Becoming my own master.

In the third blog taken from Leaving Faith Behind: The journeys and perspectives of people who have chosen to leave Islam, Aliyah Saleem reflects on pivotal moments that lead her to realise that Islam simply was a religion like any other whose outlook on the world could be inaccurate ...

Over the course of a year in an all-girl’s college in Pakistan, I transformed from a rebellious and sceptical teenager to a fully veiled fundamentalist Muslim who would have justified any kind of sharia execution if you could find me a verse or a ‘sound’ saying from Muhammad. All the knowledge that I had gained from my time at an Islamic boarding school in Britain finally made sense and I started to believe in it.

Back in England again, I started my A levels at the Islamic College of London, where I studied English, Psychology and Sociology. I was deeply religious at this point, praying my five daily prayers and when I could, a sixth prayer in the early hours of the morning.

I was teaching children Arabic and Islamic Studies, as well as teaching the interpretation of the Quran in the prayer room of the Islamic College where I was enrolled. No matter how much I prayed or spread the word of Allah, I felt empty. A suffocating depression followed me everywhere I went as I thought-policed myself, and despaired at my own sinfulness.

I wouldn’t allow myself to listen to music, digging my nails into my skin out of anxiety if I was stuck somewhere like a shop where music would be playing in the background. I felt disconnected from my sceptical and liberal father who looked at me like I was a stranger in his home. I had stopped wearing the face veil but I kept my long jilbab and hijab on all the time. I think I resented my mother for sending me away and looked down on her for not following my version of fundamentalist Islam.

This was the first time in my life when I had had unfettered access to three sources of information: TV, the internet, and public libraries. Before this, most of the content that I could access was heavily controlled to filter out anything considered too sinful for a good Muslim. At college, I started studying in a way that I was not used to at all. Islam did not enter the classroom, even if some of my teachers were Muslim. I could ask questions and not be laughed at. Instead, my teachers enjoyed my thirst for answers and encouraged me to think critically. I started asking myself the questions I thought I was done with when I embraced fundamentalism in Pakistan. Faith is nothing without trust and some time during my studies abroad, I had put my trust firmly in the Allah of Farhat Hashmi and the Deobandi¹ clerics who had inspired the curriculum at Jamia Al-Hudaa.

The Allah I believed in then was a paradoxical figure: The Most Compassionate as well as one swift to order boiling pus and water to be shoved down the throats of disbelievers and sinners. Unlike some of my Muslim friends and family, hell was not an abstract concept to me. I had spent years reciting, memorising, and studying the detailed verses on the grotesque horrors that awaited disbelievers. Even if I wanted to, I was unable to believe that Allah would not be true to his word. I was convinced that once the Muslims were cleansed of their sins and removed from Hell, the fiery pit still full of kafirs² would be sealed forever. I took every word of the Quran to be literal and found the idea that Allah’s words could be taken as metaphorical both delusional and arrogant.

During my A-level Sociology classes, we took a module on different political perspectives on religion. This was a defining moment during my education at the college because it was the first time that I was really introduced to the concept of feminism. We learnt about different feminist perspectives on religious control, particularly over the bodies of women. For the first time in my life I had found a language that explained my own suffocation at being told to wear this, or do that because I was female. The more I studied feminism, the more my own world started to fall apart. I would lie on my prayer mat, clutching at my hijab like it was a noose, wanting to let my hair run free but also fearing the consequences of divine anger. I toyed with the delicious and frightening idea that I might be able to choose what to do with my own body and life, that perhaps I was free and not a slave to God and family honour.

Questions started coming to me at frightening speed during this time. Why did the Quran sanction the physical abuse of women? If the Quran was the final revelation, why didn’t Allah spare a moment to completely ban violence against women? Even if many scholars had interpreted the verse to mean hit lightly, with a miswak-like thing, or even that it was only a metaphorical beating, would that not also amount to emotional abuse which is humiliating for women?

I also noticed things that I hadn’t before – for instance the Quran hardly speaks directly to women, instead it tends to speak to men about their women. I had also started to fall out of love with Muhammad. I was taught that Muhammad married many times and that his favourite wife was only six years old at the time of marriage, and that he slept beside her when she was nine years old. Some Muslim interpretations state that she was 19 years old at the time of their wedding. We were taught that a nine-year-old during the prophet’s time was like an adult woman in our age as females matured much faster during that era and we were assured that this was backed up by science. According to the life story of Muhammad that I was taught, he visited her soon before they were betrothed and she was still playing with toys. She had a small winged horse, and he said to her that horses do not fly to which she replied that the prophet Solomon had winged horses. The story that I was taught is that Muhammad realised that he should marry Aisha because of a recurring dream where her picture was shown to him and naturally her father, the prophet’s best friend and ally Abu Bakr hastily gave her away to him. Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha at the age of six which is supported by narrations of Muhammad considered to be authentic by many scholars is partly the reason it is so difficult to eradicate child marriage in some places such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Yemen as for some, child marriage is sanctioned because Muhammad’s life is taken to be an example for all of mankind.

I don’t consider the main sources of the prophet’s narrations to be authentic historical sources, but the fact is this, these books are historically sound to many Islamic scholars who hold political power over the lives of millions of people including little girls. The books that were written about Muhammad’s life were written many centuries after he died. Imam Bukhari’s collection of narrations about Muhammad’s lives, the gold standard among many Sunni scholars, say that he travelled through deserts looking for anyone who had heard from someone that someone had heard that someone had heard that Muhammad had said such and such a thing. These narrations attest to whether Muhammad did or didn’t marry a child and in my view the methods used by scholars of hadith are not rigorous enough for us to actually know whether it happened or not. What is more alarming is that many scholars are willing to justify and accept these narrations irrespective of the impact it has on child marriage laws in some parts of the world.

Aisha was my favourite of the prophet’s wives. She was fiery, intelligent, jealous, and waged war against Ali, the nephew and son-in-law of Muhammad after he died according to the legend. I have read many Muslim feminists hold up Khadija, Muhammad’s first wife, as proof that Islam is not a sexist, out-of-date religion. After all it was she who propositioned him and she was richer and much older than Muhammad. However, what many fail to mention is that the same sources that give them their accounts of Khadija to soothe the minds of Western liberals, support the idea that Aisha was only a child when he married her. I have noticed that Islamic feminists skirt over Aisha’s story, perhaps feeling too uncomfortable to discuss the claims that Muhammad had a sexual relationship with a child.

To this day, I feel more secure criticising the idea of God, than to speak against Muhammad. My mother always warns me – say what you will of God but don’t criticise Muhammad otherwise the mob will find you. She is right to give me this advice. Look to some of the most prominent cases of blasphemy in the world, and you will see that judges and civilians rush to condemn people who dare to criticise the final prophet. Every so often I think of Christian woman Asia Bibi, who is rotting away on death row in Pakistan because some village women said that she criticised Muhammad, a claim that she vehemently denies. A living and breathing woman is still locked away from her children and denied her freedom because she was accused of tarnishing a dead man’s name.

I started visiting churches and cathedrals when my doubts really weighed on me, to people-watch other worshippers. I spent many hours in Southwark Cathedral, listening to the choir boys singing beautifully, wondering whether I was doomed and going to burn alongside them. Christianity did not tempt me I didn’t bother to study it deeply as I thought Islam was the most superior religion. I had been taught that all religions, including Buddhism, start off as Islam, and then they get corrupted as time passes. When Muslims read the first chapter of the Quran during their daily prayers, they ask God not to make them like the people who were led astray nor like those who had make God angry. We believed that the first group were the Christians who blasphemously attributed a son to God and the second group are Jews who feature repeatedly in the Quran for some misdeed or another.

The internet became my friend as I spent a long time searching for arguments against Islam, desperate for it to not be true. Some of you reading this might think that my heart wasn’t pure at the time, and therefore the devil was able to completely take over. It is true that I wanted someone to convince me that it wasn’t true so that I could let go of the terror that took over me whenever I thought billions of people burning in hell, their skins healed and burned all over again. I wanted to be told that I didn’t have to wear hijab and that I wasn’t immodest for it. I wanted to listen to music and dance like the women I saw on TV, I wanted to be a freer version of myself. Yes, I wanted to throw away the chains that were placed on me to make me into a good woman ready to serve her husband and children. My belief in Islam started to ebb slowly away as I understood the theory of evolution and watched video after video of atheists debating prominent Muslim scholars. Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, although I accept that they aren’t perfect prophets, were some of my earliest atheistic influences.

I was both shocked and amused by their candid criticism of Muhammad and the claim that the Quran was a peaceful book which contained the perfectly conserved word of God. I allowed the doubt to take root inside me and stopped fighting it. I could read the Quran critically and some of the fear that I felt when I read verses about disbelievers left me. I was no longer able to justify the punishments for disbelievers or punishments such as cutting off a thief’s hand. I pushed aside the scholarly footnotes that preached caution before carrying out any of the Quran’s violent punishments and couldn’t help but see it as nothing more than a man-made thing like the Talmud or the Bible if it needed so many words of human caution to stop people carrying out acts of violence masked as God’s divine order.

There was a defining moment for me when any belief I had left in God was wiped out from me completely. I was listening to Carl Sagan reading from his book The Pale Blue Dot. He spoke about an image and when I googled it I was shocked. It was an image of a tiny blue dot, suspended in a beam of light – earth. I was so consumed at that point with the idea of a very rigid concept of God and Islam. When I truly realised how tiny the earth is in comparison to the rest of the universe, I couldn’t believe in a tiny God who was waiting to line human beings up after punishing some of them in the grave, to ask them why they didn’t wear hijab or why they didn’t believe in him. I felt a peace the like of which I haven’t experienced again, a reassuring conviction that this was my only life and that I won’t have the suffer the torment of being tortured in hell or knowing that others were being tortured for eternity. Some former Muslims say that doubting caused them great anxiety and fear, but for me it was exhilarating. I felt like I could breathe again when I realised that it was possible that Islam simply was a religion like any other whose outlook on the world could be inaccurate.

 

This is an extract written by Aliyah Saleem, co-founder of Faith to Faithless, from Leaving Faith Behind: The journeys and perspectives of people who have chosen to leave Islam edited by Fiyaz Mughal, director of Faith Matters and Aliyah herself.

1 The Deobandi tradition is diverse and wide, originating in Deoband, India, in the nineteenth century. It is the most influential form of institutionalised Islam in Britain with an estimated 40 per cent of mosques following its tradition.

 

2 Disbelievers.