Introduction: This is my written testimony of how I went from being a Muslim to Christian.
Disclaimers:
- If there are any Muslims reading this, I suggest that you take great caution because I have used a lot of strong terminology that will likely offend you, and you might end up reading something that you wish you never read.
- As for any right wing extremists, white supremacists or anti-Muslim bigots who might be reading this, don’t you dare try exploiting my testimony by using it as a tool to spread hatred against Muslims. I do not condone hatred against Muslims. No, I do not like the Religion of Islam, but that doesn’t give me or you the right to act hostile towards Muslims and commit acts of bigotry towards them. I am a former Muslim myself, so please take this advice from someone who has been in the inside and outside of the fold of Islam. Islam isn’t defined by peaceful Muslims or violent Muslims, so don’t judge Islam based on the actions of Muslims, as you might have heard somewhere. Judge Islam by the Quran (the Word of Allah, the Islamic God) and the Sunnah (sayings, deeds and actions of Muhammad, Founder and Prophet of Islam and his companions i.e. the Rightly Guided Calipihs, as recorded in Hadith and Sira material). But also don’t forget that you shouldn’t judge Muslims based on Islam is defined by. As much as I oppose certain Islamic teachings and the use of the word Islamophobia (which is a nonsensical word, just say anti-Muslim bigot), I also condemn right wing extremists, white supremacists and any anti-Muslim bigot out there. So anyone who tries using me as a tool to spread hatred against Muslims is being dishonest and despicable.
- As for any sincere person who’s not trying to spread ideological hatred and division and drag me into situations where people are having heated arguments about religion, but desires to send my testimony to people who are interested in hearing people’s religious testimonies, go ahead, but make sure that they don’t accidently get radicalised and are ready to read a testimony that is full of really strong and offensive language. I really hope no-one mistakens me for an extremist who has been radicalised into becoming an anti-Muslim bigot, and if anyone wants to bring up radicalisation before I start telling my story, I will be touching on that issue at some point in my story. As much as I dislike certain aspects of Islam, I do not want to radicalise anyone into having anti-Islamic views. Although there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a negative view on Islam, I do not want anyone to be forced into having my view of Islam. And I would also like to stress that there’s a time and place for having discussions and debates about religion because religion can be very personal to people because they are deeply held beliefs. I am not saying that you shouldn’t criticise and scrutinise Islam, I am just saying that there is a time and place for it and that you need to consider boundaries. If you want to discuss Islam with a Muslim, do it with someone who is comfortable and ready to do it. If you find a person who gets offended and upset at you for scrutinising and criticising his/her beliefs, that likely means you should find someone else. I don’t know what other advice to give, but if you adopt the anti-Islamic views that I have, please be very, very careful how, when and where you voice these views.
I don’t know what other advice and warnings to give out, but I think I have identified all the threats there are from reading this story.
Here’s how it started:
Back in May 2017 I was in a gmail hangout group chat with a few acquaintances of mine, we were making a lot of jokes. Some of those jokes included sharing memes about terrorist attacks that are done in the name of Islam by the likes of ISIS, I had already been participating in that months for a few months, but I got tired of the jokes about ISIS so I asked them to stop it by saying I don’t like jokes about a terrorist organisation that I believed to be a disgrace to Islam. I told them that Islam is a Religion of peace that’s only been given a bad name by terrorists.
That request led to an unexpected response from one of them, who was from Scotland. I will not mention him by name, so I will refer to him as the Scottish guy. The Scottish guy established and made it very clear that he disagreed by views on ISIS and Islam. Why? Because he opposed Islam as an ideology, and he said that ISIS is not the only form of violence and oppression that’s done and motivated by Islam. He mentioned Shari’ah law and Muslim immigrants who rape Europeans in Europe as another form of Islamic violence and oppression and argued these acts of violence and oppression as being ideologically motivated. Cameron showed me Quran verses about women, namely Quran 4:34 and Quran 4:11. His response completely caught me off guard and stimulated a response from me, so I got desperate by saying that these acts of violence are a twisted misinterpretation of Islam. I failed to address his use of those Quran verses and spent a lot of time beating around the bush and performing mental gymnastics for Islam by explaining these verses away by sugercoating these Quran verses to make them sound nicer. This debate was very short and did not go well for me.
Although I got the last word and technically won, it was a very hollow victory because he couldn’t be bothered making an immediate response, and said that he’ll respond when he has the motivation. I never got a response from him because he procrastinated. My defense of the Quran didn’t give me any true victory in the debate, so after that debate had finished, I felt the need to learn more about my own faith so that I would understand it a lot better and learn how to deal with such objections to Islam. I decided to start learning about my faith by investigating its sacred texts, origins, history and what exactly made it the most controversial Religion in the world, and why there are so many radical Muslims and Islamic extremists worldwide.
I started this with the primary purpose of refuting the radicals and extremists, and this didn’t just include terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, it also included the Muslim immigrants that rape Europeans in European countries, radical Islamist preachers like Anjem Choudary, Omar Bakri Muhammad and Abu Haleema, who promote all kinds of hate in the name of Islam. I opposed all of that when I starting doing this journey in my last few months of being a Muslim because I had the presupposition that ISIS and all these Islamist and Jihadist groups had absolutely nothing to do with Islam. I also wanted to understand the Shari’ah because I subconsciously knew that I knew and understood very little of it.
At the start of this journey, I came across a documentary called “The Jihadis Next Door” by filmmaker Jamie Roberts. The documentary itself showed us the motives and goals of Islamic extremists in the UK. The likes of Abu Haleema, Mohammed Shamsuddin, Abu Rumaysah were featured, and they made it clear that they wanted to implement Shari’ah in the UK. They hated secularism and democracy. They hated the system that the UK operated by, and felt like the UK was waging some kind of war against Muslims by indoctrinating British Muslims with western values by wanting British Muslims to abide by a secular democratic system, which is man made law, and the extremists had the view that the system itself was compromising the Religion of Islam for millions of British Muslims. Islam isn’t just a faith, but a complete way of life that has it’s own legal system called the Shari’ah. The Shari’ah is the divine law for Muslims, and Islamic extremists want to implement the Shari’ah in the UK so that Muslims can live a more pure Islamic way of life, without any western innovations. From their perspective, the concepts of secularism and democracy should not be accepted by Muslims because legislation is for no one but Allah alone. When I first saw this, I was so shocked by the sheer hostility and hatred they showed towards non-Muslims. They even showed hostility to Pakistani Muslims outside a Mosque on Pakistan independence day on the charge of “Nationalism.”
At the same time, I also heard people saying that the reason why ISIS and Al Qaeda are doing what they’re doing is because of foreign policy. In other words, ISIS and Al Qaeda had political grievances with the west because the US had a history of invading and occupying Muslim lands, which provoked Al Qaeda, and ISIS later on, into attacking the west out of revenge. I often heard this from Muslims, and they weren’t wrong. However, I suspected that they were giving an incomplete picture and oversimplifying the truth. There had to be more to it than just foreign policy. But ISIS and Al Qaeda’s political grievances cannot be ignored. This did explain why Islamists like Anjem Choudary complained about Muslims being oppressed by the UK government in his extremist activities, but even this early in my journey, I could already tell that Choudary is exaggerating and just playing the victim card.
