Hi nessrriin
First of all, I had the same doubts you had before writing in the forum, but ppl here were very nice actually(except some in the chat room
)
1) When you converted, was it because you read the Quran and liked it, or was it because of how Muslims explained Islam to you?
2) Also, what was the idea you had about Islam before you converted?
3) Why did you think about converting to it in the first place?
4) Did you know people who converted to Islam and then left like you?
Hey whyme89,
I don't blame you for not reading my explanation on why I left Islam, which is completely unreadable - I was tired when I wrote that oversized paragraph. Anyway, no I have not read (much of) the Koran before I converted. I disbelieved by the time I read a third of it, or a little less, or a little more.
I was reading about the Koran and about Islam and unfortunately fell victim to that propaganda (with a special help of miracle of 19).
I don;t think I was thinking of converting, I was curious about learning Arabic which lead me to Islamic websites. Maybe I was having an existential crisis, maybe collapse of USSR left a void in me and made me question everything associated with it, including atheism (though I don't think so), maybe I wanted to be different, maybe I was depressed. I haven't analyzed this part well.
Don't know personally any converts who later left. I think in some respects it is harder for converts to leave (though not necessarily so overall), because you have made the decision to join on your own.
A friend of mine is a fellow 19'er & I have tried hard to make him see that there is no 19 miracle. What made you see through it?
Well... A lot of useless counting of letters, verses, etc, which finally made me realize that the "simple facts" are easy to be created humanly, and most of the complicated ones are easily a coincidence. Plus necessity to remove 2 verses from The Koran to have all verses a multiple of 19, either proves that Allah failed to preserve the Koran or that he made a mathematical mistake...
More that obsessions with numbers and gematria, I think reading the book made me realize that God really neglected the content, while trying to encode 19 in it. I still believe that someone who wrote the Koran wanted 19 in it, but, of course, I can't find any miracle in it.
Dear Alif Alex Lam Mim,
As my faith had already dwindled, I considered taking a look at more liberal Islam, and so once I got to free-minds, and affiliated sites propagating Khalifa's twisted view of Islam.
In fact, I opened a topic at free-minds, explaining them that any attempt to reform/reinterpret Islam was surely going to fail, and how pathetic it is to defend Quran, but to reject hadith. It seemed their main concern wasnt really whether those ahadith were sahih or not, but rather the inconvenient bits had caused them to discard those sources concerning the Prophet.
It may be so, I can't get into Rashad's mind, but I think if you have read only the Koran, then you will be quite shocked if someone told you: "have you heard about the hadith?". This whole thing makes Islam imperfect: no mention in the main source to the secondary source, with Koranic verses claiming to explain everything, and then the book makes no sense unless you know some hadiths...
Topic: I can do this