My Journey Towards Atheism
Me being an atheist doesn’t mean I am against you, but I disagree with you.
I am a female from Sulaimaniya a small city in Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It is a beautiful mountainous city where the majority of people are Muslims, and I was born as one. In my previous years, I was a “very good Muslim” following the verses of Quran and doing my duties as Allah, Quran and Muhammed required such as praying everyday, fasting, reading Quran and sometimes visiting mosques. However, I never wore Hijab. I still remember practicing Laylat Al Qadir– a holly day in Islam occurs during Ramadan where Muslims stay up night praying, remembering God, and reading Quran.
However, since my childhood, I was always questioning my surroundings. Where is God? What He looks like? I was told that God is so big and mosques are his houses. I started imagining God; once I was in the car with my grandparents and mom, we passed by a mosque and I looked up at the Minarets they seemed immense, I started connecting the dots I said to in my mind, “ Allah is the Minarets, because they are gigantic and they are in Allah’s house.”
In my country, and in every Islamic country, Islam is one of our educational lessons that we must attend during elementary school up to university that will make total of 12 years studying Islam. Teachers used to narrate uncountable terrifying stories about God’s punishments to nonbelievers and skeptics, and they described hell as if they were messengers of hell! They said that God burns faithless people’s flesh; He puts new flesh on and burns them again for infinity. As a result, my thoughts of Allah and questioning His existence frightened me. In doing so, I would be counted among faithless skeptic people whom God would burn in hell for eternity. These aggressive images blocked my mind from thinking about His existence, ‘till I was 17 years old.
During my adolescence, especially in my senior high school year, watching TV was my favorite hobby to skip studying for. Once I stumbled across a TV show interviewing an old lady, her undone white hair and makeup-less face grabbed my attention; “who is this? She is on TV, couldn’t she take care of her look better than this?” I told myself, then my curiosity made me watch the show. Her words were like echoes of my mind. She was talking about women’s rights and how unjust the society is towards females. That lady is Nawal al Sadawi — an Egyptian and international well-known feminist writer and women activist. Nawal’s thought’s, words and courage were the reason that lead me to start buying her books one after an other, staring with Woman and Sex.
It was very difficult to find the book, and when I did the book’s cover was covered by a piece of paper so the title won’t show. I hid the book in a black plastic bag. Women reading about their own bodies and sex is a shame in my country. This book opened my eyes wide.
This book taught me a great deal about my body, how women’s lives depend on a small part of their body (hymen) and how religion plants ideas in people’s minds that women are inferiors. I will explain my thoughts about similar issues in more details in my next blogs. This book was my first step to learn more about the religion I was blindly following for 17 years.
From then on, I started reading Quran from a different perspective. I was trying to read it as any other book not as a sacred flawless one, which was challenging in the beginning. Afterwards, I decided to go into details with Quran and study it more, fortunately my Arabic is fluent. I found online Arabic-Arabic dictionaries help me understand the meaning of the words better
It took me several years to realize that Quran doesn’t match my interests in life and it’s actually against my beliefs. I gave up the religion I was born with, and as Socrates said, “ To find yourself, think for yourself.”
In this blog I will share my views about Islam, God, Human Rights mainly and other subjects.
Sivar Qazaz
