“And now, years later, why tell a story whose very point constitutes Islam’s gravest sin? Only because we need to be honest, as we used to be. Once, our mentors and scholars, our music and literature, and even our architecture, were devoted to the admission of Islam as a journey, throughout which we needed every support we could have. We’ve lately become so enraptured by Islam’s simplicity, portability, and rationality, that we’ve confused the accessibility of a tradition with the mastery of the destination it sets before us.

Islam’s deceptively easy declaration of itself—there is no God but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of that God—is a testimony (shahadah) whose only realization is existential. For I was taught the shahadah, and I still despaired of God. Just to speak these words, and to mean them, may take all of a lifetime, and it is for this reason that, for Islam to work, God must be both Infinitely Merciful and Endlessly Just.

And so we see the journey so many Muslims of our times have taken, from ideologies and identities to the fatal exhaustion and inadequacy of the mind to determine things on its own. A spiritual revolution, often beginning in pain, the desolate pain of separation, failure, and defeat. That is my journey, too—one that’s taken me many years to even realize I was on, and for all its ecstasies and disappointments, it is a journey to faith that began with the loss of it.”

The Faith That Faith Produced

Haroon Moghul discussing his bout of atheism