Hi everyone. This is going to be long, so thanks in advance if you read it all. I’m not here to attack anyone’s faith. I want to explain how my thinking changed over the years, and I’d like to hear how others have dealt with the same questions.
I grew up in a religious Muslim household. Looking back, I was always an analytical kid. I loved astronomy and planets, which is fairly normal for children, but I was also really into maths, which was a bit weirder. I tried to find patterns in everything and genuinely enjoyed solving equations for fun. I was also enthralled by the traditional Islamic stories from a young age. As I got older, though, some of them started to bother me. The story of Dhul-Qarnayn in Surah Al-Kahf (18:83-98) is a good example. He builds a barrier of iron and molten copper (18:96-97) to hold back Yajuj and Majuj, who are supposed to be released near the end of time (18:99, 21:96). Even as a kid I wondered how a whole population could be sealed behind a wall without us ever detecting them, with modern satellites and every inch of the planet mapped. A wall also doesn’t seem like enough to trap a population. They could dig under it, walk around it, or build over it. The same story has Dhul-Qarnayn reaching the place where the sun sets and finding it setting in a murky spring (18:86), which I also couldn’t square with what we know about astronomy. But I was young, so I just told myself that Allah was somehow restraining them, and I didn’t think much more about it.
Fast forward to Year 9. I was at an Islamic school and we did a “Why Islam is True” course by Hamza Karamali. At the time it seemed really solid. I felt it answered every doubt I had, and I walked away confident.
A year or two later I stumbled into manifestation and subliminal content, which led me to Neville Goddard and Joseph Murphy. One idea from them stuck with me: Muslims, Buddhists, Christians and Hindus all report answered prayers, so the effect is probably coming from belief itself rather than from the thing believed in. I tried hard to reconcile that with Islam. My first thought was that other people’s answered prayers are just a test. The Quran does say that Allah answers the one who calls on Him (2:186, 40:60), and it even says that people who call on Him in distress, including those who otherwise reject Him, are answered (10:22-23, 17:67, 29:65). But if a Hindu prays to an idol of Ganesha and gets what they asked for, that only reinforces their belief in Ganesha, just as a Muslim who prays and receives something, or sees Muhammad in a dream, has their belief reinforced. That would mean Allah is deceiving people into the very thing He dislikes most, which according to the Quran is shirk, the one sin He won’t forgive (4:48). That never sat well with me.
One thing led to another and I went into a bit of a spiral, trying to understand why I was Muslim in the first place. I think I’ve always been the analytical sort, so indoctrination never really had the effect on me that it seems to have on most people. I started going through the arguments one by one. The general arguments for God, like contingency, kalam and design, didn’t work for me. They had flaws, and even if you grant them, they only get you to a vague creator, not to Islam specifically. So I moved on to the arguments for Islam itself.
Prophecy was the first. I honestly don’t treat prophecy as a metric for validity, because people in every religion have claimed prophecies and visions, and I believe in that kind of thing happening across traditions, which is exactly why it can’t pick out one religion as true. Take Joan of Arc, who made very specific predictions, including one about a castle entry that was verified. Compare that with the hadith about barefoot Arab shepherds competing in constructing tall buildings (Sahih Muslim 8). Even granting it’s authentic, that’s vague.
Then there’s the nature of the Quran itself. So much of it consists of insults, warnings and threats toward disbelievers rather than evidence. Early on it says it makes no difference whether you warn them or not, they won’t believe (2:6-7), and it describes in detail the punishment awaiting them (4:56, 22:19-22). What really got me was reading what happens when the Quraysh actually ask for proof. In 17:90-93 they list specific demands, like a spring gushing from the ground, a garden, a house of gold, or him ascending into the sky with a book they can read. Muhammad's reply is basically: “Glory to my Lord, am I anything but a human messenger?” (17:93) And in 17:59 the explanation for why no such signs are sent is that earlier peoples denied them. If you claim to be God’s messenger, we’d expect miracles, and the fact that people before you rejected the signs doesn’t remove anyone’s right to proof. Imagine someone walking up to you today and claiming to be God’s messenger, and when you ask for proof he says he’s just a messenger and can’t provide any because your grandfathers rejected the last one. Nobody would accept that from anyone else. The Quran also says in 29:50-51 that the Book itself should be enough of a sign, which brings us to the two proofs I thought were left.
The first is the splitting of the moon. The issue is that the story appears only in Islamic sources. If the moon had really been split in view of the whole Arabian Peninsula and beyond, I’d expect it to show up in the records of other cultures, many of which carefully tracked the dates and positions of the moon and sun. Nothing like it appears.
The second is the Quranic challenge to produce something like it (2:23, 10:38, 11:13, 17:88). To me this is a rigged, subjective test. Of course nothing will match a text in its own style. Can anyone write something like Macbeth? Nobody can. It’s unique and reflects Shakespeare’s style, but that doesn’t make Shakespeare divine. Whether a piece of writing is inimitable is a subjective judgment, and the judges have already decided the outcome in advance. People have tried, too. Texts like the so-called True Furqan are believed by their authors and followers to match or surpass the Quran, and I doubt Muslims would ever concede that any attempt succeeded. A challenge that can never be lost isn’t evidence of anything.
Finally there’s morality, which for me was the point of no return. The traditional sources say Muhammad married Aisha when she was six and consummated the marriage when she was nine (Sahih al-Bukhari 3894, 5133; Sahih Muslim 1422), and Muslims are taught he is the best example for mankind (33:21). The usual replies are that it was normal at the time and that people matured earlier back then. I’ve never seen evidence for the second claim. If anything, the evidence shows puberty arriving earlier in modern times because of better nutrition, so the idea that people in the past matured faster is baseless. And “it was fine at the time” doesn’t work in Islam anyway, because Islamic morality is supposed to be objective, meaning that what was permitted or right then is permitted or right now. What I find telling is that most Muslims today recoil at the idea of marrying and consummating with a nine-year-old child, which suggests a real cognitive dissonance between their moral intuition and what the tradition endorses. The same goes for slavery and for Muhammad having slaves. The Quran regulates and permits sexual relations with “those your right hands possess” (4:24, 23:6, 70:30) rather than abolishing the institution. The logic seems simple to me. We all recognize that these things are wrong, which suggests morality is either something we innately recognize or something that exists independently, not something that depends on what a particular scripture says.
After that, I simply had no reason left to stay Muslim, and that’s my story.
So to any Muslims reading: why are you Muslim? I’d really like to know. And if you ever ran into any of these questions yourselves, how did you deal with them?