I used to be very dedicated to Islam, but now I’m not. I can’t blindly follow, can I be a Muslim that doesn’t agree with everything?

Salaam alykum,

Please do not worry, that would be the first thing that I would tell you to do. The more you worry, the more you will look for token things to be indicative of whether you have faith or not, and then you will freak out even more, and it’ll just be an endless spiral.

Now, I think you should look at what bothers you and ask yourself, honestly: “is this actually what Islam says? Or is this a human being’s interpretation?”

Many times, people are put-off by things that are labeled “Islamic” but are really the ideas of human beings, passed off as somehow the products of God. You should be wary of these things. Does what Sheikh ibn So-bin-So make absolutely no sense to you? Then don’t listen to him.

The point is that, The Qur’an does not want you to blindly follow Islam at all. When you read through The Qur’an, you’ll constantly see that God challenges you to believe, to understand, to use your reason in order to establish belief. If you do not do that, then you are not going to be able to believe anyways. You’re fighting an uphill battle at this point.

The way that I would approach your belief in Islam is the way that my teacher once told me. He was asked if he believed everything in The Qur’an, and he responded: “No.” I was surprised, to say the least, and when asked further, he replied, “I don’t believe anything in The Qur’an, until I understand it, because if I don’t understand it, how can I believe it?”

I think you should take this approach, and instead of allowing your lack of understanding shake you and allow you to stray from your faith, you should put it to the side, and allow yourself the time to process the information and work out what are the things that you don’t understand and which are the things you are certain of. The foundations of your faith, should be based on a solid foundational knowledge of your self.

So, every Muslim has a different “formula” as how they approach their faith, no matter who they are. Everyone looks at Islam differently in their hearts, because everyone is different. Some people highlight one aspect more than another, it’s simply natural, and that’s okay.

I’ll tell you about myself: for a while I didn’t really believe in Satan. It’s not that I doubted what was in The Qur’an, but the concept of Satan, and how it fit into my view of Islam and my view of the world, didn’t really check out. It was as I advanced my thought, as I grew in knowledge, that I understood how Satan factored into my mindset, and into the Islamic worldview that I have today.

The point is that it took time, and you should have patience with yourself and try not to compare yourself to others. That (comparisons) was another thing that I did, and that pushed me away, because I didn’t experience the same things they were; which is unsurprising, it’s their experience, and I needed to focus on mine.

Insha Allah, I’d be interested to know what your questions are, and hopefully I will be able to answer them. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask me, I would be more than happy to either answer them, or point you in the right direction, insha Allah.