Tonight, I’m going to hold another conference.
I’m going to talk about a man from Qalqilya who has become an apostate and who is proud of it. In his Palestinian town, Waleed Al Husseini decided that it was time for God to have a facebook page and called it “Ana Allah”, which means I am God. He announced that God would be communicating directly with people via Facebook since despite having sent prophets centuries ago His message had still not got through. The imaginary instructions from God posted by Husseini included one written in the style of Qur'anic verses forbidding people from drinking whisky mixed with Pepsi; "God" ordered them to mix it with water instead. In another post on the divine Facebook page, "God" recommended smoking hashish. First he did this at home but his father who is very religious got rid of his connection when he realized what was posted on internet. So He kept posting his messages at the cybercafe where he could spend 10 hours per day.
The Palestinian authorities were far from amused, however, and few days later Walled al Husseini , an IT graduate who had been unable to find a proper job since leaving university, was sitting in a cafe playing cards when two members of the secret police came in and arrested him. He spent the next ten months in jail, some of the time in solitary confinement, and today lives in exile in the suburb of Paris, unemployed and separated from his family and friends.
Husseini grew up in Palestine in what he describes as a normal Muslim family but in secondary school he started asking questions - "questions like whether we are free to choose or not". Without realizing it at the time, he had stumbled into a debate about free will and predestination (al-qada' wal-qadr in Arabic) which has exercised the minds of theologians for centuries. If God is all-knowing, He can surely foresee evil deeds; if He is all-powerful He must be capable of preventing them; if He is good, why does He allow evil deeds and then punish people for them? A verse in the Qur'an says: "Ye shall not will, except as Allah wills."
He went to an imam in Qalqilya to put his question but he didn’t have an answer. This kind of response - that such questions should not be asked - is a familiar one in authoritarian societies and it is a response described by many other Arabs who have since abandoned religion. By prompting them to look further afield for answers, it has probably done more than anything else to set young Muslims on the road to disbelief.
With his curiosity aroused, Husseini embarked on his own research. "I went to the library in my school and the public library in my city. You can find many things there about religion but not about criticisms of religion," he said. "I spent around four years searching because when I started with this issue I discovered more and more. Step by step I moved away from religion until I left Islam in my first year at university."
Naively, perhaps, Husseini saw nothing particularly abnormal about his decision. He knew that plenty of famous Palestinian writers had also questioned religion in the past - among them Edward Said who was an openly-declared agnostic, plus the poet Mahmoud Darwish and the novelist Ghassan Kanafani who had also been a prominent member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But when Husseini started telling his university friends that he was no longer a Muslim, he was taken aback by their reaction. Looking for reassurance, he even approached some who claimed to be Communists but their reaction was the same: "No," they told him, "We only take from the Communists their way of fighting."
Undeterred by that, he had started a couple of blogs - one in Arabic called Nour al-Aql ("The Light of Reason") and another in English called Proud Atheist. "I started discussions. I was just looking for the truth," he said. "It wasn't much, and in the beginning nobody was following me." In a blog post at the end of August in 2010 - two months before his arrest - Husseini wrote:
"Muslims often ask me why I left Islam. What strikes me is that Muslims can't seem to understand that renouncing Islam is a choice offered to everyone and that anyone has the right to do so. They believe anyone who leaves Islam is an agent or a spy for a western state, namely the Jewish state, and that they get paid bundles of money by the governments of these countries and their secret services. They actually don't get that people are free to think and believe in whatever suits them...
I would like to emphasise that by writing this article I did not mean to imply that Christianity or Judaism were better than Islam, and the reader should not fool himself into thinking that I only reject Islam among religions, all of which are to me a bunch of mind-blowing legends and a pile of nonsense that compete with each other in terms of stupidity."
Husseini was eventually charged with insulting Muslims, defaming religions and inciting religious strife but it was four months before he appeared in court. In all, he says, he made more than ten court appearances and each time the case was adjourned without a full trial. He suspects his arrest was more connected with politics than religion itself - rivalries between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Islamist Hamas movement in Gaza. Hamas was accusing the PA of not being religious enough, and the PA wanted to display some religious credentials.
Husseini was also tortured for that during his cross examinations, like being suspended from the ceiling, the obligation to be standing on one leg for one month...
"For the first four months I slept only two or three hours a night," Husseini said. "All the time I was standing and they asked me things like 'Who paid you? Are you working with the Mossad? Are you working with others?' I said no, I just write my articles, my thoughts.
Husseini knows he's potentially in danger but for the moment no fatwa has been released against him.
He just released a book titled "blasphemers, the jails of Allah"...
The town of Qalqilya
