Can you be a Muslim if you're an atheist?

An atheist finds solidarity across Muslim cultural identity in America following Donald Trump’s travel ban

In Zadie Smith’s essay about the British Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi, she recalls his debut novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, being passed around like contraband in her history class. It was treasured for its sexual freedom and punk spirit, but its most thrilling quality was not its profanity, it was its perspective. “My name is Karim Amir,” the book begins, “and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.”

Half Indian and half British by birth, he is more likely to be considered black, Asian or Muslim in his native England. But in spite of that final designation, which casts a long shadow over perceptions of Karim’s family by their suburban neighbors, the book follows him to the pub more often than to the mosque. Kureishi’s world, populated by the “new breeds” of multiracial south London, was unlike the literary worlds of Dickens and Austen to which Smith and her schoolmates had previously been subjected. “We had a Kureishi in our class (spelt with a Q),” she remembers, “and felt we recognised the world of this novel.”

That taboo so easily and simply broken, confidence may have been given to the whole slimy, suicidal Dionysian side of my nature; the lesson may have been learned that to break the law, all you have to do is—just go ahead and break it! All you have to do is stop trembling and quaking and finding it unimaginable and beyond you: all you have to do, is do it! What else, I ask you, were all those prohibitive dietary rules and regulations all about to begin with, what else but to give us little Jewish children practice in being repressed?

I remember my own relationship to religious dietary restrictions changing dramatically

Does having this experience mean I am not a Muslim?

Once my uncle said to me with some suspicion: “You’re not a Christian, are you?” “No,” I said. “I’m an atheist.” “So am I,” he replied. “But I am still Muslim.” “A Muslim atheist?” I said: “It sounds odd.” He said: “Not as odd as being nothing, an unbeliever.”

I said: 'It sounds odd.' He said: 'Not as odd as being nothing, an unbeliever.'

For his most dedicated followers on the far right, its ultimate goal remains a 'clash of civilizations'

Islam of course is a religion, but it is also a culture; the Arabic language is the same for Muslims as it is for Christians, both of whom, believers and nonbelievers alike, are deeply affected – perhaps the better word is inflected—by the Koran, which is also in Arabic.

Islam of course is a religion, but it is also a culture

I realized that what he was asking had little to do with religious faith

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from Islam | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HUedt0