I have decided to write a bit about my issues with Islam, and religion in general, but Islam mostly (better to write about what you know, right?)

The other day when Princessmaria locked her thread I felt like I was choking because I wasn't done yet. I could go on and on for pages about the subject, and much of it wouldn't be nice or debate-worthy and anyway, she was right because that really wasn't the subject of that thread. So better blog about it, right?

It was the summer of 2007. I had been a muslim for over 20 years, and very very fervent for the last ten. Always praying on time, always reading the Qur'an, always preaching, always bugging my sisters about how what they were doing or wearing or saying wasn't Islamic, always judging people. Yes, I was that kind of person. The one anybody sane wouldn't want to be around. I can't say I never had any doubts, but I was pretty good at sweeping them under the rug. After all, the fear of burning in hell for all eternity was enough to "keep me in line". Well, during that summer, I picked up a book about various mythologies in the world (always loved mythology in general), and while I was comparing them I began to feel uneasy about the number of virgin births and global floods that were mentioned. It doesn't sound like much, does it? In itself it doesn't mean or prove anything. But it did shed some light on my own ignorance about many, many things. So eventually I started doing some research on various subjects pertaining to my beliefs and what I have been taught. At first I was pretty good at mental gymnastics, at justifying this and that and trying to conciliate facts with what I thought I knew. But eventually I grew tired and challenged myself to do the following: Suppose there is no God. Suppose the Qur'an is man-made. What does your religion look like, then?

It didn't take more than that for all my beliefs to crumble to dust. It seemed so obvious that I felt like the stupidest person for not having realized it before.

Before I continue, I want to point out that Islam has a lot of good stuff going for it. It is not entirely bad. There some awesome principles in there: Taking care of the sick, the orphan, the elderly, the poor. Mandatory amount from your assets that have to be given to the needy or to charity, once every year. Teachings of humility and honesty. Strong sense of community and solidarity. All of this great.

It doesn't erase everything that's wrong, though. Here's the most obvious one: Islam is terrible to women. Sorry, but there's just no way around it. It irks me how some people like to pretend that Islam is a "feminist" religion, and it bothers me even more when stupid people swallow that up without even looking too closely into the matter. The reality is, Islam did give some rights to women, compared to how things were in 7th century Arabia, but that doesn't mean much.

There's obviously chapter 4, verse 34, in which God supposedly says that men are "responsible" for women, and that if a man feels that his wife is rebelling against him, he can hit her. Let's ignore that for a moment, though. Let's pretend that the verse doesn't exist, and look at the rest of Islamic scripture. Now, I'm not going to quote and reference verses and hadith (hadith means sayings and deeds of the prophet) because I honestly don't have time to research them, but if anyone wants to verify anything, they can ask and I'll look for the exact quote. I'll just give general meaning of the scriptures that I'm talking about.

How's that for gender equality: A woman's testimony is worth half that of a man. If you have to have people bear witness to something, you need two man. If two men aren't available, then one man and two women (it's said explicitly that the two women can help each other remember, but it's not said that a man needs anything of the sort). And it can never be four women. Scholars explain this by saying that "women are emotional creatures and it clouds their judgement" which is another way of saying women are stupid.

A woman cannot just ask for divorce and get it, unlike a man. There is a loophole around that, though, in which in order to get out of the marriage, a woman has to return the exact amount of her dowry to the man. In Islam, dowry is the money/assets that the man gives to the woman/woman's family upon marriage, so basically she buys her freedom back with money, and if she doesn't have it, well, tough titty. You'd think this is probably an obsolete, outdated practice, but a friend of mine finally got divorced exactly like that, four years ago, and I was the one she borrowed her dowry money from.

After divorce, if the woman has children, she gets custody. If she decides to remarry, she automatically loses custody of the kids in favour of the father, or the father's mother. Try to make sense of that. You have to choose between your happiness with another man, or her own flesh and blood.

There is a hadith that has been corroborated by more than one person, and which is considered a "strong hadith," in which the prophet walks past a group of women and tells them "be righteous, for hell is filled with more women than men". When one of them asked why it was so, he said "because women are deficient in their religion, and deficient in their intellect". When they asked how, he said "isn't a woman's testimony worth half that of a man? That's how you are intellectually deficient" and "When a woman menstruate, isn't she unfit to pray and fast? That's how they are deficient in their religion." So basically, god created us stupid, and made us so we bleed once a month, and somehow that renders us impure, and because of things that were totally the will of god, not ours, many of us will burn in hell. This demonstrates two things that don't make sense about Islam and the Abrahamic religions: circular logic and the major problem of free will and predestination.

That's just off the top of my head. I won't go into the veil/hijab issues. I won't go into inheritance (the fact that a woman always inherits half of what her male relatives do) There are many little things in Islam that, taken as a whole, make women out to be weak, inferior, perverted and stupid creatures that have to be under the very strict guidance/possession of a man, or the world would go mad.

I do realize that there are many muslim women who accept that. And if they're content with their fate, then good for them. I have absolutely no problem with that. What I have a problem with is women from Western countries, who grew up in secular societies, who have all the privileges that most women in the middle-east of south-eastern Asia couldn't dream of, and who decide to convert to Islam, for one reason or another (usually for the love of a muslim man) and get fed a fairytale-like version of Islam, who hear all this stuff about how hijab protects your modesty and makes you special, yada yada, and then have the gall to judge and preach women like me who have suffered all their lives (and continue to suffer) of great injustice and oppression, or derision when we express feminist views, of abuse both mental and physical. Don't try to be cute with me. I know the religion way better than you ever will. And if I sound angry and bitter, it's because I AM! Saying that I shouldn't be, that I should just move on, is like telling a person who has been victim of sexual abuse "why are you angry about it? You're not being abused NOW!" Clearly those women have no idea what oppression is like. Until they do. I'm a moderator on a forum dedicated to ex-muslims, and you wouldn't believe the number of sad stories from former "white converts" whose vision of what they thought was Islam was shattered after a short stay in an Islamic country, or after their beloved husbands went "salafi" on them. Of course it doesn't happen to all of them, and I'm happy about that. But DO NOT JUDGE.

Lest people think that my only issues with Islam is the women issue, there are several. Examples:

- Slavery: it is never explicitly forbidden in Qur'an. Sure, there are verses in which god tells believes to free a slave in order to atone for this or that sin, but other than that, it's almost as if it's encouraged. There is a hadith in which the prophet says that a slave who runs away from their master is cursed by god and the angels until it comes back to captivity. Imagine being a slave who converted to Islam back in the time of Mohamed and hearing that.

- Scientific errors: Those have become a "thing" rather recently, when proselytizers decided that every scientific theory/fact was actually predicted in the Qur'an (what they do is pick a very vague verse and claim that it was about a a given modern scientific discovery. There are tonnes of videos on youtube debunking that. Here's just an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMT_kNtOTIs

- Allah: What does it say about a creator divinity when he demands that every creature spends its time worshiping him or else they will burn? When I say burn, I have to say that Qur'an is pretty damn graphic. Every chapter of it has its fair share of verses in which god describes in detail how he will pour boiling water down the throats of infidels until their insides melt, and how whenever all their skins melts away, he will provide them with another skin just so it can burn anew. And many of these "infidels" he explicitly said that he sealed their hearts to Islam. So if you willfully turn someone away from the right path, and then punish them for it, what does that make you? And yet every other verse is about how merciful and kind he is. I think god is a petty, vengeful, sadistic, insecure, schizophrenic megalomaniac.

I guess I should talk a bit about how Qur'an is just an edited (and faulty) version of Judaic and Christian scriptures, about hadith and about Mohamed's character, but this blog is getting a bit too long so I'll stop for now.