a paradox of doubt & belief
when we're raised religious, we all end up with some BIG questions.
I don’t pray often, but while in Istanbul, I prayed in Suleimaniya Mosque. It was Maghrib, the dusk prayer. It had been a cold, blustery day. I was happy to just be inside, protected from the wind. The Imam’s voice was pleasant to listen to - the lilting tones of Quranic verse felt familiar and warm to my ears. It was nice to feel a sense of the peace in prayer, to have a moment of stillness and meditation.
Growing up, prayers were often accompanied by feelings frustration. I didn’t want to pray but I had to pray - urged by my parents who weaponised shame and guilt to motivate us. I don’t begrudge them (anymore), it seemed that they thought this was the way for us to build a habit. I guarantee you, no lasting habit is built upon those two emotions.
However, not every prayer was an unpleasant experience. Punctuated through the memories of resentment and frustration are memories of reverence, peace, love and connection through prayer. There were moments where transcendence felt possible. When the Quran reading was particularly beautiful and the collective voice of “Ameen” reverberated into my heart, I heard my voice mix into one large voice and I loved the feeling of being part of a whole. This was also something my boyfriend pointed out while we were in Istanbul (he’s an atheist): the sense of connection in a space where people can share in something as personal as prayer, together. I often wonder if my early experiences with this have been part of my ongoing belief in community.
However, this experience in Istanbul forced me to reflect on how deeply I had buried this part of myself. After all, I stopped talking about my ongoing relationship to Islam a few years ago. I spoke about it as a past event, using phrases like: “I grew up Muslim” rather than “I am Muslim.” I chose to be ambivalently and privately Muslim. Exhausted by my own struggle, and unwilling to deal with the interference and judgement of others, I had learnt to keep my faith to myself… perhaps a little too well.
My vicious sense of privacy had its roots in the trauma of spiritual abuse, abuse that also led to deep, internalised shame. It was also part of the trauma of the hyper-visibility of growing up Muslim - I didn’t want to be available for questioning by prejudiced strangers or viewed through the singular lens of my faith. I thought that if people stopped knowing about my faith, then they’d stop interfering with it. After all, I had the power to remove the opportunity for anyone to enter into my spiritual world. I could close it off from people who could (knowingly or unknowingly) led me to feeling bad for not being religious enough — or for even having a sense of faith in the first place.
In this roped-off space, my faith could be solely and completely mine. It was no longer available for the interrogation or questioning of people, whether Muslim or not. I could simply inhabit the internal space I needed, in order to live with my belief and my doubt without interference.
To me, faith wasn’t a matter of quantitatively solving the question of atheism or theism, the question of: does God exist or not? Each side presents what they consider to be ‘facts’ that ‘prove’ their point and I wasn’t interested in any of it.
I was interested in the immensity of the space in-between; the one that made room for the search for God beyond binaries, science and dogma. I was interested in the emotions that drive us to reach for meaning and purpose beyond ourselves. For me, faith was never about logic. It was about the animating force that comes with connecting to something beyond us: to community, to God, to nature, to the universe, to the wondrous interconnectedness of the beauty of life and all that exists beyond the measured limits of science.
I felt led to this kind of contemplation after having gone through a religious education that stipulated disciplined action should lead to faith. Yet, this approach left me feeling hollow and performative and I stopped practising (performing) Islam around the age of 19.
The thing is, without intrinsic motivation, all that was left were the extrinsic forces of reward and punishment. Such a framework felt as though it negated the nourishment of my inner spiritual world in favour of obedience. I felt cornered into hypocrisy. So long as I was seen as doing the right thing (obeying), it didn’t matter what I felt (or did in hiding). It felt like I was playing a game with my life: obey and collect good points, disobey and collect bad points, cash in on Judgement Day and hopefully have enough good points to get into heaven. If creationism was true, I couldn’t believe that God could create this entire complex universe and then make us play such a simplistic game to protect our eternal lives. Surely, there was more to life than that…
When I turned away, I inevitably came into contact with ex-Muslims. Yet, I was deeply bothered by the hostility and internalised Islamophobia. Yes, I had anger and frustration but I didn’t think of Islam as some monolithic horror that had come to haunt us from the belly of Saudi Arabia. I was also wholly dissatisfied with a life of ‘pure rationality’. I couldn’t get rid of my fascination with wonder and the possibility that things exist beyond our cognitive comprehension.
I realised I couldn’t get rid of my faith - getting rid of Islam was to erase a crucial part of myself. I knew I had to find a way to live with it in a way that worked for me.
I began to think that perhaps Islam was a philosophy that started with an idea; an idea that sought to do good in the world, and like any idea, could be perverted and abused for other purposes.
So, if that was the case… how could I get to the essence of this good?
If I was to believe that a man known as Muhammed had come to his community with a message of justice, how can I peel back the layers of perversion to find this core message in Islamic rulings, advice and Quranic verses? How did the expression of law measure of up to the values it sought to impart?
In clearer terms: if a law is meant to impart justice but fails to do so, can we change the law? Or must we keep the law in its current form to honour tradition, even though it no longer delivers justice?
What I did was pull myself apart - and my faith with it. I didn’t want binaries of good and evil, Heaven and Hell, Satan and God… I wanted grey zones, metaphors and multiplicity. I wanted questions without answers - only possibilities. I wanted choice. I wanted a variety of opinions to consider and most of all, I wanted to sit with uncertainty and contemplate what it felt like to live without knowing, all so I could become open to the possibility of knowing. In other words, I wanted to forget all I knew and experience the things I once knew, as new.
The thing that I remind myself, and others, is that the hardest part about the step toward your questions is that it requires you become an active participant in your own deconstruction. It is not a fast thing. The process of reconstruction takes years. For me, it’s been fourteen years since I was a 19 year old facing the questions I had been afraid of.
When it’s a faith that we are raised in, it forms a part of our identity. Thus, challenging faith challenges our identity. To engage in a deconstruction and reconstruction of our sense of self is a vulnerable and petrifying undertaking. There are no guarantees about who you will become because of it. The questioning makes you vulnerable to being ostracised from family, friends and community. It’s a journey that has no visible end goal to strive toward, only a path to walk down as you engage in a struggle with yourself stay open to what you find along the way. It is an effort to re-establish your connection to your intuition and learn to hold the space for paradox.
I’ve written versions of this essay multiple times over the last fourteen years, mostly as diary entries, questioning what I’m doing and why. I’ve been confronted with some painful, ugly experiences. I’ve made missteps that have hurt people in my family and community. I have betrayed myself multiple times, going back to toxic patterns, rebelling out of a desire to wound rather than explore, deliberately provoking and pushing my parents and, of course, self-destructing. It’s all been part of a messy, scary, enlightening journey. However, the bottom is a real place to end up and not everyone climbs back out, or up. Some keep sinking, some don’t make it out alive. It’s important to remember that these journeys are personal - they cannot be forced upon a person, they cannot be copied. Lessons can be extracted from others, there’ll be support from people along the way, but the path is going to be yours and yours alone.
So, as I prayed in Suleimaniya mosque, I realised that I no longer wanted to keep my faith in a locked little box inside my chest. I wanted to speak more freely about my connection to Islam with all the flaws, bruises and glitter that I have adorned it with. I wanted to be open about it’s brokenness and it’s wholeness. I no longer want to experience this journey in isolation, because I know there’s so many people out there who are also grappling with these questions - people I know as friends, and people who I don’t know. We don’t need to hide our doubts, because doubts can be the questions that lead us to our truth.
Love this so much
This is my favourite article so far I cried reading this. Thank you for articulating all these feelings so poignantly. 🌻 I’m just glad I got to sit next to in suleimayya mosque ❤️