My name is of course not Adam, but I will gladly tell you my real name when I do eventually get to know all you lovely people.
I was born in Bradford, and I am originally Palestinian. Both my parents are extremely religious and it is literally impossible to ask questions without me finding them reading the Quran for the rest of the night. We moved to Leicester, a beautiful flat city FULL of Muslims. I was seven but I was already very skeptical about everything, and my parents could see that so they sent me to an Islamic school as most parents do. I'm not gonna go on about everything they did there, from hitting when you need correcting to standing on one foot in a corner for half and hour etc.. It was seeing all that that made very skeptical, the kind of Learn it 3'asben 3anak attitude. But my parents believed and if they believed it, it must be right.
My parents got the genius idea to move to Palestine when I was about 14. My Arabic was very basic back then, I still couldn't read or write. At the time we moved Hamas was prepping it self to win the elections in a year, so you would quickly get accustomed to the religion everything way of life. I went to one of the many newly opened Hamas-led schools near Nablus. I hated every single second of it. It was religion after religion after Arabic.. Which is religion after PE which is pretty much marching around and chanting "la illaha illaah...". Thinking back it's quite a comical scene, but the constant hitting didn't help improve my Arabic so I found a different way.
I first met atheists when I was 15, and it was with activists I met in Bil'in whilst protesting the wall. At the time I didn't know much about the politics but Tamer (the only person in school that I found hated Islam too) helped me meet them. It was a very heart warming scene, all kinds of people were protesting. Israeli's, Palestinian atheists, Muslims, Christians and a lot of foreigners. People didn't care that you're not a Muslim anymore, they seemed to understand how the Israeli oppression has impacted their lives because of their religion. I don't know if anyone else has noticed this too, but there's a lot of young people nowadays who would reject religion if they can. Tamer told me how soon there would be a third intifada, but this time its not just against Israeli occupation but also against the indoctrinates of Islam. Islam has however taken strong hold in the west bank, with mosques usually being built near poor areas and refugee camps. The amount of exploitation is very apparent and it seemed like they were opening chains to McDonald's.
When I came back to the UK I became very active on the Palestinian issue on campus. It quickly became apparent though that I was fighting more with the Salafis of Isoc than with Israelis. The Palestinian issue in the UK is to them officially an Islamic issue, and that usually means they never back down or hear other views and ideas.
Just a quick question, how do you deal with Isoc these days when most of their members are outright Salafis?
Edit: sorry for the long winded intro, I tried to cut it down halfway through
Do you have a left forum or something equivalent at your university? Could help. Personally I will have nothing to do with the ISOC here —even though I am on cordial terms with a couple of members. They are either obsessed with A) is islam a religion of peace, B) Muhammad worship, or C) rumiite sufism. Feel free to PM me with the university that you go to.
Also, just as an a-side, is your comrade Tamer Turkish? The only reason I ask is because the spelling of his name is the turkified (latinised) version.
Topic: How my Palestinian activisim led to my Atheism