Reflection III
Introduction
In a Muslim community, one of the ways to understand why someone is not Muslim, whether it is an atheist, a Christian, or a Buddhist, is by believing that their heart doesn't see the divine light, or that God has taken the possibility away from them to have faith in Him. There is no reason why God would allow or forbid someone to enter His path. This is how God wants it and He is not to be questioned. The approach of the Muslim community to certain words of God, that people refuse to believe, should have a less emotional and more libertarian reaction. Still, maybe that is an expectation I have of the right thing from the wrong community. If someone believes that a certain verse can not be an expression of God, because they can not fathom how self-centered a God can be on the belief in Him and the punishment of it when opposed, the approach should be that this person thinks this verse is not God's expression. In contrast, the Muslim community integrated into their educational upbringing in all Muslim families around the world the mentality that questioning Him might be an early sign that someone's heart is starting to harden. In this post, we will approach the understanding of a hardened heart in Islam.
Is faith in God's hands or is there free will?
It is very common to praise someone who isn't Muslim and behaves righteously as "May God guide him/her." because the most important step in someone believing in Him is in His control. Yet, in the Quran, some verses refer to God's disappointment about some of us who have a heart that doesn't understand, eyes that don't see, and ears that don't hear. How would that be possible if that is in the hands of God?
"Indeed, We have destined many jinn and humans for Hell. They have hearts they do not understand with, eyes they do not see with, and ears they do not hear with. They are like cattle. In fact, they are even less guided! Such ˹people˺ are ˹entirely˺ heedless (careless)."
Al-A'raf, 7:179
Allah and the unbelievers
In the following verses from the second chapter of the Quran, chapter Al-Baqarah, I will question God's approach to increasing the absence of belief among unbelievers.
Alif-Lãm-Mĩm.
This is the Book! There is no doubt about it —a guide for those mindful ˹of Allah˺,
who believe in the unseen, establish prayer, and donate from what We have provided for them,
and who believe in what has been revealed to you ˹O Prophet˺ and what was revealed before you, and have sure faith in the Hereafter.
It is they who are ˹truly˺ guided by their Lord, and it is they who will be successful.
As for those who persist in disbelief, it is the same whether you warn them or not—they will never believe.
Allah has sealed their hearts and their hearing, and their sight is covered. They will suffer a tremendous punishment.
And there are some who say, “We believe in Allah and the Last Day,” yet they are not ˹true˺ believers.
They seek to deceive Allah and the believers, yet they only deceive themselves, but they fail to perceive it.
There is sickness in their hearts, and Allah ˹only˺ lets their sickness increase. They will suffer a painful punishment for their lies.
There are so many things written in the Tafsirs (explanation, interpretation) about verses in the Quran, including the ones listed above, that interpret how God would want us to understand what He revealed. I can read a whole book, or rather, volumes of books about why God chose these words to express Himself, but I refuse to understand God through a human filter. I believe that, if we want to understand the Quran as it is, we should not read seven books to understand one verse, or three chapters to understand why God did not use a specific other word that would have made a verse less controversial. Now that Muslims can use the Internet to study their religion with unbiased sources and translations, meaning reading the Quran as it is, the filtered answers of Muslim scholars are no longer satisfying.
Not questioning God to avoid the label of a hardened heart
A Muslim who questions will not listen to his instincts to find the answers he is looking for. The fear that he will become someone whose heart turned blind overtakes the urge to look for satisfying answers. If he follows his instinct, the worst thing that can happen to a believer might happen to him. There is forgiveness for everything, but losing God. If you are a believer, every sin can be forgiven by God, because the most important thing is to have faith in Him, even if it is the size of an apple seed, and the rest doesn't matter in the end. What a disappointment it is for decent human beings who have no faith in Him. Those are the ones who will burn forever because their good deeds will never overtake the arrogance of not believing in God.
A Muslim that grows up in such an upbringing will hardly question a single verse, let alone why God always chose a prophet from the Middle East, why we should learn Arabic or Hebrew to understand Him, why we have to turn around and touch a big stone building that we refer to as His home and stone the devil with some more stones, or simply why we have to prove ourselves to Him with certain practices if He knows our intentions. These practices are for people who have discipline and it is not easy for everyone to have that, which is the reason why a lot of Muslims wake up and sleep with feelings of shame for not praying that day, even if they did something very brave in the name of humanity. These are very surface-level questions to which very long answers are possible because they concern a community that knows how to find answers that are not there. And I admit that I learned to accept the unsatisfying answers for them only to avoid turning into someone whose heart hardened. I can say that I am sure that there are so many Muslims out there that find so many things either controversial, or not logical at all, but they wipe it off with the thought that it doesn't have to be logical. They might also trust their gut feeling, without realizing that the gut feeling is usually fed with preferences, comfort, and mental manipulation of the self.
Faith is not a choice, but a state of mind. Free will won't change the way I reason. Is my heart hardened?
Why do I think faith is not a choice? Anyone who is born within a religious community and fed with a dominant punishment mentality of a scary Almighty God has no choice but to believe in it. Someone who converts to Islam chooses to believe in the scripture, but that group is not the subject of this topic. There are a lot of problems in that approach too, but unlike the Muslim community, I respect anyone's choice for a belief system in which they feel the best about themselves, but I will not take a step back to discuss what has to be said.
Converts
I think that anyone who converts to Islam either has read Islamic sources that are most of the time cherry-picked, or they have read the Quran without understanding what they read, or they are living Islam with an adapted lifestyle, thus not fully, that allows them to live synchronized in the country they were born, or they were inspired by the attitude of a Muslim, thinking their morals were the whole image of the Islamic religion. Another possible reason might be that they accepted everything bluntly, with controversies said and done by Mohamed and many scientific mistakes in the Quran altogether. For me, the last group is the one who believes with their whole heart, but it would be better for these individuals to live in a country where Sharia laws rule the country, as their expectations would be satisfied to the fullest. They would also not feel excluded in the society in which they converted to Islam.
Reverts*
Now that I used the word 'convert', the reader should also know an important argument in the Muslim community, which is to call anyone who converted to Islam a revert. They believe all individuals are born Muslim, but throughout their lives, they may adopt other belief systems, and if, at a certain point in their lives, they choose to adopt the Islamic belief 'again', they revert to the natural source of humanity. Thus, calling them a convert would be absurd. According to the Muslim community, there is no natural identity to the human being that is above the Muslim identity and Islam as a religion. They might think it is a form of a spiritual and humanistic approach to their belief, but in my opinion, it is a very big form of disrespect and disparagement towards any other belief system.
1. Faith is not a choice
I will divide the upper title into three sections to discuss them separately. My focus under this title is the group of people who are born in a Muslim family and have had an Islamic upbringing. How can the choice of not believing in Allah be an option when, to ensure faith in a child, parents tell God's scary characteristics, like the grandeur and power of Allah that always watches over everyone, which is a conscious choice parents perform and a process they also had to endure in their childhood that worked for generations? The first step is always the traumatizing side, about how the scary God can interfere with the child by punishing him for something he should not do, or to behave well and listen to the parents because one day the apocalypse will come, which hasn't for over 1400 years. The natural love a believer has toward God is a personal approach of the person that manifests later in his life, which turned the scary approach during his Islamic upbringing into a divine and mysterious love to be able to keep believing in God and unconsciously avoid all the punishment they were told as a child.
2. Faith is a state of mind and free will won't change the way I reason
Until a believer is able to fight his fear of being punished for questioning God, he is living in a state of mind where he mainly survives to avoid any curse for his possible new choice of belief. Some people who were born Muslim naturally never believed in the irrational stories that are the basis of their religion, for which they found their new belief system earlier on but for others, it might be a harder step, as feelings of parental and environmental expectation, disappointment by the community, and feelings of shame dominate their minds more than the need for answers to questions they should not ask.
The one thing that shook the whole pile of irrationalities
The things I never found logical, like fasting for 60 days if you intentionally break your fast, which I did when I was 11 years old because it was too hard, are still things that I will not find rational. How can a day of cheating equal to 60 days of fasting? But examples like these are piled up on the side for a Muslim until the day comes when something shakes the whole pile off. This year is my fourth year studying Philosophy and no philosopher has inspired me to question the faith I hold onto so strongly, because, at the end of the day, it is called faith for a reason. My Muslim environment usually made jokes that expressed their fear of my 'possible' loss of faith because of my philosophical studies. "Do not overthink and lose yourself like some philosophers!" they would say. I would find it funny.
Little does the Muslim community know they should fear History classes more than they should fear Philosophy classes. In History classes, we learn on a deeper level how religion and politics are very intertwining games that are stretched out through a long period (since the time we invented language), which, for the individuals that endure their manipulation, only experience politics and religion in a short period of a lifetime where they usually do not research the emergence of it. The systemic spread and control of the war of religions is something a very small group of people in the religious mass are aware of. Historical criticism also teaches us not to trust sources and even if we do, to be aware that the deliverer of those sources always takes a specific position to spread information. According to this approach, you can try your best to be as neutral as possible, but neutrality itself is almost impossible.
Mohamed's advice to drink camel urine
One of these days when I was into history, now that I kind of snapped out of the magic of religion's emergence after following a couple of important History classes, a video of the YouTuber Diamond Tema popped up on my YouTube timeline where he talked about Mohamed's advice to drink camel urine. I had already watched some of his other historical videos, so I knew how unbiased he was in his research for explaining educational things in his videos. I might have stared for minutes at my screen after seeing the thumbnail, because, whether I was going to watch his video or not, I was long gone by the fact that a God's messenger might have advised such a thing. If it was not Mohamed but another important figure of another religion, I know for sure that this practice would have been a big topic of joke among the Muslims against that other religion. I had almost the same opinion: a disappointment that was immediately directed at Mohamed.
I can not prove it, but I can tell you that my brain underwent some sort of gray noise for a couple of minutes until I kind of blinked multiple times and decided to watch the video. At that moment, I knew that I lost something very big in me, that I could have known years ago but because I was surrounded by Islamic sources that were biased, whereas unbiased sources gave me the impression that they might not have understood it all well, I learned this information at the age of 25. Since that day, the rest of any irrationality that I tried to make sense of, like miracles, the revelation itself, Mohamed's certain traditions, and sayings, the big stones that we symbolically call the devil and which are to be stoned, that are built by humans, ... had an answer. Now I knew. All the magic was gone because, from that moment on, I could only see Mohamed as an influential historical figure.
Can I return to restore my faith?
That was the moment when I was thinking whether I still had the choice to go back and believe in Allah. I tried to understand why Mohamed might have advised in a specific context to specific people to do such a thing, but no answer was satisfying. The image of him being chosen carefully by God was long gone. Is it a choice to snap out of irrationalities and not be able to fit them into my reasoning again? After months of research, and still going on, I had no free will to return to Islam anymore. The right way for a mind to find answers is to go forward for it to only get clearer with the answers it finds. Once it does, the ratio can not make sense of what he once believed in, and can barely manipulate himself back into it again. Since the day the whole pile fell off, I do not have free will to believe in Allah even if I wanted to. Islam has one of the best storytelling tactics to keep their followers locked in a system where no one knows who the owner is. They are led by preachers who "... teach us to be satisfied by not understanding the world.", as Richard Dawkins states. That is clearly the case. Do you have an answer on why that might be? I firmly believe that the majority of the Islamic preachers know what they are doing and I also believe, but I do not confirm or try to prove, that most of the preachers aren't satisfied either with the Islamic primary sources. There must be a reason why all of them filter the primary sources by writing numerous books and interpreting them so differently.
With this being said, my faith was a state of mind, almost like an emotion I held on to until my reasoning didn't allow me to believe in fairy tales.
3. Is my heart hardened?
I would think so about someone who left Islam if I was Muslim. Now that I snapped out of the emotional manipulation of Islam, I can say that my heart has probably enlightened.
I know that my Muslim environment who knows that I am an atheist, believes that my heart hardened and that I am a lost case, even though they still respect me. If I know some of my Muslim friends very well, I can ensure that they probably pray for the day to see me believe in Allah and Mohamed again. I am sure they pray for the day my heart softens again. This does not disturb me, on the contrary, I think it is a very kind approach of them to pray for me. They would not have that choice if we were in a Muslim country though, as apostacy is punished with death.
Conclusion
The only thing for which my heart might have hardened would be towards the Muslim scholars who know what they are doing with their speeches and preaches. Otherwise, the best thing that has happened to me after leaving Islam, is to feel synchronized with nature and my environment, now that there is no wall between me and where I am.
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