Story of a revert
He was born a Muslim but he chose to abandon his faith. But right before declaring his apostasy to God Himself. God inspired him to make a finally prayer to the God he was soon going to stop believing in. He made dua to Allah, weeping, “Oh Allah, If I land myself on the wrong path, you will guide me to the straight path”. He didn’t ask but he demanded Him as he cried with his heart, he was being taken away by the forces outside of his self but it was his self(ego, nafs) that which was the biggest hurdle between him and his Lord as he later comes to realize.
I choke every time, I begin to write my story. After all, it is not easy to write about how I wronged myself. I was wrong and I wronged myself in the eyes of my Lord. I taught myself how to think, to think without the biases I soaked in like a fresh-out-of-the-box sponge. I soaked in all the emotional tantrums, cognitive biases, personal hoaxes from the enemies of the truth, premature wailing of individuals such as myself who thought they found answers in the shadow of the questions they raised, mistaking it for truth.
When I first reverted, I deemed my story to be as beautiful as it was tragic. But now I realize that the beautiful part was only near the end when I dressed in light. Most of my story of deviating from the straight path was tragic, but really, it is the end that really matters.
The end, something that has always worried me. I want a good end. All too often we’re turned off by cinema when it fails to deliver a rooted conclusion to the film on the screen. I learned that our souls are the screens on which our stories, the things that God chooses for us, the choices we make, the actions we take, they’re projected on the screen of our souls. And I imagine an end, and there surely should be an end, but not a premature and faulted end. An end brought upon us by our own follies. It is wise to ask for a good end.
In March of 2019, I renounced the faith I was born into, i.e Islam. I will get into the reasons for my abandoning of my faith later on as its a multi-facted and nuanced subject which I don’t want to turn into a blamefest.
Almost as if it was predestined, my apostasy kick started my search for the truth, or it was my search for truth and my subsequent apostasy was a result of a reaction of the “blind faith”, a faith not bound with intrigue and intellect that resulted in my clandestine search for an alternate truth. I needed to hear that doubts were valid and I thought myself to be a revolutionary for having done something nobody from my milieu dared to do. To ask questions. I did ask questions but my heart was already sealed in disbelief and I belied myself into believing I was on the truth.