How I Lost My Muslim Faith and Became an Atheist
A former Muslim recounts his personal journey from Islam to atheism after the rise of ISIS.
Out of concern for the authors’ safety, this text is published pseudonymously.
To be born in a third-world country means that survival comes with its own challenges. What makes people there tolerate the dire circumstances of life is usually their strong social network. So what if you find yourself in rebellion against everything your society values and stands for? In that case, you are standing outside your community, and life can be very lonely.
I was born in 1996 in the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah in Northern Iraq into a religious, conservative, middle-class family. From the day I first opened my eyes, God (Allah to be specific) was everywhere. I was raised to pray to him five times a day, fast in Ramadan, be compassionate toward the poor, travel to Mecca as often as possible, and most importantly, I was instructed to believe that Allah is the only God and Mohammad was his last messenger. I lived this simple, faithful life, believing in every aspect of Islam, memorizing five out of 30 chapters of the Quran (roughly 100 pages), and I read the holy book as often as I could. The deep questions about God and religion were not important to me, because my Islamic teachers always told me: “Once you start questioning the existence of God, Satan is playing with your mind. When that happens, ask God for forgiveness and think of his creation instead.”
Everything began to change in 2014 — for myself, but also for the wider society I live in. That year, I finished high school with a very good grade, which guaranteed me entry into a renowned college. Roughly at the same time, though, the Islamic State (ISIS) invaded the city of Mosul in Iraq. There and elsewhere, they killed many people, enslaved countless women, and destroyed great historical places. In Kurdistan, the rise of ISIS polarized the population, because the group claimed holy authority for their actions and said that everything it did was supported by Islamic Sharia (law).
Before the rise of ISIS, it was easy for many ordinary Muslims to ignore the real implications of the Quranic text. But starting in 2014, the advance of ISIS forced a debate on my society. Some Muslims immediately claimed that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, while atheists and agnostics saw their barbarism as a consequence of Islamic teaching. To support their claims, both sides needed to dig deep into the scripture to clarify and justify their statements. It was suddenly important for both sides — and everyone in between — to get their facts right.
I myself was part of those Muslims who claimed that ISIS had nothing to do with Islam. But as I looked more closely into their actions and justifications, I realized that ISIS killed people whom they considered kafirs (unbelievers) and murtads (apostates) based on verses from the Quran, like chapter 9, verse 5 (“…kill the polytheists wherever you find them, capture them and besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every ambush…”), or chapter 9, verse 29 (“Fight those who do not have faith in Allah…”). The Hadith, which recounts the life of the prophet Mohammed, also supports these acts as they advocate for the killing of apostates. I thus realized that ISIS indeed had Quranic support for their actions.
Before I did my research, I was sure that Islam did not condone killing. One day, I was arguing with an atheist friend of mine, and I told him: “If you can tell me about one time in history when the prophet Mohammed beheaded one person, I will seriously reconsider all of my beliefs.” He sent me a link to an article titled The Events of Bani Quraitha. That text is based on one of the most trusted historical books from Islam called Al-Bidayah wa al-Nihayah, and it recounts how —on the command of the prophet Mohammed — his Muslim followers beheaded 600 Jewish men as prisoners of war. That for me was strike one.
After I learned about the brutal slaughter of the Jews, I started to reconsider everything about Islam and religion in general. I asked myself the most fundamental questions: Who is God? Does he exist? Is Islam right? Is the Quran flawless? Do we have free will? How did the universe begin? What is evolution? Can evolution be compatible with Islam?
In 2015, I was arguing with another friend. At that point, I already had my doubts about the prophet, and I had begun to consider Islam more critically — but I was still a Muslim and held the Quran in the highest regard. (On the internet I had read about the supposed flaws of the Quran, but the Islamic sources I found always provided a witty reply to it, because the Quran and the Arabic language allow for some flexibility.) “The Quran is flawless”, I exclaimed to my friend. “Okay”, he answered, “but how about the following part of the Quran, chapter 41, verse 9–12?”:
(9) Ask them, O Prophet, “How can you disbelieve in the One Who created the earth in two Days? And how can you set up equals with Him? That is the Lord of all worlds. (10) He placed on the earth firm mountains, standing high, showered His blessings upon it, and ordained all its means of sustenance — totaling four Days exactly — for all who ask. (11) Then He turned towards the heaven when it was still like smoke, saying to it and to the earth, ‘Submit, willingly or unwillingly.’ They both responded, ‘We submit willingly’. (12) So He formed the heaven into seven heavens in two Days, assigning to each its mandate. And We adorned the lowest heaven with stars like lamps for beauty and for protection. That is the design of the Almighty, All-Knowing.”
In these verses Allah claims to have created first the earth, then the mountains, and finally the skies. Not only is this scientifically false, what is more, the Arabic phrases cannot be twisted or manipulated for this verse to have a different meaning. And that was strike two.
In the summer of 2017, during Ramadan, I found myself in a mosque. It was the 27th day of Ramadan, a night that Muslims consider the holiest of the year. I was praying to God, repeating the following prayer several times: “God, please, if you exist, make me believe in you”. By now, you already know about the poor results of that prayer.
One night, in the winter of the same year, I was about to go to sleep and — as usual — was going to set my alarm for 5:00 am for the morning prayer. But that night I said: “Wait, I think I don’t believe anymore”. I did not set the alarm and slept peacefully that night, and I have never set my clock for praying ever since. My faith was not strong enough anymore to make me get up early every morning to pray to God. To do that requires a great amount of dedication coming from belief, which I now lacked.
But since I still remained vaguely committed to Islam, I tried to rationalize why I didn’t pray. After doing some research, I found out that there is a group of Muslims that does not believe in an imperative to pray five times a day. They argue that the word for praying in the Quran, which is “salat”, can have multiple meanings, and can simply refer to communication. These scholars believe that God won’t punish those who don’t pray, but only those who act as if he didn’t exist and who cut every connection with him.
In these years from 2016 to 2017 I still believed in Islam. But I thought that the religion as it actually exists is incompatible with the modern world we live in, and hence I joined the camp of Muslim reformists. The group I found most persuasive were the Quaranists who do not believe in polygamy, drink alcohol (some of them, at least), do not believe that non-Muslims go to hell. Instead, they study the Quran as deeply as possible, as they believe it to be the one and only source of laws in Islam.
To be clear, the Quranist reformers are a tiny minority in the Islamic world. I once heard an estimate that there are only around 80,000 of them worldwide. By joining this minority, I was really already more than halfway out of Islam.
After a while, I remembered the verse of the Quran which talks about the creation of the universe and says that earth was created first, before the skies. So I asked myself: If I reject every other aspect of Islam because it didn’t make sense to me, except the Quran — what if the Quran is wrong too? What then is left for me?
After a long mental struggle with the false verses in the Quran, I was left with nothing. I didn’t have faith — neither in Islam, nor in the Quran, nor in the Hadith, nor in God. I lacked belief in Islam and every other religion, which — by definition — made me an atheist.
Now, in the year 2022, I still pretend to pray five times a day, fast, and believe in God and the prophet Mohammed. I even go to Friday prayers in the Mosque, because if I would not do so, my parents would know about my atheism, which they cannot — for three reasons: Firstly, if my family would know that I am an atheist, it would be for them as if they had lost a son. My parents would be devastated if they looked at me and thought: “Oh dear, he is going to suffer in hell for eternity”. I love them enough to not put that burden on them. The second reason is that in Islam, the penalty for apostasy is death. And since there are radical Islamists in Kurdistan too, I am not inclined to risk my life. Thirdly, Islamic Sharia gives even my family the right to kill me because I have not been obeying them.
That is my journey out of Islam, and those are my current life circumstances. I dream that one day, I can live in a country where being an atheist is not a taboo and where there won’t be any discrimination and prejudice against me. Hopefully, that day won’t be too far in the future.
