The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (80 page)

When I finally admitted to myself that I was an unbeliever, it was because I simply couldn’t pretend any longer that I believed. Leaving Allah was a long and painful process for me, and I tried to resist it for as long as I could. All my life I had wanted to be a good daughter of my clan, and that meant above all that I should be a good Muslim woman, who had learned to submit to God—which in practice meant the rule of my brother, my father, and later my husband.

When I was a child, I had a child’s revulsion against injustice. I could not understand why Allah, if he were truly merciful and all-powerful, would tolerate and indeed require that I stand behind my brother at prayer and obey his whims, or that the courts should consider my statements to be inherently less valid than his. But shame and obedience had been drilled into me from my earliest years. I obeyed my parents, my clan, and my religious teachers, and I felt ashamed that by my questioning I seemed to be betraying them.

As I became a teenager, my rebellion grew. It was not yet a revolt against Islam. Who was I to contest Allah? But I did feel constricted by my family and our Somali clan, where family honor was the overriding value, and seemed principally to reside in the control, sale, and transfer of girls’ virginity. Reading Western books—even trashy romance novels—gave me a vision of an astounding alternative universe where girls had choices.

Still, I struggled to conform. I voluntarily robed in a black
hijab
that covered my body from head to toe. I tried to pray five times a day and to obey the countless strictures of the Koran and the Hidith. I did so mostly because I was afraid of Hell. The Koran lists Hell’s torments in vivid detail: sores, boiling water, peeling skin, burning flesh, dissolving bowels. An everlasting fire burns you forever for as your flesh chars and your juices boil, you form a new skin. Every preacher I encountered hammered more mesmerizing details onto his nightmarish tableau. It was genuinely terrifying.

Ultimately, I think, it was books, and boys, that saved me. No matter how hard I tried to submit to Allah’s will, I still felt desire—sexual desire, urgent and real, which even the vision of Hellfire could not suppress. It made me ashamed to feel that way, but when my father told me he was marrying me off to a stranger, I realized that I could not accept being locked forever into the bed of a man who left me cold.

I escaped. I ended up in Holland. With the help of many benevolent Dutch people, I managed to gain confidence that I had a future outside my clan. I decided to study political science, to discover why Muslim societies—Allah’s societies—were poor and violent, while the countries of the despised infidels were wealthy and peaceful. I was still a Muslim in those days. I had no intention of criticizing Allah’s will, only to discover what had gone so very wrong.

It was at university that I gradually lost my faith. The ideas and the facts that I encountered there were thrilling and powerful, but they also clashed horribly with the vision of the world with which I had grown up. At first, when the cognitive dissonance became too strong, I would try to shove these issues to the back of my mind. The ideas of Spinoza and Freud, Darwin and Locke and Mill, were indisputably true, but so was the Koran; and I vowed to one day resolve these differences. In the meantime, I could not make myself stop reading. I knew the argument was a weak one, but I told myself that Allah is in favor of knowledge.

The pleasures and anonymity of life in the clan-less West were almost as beguiling as the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers. Quite soon after I arrived in Holland, I replaced my Muslim dress with jeans. I avoided socializing with other Somalis first, and then with other Muslims—they preached to me about fear of the Hereafter and warned that I was damned. Years later, I drank my first glass of wine and had a boyfriend. No bolt of Hellfire burned me; chaos did not ensue. To pacify my mind, I adopted an attitude of “negotiating” with Allah: I told myself these were small sins, which hurt no one; surely God would not mind too much.

Then the Twin Towers were toppled in the name of Allah and his prophet, and I felt that I must choose sides. Osama bin Laden’s justification of the attacks was more consistent with the content of the Koran and the Sunna than the chorus of Muslim officials and Western wishful thinkers who denied every link between the bloodshed and Islam. Did I, as a Muslim, support bin Laden’s act of “worship”? Did I feel it was what God commanded? And if not, was I a Muslim?

I picked up a book—
The Atheist Manifesto
by Herman Philipse, who later became a great friend. I began reading it, marveling at the clarity and naughtiness of its author. But I really didn’t have to. Just looking at it, just wanting to read it—that already meant I doubted. Before I’d read four pages, I realized that I had left Allah behind years ago. I was an atheist. An apostate. An infidel. I looked in a mirror and said out loud, in Somali, “I don’t believe in God.”

I felt relief. There was no pain but a real clarity. The long process of seeing the flaws in my belief structure, and carefully tip-toeing around the frayed edges as parts of it were torn out piece by piece—all that was over. The ever-present prospect of Hellfire lifted, and my horizon seemed broader. God, Satan, angels: these were all figments of human imagination, mechanisms to impose the will of the powerful on the weak. From now on I could step firmly on the ground that was under my feet and navigate based on my own reason and self-respect. My moral compass was within myself, not in the pages of a sacred book.

In the next few months, I began going to museums. I needed to see ruins and mummies and old dead people, to look at the reality of the bones and to absorb the realization that, when I die, I will become just a bunch of bones. Some of them were five hundred million years old, I noted; if it took Allah longer than that to raise the dead, the prospect of his retribution for my lifetime of enjoyment seemed distinctly less plausible.

I was on a psychological mission to accept living without a God, which means accepting that I give my life its own meaning. I was looking for a deeper sense of morality. In Islam you are Allah’s slave; you submit, which means that ideally you are devoid of personal will. You are not a free individual. You behave well because you fear Hell, which is really a form of blackmail—you have no personal ethic.

Now I told myself that we, as human individuals, are our own guides to good and evil. We must think for ourselves; we are responsible for our own morality. I arrived at the conclusion that I couldn’t be honest with others unless I was honest with myself. I wanted to comply with the goals of religion—which are to be a better and more generous person—without suppressing my will and forcing it to obey an intricate and inhumanly detailed web of rules. I had lied many times in my life, but now, I told myself, that was over: I had had enough of lying.

After I wrote my memoir,
Infidel
(published in the United States in 2007), I did a book tour in the United States. I found that interviewers from the Heart-land often asked if I had considered adopting the message of Jesus Christ. The idea seems to be that I should shop for a better, more humane religion than Islam, rather than taking refuge in unbelief. A religion of talking serpents and heavenly gardens? I usually respond that I suffer from hayfever. The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim vision, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my grandmother’s angels and djinns.

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

Dedication quote reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group from
The Drowned and the Saved
by Primo Levi. Translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal. Copyright © 1986 by Giulio Einaudi editors s.p.a., Torino. English translation Copyright © 1988 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

“A Letter on Religion” by H. P. Lovecraft: Letter printed by permission of Lovecraft Properties, LLC.

“Why I Am an Unbeliever” © 1926 by Carl Van Doren, reprinted by the permission of the estate of Carl Van Doren.

“Memorial Service” by H. L. Mencken. Reprinted by permission of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, in accordance with the terms of the bequest of H. L. Mencken.

From
The Future of an Illusion
by Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey. Copyright © 1961 by James Strachey, renewed 1989 by Alix Strachey. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Material taken from various volumes of
The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein
, copyright © Hebrew University and Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Excerpt from
A Clergyman's Daughter
, copyright © 1936 by the Estate of Sonia B. Orwell, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

From
A Clergyman’s Daughter
by George Orwell. Copyright © 1935 by George Orwell, by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Secker & Warburg Ltd.

“In Westminster Abbey,” from
Collected Poems
, by John Betjeman, copyright © 1955, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1968, 1970, 1979, 1981, 1982, 2001. Reproduced by permission of John Murray (Publishers).

“Monism and Religion” and “An Old Story” by Chapman Cohen. Courtesy of American Atheist Press.

“An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish” by Bertrand Russell first published by Haldeman-Julius in 1943. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Books.

“Aubade” from
Collected Poems
by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

“Aubade” from
Collected Poems
by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, LLC.

“Church Going” by Philip Larkin is reprinted from
The Less Deceived
by permission of the Marvell Press, England and Australia.

“The Wandering Jew and the Second Coming” copyright © 1997 by Martin Gardner. From
The Night Is Large: Collected Essays 1938 ndash;1995
. Reprinted with the permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

“The Demon-Haunted World” by Carl Sagan. Copyright © 1997 by Carl Sagan. Reprinted with permission from Democritus Properties, LLC. All rights reserved this material cannot be further circulated without written permission of Democritus Properties, LLC.

“The God Hypothesis” by Carl Sagan. Copyright © 2006 by Carl Sagan. Reprinted with permission from Democritus Properties, LLC. All rights reserved this material cannot be further circulated without written permission of Democritus Properties, LLC.

From
Roger’s Version
, copyright © 1986 by John Updike. Reprinted with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

From
Dreams of a Final Theory
, copyright © 1992 by Steven Weinberg. Reprinted with permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

“Conclusions and Implications” from
The Miracle of Theism
by J. L. Mackie (OUP 1982, pp. 240–262) by permission of Oxford University Press.

“If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted” by Elizabeth Anderson. Chapter 17 from
Philosophers Without Gods
, edited by L. M. Anthony (OUP 2007, p. Chapter 28-29) by permission of Oxford University Press.

“Genesis Revisited” by Michael Shermer. Copyright Michael Shermer. Originally published in
Skeptic
magazine (www.skeptic.com).

“That Undiscovered Country” by A J Ayer from
The Meaning of Life and Other Essays
Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, London © 1990 by Alfred Jules Ayer.

“Thank Goodness!” by Daniel C. Dennett. First published on the Edge Web site, http://www.edge.org. Copyright © 2006 by Edge Foundation Inc.

From
Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith
by Charles Templeton ©1996. Published by McClelland & Stewart. Used with permission of the publisher.

Excerpt from “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God,” from
The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins. Copyright © 2006 by Richard Dawkins. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God,” from
The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins. Copyright © 2006 by Richard Dawkins. Reprinted by permission of Transworld Publishers, a division of the Random House Group, LTD. All rights reserved.

“Gerin Oil” by Richard Dawkins, copyright © 2003 by the Council for Secular Humanism (CSH). This article originally appeared in
Free Inquiry
magazine, Volume 24, Number 1 (December 2003/January 2004), published by the CSH in Amherst, New York.

“Atheists for Jesus” by Richard Dawkins, copyright © 2004 by the Council for Secular Humanism (CSH). This article originally appeared in
Free Inquir
magazine, Volume 25, Number 1 (December 2004/January 2005), published by the CSH in Amherst, New York.

From
God: The Failed Hypothesis—How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist
, by Victor J. Stegner (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), pp. 113–136. Copyright © 2007 by Victor J. Stegner. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

From
Why I Am Not a Muslim
by Ibn Warraq (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), pp. 105–171. Copyright © 1995 by Ibn Warraq. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

“Breaking Which Spell?” from
Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomena
by Daniel C. Dennett, copyright © 2006 by Daniel C. Dennett. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

From
Breaking the Spel
l by Daniel C. Dennett (Penguin Books, 2006). Copyright © Daniel C. Dennett, 2006. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

“There Is No God” by Penn Jillette. Copyright © 2005 by Penn Jillette. From the Book
This I Believe
, edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman. Copyright © 2006 by This I Believe, Inc. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

“End of the World Blues” by Ian McEwan. Published by arrangement with Rogers Coleridge & White.

“Imagine There’s No Heaven: A Letter to the Six Billionth World Citizen,” by Salman Rushdie. Copyright © 1997 by Salman Rushdie. Reprinted with permission of the Wylie Agency.

From
The End of Faith
by Sam Harris. Copyright © 2004 by Sam Harris. Used by Permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The Publisher is grateful to the following for their permission to reproduce copyright material: Oberon Books Ltd., for permission to use an extract from
Against all Gods
, © 2007, by A. C. Grayling. ISBN: 9781840027280 (www.oberonbooks.com).

“How (and Why) I Became and Infidel” copyright © 2007 by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Published by arrangement with the author.