Re: My Story
Reply #2 - October 06, 2010, 11:41 PM
(Continued - sorry about the length)
Returning back to the U.K., my mother had slowly become more hard-line and she started trying to mould us into a more convincing Muslim family. My father, who had not really changed much, went along with it all, and so we began to attend Islamic weekend courses, where I listened to all the prominent sheikhs and speakers. This was the beginning of my actually learning what Islam is, where I began to learn what it actually taught, how most of what we enjoyed, music, television and other things were generally frowned upon in Islam according to the ahadith. The speakers moved me and their arguments convinced me. The illusion of living in a proper Muslim community for that brief window each year warmed my heart.
This was probably when I started praying regularly, looking back because those speakers had a real knack for articulating Heaven and Hell and the Day of Judgement in vivid terms, capturing my imagination. I remember speakers talking about the large-eyed hoories of Heaven and thinking to myself ‘Who wouldn’t want that?’
When I started university, one of the first things I did before classes even started was to join the Islamic Society. I jumped at the chance to become a committee member. ISoc socials became my social life. I gave ISoc my all – I naively wanted this to prove to me Islam could work, that we could do something great. I would diligently keep minutes for meetings, picturing myself as an indispensable cog in some great machine that would bring Islam to the entire university campus and cause everyone to miraculously convert. Islamic Awareness Week, the highlight of the ISoc calendar proved my vision wrong, as barely a handful of non-Muslims attended if any.
What was wrong with our talks? Our publicity? Why was it that mainly Muslims came to our talks and hardly any non-Muslims? We would, year after year, sit and discuss this for hours, reviewing feedback, brainstorming, scratching our heads (and usually going off onto theological tangents in the process). It seems now clear to me that I was not the only naïve one in the room. And it is now clear to me that the problem wasn’t us being unrighteous, ill-intentioned or divided, as many Muslims to this day use as an excuse for every failure in every part of their lives – the problem was, and is, has always been – Islam itself.
After an Eid celebration at a local mosque, a solemn-looking man walked up to the front and proceeded to play a brief documentary about the Iraq war, featuring dismembered bodies, women retelling stories of rape in Abu Ghraib and numerous scenes of Americans bombing Iraqis. I went up to him after and began asking him questions. What was the purpose of his organisation, what did they do, what was their mission? The man was very conspicuous in his language, and spoke in hushed tones, but I was enthralled for the first time I had heard the idea of the ‘Islamic State’. Around this time, young and naïve and fresh out of school, I was looking for a ‘calling’ to show that Islam was the truth, and this seemed to be it.
Coming away from that meeting my mind became afire with these abstract ideals, that Saudi Arabia was the way it was because it was not an Islamic State, but that there could be an Islamic State again if we only willed it, and then all the atrocities all the defenceless Muslims around the world would somehow miraculously end. I met the guy several times over several months, in fast food restaurants, the mosque and his house. Hizb ut-Tahrir was new to my town, there were only a handful of members and I was being "assessed", I suppose. The brother offered to help me with my studies, lending me textbooks.
It wasn’t until the second or third meeting that he told us about the plan of the Hizb, which was to essentially convert as much of the population of the host country as possible and then ‘peacefully’ overthrow the secular government of the host country through a bloodless military coup. I bought it all. After all, I was now on the edge of something ‘real’ - this was the seemingly only way to form that utopian ideal I had longed for since my teenage years. But I didn’t commit myself fully. A part of me did wonder why I had never been told forming a Khilafa was part of my faith.
During this time I was exposed to new ideas that I had never heard of before, the ‘clash of civilisations’, the fact that being ‘British’ didn’t quite fit with being ‘Muslim’, the ‘fact’ that Zionist Jews were behind everything bad which has pretty much ever happened.
Anyway, I stopped meeting with the Hizb guys after a while as I found them to be far too uptight about everything, and later after reading ‘The Islamist’ I found this book to confirm my suspicions regarding HT’s means to the end, if not the end itself.
During an assignment in university we were told to choose a topic we were passionate about. I chose the Qur’an, despite never having actually finished it. I started to become interested in what the allegations against were – if they were untrue, at least I could rid my mind of them, right? This was the first time I visited “anti-Islam” websites and others like it, and the first time my bubble started to falter as I realised the staggering number of allegations made against Islam. This was the first time I became aware, after over a decade of attending Islamic talks and reading Islamic books that the Prophet had, at age 55, married and had intimate sexual relationships with a nine-year-old girl.
That single fact that our beloved Prophet Muhammad, the one who had been sent to us to save us from Hellfire, who had liberated the world with Islam, had slept with a nine-year-old girl was like an icicle digging into my chest. I had compromised everything for Islam, and now I felt like the Prophet had stabbed me in the back.
Topic: Leaving Islam (My Story)