The Zindiq Posts: The Atheist Muslim

The first thing that greets you as you pick up Ali A. Rizvi's The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason, is the quote by famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins of The God Delusion  -  "A beautifully written page-turner... One man's epic struggle to climb out of the pit of dogmatic religion into the sunshine of enlightenment. And because the religion concerned was Islam, his success story is the more important for ou troubled times." 

I can relate to this "epic struggle", which I saw in my late husband Arshid Malik's life when I met him, fell in love with him, married him despite opposition from our families and with whom I had a stormy marriage of 15 years; before he succumbed to his depression and bipolar disorder (a consequence of untreated trauma of years of incest by a cousin). The combination of destructive internal factors of self-medication, nicotine and liquor and the external factors of mental and physical repression of living in a conflict zone where Islamist forces are hell bent on imposing sharia law while in a proxy war with a secular country took their toll on Arshid. A struggle it definitely was with his identity - politically, religiously, socially and ideological wise, when I met him and was impressed by his open display of it. But then he kept vacillating between belief (to my utmost disbelief to see him reading the Quran and offering prayers) to agnosticism as he started getting introduced to my friend circle on social media and back to atheism again when he realised there was a whole new world out there in the last years of his life. 

I recall showing him Ali A. Rizvi's posts and discussing Alishba with him and urging him to add them as friends. He was as fascinated as I had been and would often marvel at Ali's patience with trolls and his epic discussions with Kashif Choudhary MD, a regular debater who often challenged Ali. I learnt a lot from those debates, and how one had to keep one's cool, grow a thick skin, and basically keep sticking to the post and not allow anyone to digress from the main issue being discussed that time. Slowly, I realised my own confidence was growing and the silence which had enveloped me all those decades ago ever since the mind realised the childhood bigotry and later recognised the communal forces that upset the secular lives we had and tried to impose a radical Islam. 

It gives me immense pride to start off the blog with Ali A. Rizvi's book. Arshid would have approved. The author's biography reads as follows: 

Ali A. Rizvi spent the first twenty-four years of his life as a Pakistani youth growing up in Libya, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and the next fifteen years as an adult living in Canada and the United States. Rizvi is one of only a handful of nonbelievers from Islamic backgrounds that have openly voiced their views and told their stories without significant risks to their livelihoods. He has been writing extensively about the subject for several years, contributing to The Huffington Post and other major media outlets like CNN.com. In addition to being a writer, Rizvi is a medical communications professional and a trained physician with residency and fellowship training in oncological surgical pathology.