A heartening message from a sister who visted my lectures and debates at AUB, Lebanon.

Some of you my recall my mentioning of my experience with dawah at the American university of Beirut, Lebanon in the video "The challenge to Muslim minds".

Well, I just received this very encouraging message and I felt had to share it.  All praises to Allah.  Her last comment was excellent mashallah. Adam Deen.

 

I attended Adam Deen's workshops during one of the most disturbing periods of my life.  For more than a year, I had been attending philosophical discussions with skeptics and atheists arguing that faith and believe in God is illogical and ungrounded.

After resisting for a long time, I no longer could be satisfied with a purely emotional and spiritual relationship with Allah and found myself slowly backing off from my religion and growing uncomfortable about my long held faith. It became difficult to pray, talk to God or identify myself as a believer when deep down I knew that am not sincere because am not logically convinced ( as Allah himself orders us to be in the Quraan).

No matter how guilty I felt, adopting a blind faith without rational proof  wasn’t an option because if you truly take God and your faith seriously, you can never accept that belief in Him can be blind or irrational. The God I have always worshiped was anything but that and I was sure that as long as am sincerely looking for the truth, God will forgive me and guide me.

And those debates and workshop were the answer to my prayers.

Attending a debate in which the more rational, logical and scientific side is the Muslim one was honestly against all the stigma that our religion has sadly gained. Having a Muslim intellectual argue for the existence of God using strictly scientific and logical language with up-to-date scientific arguments amazingly bridged the gap between faith and science. The confidence and depth Adam argued with worked against our sense of defeat and the idea of having to choose between faith and rationality and between being religious and being open-minded.

The workshops I attended later trained me on how to spot logical errors and armed me so that I am no longer afraid to participate in logical discussion about faith. With this must-have training you can start being an element of change against the perception of  believers as rigid-dogmatic followers who always fail to justify their faith and instead get irrationally defensive about it.

People in the Muslim world are always afraid of philosophy because they believe it leads to Atheism. Truth is, the problem isn't in philosophy or logic but in the lack of Muslim intellectuals who can represent Islam correctly as a religion of reason, logic and rational truth.

Best,

Manar

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