Abdullah Sameer

أَلَا يَعْلَمُ مَنْ خَلَقَ وَهُوَ اللَّطِيفُ الْخَبِيرُ Does He who created not know, while He is the Subtle, the Acquainted? (67:14)

You must be so miserable now that you left Islam

Abdullah Sameer

I hear this all the time.. Without Islam or belief in God your life must be so miserable sad depressing.  Turn back to Allah now before you end up a pitiful miserable wreck!  Infact one of the comments on my blog said

Know that I once was an apostate too for a number of years. It brought me nothing but misery and suffering. I am glad I saw the error of my ways then. If you wish to repeat the experience for yourself, be my guest.

I asked him why this was, but did not receive any response.

I am happier now than I have been as a Muslim.  Why?

Islam does not equal happiness in life.

Too many people have been brainwashed by Islam to think that all non-Muslims are depressed miserable sad souls, even if they look happy they are really not.

This is just not true.  Happiness is more about finding your way in life, finding joy in the things you do, with your family, or with your friends, or with making the most of your life, with achieving your goals or getting where you want to be in life.

This excellent comic explains how to find meaning in life without believing in God:

LifeDonuts

Comic: Life and Donuts by Stanley

How I am happier now

Well for one there isn’t the constant guilt of worrying “am I good enough for Allah?”.  The fear of the day of judgement, the one that will turn a baby’s hair gray and will make you run away from your mother and father.  The guilt when you slip up on one of your five daily prayers or commit some sin that Allah hates.   This excessive fear that’s put into Muslims in order to scare them into being a good person has different effects on different people.  For me, it was a constant worry and analysis about everything I ever did.

With difficulty comes ease

Some people think that a depressed Muslim is a Muslim that doesn’t pray enough, or is not religious enough.  This is so wrong. Depression and unhappiness are challenges that certain people face from time to time.  Not being happy does not mean you are missing God in your life.  That’s just silly.  Sheikh Yasir Farzaga has spoken about this – that depression is actually a sickness and not a lack of faith. Likewise I would argue believing in God or remembering him doesn’t bring happiness.  A lot of ex-Muslims have contemplated suicide, and the reason for this is because of their families abusing them, kicking them out, harming them, telling them they are worthless and stupid, and so on.  It didn’t come from not believing in God, it came from the harm of the Muslim community targetted towards that individual

If you are a Muslim, consider that Islam does not equal happiness. It can bring you some happiness, but that happiness can come from other means too.

 

Does the Sun Set in a Muddy Spring?

Abdullah Sameer

First check out this post on Dhul Qarnayn though.

For the first video, here is a summary

QuranMuddySpringPoints

These are some really outstanding points.  Put together, they completely smash the idea that this Quranic story is the truth from God.

One interesting snippet I found was in the video on “does the Quran set into a muddy spring” below, The Masked Arab actually goes through all the early tafaseer and shows that even these early masters of the language and scholars of the religion took the setting of the sun literally.

When we look at Tabari (#11 on the list), His tafsir is considered foundational.  Arguably the most credible tafsir in the Quran.  All other major tafsirs like Qurtubi, Jalalayn and Ibn Kathir borrow heavily from Tabari’s tafsir.  What he did is gather all the narrations he could find, and for 18:86 Tabari gathers a 15 narrations from early Islam to describe this single verse.  All Muhammad’s companions took it literally that the sun set to the spring.  The only difference was whether it was warm, muddy, or black.  14 tafaseer later (350 years after Prophet Muhammad’s death) in Tabarani that people started to suggest that it was actually just the perspective of Dhul Qarnayn and the sun didn’t literally set in the sea.  The problem with this Tafsir al-Kabir Imam Tabarani is its controversial and considered a fabrication that was written 500-600 years later.  So on we go, until the 18th tafsir written by at-Thalaby in 427H also has a very interesting point as to where Prophet Muhammad got this idea from! He cites a poem from an ancient Yemeni King Tubba who lived 700 years before Muhammad.

This pre-Islamic poem that Prophet Muhammad surely would have heard said that Dhul Qarnayn reached the west and east… He saw the sun as it was setting into a spring of black mud.

By the 20th tafsir, 440 years after Prophet Muhammad’s death the tafsir  says the meaning of the verse is literal, but it gives a second opinion that says it may be not literal.  450 years later they realized the sun was too big to set in the muddy spring.  Since this book is from God, it surely must contain many signs of it’s divine nature, like facts not known at the time. Rather what see is the opposite, ancient stories that are untrue containing many mistaken ideas written as if they are true stories revealed by God.

What is the point here?  You have someone like Zakir Naik who comes and says we are not understanding the verse correctly, it really means that Dhul Qarnayn saw the sun setting in the sea, it didn’t actually go in there, but when you look and see that is not really what the Quran is saying, its an apologist re-interpretation due to modern scientific knowledge rendering the Quran inaccurate.  So Zakir Naik must understand more Arabic than all these classical scholars combined.

Light Upon Light

Abdullah Sameer

Back in 2003, I decided to to create a web site to share Islamic videos with others.

lightuponlight

At the time, there was only Islamicity.com which offered free Islamic videos, but they were very limited and you had to pay money in order to watch them.  So I decided I wanted to share Islam with others so I created a free site with Islamic videos.  My friend told me that it would be too expensive to host free videos, so I created a small web hosting company in order to fund the site.

The challenge

I found a major challenge.  Nobody wanted to allow me to put their videos online for free.  Everyone was too stingy to share their Islamic videos for free online.  They were profiting from selling their $10 VHS tapes in Islamic video stores and could not be bothered with putting them online. A notable exception was Khalid Jan who gave me permission to put all his videos for free online.  So I had to video tape them myself. I bought some camera equipment and went to conferences and events and recorded them myself.  One example of this is this Ziaullah Khan video.  I still had a major challenge.  Most of the sheikhs refused to allow me to put the video online for whatever reasons… Fast forward to Youtube, and everyone is doing it now.  But back then, it was a major struggle to convince them.

I also put articles on there, like this article praising jihad, among others.

Leaving Islam

Many years later, I am now leaving Islam.  The reasons are posted on my blog here.  I hope that some people will find my blog and read about why I left Islam.  Check out the Top Posts here.

The Difference between the Urine of a Baby Boy and a Baby Girl

Abdullah Sameer

No comment needed..

The Prophet (sallAllahu alayhi wa salam), “Water should be sprinkled over the urine of a boy, and the urine of a girl should be washed, when the two types of water (urine) are the same. He said, “That is because the urine of the boy is of water and clay, but the urine of the girl is of flesh and blood.” Then he said to me: “Did you understand?” I said: “No.” He said: “When Allah the Most High created Adam, He created Eve (Hawwa) from his short rib, so the boy’s urine is from water and clay, and the girl’s urine is from flesh and blood.” Then he said to me: “Did you understand?” I said: “Yes.” He said: “May Allah cause you benefit from this.”

Ibn majah, authenticated by Albani

The Difference between the Urine of a Baby Boy and a Baby Girl