Hello CEMB,
I'm from India, born and brought up there, currently living in US. Born in a Hindu family, from a rural hinterland in Southern part of India. We've a very assimilated Muslim community here, I think they're our people, who converted from Hinduism to escape the caste oppression. I'm familiar with Indian Islamic culture (Ramzan, Milad Nabi, Bakrid, Moharram; and the Hyderabadi biryani, kheer made during the Eid, Beautiful Urdu Shayaris) from my childhoood.
In my village, there are around 30 Muslim families, they didn't even had a mosque until last year. We've a sufi saint tomb, where all kind of prayers and festivals used to be held. No body wore any hijab/burqa/niqab. And all of those families participated in Hindu festivals with equal enthusiasm. We've so many Hindu kids named as Saeed (after local sufi saint) and so many Muslim kids named after national leaders who are Hindus.
My close friends, the friends I grew up with, are Muslims. Heck, I never thought we were any different - that I'm a Hindu and they're Muslim. We were so close that - I used to go into any of their houses, and if I get hungry, will directly go into kitchen and fetch anything for myself to eat.
All this beautiful co-existence, bonhomie, camaraderie changed, when some of our young people emigrated to Gulf region looking for jobs. After few years, they brought back the Gulf culture back with them - women started covering themselves up etc, level of religious observance really really spiked up. And my friends, the guys I grew up with, they no longer can express the same warmth.
How I miss those days !!! And to add fuel to the fire, Hindu right-wing organisations made inroads into our idyllic little village and started polairising the society. Our beautiful village now just a simmering ground for religious strife.
But growing up in India, and Hindu-Muslim animosity is not new to us at a broader national level, in spite of near absence of this in rural areas., so I kind of understood the transformation of my village's Muslims. But what stuck my curiosity was the kind of cultural difference between Gulf Islam and the Sufi-strain Islam in my village. It's not that I couldn't discern the difference between culture and religion. I remember reading a NGC article on South Asian Islam, how the Bhakti traditions of Hinduism interacted with Sufi of Islam, and gave rise to distinctly benign south asian flavour to Islam. But I wanted to find out the real Islam, the Islam, so many South Asian Mulsims don't follow, because they can neither speak nor can understand the English translations. I went onto research the Quran/Hadith/Sira. It was so boring initially, but I kept at it for so many years.
Growing up in a Hindu household, I was never religious. My mother taught me and my sister, some sanskrit verses for various gods, but that's about it. My father was never religious, he was a hard-core communist in his youth, and used to look down on the religiosity of my mother. Anyway, Hinduism is such a dis-organised religion, we grow up never reading our so-called sacred books.
But as I was researching Islam, I also picked up interest in Hindu liturgical literature. It too was equally boring. I found some deep philosophy in Bhagavad Gita, but completely put off by the caste system it espouses. I liked the egalitarianism taught by Islam, and understood, might be one of the reasons, why Islam found so many willing converts during medieval era.
As I read and read about these two religions in parallel - I realized that at very deep level, none appealed me. I realised that I've always been an unbeliever, it's just I was playing along with the surrounding culture. It's not a big deal to become an atheist in Hindu community anyway. When I told my mother that I don't believe in her gods on the phone, she was like - oh okay, let it be so, but don't forget to eat on time, lol.
Islam contributed a lot to South Asian civilisation - in terms of arts, architecture and cuisine. It also has a very distinct flavour. I still have good things to say about South Asian Islamic culture in general. But Islam as a religion, not much. These two religions caused and continue to cause so much bloodshed in the sub-continent, so much so that, I felt like why don't both these Hindus and Muslims leave India alone. If the amount of bad-blood between Hindus and Muslims can be converted into some kind of fuel, India will not need to import oil from Gulf/Russia for another 1000 years.
I failed to find any atheists/agnostics amongst the Muslims, when I was back home. But as I started to research, I realised that there have been lot of skeptics in the history of Islam. Wanted to meet those kind of folks, so I joined this forum.
Topic: Hi, An atheist from India