‘No matter how many good things you have done before you kick the bucket, if you are not a Muslim, then bad news for you. Even back then, I had a problem accepting that part of the religious teaching’

“In the afterlife, only Muslims get to enter paradise.”

That was what my Quran tutor told me when I was in fourth grade. The moment she told me that, I was really, really, surprised.

I was raised as a Muslim, and like any other Muslim kid in Indonesia, I had to learn how to recite the Quran. My father hired a Quran tutor for me and I spent a couple of hours 3 days a week with her. I did not only learn how to recite the Quran from her, I also learned about Islam in general, about what Islam (well, at least her version of Islam) teaches us.

One of the things that I learned from her was that entering paradise is a Muslim privilege. No matter how many good things you have done before you kick the bucket, if you are not a Muslim, then bad news for you.

Even back then, I had a problem accepting that part of the religious teaching.

Here is the thing, I was born into the Muslim tradition because my father is a Muslim man. However, that was not the only tradition that I was born into.

My mother is a Catholic woman, a devout one in my opinion. When I was very little, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents from my mother’s side. They had to babysit me a lot because both my parents were working back then.

They had a lot of Catholic ornaments in their house – crucifixes on the walls, a statue of Virgin Mary, pictures of various saints, and many others. They would tell me stories about Jesus when they were babysitting me and I liked those stories.

When I was not being babysat by them, my father usually told me to perform shalat prayers with him. I did not know how to actually perform the prayers, of course, but I would just follow the movements from him.

That was my early childhood. I was always aware of the fact that my parents had different religious backgrounds. I did not have any problem accepting that fact – it all just made sense to me. I also knew that there were other people with other religious beliefs out there and thought that all of those different beliefs were as valid as mine. I had already identified as a Muslim at the time. If anyone asked me what my religion was, I would answer: Islam.

I never thought that my religion was superior to others, though. Until my Quran tutor taught me otherwise.

Becoming agnostic

I guess that was the starting point of the journey that led me to become an agnostic-atheist.

I had a problem accepting the doctrine of the superiority of Islam over other religious beliefs, that only Muslims can enter paradise after the apocalypse. I loved my grandparents and I thought that it was not fair that they were going to hell just because they believed in God in a different way than I did. As I grew up, I started having other questions regarding other aspects of Islam such as the role of women in the traditional views of Islam and LGBT rights, but I was also afraid to question those views further because I did not want to go to hell for doubting my faith.

It wasn’t until my second year of university that I finally stopped practicing Islam. I stopped performing shalat, I stopped going to the masjid (mosque) every Friday, and I stopped performing shawm (fasting) during Ramadan. I did not identify as a Muslim anymore. I was not an atheist yet at the time. I was kind of a deist, still believing in a “higher power” of some sort. But I had finally become a murtadin (apostate).

I was not open about my epiphany to my parents. I lived in a kost (a boarding house for university students) in Yogyakarta when I first stopped identifying as a Muslim, while my parents lived in Jakarta, so that made it easier for me. But every time I went back to my parents’ house in Jakarta, I would pretend that I was still a Muslim.

I would try to get out of the house every time it was near prayer time, because I did not want to pray with my father. Of course I could not always get out of the house during prayer time, so I had to pretend to pray with my father during those occasions.

Ramadan was the hardest challenge for me. I had to pretend that I was fasting and think of how to sneak food into my room without getting caught. Every time I went back to Jakarta during university break, I could not wait to go home to my kost in Yogyakarta.

Exploring Buddhism

I began to have curiosity about Buddhism during my first years of apostasy. I read a lot about Buddhism and also went to the local Buddhist temple near my kost to learn more about it. I used to meditate regularly, and I am still trying to now.

This artilcle was taken from the following web portal

 

http://www.rappler.com/world/regions/asia-pacific/indonesia/bahasa/englishedition/106964-atheist-islam