this is was the result after four months of taking art classes, my instructor said i was talented and took pictures of my drawings which made me unreasonably happy, unfortunately i dropped art now for almost seven months, i don’t feel like i can create or improvise, and i’m not in love with something concrete to enjoy drawing it endlessly.
are there algerians who do art ? :)
to make this clear, i’m a 19 years old muslim and i will always believe in the existence of one god who is omnipotent and omnipresent above everything. but lately i’ve been wondering, how much do i really know about my religion?
over the past few months, i met someone online who completely changed the trajectory of my thinking. i consider myself a basic muslim who sticks to their beliefs and practices without engaging much with other religions or ideas that might even slightly contradict islam, i see non-muslims (or used to) as blinded people from the truth who might end up in hell, so i always had this aversion to anyone who doesn’t share the same beliefs.
but now i wonder if this is truly the right approach? what then makes me different from any other abrahamic believer or even from a buddhist? a shamanist or a polytheist?
the person i met was an atheist, but also extremely knowledgeable in many fields. he introduced me to ideas in anthropology and the main notion in anthropology is that everything that exists has a cause, nothing emerges from nothingness. i tried to debate him but each time i ended up struggling to respond. i was introduced to concepts i had previously refused to engage with, such as evolution, which is considered strictly forbidden by many muslim scholars, i started reading more, including interpretations from muslim scholars. i found it difficult to fully reject the theory of evolution, even though it conflicts with my creationist understanding. some interpretations suggest that prophet adam عليه السلام could have been the first homo sapiens (و الله أعلم) which i found more credible than any other interpretation. when reading about geology, i also encountered arguments that question the literal interpretation of the flood narrative, and these explanations often appeared more scientifically plausible, when diving into the bible, i was surprised to find that many things we believe in today, or that many people believe in, are actually just derived from judaism, such as صوت المرأة عورة, or the full covering of women’s face (niqab). what scared me the most is how easily sheikhs we know today can shape interpretations however they want. and if i am only just discovering these things, how many other things could have been altered or added over time just through these interpretation?
and there are other similar arguments. one of the hardest pills for me to swallow is that there are indeed many hadiths that seem to contradict one another. putting aside the obvious ones that come directly from the prophet, there are hadiths saying that the simplest actions could grant you jannah and keep you away from hell, while on the other hand there are hadiths that feel extremely threatening, and the smallest thing could condemn you to hell in an instant. and maybe i am more affected by this one because i’m a woman and there are countless hadiths saying that women may enter hell for doing the simplest things (husband being unsatisfied with them, wearing perfume, walking on the same sidewalk as men…)
to be honest, i feel frustrated with myself and my lack of knowledge about my religion. it’s undeniable that, for me, religion has mostly been inherited rather than deeply understood
and it’s something i see almost everywhere. do people truly understand what they believe in, or do they simply inherit it the way it is given to them? is there really a difference between a literalist muslim and someone who strictly believes in hard physics.
i find it difficult to return to my previous habits of adherence, praying, and performing the usual practices in the same way as before. i feel aware of how little i actually understand about my religion. but at the same time i don’t want to abandon it. i want to take a long journey of learning and questioning, to understand islam not as something i simply inherited from my parents or my country