The Hell Example

When I was younger, about 17/18 years old, I really had to think about religion, I began questioning my religion of Islam. I remember clearly, it was the summer of 2006, I was due to go to university come September and I had been reading a lot about religion after having grown disillusioned with the faith.

Why had I grown disillusioned? A lot of reasons contributed. I’m from a Pakistani family, I had been raised in a multicultural area of town, and lived a 5 minute walk from the local Mosque (like the Church for Muslims). Because a lot of the children of the same background were known as trouble makers, I wasn’t ever allowed to hang out with them after school; I couldn’t even go to the Mosque to learn about the religion with the other children. After a few trials of learning from home teachers, my dad took on the responsibility to teach me, one of my sisters, and 3 other children the Qur’an (Holy book of Islam). As a result, I didn’t have much interaction with Muslim children, fast forward to my teen years; you have a boy who loves music, acting, dancing and elects to follow these in extracurricular activities. I enjoyed sports and took part in Basketball, Football, Karate, Athletics and at one point I tried Cricket, but didn’t enjoy it. Cricket being the sport to be interested in if you come from my background, meant again I had nothing in common with Pakistani kids, and therefore the majority of the Muslim children in my area.

Cue the ‘joking’ name calling ‘kala’ (a word used for black people) as a reference to the music, dancing, basketball and group of friends, ‘gora’ (a word used for white people) as a reference to everything else, such as the enjoyment of reading books. Bear in mind, I could probably speak Punjabi at a much better level than half these children, and knew a lot about my ancestry, I just embraced my British, multicultural culture in conjunction with my heritage. I never felt a part of the culture of the Pakistani community; they never accepted me for being different in my interests. Unfortunately in the community I lived in, as we got older, the boys took to the drug trade, as a badge of honour and for monetary gain; also they got street credit for smoking the stuff. I opted to stack shelves in a supermarket when I turned 16, never wanting to contribute to society’s downfall to fund my desired lifestyle. Recreational drug use just wasn’t for me either, further alienating myself from this group.    

I then lived through my school years and had to see the September 11^th attacks on TV, as well as the London 7/7 bombings. I felt that my religion has fallen into the hands of people that I didn’t want to associate myself with. After months of reading, and thinking, I decided that yes I am a Muslim and I can adapt the religion to the modern age. Does a few rules not followed make you a non-believer? No. So I am now a Muslim man, who knows that majority of the world’s Muslims do not agree with terrorism, and not even 1% of Muslims have been convicted terrorists, so that means that more than 99% of us are good people.

Fast forward to present day, I am a liberal Muslim. People say that there is no such thing, you have to be all or nothing. Fine, you cannot judge me, you have no jurisdiction over me, so shut up. Then this is where the thoughts came up, the one’s I have been thinking lately. I am not looking for answers to these thoughts.

The one thing that always stood out to me of these ‘higher than thou’ minded people. They discriminate, ridicule, and judge. All of these things are sins in the major faiths around the world. You have some Muslims blowing themselves up in a fight for freedom, we have had Christian’s plant bombs and shoot innocents in a fight for freedom, Hindu’s fight for the right to Kashmir, Jews are committing crimes against people of Palestine. All involve killing, which are sins. At a smaller scale, you have lies, deceit, sex out of wedlock, theft, back biting. At a much smaller scale you have gossip and passing judgement on people. All sins. The thought that has provoked in my mind recently is, does anyone really believe in Hell? If you truly believe that you will go to Hell, then no one would act in the ways described above, from the large scale wars, to the smaller things like gossip and lies. Hell is thought of as the most horrendous place you could ever go to, the worst form of savagery, every fear you ever had at its largest scale exists there, so why would we risk going there? Myself included! That is all, now sit back with your drink and mull that over.