Amil Imani : My Breach with Islam

Geller Report:

My breach with Islam started as far back as I could understand things. More to the point, I never embraced Islam in the first place.

My Early Life

While I was born into a non-practicing Shiite Muslim family in Iran, as children, no one within the family forced Islam down our throats. In other words, in my younger days in Iran, I had never been exposed to Islam at all, except by observation. I think I speak for many Iranians as well. Most Iranians truly did not know what ‘real’ Islam was until after the invasion of 1979, the Islamic Revolution. To be exact, until the Ayatollah Khomeini set foot in Iran and took the genie out of the bottle for everyone to see the ‘true’ Islam.

The type of Islam Iranians practiced during the time of the Shah did not even exist at all. It was only a fiction or a fantasy manufactured out of whole cloth. Some people in Iran however, are still in disbelief and refuse to accept that true Islam is not what the Ayatollah Khomeini introduced in 1979.

As humans, we know religion casts a huge shadow on everything in life. Like other humans, I, too, had to deal with this enigma and couldn’t simply just set it aside. And Islam, the Shiite Islam was the most pervasive religion around. I wanted to know more about this ‘religion,’ beyond the textbooks. In our schools, we were forced to memorize a few non-violent Surah (verses) from the Meccan period when prophet Muhammad’s beliefs and sayings were relatively innocuous.

Short Reminder

To polish Islam’s image though, Muslim apologists usually quote verses from the Quran that were written in the early days of the Islamic movement while Muhammad lived in Mecca. Those passages make Islam appear loving and harmless because they call for love, peace and patience. Such is a deception. The apologists fail to tell the gullible masses that such verses, though still in the Quran, were nullified, abrogated and rendered void by later passages that incite killing, decapitations, maiming, terrorism and religious intolerance. The latter verses were penned while Muhammad’s headquarters was based in Medina.

I still recall what my high school history teacher told us in our class. He explicitly said that the Islamic creed was imposed on an enlightened, tolerant and free Iranian people at the point of the sword. For me, that was the defining moment to start and find out for myself.

Findings

I came to the realization that the root cause of Iranian peoples’ degradation and suffering was Islam. I found out that it was an ideology imposed on a sophisticated, tolerant and free people at the point of the sword by savages hailing from the Arabian Peninsula during the seventh century with promises of booty and women in this world and glorious eternal sensual rewards in the promised paradise of Allah in the next.  MORE