I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. How would I, an ex-Muslim atheist, want to raise my children? Like most Pakistani atheists, I am married to a Muslim spouse who is very sensitive about my atheism.

It goes without saying that I will not be able to keep pretenses about Islam with my children. That would be unauthentic and wrong. Perhaps it would make sense to let my children be indoctrinated with Islam. If nothing else, they would be better adjusted, socially. However, I need to earn my sleep at night and indoctrinating my own children with a known falsehood would be morally problematic for me.

I have therefore come to an agreement with my spouse: She will guide and advise them as she prefers, as Muslims, and I will not contradict her messages to them, until they are at least of an age where they can judge for themselves. Then it will be up to them whether to debate me to death, or see the light.

My duty would be to instill an innate sense of skepticism, an appetite for objective inquiry. I am positive, that Islam itself, with its teachings and its history, will do the rest!

It has been a long while since I last posted here. I stopped mainly because of too many things happening in my personal life, and then I sort of forgot about it. Then I checked this blog’s email today and I’m blown away by the number of people urging me to stay on and write. My life has gotten busier over the last couple of years, so while I can’t promise to write regularly, I do promise to keep it updated as much as I can.

“What really hurt Muslims about this issue is how this newspaper has presented Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, is a stereotyping of Muslims as well as the religion of Islam, that Islam is a religion of terrorism, a religion of violence and so forth,” – says Imam Mohamed Magid, an American Muslim leader.

Sometimes, a picture is worth more than a thousand words:

February 03 protests in London.

An Indian provincial minister, Haji Yaqoob Qureishi, has placed a 510 million Indian Rupee (US$ 11 million) bounty on the head of the person who caricatured the Prophet. Unfortunately for him – and probably unbeknownst to him – the series of twelve original cartoons that were published in Jyllands-Posten were by twelve different cartoonists; the irony is the ignorance.

The Daily Times is reporting on the murder of Jamshaid Nawaza Nayab – a writer and schoolteacher who advocated secular thought in Pakistan’s NWFP province. It is not the least bit surprising for me to read that someone who dissented from the hardliners was silenced in this most gruesome way. Nor is it surprising that the local religious leaders endorsed rather than condemned his murder. What’s ironic though – is that Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, much like the American founding fathers – was himself a liberal and wanted Pakistani society to evolve on decidedly secular lines: “You will find that in the course of time, Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”

As Europe protests over the violent reaction to the Danish cartoons – the murder of Nayab should be instructional in understanding just how far Muslims are willing to go in order to quell political or religious opposition.

James P. Pinkerton writes in a recent editorial for Newsday.com:

“It’s time for all of us to recognize that different cultures have different values. For the West, broadly speaking, the highest value is freedom, including freedom of religious expression. But for the Muslim world, the highest value seems to be Islamic piety.”

In Muslim countries – the highest value is obedience to Allah and his Prophet. Why is this so difficult for the West to understand today? After all – it was only four centuries ago that the Bruno’s of this world were destined to meet a dismal fate for defying the then highest value of the European culture: Obedience to the Christian God. Muslim countries today are quite simply akin to Europe in the dark ages; only worse because the Muslim doctrine itself encourages violence whereas the Christian doctrine did not.

Muslims like to claim that Islam advocates equality of rights for women in an Islamic society. While I’ve always known for this claim to be utterly and unashamedly false – every now and then a Muslim group or organization in Pakistan or elsewhere in the Muslim world does something that just plain gives their game away.

Case in point – the ‘Equality of Opportunities for Women Employment Bill 2005′ – that was recently presented in the Pakistani National Assembly. Since Islam is all for equality of civil rights for women – and since Pakistan is a Muslim nation – one would think that such a bill would be passionately supported by the conservative Muslim political parties, right? Wrong!

The bill was presented by PPP – a progressive and somewhat secular faction in the National Assembly and while the bill eventually passed – it is telling that MMA voted against the bill.

MMA is the united alliance of pro-Islam political parties in Pakistan. Enough said.