“I had a very difficult time following a so-called religion whose founder and followers had butchered my ancestors, raped and sold our women, burned our libraries, and destroyed our magnificent culture. Islam was forced down the throats of Iranians with the sword of Allah. In my heart, I never considered myself a Muslim. However, I didn’t reveal this until later in life for fear of retribution by radical Muslims.”
Thus writes Amil Imani in International Analyst Network.
What makes this statement more remarkable is that he was brought up in an Islamic family. “I never embraced Islam in the first place, although I was born and raised in a Muslim family,” he writes.
He has a go at sharia law, saying, “Sharia law stipulates that any Muslim who turns his back on Islam should be given a chance to revert to the faith. For an unrepentant male apostate, death is the proscribed punishment and life imprisonment for the female apostate.”
And this points up the sheer illogicality of it all. How can you force someone to believe something? They either believe or don’t. Belief is not a voluntary action: it’s entirely involuntary, like your heartbeat.
It also insults the religion, if these bozos who insist on blind faith could only see it. If someone is being coerced into “revert[ing] to the faith”, they will outwardly embrace the tenets without believing in them. They’ll never be able to tell anyone, for fear of punishment. But the fact remains: they are pretending to believe. So how many Muslims – and those of other belief systems where coercion is a factor – are thought to believe in their hocus-pocus while not doing so?
Far better, surely, to have a believer who is literally that, rather than a “believer” you have to put quote marks around.
And all of this prompts the question: how many true believers are there? As many as they like to claim? Obviously not, if many of them are “believers” under duress.
