In the Spring of 2019, I came out publicly as both an ex-Ahmadi and an ex-Muslim. While I’ve been blogging and commenting for a couple of years on social media under the alias Reason on Faith, I am finally ready to have you put a face and a voice to that name.
Lessons Learned on Community and Dissent
How do tight-knit religious communities manage dissent? How do they employ social and emotional leverage to control the flock? This article explores the role of religious communities and the drive to live authentically. It draws upon the author’s experiences with Ahmadiyya Islam, as recounted in The Things We Think—a prequel to this piece.
I have made peace with the impending fallout in my personal life and with the social blowback my loved ones will incur within the Community. To normalize dissent, we have to start somewhere. Those who seek to shame the family members of we who are speaking out; these are the people onto whom our collective scorn should be directed. If anyone, these are the people who deserve to be the targets of a counter-campaign of naming and shaming. Not the families of those of us who are expressing dissenting beliefs. None of us should be discouraged from expressing open and honest disagreement with the ideological beliefs into which we were indoctrinated.
The Things We Think
During much of the 1990s, I found myself writing religious questions with preemptive rebuttals to weak and recycled apologetics. I was searching for substantive explanations to disturbing questions. The obvious inequality of women as articulated in the Qur’an, troubled me. My written questions became a book, shared privately with the Jama’at. I wasn’t speaking out publicly back then.
My approach consisted of gathering the strongest counter-arguments to Islam. In most cases, the strongest counter-arguments came from mere contemplation. From honest reflection. I questioned some of the Qur’an’s most problematic verses on women. My analysis turned into a book. The written form lends itself to the communication of nuanced ideas too difficult to catalog in conversation.
The Postulates
The critique and defense of religion often occurs downstream from where two well intentioned interlocutors ought to focus. In my original study and questioning of Islam, I found that apologists were applying an inconsistent set of criteria when justifying or praising various injunctions and teachings of the faith.
This article is a modern take on those foundational rules assembled during my early years of questioning Islam. When we agree on basic axioms, any teachings or apologia which defy them, must logically fall. I call these foundational rules The Postulates.
The Pigott Prophecy
An exploration of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s death-prophecy concerning claimant to divinity, John Hugh Smyth-Pigott. Twitter conversations with Ahmadi Muslims on this topic are cited and expanded upon to illustrate that we who maintain this prophecy was a failure, have solid reasons for arriving at this conclusion.