After all these years, I can make this confession. My journey away from religion began with my first attempts to read the Quran. I had high expectations. I had expected a highly intellectual text that would give me incredible knowledge and blow my mind. Instead, I found passage after boastful passage about how awesome and powerful God is; and passage after passage of carrot-and-stick language: you will be handsomely rewarded if you follow the Quran and severely punished if you do not.
This kind of language was wholly incongruent with my concept of God. I understood God to be a Higher Power who inspires us to be a force for good in the world. But the language in the Quran sounded like it was coming from a petty, vengeful, and manipulative source. The language felt oppressive. If I do not follow the teachings of Islam, I will be severely punished and burned in the fires of Hell. I did not appreciate being threatened in this way. In fact, I was insulted. Did God really have to bribe me in order to be good? Did God really think I need to be threatened with Hell in order to listen? I would rather go to Hell than be cower before such oppression.
You might be thinking that my thoughts are blasphemous. If you are fearing that I will be severely punished for even having such thoughts, then you are lending more credence to this above impression I formed in my late teens.
On the other hand, you might be thinking that I was young and did not have the maturity to be able to process the text of the Quran. That perhaps I had a childish reaction to it. This very well may be. After all, the Quran is not a straightforward text. It is not even straightforward prose. Scholars are still debating interpretations of passages and the meaning of certain words. My approach to trying to read the Quran so literally was possibly not a wise one.
As a result of this reaction, while I did not turn into an atheist, I could no longer find the same motivation to practice religion. I did not wish to force myself to go through the motions out of fear of Hellfire. However, I remained spiritual. I believed in a Power greater than myself. But I did not think of this Higher Power in human terms: as someone I should fear or as someone who would punish me. I did not think that this Higher Power possessed human emotions and would feel anger if I disobeyed and satisfied if I obeyed. I thought of this Higher Power as the source of my conscience and my judgement. I vowed to live according to my conscience and my judgement and not by rules that don’t make sense to me. I gradually developed my own belief system.
Ten years after my first attempt at trying to read the Quran, I tried to read it again. This time I was motivated by a conversation with a person who had an impact on how I viewed my faith. He asked if I had read the Quran and that was a difficult question to answer because of what I have described above. He told me that reading the Quran literally or line by line will not offer any perspective. It is important to view it holistically. He told me that the word “islam” means submission and that the Quran is all about submitting and surrendering to a higher power. (I would later encounter these concepts again in my further reading.)
Approaching the Quran from the perspective of Submission proved to be quite revolutionary for me. I’m not saying that it all makes sense now and I am no longer bothered by the carrot and stick language. I am still made very uncomfortable by that language. But I can view it from a different perspective.
As I read passage after passage about the evils of Disbelievers, I realized that Disbelievers did not Submit. I had assumed, based on my modern context, that the Disbelievers were atheists or followers of other Faiths. (I am not sure if the concept of atheism existed at that time and whether the Quran addresses atheism.) I had a hard time understanding why God was so angry at them for having a different belief system. But I read more and saw the anger directed at idol worshippers, it dawned on me that idol worshippers’ belief system did not encourage spiritual surrender.
Many idol-worshipping cultures have tried to ensure outcomes by making “offerings” of money, food, virgins, human life, and so on and so forth, but they did not embrace the idea that some things were truly out of their control. They were perpetuating a huge scam when they were trying to buy control over their lives, rather than surrendering to that over which they can have no control. To truly Submit is to acknowledge and accept that certain things are beyond our control, but having faith and proceeding forward anyways, and when things go wrong, learning to come to terms with it and keep moving forward.
This is my current interpretation of the passages in which God expresses anger at Disbelievers. I still do not understand why the language appears to be so uncharitable. It makes sense to me that people had every reason to be resistant to this idea. After all, many modern Muslims are still resistant to this idea. In my personal life I know many who have swapped out these tangible offerings with prayers. They seem to have this idea that they can leverage prayer to convince God to change God’s plan. I have heard of a few people who have lost their faith when their prayers were not answered, and when they were advised to accept that maybe God knew best, they struggled with that idea. People who grew up with the Quran struggle to understand the concept of Submission. So is God constantly angry at these people the same way God was angry at those Disbelievers?
I don’t have the answers, and perhaps I never will. I probably will never fully understand the concept of the Quran. Somehow I am the opposite of most people around me. I find it very easy to understand the complex concept of Submission, but I cannot understand the relatively simple concept of Heaven and Hell. Perhaps I don’t understand it because of the lack of complexity. It is as simple as legends and folklore and does not require any level of spirituality to understand. In a very similar way, I don’t understand the concept of jinns or the concept of Shaitan. Perhaps someday I will if my mind can expand enough; perhaps I never will. Either way, it’s alright. I accept that I may never understand, and that does not stop me from Submitting; in fact, this is a part of my Surrender.
Tushmit's Stream of Consciousness 