A Chat with Abdulrahman
From habitual Muslim to an open-hearted and intentional person of faith
I am excited to start a series of interviews with people and their spiritual and religious journeys. I am aiming for once a month and already have a few folks lined up.
Those of us who grew up in religious life often find ourselves trying to navigate the faith of our parents with our own experiences and faith.
This week we hear from Abdulrahman.
Abdulrahman is someone who is going through life, and sometimes running through it, while learning along the way, or trying to. A recent immigrant to NYC from Kuwait, a country with a population of 4 million. He’s trying to navigate the individual and the communal aspects and obligations of his life and writes about these things and other not-so-serious things on abdulrahman.substack.com.
Let’s get to it!
This experience of faith can be about Islam, but I’m sure many people have had similar experiences in their respective religions. Hence, if you remove Islam, and put whichever you are, you’ll find the journey almost identical.
Tell a little about your experience of faith/religion as a child.
My upbringing was a ’traditional’ one. My parents didn’t have any formal education, but they were focusing on the religious upbringing of their kids as there was a religious wave in the ‘70s-’90s within the Gulf region and in Saudi and parts of the Arab world. This revivalist movement that started in the 19th century reached its peak by the time I was growing up.
It was interesting to reflect on because all of us - my brothers and I - were told to go to the masjid and were scolded if we didn’t. You know it as a mosque but the Arabic origin of the word reflects the original intent of the word. It comes from the word "to prostrate”, hence the ‘masjid’ technically is "the place of prayer and prostration”. Not only that, but people who know about Islam know how encompassing it can be. One can live daily life according to the principles of the faith, and every act one can do in one's life can be an act of faith with the right intention. Due to the nature of doctrine and religious practice, there was little questioning of the faith itself, and what the underlying questions beyond the ‘questions of practice’ i.e.: how to perform this act according to the faith (or the dominant interpretation of it).
Bigger philosophical questions were shunned, because “Philosophy is evil and a Western corruptor of the mind, and has no benefit.” There was a strong emphasis on a ‘pure creed’ type of religious teaching, the closest to it can be the Lutheran or the Protestant aspects of Christianity. The ‘Wahhabi’ dominated the public sphere in the region and dominated the religious discourse with its exclusionary practice of every other religious opinion that contradicted or questioned it.
There were visible cracks in that logic, but the emphasis on uniformity prompted the majority of people to comply, and basically not ruffle any feathers. I joined a religious youth group at 12, which is in some ways opposed to the Wahhabi doctrine, and it was the beginning of the religious search.
I used the word ’traditional’ apart from the Western use of ‘conservative', because it has certain connotations in the American mind, that don’t apply to the non-American/Western reader. The semantics are different, although we might be reading the same word, what it means to me is different from what it might be understood by you or your readers.
What prompted you to change your perspective?
I’ve always been interested in 'the other’ be it within my faith, or outside it from a young age. I somewhat taught myself the English language, and that was a great window into other cultures, some of which were “dangerous” to my faith. That was me joining a philosophically different religious youth group than my family’s natural doctrine. It was an interesting phase as I was reading books on creed at 15, and watching Friends at night. This constant tug-of-war between the 3 cultural forces in my life prompted me to ask many questions. I wanted to be open to the world, but I was brought up that the world is “a bunch of infidels going to hell.”
I was going through my thought processes thinking how come only this sect of Islam is right, and there are more than a billion people who don’t follow it. It didn’t make sense. How can all these people be wrong with their scholars and preachers and imams and thought processes?
I got into university and started to read about Islamic thought that wasn’t from that Wahhabi doctrine because I was tired of everything being forbidden. And I do mean everything!
music
television
socializing with the opposite gender
Western culture
excessive engagement with sports
The contradictions were glaring in what my extended family members were teaching/preaching about Islam being a tolerant religion focused on “good behavior and forgiveness” but how intolerant my surroundings were towards opposing religious thinking, even in simple things like music, or the likes. It was funny! It still is funny, to be honest.
During that time, I was fascinated by Buddhism, think it was the peak of Buddhist cultural export with the Dalai Lama and the increased Western interest in it made me really think of ‘comparative reading’ as a way to form my opinion. (Anecdote: I was watching LOST, the famous TV series, and was thinking of “Dharma Corp” and how subliminal that was in me researching the Buddhist Dharma concept).
This comparative study was really motivated by one question: What do other religions/faith ideas have that Islam doesn’t?
I started from this point, wanting to explore how I could experience other faiths that my faith didn’t have. After a couple of years, I came to the conclusion that from a moralistic point of view, there are very few things that I find different in how to engage with the world, in comparison to other religions. In fact, the similarity was astonishing!
“Love Thy Neighbor” in the Christian faith, has an equivalent of “No one believes until he loves for his neighbor what he loves for himself”. There are so many more.
What was the scariest/hardest part about deconstruction?
The hardest part was that I was trying to engage with family members, but I was absolutely shunned, ridiculed, and given nicknames. The Sufi, The Deviant, The Philosophizer, and so on. All these were comments made by the immediate circles, and I was warned against some of my opinions because they didn’t comply with the doctrine of “don’t ask, don’t differ.” That was dominating the discourse not only in my family, but the whole religious sphere in my country, and my region of the world as well. The Wahhabi doctrine dominated the public discourse and dominated the government's religious authority bodies to a degree that it was using authority in fighting every other opinion. This religious intolerance was not only institutional, but it was also societal as well.
What was crazy to me was that I was reading about religious discourse before the rise of Wahhabi ideology. I saw how tolerant the religious discourse (Political discourse: something else!) was for over 12 centuries within Islam. I couldn’t help thinking: What books are these people reading when the famous jurisprudence schools were engaging with each other constantly on so many topics? I was reading how ‘House of Wisdom’ in Baghdad was translating ancient Greek Philosophy, how Al-Ghazali was discussing ’the nature of God’ with other Muslim philosopher scholars, and how Maimonides, a Jewish scholar, was leading the courts in Muslim Andalucia, but I saw none of that tolerance in the modern discourse. And it baffled me!
How do you feel about faith/religion now?
After taking more than 10 years trying to form a sense of religious identity that doesn’t exclude everyone who says something different, I found myself leaning more towards the intentional aspects of the faith. I wonder about what it means from a psychological and societal aspect, not from a procedural perspective, as is the emphasis with any ‘literal interpretation’. Religion for me is not a procedure or a process that needs to be adhered to to the T as I was told, but it is a process of growing into and making sure the process means something that is spiritual.
It was always “do this, so you can get this in this life or the next” type of teaching, but now it is more “do this, because I need it for my fulfillment as a person, and maybe I’ll get this or that in this life or the next.” This shift is absolutely major for me currently and I’m still learning it. There’s a growing emphasis within me on understanding how my faith adds to my mental well-being, and my ability to face life difficulties in general (going through a rough patch so pray for me!).
Also, as someone who is a recent immigrant to New York (away from a very homogenous society), seeing religious practice that is compatible with the basic tenets of the faith, yet different in its branches is very soul-enriching. It tends to confirm my belief that Islam is not only compatible for Eastern societies, or brown people, but also for people living in places like London, NYC, and Tokyo. In fact, I believe that it is MORE important to people in those big cities. It offers something that modern life definitely takes away from, and if it didn’t, it definitely didn’t add to us. I’m sure a lot of readers can attribute their personal faiths to this as well. Modern society definitely needs faith-based and spiritual principles to combat, this encompassing machine. (A song comes to mind here: Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes).
Think of the sense of community, camaraderie, caring for neighbors, sympathy with those less fortunate, and the moral obligation not to wrong others and cheat them. These are aspects that we see lacking in our modern lives in big cities, and seeing how important it is in my faith (and I can argue for other faiths in general), it’s definitely something we need.
One famous author I love is Alija Izetbegovic, the first Bosnian president, and he says: “There is no freedom without God” I read this the first time around 15 years ago, and it never left me. You can engage with it philosophically, religiously, or in whichever way, and it still resonates. Not only did he liberate his people from the Serb invasion, but he also liberated me.
How are you engaging with a community (spiritual or otherwise)?
It’s interesting you mention this, as I was talking to a friend about my experience being a recent immigrant in NYC. It’s interesting to me because of the homogeny of the society that I was brought up in, finding a spiritual community isn’t a thing at all. It’s absolutely essential here in the US, especially if you are a religious minority, for the obvious reasons of camaraderie and support.
My intellectual engagement with my faith generally comes from non-Arabic speaking Muslims right now because the West is where Islam is being stretched and examined from theological and societal perspectives (the same can be said about Christianity as well I guess), but also due to the declining intellectual and personal freedoms in the Arab world (and by extension the Muslim world), the ability to engage in theological discussions in my parts of the world post the Arab Spring has declined significantly, reducing the intellectual production in topics such as society and faith, or the relationship between faith and life in general.
I have many other communities (one in Substack), but also I try to be an active member in whichever group I’m in. It could be my running club, my group of friends, or the mosque I go to. Being a social person, fostering community comes naturally to me, and I’ve grown up in a community, not as an individual, so I recognize how important it is.
I also talked about similar ideas in a post observing the Muslim experience in the US and finding some early opinions about how I feel. I also mentioned some stuff about Ramadhan and how it feels different away from family, and for the 2nd time in 38 years, to be away from family.
For the Ears
Ah, where do I start? I didn’t listen to music until I was 17, because it was ‘forbidden’ and ‘an act of evil’ but I dug deep into it, and it wasn’t something that I regret the least bit. It’s another topic, but here’s this song: Soukoura by Ali Farka Toure & Ry Cooder.
In fact, I wrote about it in a previous substack here.
For the Eyes
I mentioned Alija Izetbegovic, and he has books that are translated into many languages. One of his most impactful books was his famous: "Between East and West” which was translated to “Islam Between East and West”. It is a philosophical critique of postmodernity, and emphasizes humanism guided by spirituality as opposed to Nietzsche’s “Superhuman”.
I think this is one of the deepest books that presents Islam’s philosophical ideas in a modern language, that is based on a humanist approach to faith.
For the Taste Buds
Apart from being fueled by the "Muslim Wine” aka coffee, give me any type of pastries and I’m happy. There are the 'gym rat’ types, and I’m definitely the 'bakery rat' type. Dough is life. :)
I fully embrace the bakery rat label. Pastries are the best! Thank you for sharing your story, Abdulrahman. May you continue to find peace for your senses and your soul.
So much of this story bears commonalities with the conservative religious upbringing that I lived. Don’t socialize with the opposite gender too much, lots of restrictions about popular culture, and dedicated church attendance. The intensity of religious structure and strictness is not limited to evangelical Christianity.
Dear readers, if you would like to share your journey of religious deconstruction and reconstruction you can fill out this form.