The big aftermath

(This is a continuation of The Big News. I wasn’t originally planning on writing it, but I feel it’s important to really give readers a fuller perspective on how I think about stuff, especially family relationships & parenthood)

It’s now been 2 years and 7 and a half months since I became murtadd (ex-muslim). It’s still one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for myself. At the same time, not all consequences of that decision have been positive.

The most dramatic consequence to date is I WAS MADE HOMELESS. Yes, that was directly because I told my mother about my apostasy. I didn’t tell her straight away, because I was building up the courage and still getting used to it myself! I had no intention of keeping it hidden forever though, because that’s the coward’s way.

It took about a year, and as I expected she didn’t take it well at all. Here’s a list of the things that happened as a result:

• She stopped speaking to me – while we were under the same roof. The only communication we had was her telling me to move out, and loads of shouting. It got so bad that if she’d gotten physically violent or threatened it (which I believe she would have), I would’ve defended myself by any means necessary. Any.

Oh, another thing I should mention is I have an autistic younger brother. Even though his autism is severe enough that he still can’t say full sentences (he’s 25), I’m certain he understood the intensity of the conflicts even if he didn’t understand what they were about. I’ve always felt he’s been severely underestimated his entire life. Apart from the fact that I only retaliate not initiate violence, I also knew that mum is his only means of support which is why I held back at all.

• She stopped respecting my privacy. She read my diary – which she never used to do before.
• She started throwing my belongings away. That’s when I made a conscious decision. When I get myself properly settled I would steal mum’s Qur’an & ahadiyth collection, because I knew that’s what she treasured most. And I’ve done it.

• She forbade me from eating any food I didn’t buy myself. That’s when my eating habits became seriously disturbed; I went down to only eating 1 meal & 1 snack a day. Even now I still don’t eat as much as my body needs.

• She dismantled my bed. This meant I had only the living room floor to sleep on. My sleeping patterns became seriously disturbed as a result; I had to wake up to use the toilet literally every single night. I didn’t have even one unbroken night’s sleep in all that time.
• Something that did surprise me is how Pakistani mum really is (behaviourally. She’s of ‘black’ Jamaican background). In all the time I lived with her, I never knew her to care what other people thought or said about her. Even having my autistic brother wasn’t an issue (& I know for some parents it is. They’d be too ashamed to let the kid see light of day!). Once I told her and my ex-stepdad of my irtidad that completely changed. She begged/ threatened me to never tell anyone in the local community. I know that’s a Sasian thing because the area we lived in was predominantly Pakistani, and they’re really up themselves about honour, shame, all that fuckery. I replied I wouldn’t tell anyone UNLESS THEY ASKED.
• I became suicidal. There was a day I had a knife to my throat and was ready to slit it, but it was only the thought of my gf that stopped me. To this day she doesn’t even know.
• Months before I got properly kicked out, I went to the local social services to get rehoused. As you know, the social housing sector is pointlessly slow. Part of the reason is they take the piss. I told them the whole thing (including the suicidal tendencies), and they didn’t believe me. At one point they tried to turn me away because I didn’t bring my passport with me, even though they’d met me before and knew I was a British native! Not to mention that I wasn’t a priority because I was otherwise healthy, non-disabled, heterosexual, single, male, under the age of 35, and with no history of drug/ booze use let alone abuse.

Yes, suicide is considered a non-priority by the English social services. In that case I hope they do us all a favour and top themselves.

• After she kicked me out (in writing), I lived in a hostel. I found it myself after loads of referrals from other services and searches. I was there for 4 months. It’s telling that the other tenants were almost all African immigrants. But they were never the problem. The vast majority of them I got on very well with, and I still speak to them to this day. The main problem was the landlord (Pakistani Christian), cook (Sasian, once gave me rotten fruit and refused to apologise) and housing coach (‘white’, and useless as shit), plus the “responsible tenant” who was there to keep an eye on us (house n***** who hogged the washing machine). So yeah, England is still racially segregated.

However, after 2 months in the hostel I found out about Crisis. It’s a charity dedicated to helping homeless single people secure private accommodation, as well as help with benefits, employment, etc. if they need it. Yes they found me a place. YAY!!!

At various points mum has tried to contact me again wanting to meet my girlfriend. Fortunately I’d made her fully aware of everything, so my gf refused to meet her. Just as well; I didn’t want them to meet! I honestly believe she’d have been in physical danger. Why? She’s exactly the opposite of the kind of woman mum wanted me to have: non-Muslim & from a certain Wafrican country that Jamaicans often hate. Plus it’s likely mum would’ve tried to blame her for my apostasy, completely ignoring that I apostatised before I even met her. I love my gf too much to put her in that level of danger.

Why did I not tell other family members? I have loads. Because they most likely wouldn’t have believed me; mum’s always been the sensible level-headed “good girl” among her siblings. Also, it wouldn’t have helped; my family members have always been very slow to help each other. Furthermore, being the only Muslims in the family made us the odd ones out. Though we were respected and seen as “good”, I’ve always noticed a certain reservedness everyone displays toward practicing Muslims. Even the one member I told didn’t believe I could “just give up” the faith, that I was still Muslim deep down*.

For those reasons I consider MY WHOLE FAMILY as bad as mum, and I unapologetically hate her and have no desire to reconcile. Ever.

* On a slight tangent, people who’ve never met me greet me with “as-salamu ‘alaykum”. Even my gf agrees I “look like a Muslim”, and it’s not just the beard! Shite!

This is why I have huge reservations about parenthood. I don’t want this shit to be epigenetically passed on to the next generation, or to accidentally project any lurking insecurity onto them. Not to mention I resolutely refuse to have children in a ‘white’-majority country.

(Please see my poem Fifty Percent)

I was never unwilling to accept, but now I’ve experienced first-hand, that:

In some cases, parental love is conditional and temporary. Not all parents love their children or wish them happiness and success. I know this doesn’t refer to all parents (otherwise we’d all be screwed!!!), and I have friends with very supportive parents/ families. I also acknowledge that my situation is not unique, as being made homeless is a surprisingly common theme among ex-Muslims.

This makes sense considering Muslims are taught that love of Allah and his prophet (not prophets?) takes priority over EVERYTHING else – including family. Muhammad directly said no-one’s a true believer until s/he loves him more than their family. Flick through the ahadiyth and you’ll see a lot of his followers greeting him with “May my father and mother be sacrificed for you.” The Qur’an (64:15) says “Your wealth & your children are only a fitnah*, and Allah has with him a great reward.”

* can translate as trial, infatuation, tribulation, riot, enchantment, persecution, test, temptation or civil strife. Take your pick.

It is 100% true also that under the shariy’ah, murtadduwn are to be killed. If England were a Muslim-ruled country, I would have been slaughtered.

(In case anyone’s under any illusions, ex-Muslims do get physically attacked and killed right here in England too. I was just stupidly lucky.)

I write this fully aware that my mum sometimes reads this blog (remember she no longer gives a shit about my privacy). But it is an important story to tell. I originally wanted to keep it firmly in my past, but it has made me who I am today.

I am free of the burden of my family’s secretiveness!

I am spatially distinct from the filth of Abrahamic monotheism!

I am on my way to bigger and better things with my creativity and destiny!

I am several steps closer to leaving this shithole country for good!

I like being alive!!!

The big news

This is going to be another personal post. A year and 3 months ago I made a life-altering decision, one that continues to affect me. To convey its significance, a bit of background:

My mother has been a devout Muslim my entire life, and of course that’s what I was born into. In case anyone’s curious, both my parents are ‘black’ Afro-Caribbean, not African, not south Asian, and especially not Arab.

Why especially not Arab? You wanna start somefing?

She doesn’t follow any sect like Sunni, Shi’i, etc. and neither have I, in accordance with the Qur’an’s direct command “Don’t divide the religion”. I prayed 5 times a day every day; fasted all 30 days in Ramadan; paid my 2.5% zakah; did jumma’ every Friday; read the whole Qur’an in Arabic and English (I’d memorised about 30 surahs + translations in my late teens); avoided ever being totally alone with a girl; agreed that cherry-picking what to believe in was a sin; sought marriage in my early 20s; never bared my chest or shoulders in public – not even in front of other guys; believed all sexual activity was sinful except between a husband & wife; agreed there should be no divide between religion and other aspects of life; and sincerely thought it was the best, most comprehensive and only uncorrupted religion.

But in mid-September 2013, something changed.

I’d always been introspective and stuff, but at that point I admitted that my piety could be a bad thing. There was no getting away from the fact that this level of devotion has made me worse off in certain ways, e.g. no experience with attracting girls (despite wanting to get married young!); unwillingness to acknowledge historical evidences in the religion (i.e. the ubiquitous tug-of-war of peace v. violence, political acquiescence v. revolution, tolerance v. intolerance of non-Muslims, enslavement v. emancipation, racism v. anti-racism, observance v. suppression of female rights, conservatism v. moderation v. laxity, monetary & sexual greed v. restriction, nationalism v. universalism); disconnect between myself and other people.

Ironically, though I felt non-Muslims couldn’t completely relate to me for reasons of belief, it was easier than relating to most other Muslims. I felt I couldn’t relate to Muslims around me simply because most of them were of south Asian background. They don’t even know Caribbean Muslims exist let alone try to get on with them! And as much as they don’t like to think so (especially Pakistanis) their cultures are founded on Hinduism, which in some respects they still practise, anti-Islamic as they may be.

HOW DARE YOU claim we are Hindu?!? Astagfirullah! By the merciful will of Allah we are Muslims, and we always have been Muslims, and we always will be Muslims, and may your takfiri ass burn in the lowest level of Hellfire, and…

Furthermore, most Muslims are too narrow-minded to deliberately explore subjects that contradict the Islamic paradigm, or even parts of the religion that scholars don’t discuss. Basic questions don’t get answered, or even asked, like:

• What religion did Muhammad follow before Islam? To this day no Muslim knows or cares
• Why is circumcision so common despite the Qur’an making no mention of it?
• Why do some ahadiyth describe Muhammad as ‘black’ and others as ‘white’?
• Why are many Muslims uncomfortable discussing sexual matters when Muhammad himself had no qualms? In 1 hadiyth a woman came up to him and asked if women can ejaculate, and he just said yes! Also, in the Qur’anic account of Jesus’s birth the angel – which had “the likeness of a man” – blew into Mary’s farj. Modern translations render farj as sleeve, but just check any online Arabic-English translator and it translates as vulva/ vagina!
• What age was A’ishah when Muhammad married her? This is still hugely debated
• Why’s it accepted that there were no female prophets despite Mary mother of Jesus being mentioned amongst a list of prophets in the Qur’an?
• Why does the Qur’an directly tell believers to free enslaved people yet throughout all of Islamic history taking slaves (concubines & sex slaves too, not just prisoners of war) was standard?
• Why should divine revelation be the criterion to judge & live life by when people disagree on what it says or means?

All in all, most Muslims have a romanticised understanding of Islam; back during the Islamic empire the world was much better off and would be again if we just returned to it. But this simply doesn’t agree with historical evidence or present-day reality.

In fact, when I told the big news to my mum I gave her this list of criticisms:

• Islam doesn’t make sense to me. There are too many mythical and magical aspects of it, eg. Satan (where is he? If he’s so real, why can’t we see/ hear/ feel him?), jinn (what are they? How come we can’t see or hear or feel them? Is there a scientific explanation for them?), prophethood (why would God only send messages to certain people in certain time periods?), the ahadiyth (the isra & mi’raj – only make sense as a dream/ hallucination, the dajjal, al-Mahdi, the return of Jesus, all the signs of the day of judgment’s approach, the story about Muhammad going to heaven and asking Allah to reduce the prayers from 50 to 5, etc.), Islam’s status as the religion of the fitrah (bollocks. There’s no evidence of Islam as we know it existing before Muhammad’s time, or of being somehow innate in people’s natures), angels (despite my personal understanding of them as mere forces of nature, Islam sees them as living beings with wings and faculties that bear similarities to humans’. Where are they?). And there are so many questions I’ve had for years that no-one can answer, so I’ve had to find my own answers. The only answers that I’ve gained have come from using my own brain, not relying on Islamic sources or ‘knowledgeable’ people.
• (update: now I realise that Allah was a tribal god, just like Yahweh was for the original Jews who happened to become universalised as the religion spread to other parts of the world. It’s true muslims changed polytheism to monotheism, setting up Allah as the ONLY god, but I’ve found no evidence that they had a different perception of who/ what Allah is. Ancient Semitic people saw him as basically a man, with hands, a face, shins, feet, eyes, etc. not as an intangible omnipresent ‘force’. How else would he supposedly have daughters?)

What daughters?

•  It’s incompatible with what I understand and have experienced for myself. I used to believe patience and suppression of anger were virtues but I’ve experienced too many times to ignore how impatience and anger have helped me. I was led to believe Islam is the perfect religion and it has answers for all of life’s problems, so why have I had to look outside the religion for answers to my problems, whether deep emotional ones or mundane everyday ones? I always thought controlling my sexual desires was a virtue and felt guilty for looking at women and porn – even dating was haram, but if you don’t approach women how the raas are you meant to find one you like? Ultimately it doesn’t really matter what people call themselves, what matters is what they personally believe, want, prioritise and care about. All religions can be and have been used to justify anything and everything – war, peace, slavery, emancipation, racism, anti-racism, misogyny, sexual equality, etc. so what good are they by themselves without people to apply them?
• It’s boring and inane. All the God-damn repetition of prayers, fasting, and all the du’as for every little thing we do is reminiscent of someone with OCD or something! All the little prohibitions are bullshit too, eg. not eating & drinking with the left hand (that one really pisses me off, and it only makes sense when you’re wiping your ass with your bare hand and have no guarantee of being able to wash it like back in those days), not praying dead on midday or sunset (wtf? Prayer is prayer any time of day!). How does any of that matter to everyday life? And there’s no let-up, no change, no room for new input, nothing!
• Masajid are full of shit. I reckon they used to be good back in the days of Muhammad but now they’ve become places to pray and nothing else. And they’re run by old Pakistani & Bengali men, who are out of touch with this generation, this culture, who pass off their backwards cultures as Islam and usually don’t cater for women, the disabled or non-Asians. The ummah is also full of shit, what ummah is there really? When muslims in Africa are starving or being killed off, how many Asians bat an eyelid? How many Asians even know about Caribbean muslims?
• I’ve outgrown it. Simple as.
• (most important) It’s never helped me in anything I really cared about. It’s never helped me develop or even see the importance of self-confidence, it’s never helped me find what I really want to do in life, it’s never helped me make friends or take an active interest in the dunya, it’s been of absolutely no relevance in my recent successes in creativity. If it really were such a good religion it should’ve done all of that, but it hasn’t.

Now that I’ve looked into it with this new perspective, I understand Islam is a collection of man-made guidelines, opinions, tribal add-ons & superstitions – just like every other religion, philosophy or systematised belief. In an ethnic and historical context it’s an Arabised fusion of Judaism* (hence the appeal to clear laws, circumcision, distinctive behaviour & dress code and references to Old Testament figures) and Christianity* (hence the relative flexibility, ethnic inclusiveness and inordinate focus on Jesus).

* Remember that Christianity was originally a sect of Judaism diluted down to appease non-Jews, while Judaism was just another tribal faith that was spread around the world by the Jewish diaspora & foreigners invading Judea (Palestine), and both faiths were already spread to the nearby Arabian peninsula and adapted to local audiences.

By Arabised, I mean from the outset it was designed to appeal to a predominantly but not exclusively 7^th century Arab audience; it’s in the Arabic language – the Qur’an was originally written in 7 different dialects, it speaks of deities that Arabs or their southwest Asian (“Semitic” or “Middle Eastern”) ancestors used to worship (Wadd, Suwa’, Yaguwth, Ya’uq, Nasr, Allah and his 3 daughters – al-Lat, al-‘Uzza & al-Manat), speaks of nations/ places that Arabs were familiar with (‘Ad, Thamuwd, Iram), and assumes listeners are already familiar with magic, angels & jinns, the Holy Spirit & “what your right hands possess” – which they would’ve been.

On a slight tangent, I also get the impression that Muhammad was seen as a good but somewhat weird guy back in his day before Islam. This is exemplified by the fact that he was generally a nice guy and easy to get on with; the typical 7^th century Arab man was all about getting drunk, defending his honour & burying his newborn daughters alive. And he first married at 25 (which back then was fucking LATE!), to Khadijah, a 40-year-old widow who made more money than him! Most men nowadays would be gobsmacked at this! Then during Islam he became an active revolutionary, which made him an enemy to the state (Makkah) and his own tribe (Quraysh). There’s also a hadiyth which has Muhammad saying, “Islam began as something strange, and it will return to how it began – strange, so give good news to the strangers.” This suggests that Muhammad accepted his status as a weirdo by the standards of his day.

Though I admit I like those aspects of him, the possible paedophilia (if it’s true he married A’ishah when she was 6) stops me respecting him. Also, as good as Islam may have been back then, it’s irrelevant. People follow what they want and use aspects of a given religion to justify it, and when they get into positions of authority the reworked religion gets systematised and enforced on others as a new culture, for the benefit of some and the detriment of most. Hence the tug-of-war I mentioned above. That’s the state of Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. in 2015.

Yes, Buddhism.

Back on topic. The big news is I’m not a Muslim anymore!!! I am a murtad, apostate, ex-Muslim, non-believer, a kafir if you will. However, I’m emphatically not atheist or agnostic. Definitive categories don’t work for me as my beliefs are fluid and dynamic, so brief descriptions of my current state of spirituality are in order:

• Monotheistic, still deciding what to call ‘God’ (Allah, Yahweh & God all have an anthropomorphic slant, but I believe It is not human or like any biological organism, and is definitely not male or female)
• Trusting of emotions as well as rationality, subjectivity and objectivity
• Understanding the importance of self-esteem, sense of purpose and following my desires
• Trusting of my real-time experiences over pronouncements of ancient books
• Prioritising external material blessings over internal spiritual ones (not because I think it’s more important, but because I’ve been brought up to do the reverse so much I’m trying to balance it out)
• Situationist, fallible & liable to change without notice (which is a good thing; change is the foundation of reality. People who refuse to change refuse to improve, and people who refuse to improve are fucked)
• No longer feel guilty about swearing!

Because of this change, I now have a working understanding of religious history, I relate to people better, I accept my quirks & faults, I no longer feel obliged to be patient with people or situations I don’t like, and I have a sexiness-incarnate dark-skinned GIRLFRIEND with whom I spent Christmas & New Year’s – and enjoyed every second of it! YAY!!!