I have always been the black sheep of my family. Unlike many of my friends and family, I’m a curious person who asked a lot of questions. I always wondered about the contradictions in the Qur’an. But reading the hadiths and tafsirs really did it for me. I realized that Muslims do not read the Hadith and let their Imams explain it to them. I realized that it really is a religion of picking and choosing. You want it to be peaceful? Pick peaceful Hadiths and Quranic verses! But what about those hadiths that say women are not intelligent and other worse hadiths? Well… they choose to ignore them.

When I confronted imams with these problematic hadiths, they told me they weren’t sahih. But isn’t it sahih if a lot of scholars say it is? And the concept of abrogation really did it for me. When you read the Quran, you didn’t know if the verse you were reading was abrogated by another verse.

All in all, religion didn’t make sense and I decided to leave.