u/Burrguesst

I was born muslim, and still practice, although I struggle with religious trauma and OCD. I sometimes try to find meaningful ways to connect but often find muslims focused heavily on ritual over meaningful exercise in the world. Any problem you have, it's "recite a surah" or fo "dhikr" or something. And it's not that I take issue, but it all becomes pretty abstract. I feel most spiritual in the spring when I'm around nature and that has had a more profound impact on me than a lot of other stuff muslims generally prescribe.

However, one thing has always bothered me recently, which is this heavy emphasis muslims (from my perspective) have on suffering as a means of spiritual power. It has a kind of "I ate the hottest pepper so that must mean something good about me" vibe. And it occurs to me that this attitude induces a lot of shaming and comparing, and becomes an issue with flexibility in ritual matters.

One example would be fajr prayer. I live in the northern US and it becomes pretty difficult to maintain the five prayers on time, not just because of the little night in the summer, but also because of the wild swings. I usually miss it and just make it up and kind of cut myself some slack because I don't live near the equator. But everytime I read about it, it's just a constant deluge of YOU MUST DO THE FAJR ON TIME OR ELSE YOU ARE SPIRITUALLY SICK. NO EXCUSES. DONT BE LAZY. And there's this assumption that it was always meant to be challenging but I don't really think it was. The quran talks about not making things difficult and I assume that preindustrial arabia probably had pretty consistent days and nights and most people woke up at dawn and went to sleep after sunset and that it wasn't a particularly invasive part of life.

I sometimes wonder if muslims don't make it harder on themselves as time goes on because they actually become more rigid and put a premium on suffering as sign of spiritual health, when it might just be needless suffering. It's not like religion is the only realm where this occurs. People often mistake excess difficulty for meaning when its just difficult.

Does anyone else get this feeling? Is there any truth to what I'm saying?

To start, I'm ostensibly sunni, although I find that label less meaningful each day (i probably have more in common with ma'tuzalites at this point). But I've been going through some of the more controversial periods of islamic history, specifically following the death of the prophet, and finding the thinking/rationalizing of "scholars" not only poor and circular, but also specifically designed to maintain the a "consensus" established following the birth of the first caliphate.

Their arguments would be that this is good because it ensures the message is maintained in its original form, but I would counter that it is a historical (not divine or religious) system created to maintain historical myths that are not indicative of the truth.

One of the specific cases is that of Khalid Ibn Al-walid. I should say that, I don't make a conclusive statement about this case, but if what is sad about him has historical validity, I would not consider him a good person. Whether this is from the incident with the banu jadhimah or Malik ibn nuwayrah. There are many ad hoc explanations downplaying or excusing Khalids actions, but my immediate response is "this guy seems to be accidentally killing people a lot, doesn't he?"

And my point isn't even that he's bad or good or Allah has forgiven him or not. It's more so the mental gymnastics one has to do to avoid the obvious answer, which is: yeah, some of the companions were not the best people in the world. But instead, you have a whole corpus devoted to making sure you do not come to this conclusion. Why? Idk. Its not like belief in Islamic requires infallible belief in people. But it feels like what's really at stake is the corpus itself. Not just the hadiths, but the myths and ideas themselves: sunnism. Which is kind of weird, because sunnism is not a divinely ordained notion, as much as it or any other islamic school of thought would like to think they are. Its just a method. A method that refuses to engage with anything outside its own parameters, which ironically makes it very weak and insular.

Idk. Those are just my thoughts I've been mulling over.

Also, in case someone thinks so, no, I'm not shia, like I said, I probably have more in common with ma'tuzalites.

Not in terms of content, but in terms of the "it's bad but entertaining" quality. Hard to find movies that take themselves seriously, suck, but keep your attention, and don't go overboard with obvious bad effects etc.