The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason

by Ali A. Rizvi

Obviously, this is not the kind of case one could make for, say, prayer—and most religious people I knew, who would easily choose medicine over prayer if told to pick just one, were well aware of this.

the

begins to develop at about twenty days, and the ears and eyes begin to develop simultaneously in the fourth week. Getting into the

What creator of nebulae, time-distorting black holes, and hundreds of billions of stars and galaxies would be so insecure to consider it an absolute requirement that the inhabitants of this infinitesimally tiny speck of a planet regularly kiss his ass in gratitude for the infinitesimally tiny fragment of time they’re here, or suffer an eternity of fire and torture?

What I’m standing up for is not letting your government define “hate speech” for you. That should be your decision, not theirs.

Without hate speech, freedom of religion can’t really exist.

In countries where Muslims are a minority, Islam is an identity. In countries where Muslims are a majority, Islam is a religion. This dichotomy has consequences for liberals on either side.

The same holy book that Muslims in the United States and elsewhere revere as divine and peaceful is used by the governments of Muslim-majority countries to endorse everything from domestic violence to the execution of apostates.

Religion was “the wish to be a slave,” said Hitchens, “… the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who … must subject you to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute … of your life, before you’re born and, even worse—and where the real fun begins—after you’re dead.

Your right to believe what you want must be respected, yes; but the beliefs themselves need not be.

Criticizing capitalism does not make you an anticapitalist bigot, and satirizing communism does not make you a “Communophobe.” Criticizing religious ideology is no different. It’s merely a bunch of ideas in a book. Moreover, Islam is not a race. You can’t convert in or out of being black or white—but you can convert in or out of a religion.

“intellectually ridiculous.”19

Aslan says these “prejudices and preconceived notions” can be “cultural, nationalistic, ethnic, [or] political”—but, somehow, never religious. How does this logically make sense? Why go out of your way to indict every etiology but one—especially when it shares indistinguishable characteristics with the others—if there isn’t some kind of compulsion or bias to protect it? Because it’s taboo to criticize religion? Because it’s revered by billions and criticizing it would give offense?

As for my Pakistani Muslim friends who accuse me of betraying my heritage and being blindly obsequious to Western imperialism, I say only this: Islam is an Arab religion. Consider that you are a person of South Asian heritage who: • follows an Arab religion; • reads and reveres an Arabic holy book; • prays in Arabic; • greets others in Arabic; • reveres and emulates an Arab prophet; and • bows in the direction of Arabia five times a day in prayer.

The most revolutionary human rights struggles in history have drawn violent opposition, ostracism, alienation, abuse, injury, and even death for those engaged in them. The fight for women’s rights took much more courage for the women of the 1800s—who became pariahs in pursuit of their cause—than for those born in the late twentieth century. Civil rights activists who spoke up at a time when lynching blacks was publicly accepted and

commonplace took on a much more

dangerous task than those born in the America of Barack Obama. Countless LGBT activists have faced violent discrimination, cruelty, and death merely for demanding acceptance in the last few decades; today, marriage equality is the law of the land in both the United States and Canada...

New atheists and anti-theists think of religion the same way. Today, it is considered sacred and untouchable, just as racial segregation or state-sanctioned gender discrimination were in the United States less than a century ago. The consequences for speaking out against religion today—especially Islam—are often as ...

Bigotry against bigotry isn’t bigotry, and tolerance of intolerance isn’t tolerance. Intolerant attitudes that are unacceptable in general life shouldn’t suddenly become acceptable when presented under the guise of religion.

proposed

Muhammad migrated to Medina and soon found himself no longer an outcast, but a statesman and military leader in command of a small but powerful, fast-growing army. The Medinan surahs became longer and more political,

to

Muslim

Hi, Amber. Thank you for your message. I am so sorry for your loss. My father died over a decade ago, and the question you asked ran through my mind then as well. After struggling for a while with trying to make sense of it all, I eventually decided to approach it by separating my thoughts into two categories: what I know, and what I don’t know. I know that we’re alive through our offspring. You are physically an embodiment of your father’s biological and genetic essence. This includes everything from how you look to many of the behavioral and personality traits you have. In other words—and this is not an exaggeration—your father is literally alive through you, as mine is through me. For me, knowing that is incredibly powerful and comforting. I know that we continue to exist through the Earth. This is my attempt at being euphemistic about your fertilizer theory. As part of this huge reservoir of terrestrial carbon, we die and become part of the Earth, which gives rise to new life, as it once gave rise to us. That is also very powerful to me, in a more collective, worldly sense. I also know that I’ve only been conscious for some forty years out of the 13.8 billion years that the universe has been in existence. Everything from plankton, to dinosaurs, to the formation of the U.N., to the moon landing happened before I was even remotely self-aware. I don’t miss those things, nor do I recall that huge chunk of time as horrible or upsetting. I simply can’t recall it at all—becau...

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got. And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever. And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their prog...

Admitting ignorance is humbling. It reminds us that as fleeting inhabitants of this vast universe, we are part of something much bigger. It forms a foundation for the curiosity that defines us as human beings, that drives us to contemplate our existence, educate ourselves, and to grow and evolve as individuals and as a species. To lose that is a much worse death than physical death.

when they thought in terms of what’s pious and sinful instead of what’s right and wrong—it was a corruption of their morality, not a manifestation of it.