The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason

by Ali A. Rizvi

was because it was “metaphor,” and I was “taking it too literally”; indeed, it seemed as if the more questions I asked, the more “metaphorical” the Quran got—anything in the text that had been proven false over the centuries was deemed a “metaphor.” • If I pointed out that many of the Saudis, Egyptians, and other Arabic-speaking nations also interpreted the book in the way I was describing, I was promptly reminded that the Saudis had been bought by America and Israel a long time ago, and remember, those Egyptians even had a treaty with the Jews. And if all else failed, they’d say these were “just words” unless “interpreted correctly,” something along the lines of what we hear from apologists like Reza Aslan today.26 Needless to say, rendering the Quran’s words meaningless and giving no objective parameters for what a truly correct interpretation would look like effectively made the book immune from any possible criticism. It was a neat little trick, but I was happy to be challenged. It made me dig deeper into how the scripture could be interpreted, how the problematic passages could be rationalized, and what the historical context for some of these verses really was (see chapter 7). A second upside to this was the realization that my family and friends were truly decent human beings. As much as their denialism could be frustrating in an argument, their flat-out refusal to accept that their religion prescribed bad things meant, to me anyway, that they were good people. And ...