Table Of Content

“In this searingly honest account, Harris does not attempt to answer these questions for you, but he does, unequivocally, assert that the answers you were given were lies. “The Curse of God” outlines how this lie has plagued humanity for way too many years. It’s time we dispel with these dangerous myths and start to focus our energies on each other instead of on imaginary friends in the sky.” —Yasmine Mohammed, author of The Girl Who Would Not Submit and Founder of Free Hearts, Free Minds THE CURSE OF GOD WHY I LEFT ISLAM HARRIS SULTAN Contents Foreword for the Curse of God by Ali A. Rizvi Introduction Chapter 1 The Art of Thinking Change of Mind Chapter 2 The Necessity of Religion Depression Chapter 3 The Baggage of Religion Chapter 4 The God Hypothesis The Character of God Angry Hatred for Women Vengeful Genocidal Simply Evil Some Other Problems with God Chapter 5 The Character of Muhammad Violent Womanising First Woman Second Woman Third Woman Fourth Woman Fifth Woman Sixth Woman Seventh Woman Eighth Woman Ninth Woman Tenth Woman Eleventh Woman Twelfth Woman Thirteenth Woman Fourteenth Woman Fifteenth Woman Sixteenth Woman Seventeenth Woman Eighteenth Woman Nineteenth Woman Twentieth Woman Twenty-first Woman Twenty-second Woman Twenty-third Woman Twenty-fourth Woman Tyrannical Cult Leader Death of Muhammad Chapter 6 Morality Chapter 7 The Quran Is the Quran the Word of God? Scientific Inaccuracies of the Scripture The Big Bang Embryology First Way Second Way Salt and Fresh Water Fallacy Body of the Pharaoh (Ramses II) Knowledge of the Mountains Darkness in the Sea The Quran and the Cerebrum Rain and Hail Flat Earth Geocentric Model Sun and Moon Being Similar Moon Splitting Flying Horse Jonah and His Whale The Sky as a Physical Object Thoughts Come from the Heart Purity of Milk The Purpose of Animals Authenticity Incorrect Verses Lost Verses Modification of the Quran Violence Meccan Verses Medinan Verses Chapter 8 Islamophobia Chapter 9 How to Debate with a Muslim Apologist 1. Claims Absent of Reason 2. Claims with Some Reason UME Technique 3. Unfalsifiable Claims GOL technique Circular Logic Personal Beliefs Are Sacred Common Excuses Final Word References FOREWORD FOR THE CURSE OF GOD by Ali A. Rizvi We have all heard of lapsed Catholics from magazine articles and stand-up comedians. In the Jewish community, secular Jews are almost the default. Former Hasidics are featured in award-winning Netflix documentaries. Ex- Scientologists frequently score lucrative book and TV deals. What, then, of the ex-Muslim? Is it really reasonable to assume that the world’s second largest religious community – numbering over 1.6 billion – is the only one that hasn’t produced any significant number of freethinking individuals who favour reason over faith, and morality over piety? Of course it isn’t. Yet while lapsed Catholics, ex-Hasidics, and ex- Scientologists are embraced – even celebrated – ex-Muslims are somehow dismissed as a fringe faction, as Islamophobic ‘native informants’, or as self- hating traitors who are party to the demonisation of Muslims by the anti- Muslim populist far-right. This, dear readers, is bigotry. It assumes that Muslims are uniquely unable to tolerate dissent, satire or even dialogue. This book, then, is much more than just a riveting account of why a once-believing young Muslim man lost his faith in pursuit of truth and moral consistency; it is also an opportunity for Muslims to engage in the kind of dialogue they are widely thought to be incapable of. All of us who live in liberal Western democracies are beneficiaries of the Age of Enlightenment. Our fundamental values and rights – of free expression, individual liberty, equal rights and democracy – are the result of courageous freethinkers who challenged the European theocracies and religious orthodoxies of their time. So brutal and powerful were these regimes that they make today’s Islamic State look like amateurs. Thomas Jefferson, who incorporated these enlightenment ideals into the U.S. Declaration of Independence, is famously known to have taken a razor blade to the Bible, stripping it of all supernatural claims and superstition. Rather than building a nation on the basis of ‘Judeo-Christian values’, as some erroneously claim, America’s founding fathers did quite the opposite: they founded their nation as a deviation from Judeo-Christian values. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution throws up a wall between religion and state, while guaranteeing free speech and free expression. Today, this Age of Enlightenment is dawning again – in the Muslim world. Like Voltaire, Rousseau and Jefferson, countless young men and women across the world’s Muslim communities are openly questioning the religion of their parents and organising as they never could before. Just as the advent of the printing press opened up the contents of a once-opaque Bible to the average person, the Internet has made the contents of the Quran transparent to any pre-adolescent child with basic Google skills. When I grew up in the 1980s, we had a Quran on the top of a bookshelf in the living room. It was in a language we didn’t understand, and it could not be touched, much less opened or read, without a purification ritual called wudhu. Most Muslims, while revering the book as sacred, had no more than a vague familiarity with its contents. For those of us who did wish to read and understand it, finding all of the verses related to a certain topic took hours of perusal and bookmarking, preferably of a translation that was acceptable to most Muslims (most weren’t). In contrast, today children can conduct keyword searches of the entire Quran by topic, compare dozens of translations side by side, delve into etymology, grammar and syntax, and share everything they’ve learned with their friends – in minutes. Why don’t we hear about it then? The answer to this question is as simple as it is unfortunate. The few who have dared to speak out in Muslim-majority countries have had to bear dire consequences. My friend Raif Badawi continues to be imprisoned in Saudi Arabia, separated from his wife and children for over six years as of this writing. His crime? Blogging about the separation of religion and state in his country. The charge? ‘Insulting Islam.’ Secular bloggers like Avijit Roy in Bangladesh have been hacked to death with machetes in broad daylight for writing a book challenging religion and promoting science and rationality. Iran executed the 37-year-old Mohsen Amir Aslani in 2014 for questioning the story of Jonah (Yunus in the Quran) and the big fish he allegedly lived in. Mashal Khan was lynched to death by a mob of university students – yes, university students, who killed him openly on campus – for, among other things, asking questions about Adam and Eve. This is just a superficial sampling of the people who have stepped up to speak openly. There are many more we never hear of. And there are still more that don’t bother speaking up in the first place. You may now understand why. Thirteen countries in the world currently punish atheism with death. All are Muslim-majority. Even in countries where the government doesn’t get you, the mob will. Recently, Muslim governments have begun to crack down harder on the non- believers in their populations. Saudi Arabia has declared atheism to be a terrorist offense. Malaysia has announced its intention to actively hunt down atheists. Pakistan is doubling down on its blasphemy laws, trying to get everyone, from the UN to YouTube, to support them. Similar crackdowns are underway in Iran and Egypt. This sounds like bad news – until you ask yourself why. Why the crackdown? Why the desperation? It is in the answer to these questions that one finds encouragement: apostasy is on the rise in unprecedented numbers in the Muslim world. In this book, you will read about these numbers, which – as eye-opening as they may be – are almost certainly under-reported because of the dire risks and consequences involved. Even in the United States, a recent Pew Research poll found that almost a quarter of children born to American Muslim families no longer identify with the faith. To the outsider, this may not be hard to believe since it is consistent with the increasingly large numbers of youth leaving religion in general. However, for Muslims, it is undoubtedly new. Both the left and the right get it wrong when it comes to Islam and Muslims. For many on the left, any criticism of Islam is seen as bigotry against all Muslims; for many on the right, problematic parts of Islamic doctrine are assumed to be the beliefs of all Muslims. Both sides make one key mistake: they conflate ‘Islam’, which is a set of ideas, with ‘Muslims’, who are living, breathing people. Islam can be challenged and criticised, because ideas and books don’t have rights and protections. Muslims should not be demonised or discriminated against, because human beings do have rights and protections. Challenging ideas moves societies forward. Demonising people rips societies apart. In The Curse of God, Harris Sultan deftly strikes this balance with intelligence, honesty and compassion. His criticism of Islam, the faith of his ancestors, is scathing and unapologetic, yet rooted in dispassionate and thoroughly researched reasoning. This book will help questioning Muslims realise they are not alone in their doubts. It will help the Muslim parents of sceptical children understand that their choices are not an affront to their upbringing but an attempt to live a life that is morally consistent and free of cognitive dissonance. It will help far-left apologetics understand that diversity doesn’t just occur between groups, but also among the individuals within them. It will help far-right identitarians understand that the Muslim world isn’t monolithic, but also contains within it millions of dissidents, freethinkers and secularists who value freedom over authoritarianism. When freethinkers in Europe challenged Christianity, we called it the Age of Enlightenment, and we benefit from it to this day. Now that freethinkers in the Muslim world are risking their lives and livelihoods to challenge Islam, it would be an injustice to call it anything else. —Ali A. Rizvi