SOCIETY AND BELONGING
I Have Flirted With Atheism All My Life
Critical thinking is one of the most important merits that we all need to develop and sustain. I don’t mean it in the buzzword sense companies like to use it in today’s world. Not everything is about being the perfect employee.
I mean critical thinking for YOU, yourself:
- Questioning the things that are given to you as granted.
- Refusing to accept the pre-packaged black and white ideologies.
- Digging deeper to find your own truths that are aligned with your true self.
Even though, at some point in our lives, we might be very close to our true self, we end up losing that connection over and over. We forget who we are, why we do things and what truly matters to us.
For sure, we learn, grow and change over time but our core remains the same. That core is our intuition that guides us in life.
Not that we don’t know the significance of that core. We are very well aware that we lost touch with it. Only, we call it “being lost” in life, not being able to put in words correctly what it is exactly that is lost.
We end up taking coaching sessions, reading self-help books, listening to other people’s advice, working in jobs we don’t like, doing meditation and other activities just not to “be lost”, just to get back in touch with our intuition.
But something happens and we manage to get back in touch with that side of ourselves again. We feel alive and healthy.
My journey of belief, disbelief and belief started with critical thinking, continued with losing and gaining back connection to my intuition, or my true self.
I was born into a certain religion or a belief system like everyone. In my case, this religion is Islam, although a very secularised version of it.
Still, through this belief systemI have learned to pray to God:
- express my gratitude and joy,
- talk about my fears and anxieties,
- share my wishes.
Through this religion I have learned that everything will be OK and that I don’t need to worry, I only need to ask God to show me the right path in my life.
My first religion class in school was at the age of 10. I was being introduced to the non-faith related, indoctrination part of an institutionalised religion.
The religion teacher has once said;
“Look kids, you are all so lucky. Because God chose you to bless you with Islam. It’s the last and best of all the religions. That’s why you have been given a chance to heaven as long as you follow all the rules (that the clergy defines) obediently.”
Once again, because of living in a liberal and secular society we didn’t have to take for granted whatever the religion teacher was saying and were able to criticise and question it.
His sentences automatically triggered me.
I raised my hand and asked:
“What about the other kids in the world that have another religion just because they were born somewhere else? Why would God not want to give them the chance to do right and go to heaven? They are just children.”
Not expecting a counter, the religion teacher gave a half-hearted reaction:
“If they are meant to go to heaven, God will make sure they convert to Islam”.
I was not convinced.
This was the beginning of my mental battle with institutionalised religion.
Wisdoms taken from or attributed to Islam had valuable teachings for me as I grow up.
The biggest sin you can ever commit was violating others’ rights. How can you not embrace that rule?
It taught me the idea of inner and outer justice, doing right and caring for your community because you also learn that if you sleep tightly as your neighbour is starving, you are not one of us.
And even if you do wrong, you can always come back and ask for forgiveness.
As Rumi says:
“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”
A big community that accepts you the way you are, doesn’t matter how broken you are inside.
Or as Yunus Emre says;
Knowing is about grasping the outer world, but it is also about understanding yourself. If you fail to understand yourself, it’s in vain that you try so hard to understand the outer world.
My inner world has been enriched by the wisdom, the philosophers and the poets of Islam.
At the same time though, there were the clergy.
Men who show up on my TV to tell me how to be a good Muslim.
But they were so far from the valuable teachings within the entirety of Islam.
They were the army of patriarchy.
Solely concerned with preserving the system that systematically suppresses women, kills their souls and bodies, justifying rape, justifying abuse and all things ugly:
“Be obedient, don’t ask questions, accept the rules as given, be a virgin, wear this not that, a man can slightly slap their wife if they refuse to have sex, women are allowed to taste food during Ramadan fasting because they shouldn’t serve bland food to their husbands…..”
Stop!
The voices were unending. They lit a fire of anger in me. They broke me into pieces only for me to break their voices all at once.
I was able to silence them by completely rejecting the idea of God.
As I grew up and went to university, I went as far as to call myself an Atheist for a short period of time, then an Agnostic for a much longer one.
Agnosticism was an easier choice.
I didn’t have to believe in God but I also didn’t have to reject it.
Atheism meant strongly opposing the idea of God. How can I reject the idea of God when I can only know so little about the origin of the universe?
Atheism and Dogmatic Belief Systems sounded like the two sides of the same coin to me. It doesn’t matter if you blindly believe everything a certain religion says or religiously defend the idea that God doesn’t exist, in both cases you claim you can know certainly.
Agnosticism on the other hand was the perfect shelter for lost souls. I didn’t know what I could know or not know. I didn’t care. I fell into oblivion and didn’t want to bother with these questions.
Though there were moments of fear or doubt in my life that made me really wish I had something to believe in, a God I could talk to, and share my deepest worries with. (Or a loving and caring therapist could’ve helped)
Instead, I picked on new ways of coping with my worries; like wanting to travel all the time and get away the moment people get close to me, drinking to forget, binge watching series to suppress my pains.
Then I met someone who has inner peace and a stable belief system.
It was different than the one I have been born in but, just as institutionalised, just as patriarchal.
Though he had a different take on his birth religion, he kept associating himself with it and its institutions but rejected the hostile voices within it that didn’t align with his values.
It was like a moment of enlightenment within me. Something I have already known but forgotten.
The belief system within me and the institutionalised religion outside of me don’t have to be the same, but I can still use and be at peace with the terms and expressions I have learned from the institutionalised religion that feel home to me, bring me comfort, connect me to my family and community.
I have never stopped believing in the main values of Islam I have learned as a kid. In fact, they are not even very Islam-specific and could easily be universally applied and accepted.
But I wasn’t ready to call myself a Muslim again.
- I accepted that I believe in something, something bigger than me. Let it be Mother Nature, the Sky God, my conscience.
- Something that gives me a sense of justice, fairness, beauty and meaning.
- Something that I connect through the smell of cloves on the hand-made praying mat (not that I actually pray on it) my mom made as a teenager.
This was the beginning of my journey to reconnect with that intuition or my true self.
- I cultivate it through listening to my feelings without judgement, trying to understand why I feel that way and what they are trying to teach me.
- I tinker it through writing, because putting my thoughts outside of myself gives me clarity.
- I sharpen its focus by disciplining my body through physical exercise.
- I feed it with philosophy, poetry and history and arts.
And of course, I remain open to love, kindness and beauty from outside and within.
I still think critically in the sense that I will never accept what the clergy of any religion says about how I should be living my life.
And yet, I am able to call myself a Muslim again.
It doesn’t mean I am praying five times a day or covering myself. It doesn’t mean I sacrifice an animal and fast for 30 days.
It means whatever I want it to mean. It doesn’t define me, only I can define what it means for me.
It defines a connection between me and a superior force I choose to believe in, may that source be outside or within me.
I claim the word Muslim since it is the way my family taught me to navigate within the ocean of my own feelings.
I claim the word Muslim because, it’s a cultural aspect of me and reminds me of the festivities, all the good times I had with my grandparents and people I love. Sharing food with my neighbours and being genuinely interested in others’ wellbeing.
There are also many aspects of it that I refuse and not let in my life. Because the moment a single ideology or a belief system defines us entirely we lose connection to our intuition, our authentic self and accept things dogmatically. It’s not only true for religions but all kinds of ideologies.
But I am not going to go around and shout loudly about being Muslim and try to bring my version to others.
Because one of its main teachings is that your belief can only be within you. Anyone who claims to know it better than you or on behalf of you — is a fraud.
I have also mentioned feminist in the title. Maybe I will explain that another time although it feels self-explanatory. If you are genuinely for human rights, you are a feminist — that’s as simple as that for me.
Think about this article next time you hear something about “Muslims” or “Islam” and remember how every belief system has actual individuals who interprete very different things by it.
