so I began reading books
about Islam and Muslims written by
non-Muslims. I remember being sur-
prised at how many were far more
coherent and insightful than most of the
Muslim authors I had come across.
Bemard Lewis, Martin Kramer, Daniel
Pipes, Emmanuel Sivan and Timur
Kuran (to name but a few) were inci-
sive in their treatment of Islam and mili-
tant Islam. I also found Ibn Warraq's
books on the origins of Islam to be
quite excellent and well-informed.
By now I was also educating myself
with a few books on the rules of critical
thinking. Edward T. Damer's book, and
the famous one by Theodore Schick, Jr.,
and Lewis Vaughn, How to Think About
Weird Things, reinforced my appreciation
of Baruch Spinoza's famous quote. A
few articles in Free Inquiry slowly
steered me towards being comfortable
with atheism, including one by
Theodore Schick, Jr. I can't seem to pin-
point the exact timing of when I went
from a theist to an agnostic, and an
agnostic to atheist. It happened very
gradually. It was as if I woke up one
morning, discovered I was an atheist,
thought it was okay, and went to work.
But without first reading How We
Believe I am sure that I would not have
taken up this remarkable and enlighten-
ing joumey. I still remember how the
words leapt off the pages into my mind,
and how my believing soul froze for just
a moment while the rest of the world
swiveled around me towards a new
position. That position seems to be
somewhat established now: my thoughts
on the existence of God reached a more
or less coherent form last year. It has
been a rich and intellectually liberating
experience to lift those dogmatic shack-
les that had burdened my mind for so
long. I no longer worship religion, as I
now recognize that faith continues to
harbor many serious problems, especial-
ly one such as Islam, but I don't hate it.
-Adi Farooq Birmingham, United Kingdom,
http://www.windsofchange.net
From Skeptic magazine Forum section
Vol. 10, #3
http://www.skeptic.com
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