I Had No Idea the Problem was Simply Islam

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Nenayahi

Feb 11, 2002

Dear Ali Sina, 

i seriously respect you, and so impressed with the thorough job you’ve done on your site. You’ve nothing to hide so you can easily argue against Islam -i really wasnt expecting such detail, there’s just nothing anyone can say to defend Islam, I am amazed you regularly have debates with muslims!!

You ALWAYS win and its just because you truly know your stuff. you got the facts and the clear mind to bring them. Youre a genious.

I just want to say you truly saved me from the worst mistake i could have made in my life. and if i had done this i might be stuck in this hole with children to boot, might be dead in afghanistan, or somwhere else at the hands of like-minds,for verbalizing the truth as i saw it.   who knows. i had come to meet and know a man by the internet, exchanging emails  for months and really feeling like a close friend, even in love with him planning to marry one day.Even i remember his first words to me “a muslim never betrays!”I had come from a small town not knowing any muslims personally so i had nothing to go on but stereotypes and i wasnt about to let that hinder me.

A little over a year ago, where my story begins,  not many people in this USA really cared about TALIBAN or had even heard this word.  Even i was only 17 then but always been concerned with injustice, anywhere.  i’d sometimes go in a channel online, just to spread the word of pakistan supporting them. which was denied again and again.

I had no idea the problem was simply Islam , as a child i had always romanticized about middle eastern culture and thinking this religion to be woven around everything and so could not be so bad, even though i knew already i didnt exactly agree with it.  So i had no qualms about this man being so proud of his religion, and boasting of being a true muslim....and after not long our conversations led to Usa’s terrorism and somehow about taliban.  to my horror and shock he suddenly began to defend the taliban saying how they are innocent and true  and how he was even asked to be taliban representative even though he admitted they were strict. (living very near the border of afghanistan) I couldnt believe how this seemingly kind, respectful man could identify with these lunatics.

I felt so betrayed and wanting to end this dialog and connection between us right then and there but he persuaded me not to mind and covered over the discovery with professions of our friendship and love.  i felt there must be something more to him as we got along so well in other areas and didnt want to be judgemental or prejudiced, i actually bought into the ideas he sold that my media was tainted with biased jewish vendettas, and this man really played off my sympathies. always the victim he was. and i always fell for the under dog. i spent aweful phone bills to him, and really trusted in his character.  I thought this was the man i was going to marry. This was of course until we met and his former words of “i wish u to embrace islam but i wont force you” turned into “I cannot accept an athiest!!” i had become so attached that i really tried to find a way to be comforted, blinded, so he would accept me, my family were kept in the dark about the true nature of all of this.

Looking back now, the Qur’an he gave me was such a joke!! it was arabic/english and There were footnotes at the bottom of each page for the translator to explain the verses, softening them again and again and putting nuances of leniency in between, the proper “sugar for the medicine to go down” !! he took the philosophy that eternal hellfire was not that unjust because heaven and hell are not physical places and cannot be truly known in this life, and how allah does as he wishes so therefor making it possible for him to rescue them after they’d learned their lessons, and how eventually there would be no more people in hell at all...etc etc

The translator’s own philosophy dominated the forwarding of the book,setting the scene and it really had me brainwashed for a time!!  I felt crying, in the beginning as if i’d been led into the truth (my background being christian, Jehovah’s witness, so i had been brought up to despise mainstream christianity, knowing it was not pure and didnt mind the sayings of “christians gone astray”!)

I read alnisah , the women, never was there a chapter dedicated to just women in the bible! i was so amazed...i just feel like laughing now, so dissappointed that, here was a chapter Allah supposedly recognising the women but WHY ISNT HE TALKING TO US WOMEN?

if i remember correctly, he’s only talking to men ABOUT us. and to us THROUGH men.. why would god be so negligible, and distant....unfair priviledges, and unneccesary restrictions echoed in my mind.still i convinced myself this was god..but i could not truly become muslim and respect myself, its true my mind was dillusional, but my heart told me otherwise. As the scenery grew i came to see in another light,  this man became more and more stubborn and increasingly impatient (since he would not marry me until i embraced islam) i felt worried and confessed to him one day that i wasnt even sure if i believed in god.  all the disasters in the world how could there be a god watching this all.  even in palestine which i felt compassion for their plight, thinking it to be similar to my cherokee ancestors losing their land and i  knew he had friends in jihad there, i asked him if muslims are such victims everywhere why is not Allah/god protecting them!  (some time later i was told by him this was merely a TEST for muslims to support one another)  what bullsh!t.

ohhh, but just then  he was so flabbergasted, horrified, that he just left and went home to his sister  and his family to talk about all this..  his sister had liked me though we’d never met face to face, she was shocked too but let him feel as if i needed more time.. this man’s supposedly a hafiz, but why would he not openly debate with ME?  instead he always referred muslim centres to me and sent emails to me from supposed muslims scholars in Pak or whatever, but i had only my conscience to dispute islam, no references, no idea of hadiths, so i was left speechless. all i had was copy of quran, and internet as my tool. i felt too inept to argue anymore....

I remember in quran where it says about those who are your friend and say they believe but lie & curse u behind your back. (rough quotation, i know, but hopefully u know what im talking about)

Anyways  i realize this is a SELF FULFILLING prophecy because muslims make friends with us, try to convert us but then make it impossible to talk to them to their faces about how we truly feel or they become irate and angry so we let them go along for a time in their illusioned state about us.thus they say as if we are liars..

We were close friends before him springing Islam on me, so i Knew he felt some guilt for what he was doing to me, stern ultimatums were constantly mixed with sober professions of loyalty, i fear he was being torn and pulled back and forth between reason and arrogance. i truly felt sorry for him.

somewhere he had a conscience but it was twisted for only the poor muslims, as us and you/and we and them.in our arguements he always put up a wall with me on usa’s side and him and all victimized muslims on the other..

shunning my questions and valid concerns with what usa government has done unjustly or what western culture has to blame for. as if it validated any more of the same kind.

Finally i finished the quran, and still felt empty, and he had plans of moving here permanently so the pressure was rising. After 9/11 my perception was shattered when he told me “if my religious leaders declared war on usa you should know i will fight until i die for this sacred purpose.”

i went in my room, picked up quran, opened to the verse of “women a degree below men” and could not control the tears, i threw it against the wall and and promised myself aloud that i was not going to give away my power for any man even if it meant losing someone i loved and who i knew was a victim himself.  Then I found WWW.golshan.com by complete accident which led me to www.faithfreedom.org , here was all the references, community , rational thinking and information that i always needed.

THANK YOU SO MUCH ALI SINA AND TO THOSE WHO HELP YOU ON THE SITE I LOVE YOU, YOU ARE AWESOME.

At last my mind is free, because there is no confusion anywhere on the origins of islam or illusiveness of hadiths .  i read on your site of a young man who was tortured and killed a few years ago for accidentally letting a quran fall into the fire.  i cant describe my feeling in words, but that night i burnt my own quran in his name.

my fiance and i have exchanged such bitter accusations and millions of goodbyes and still he says he loves me and im his life and how hes just so lost  without me. but i know we’ll never be together again and its all because of this damn mohammed. (and my bf’s ego.)

i’m an idiot for getting so mixed up with him!!! but personally, i think islam is not so much the perpetrator of hatred or intolerance etc, as it is  an excuse. like some other religions are, an excuse in controlling people and especially women. since they are all invented by men. somehow they have an ethical conscience so they must feel some guilt because they need religion to help them feel justified and to convince other people that its justified,

but the Islam is the best security blanket for man’s natural inclinations. greed and lust, revenge, killing, rape...(wars) as if GOD’s approval is on all that they do.. why else is it so widely worshipped.. i dont and i wont accept that people are subjects of their environment, i am nothing as the way i was raised and i know many who are not, i think people shouldnt use these as excuses for who is doing right or wrong.  ohh maybe i am wrong about this, maybe we are an exception?  i am aware of society’s pressure and i guess if someone has not matured spiritually (outside of religion) that they will go along with what theyve been trained.  i KNOW there are good people in the world but...history says these are never the majority. there’s a huge psychological mysoginy going on with muslims. of course not all of them! but i’ve come to see its not so much Islam, in general. but the way men reason! (no offense to those decent men out there) because i find the same thinkings in men of other cultures/religions, they just dont have the encouragement and allowance to  carry them out, as Islam does for them!

hey i know my views might offend some men. but this is just everything i have seen and heard and experienced in my short life. and im sorry if im wrong, in fact i hope i am wrong. i’ve talked with very few muslim women, but i have yet to see who is happy here in this religion, when asking them how they accept such treatment i am told this is just our destiny as women, that women have always suffered.  This passiveness is what i blame women for, women all over the world in every creed, in letting all these things happen and not rebelling or standing up for whats right.

But even to those muslim men who seem quite liberal in their political views or on how they live their lives, obviously different from my former fiance.....until you really get to know these people and their TRUE views on women come up.  these mslims still think that women are not equal to men, in every aspect.

Yet they still give me this line of “Islam teaches to love women and respect women” can you believe this! with what love besides the deigning, patronizing love  that one might love a pet dog?!

they tell me that women are weaker than men. do they think that menstration, pregnancy, and childbirth are all so easy?!

or that muscular density is the crown of superiority?  i cant have the patience for the neanderthals.  how women are deficient in intelligence? when we have slightly more gray matter in our bains than them...!

i dont know how you have the stamina to keep repeating yourself again and again, because for me, muslims are like broken records and when you answer them they say again what u just answered!! its like they have a selective memory.

i know you MUST have so much LOVE for humanity and muslims because you never give up.

I know u will not and i THANK YOU for doing what i wish i could. they tell me , well women depend on men...but they fail to see that their doctrine of belief is the very instigator of such!

Dont we as humans all depend on each other?  how do women simply depend on men that is more so than their dependence on us----is it for financial income???

And so these same men do not depend on women to give birth, and to be the main caretaker of their own children?!

how is this all possible while maintaining a career of their own? i know it can be done but with something always falling by the way side, Really what do they expect! i cant understand it, With the internet, I’m not sure why but i often end up talking to muslims.

(men, of course, since women are not encouraged to use internet) i dont know if this is so because of my name which some think appears to be islamic but its not..

or also because there are just so many muslim male youth in pakistan for example, who hang out in these net cafe’s.

pakistan is a strange country to me, editing kisses out of western movies, but doing nothing to censor the drones who flock to net cafe’s for media of naked women and X-rated material.

these same men that interest so much in physical beauty of women and in their outer appearances, are quick to think that beauty of a woman , of her body, if detectable is automatically an open invitation to feel sexual arousal and then to stare and gawk which these men feel guilt in doing,-unless behind closed doors or with a friend in a cabin in front of a computer.- since sex is taboo in Islam.....oh, wait...unless it is a man with his wife..wives...i mean  his wife and his,,,? captives, slave girls. uh- i mean unless it is in JANNAH uh .....hmm) haha.

and they cannot TAKE RESPONSIBILTY FOR THEIR OWN FEELINGS..and paint the picture that they are more or less UNCONTROLLABLE if aroused so to prevent rape...and AIDS. women have to take up the slack and suffer for this.(HIJAB).  ridiculous!!

I also know many muslims feel that if a woman is more beautiful than usual , she must take extra care to cover herself. this is what ive been told. As if beauty is an INVITE for rape and molestation and not something to be appreciated or celebrated, with dignity. why are muslim men so obsessed with sex , ahh.

I think lately that it is not just “muslim” men, but that Islam is simply an EXCUSE for the male mind to wallow in its lowest form.

And another hypocracy i have found is that these types of men (who defend, and honor islam) even if they dont practice it to the letter....  would never accept a woman who has been involved in the production of these materials that they so love to enjoy.(secretly) hell, when talking with me as they know im an american woman, they even have the gull to get up on their high horse and question if i wear MINI SKIRTS or BIKINIS. which naturally, they abhor...

(since i am looked upon as a potential marriage partner just because i am a woman-but i wont get into that right now!-) Why, they even worry of their girlfriend/wife being stared at by another man! to them this is such a threat, as if women are their property (mindless, sexual objects, with out free will) and might be stolen away by this other man if she can be stared at so long. and they think they have all the right to think and do such since “women are 10x more attractive than men” of course unless they are GAY they would think this--- duhh.  and so special precautions must be tooken for all of their beauty and allure! give me a break!!  do they really have no sense of reciprocity?  i KNOW women also lust after men and in the beauty of men in the very same way, but in a repressed society i guess it’s not that noticable ...  and i dont feel women are greedy in their sexuality nor often physically capable of forcing their will onto these men. (which as the male gender, timelessly,universally has done) so i guess this is how we are “WEAKER”, huh!

Anyways, I am sorry and please dont reply but i felt like telling my story to SOME one.. i know youre very busy so im sorry for the length, if you reading this thankyou very much for listening You give me alot of hope in this sham world that others exist like you and i can see many people echoing my praise

YOU ARE A SMALL LIGHT IN THE SMOKE A TINY SUN IN THE BLOOD SO DEEP IT IS THERE AND NOT THERE SO PURE IT IS SINGING.