Losing My Religion

I come from a place where everything is the same. Everybody follows the same religion, everybody is the same color, everybody speaks the same two languages, and everybody celebrates and mourns the same things. When I moved away, I was exposed to everything else there was, and for the first year I was insatiable. I wanted to know everything about everybody, but most of all I wanted to know about their religion. I think at that point in time I associated with Islam enough to call myself a Muslim, and I found it fascinating to be surrounded by Christians and Hindus and Buddhists and Sikhs. But the more I asked people about their religions, the more I realized that nobody knew. And that's when I realized that if somebody asked me about the religion I claimed to follow, I would have nothing to say. I could tell you stories about what school boys do during Ramadan, and I could tell you that all the men in the family go to pray at the mosque early morning on Eid, and I could tell you that the head male of the household is supposed to slaughter the goat on Eid-ul-Adha - but I knew nothing about the religion. I couldn't tell you why anybody did those things. For me, my religion was my culture. It was not something I thought about, or learned about. I read the Quran - in Arabic. Didn't learn anything. 2 years I spent reading all 30 of those books, and I couldn't tell you anything about what it said. And for some people that's enough. Associating with a religion and having it to fall back on is all they need. But I couldn't do that, and I found it very hard to hold onto religion once I understood that.

I don't know if this would've happened if I hadn't left. Where I come from, instead of being peer pressured into drinking and smoking, you get peer pressured into praying. I remember I went to one of my friend's house when I was in the 7th grade and she got up to pray, and I actually prayed too because I felt bad just sitting around. I didn't want her to think that I didn't pray, because I wanted to be one of them. I don't think I ever completely got it. I would always try to get out of reading the Quran, but I think that might be because I couldn't understand anything and just reading a bunch of pages I didn't understand didn't really interest the 10-year-old me. The one thing that really stands out now is that whenever I was told to pray (during Ramadan or whenever my mom decided that she was going to be religious for a few days) I would try to get out of it. And the reason I did that was because I didn't completely believe in God or Islam, and if God in fact did exist, he'd be pretty insulted by me just going through the motions. Mom insisted that you start out by going through the motions, and belief comes after, but I could never quite get comfortable with that idea. I always thought that if God existed, he'd want you to believe in him before you started praying to him. And to this day, I haven't found a reason to believe in God, and so I don't.

Once I lost the religion, it became very difficult for me to connect with other Pakistanis. I felt like an outsider, and that I had lost the common ground that once linked me to my entire country. It’s the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It was made so the Muslims could have their own country. The Pakistani flag is green to represent the Muslims. And I had lost that one thing that was the reason my country existed in the first place. Damn.