From Inherited Faith to Living Revelation

Introduction

I was raised as a traditional Sunni Muslim, in a home that held the Prophet's name in the highest regard, where faith meant obedience, conformity, and belonging. Islam, as I knew it, was a choreography of rituals: the call to prayer echoing from the local mosque, Friday prayers, the fasts of Ramadan, the joy of Eid, and the recitation circles that marked births, marriages, and deaths. It was a life ordered around sacred repetition.

When I became a parent, I passed those same rituals to my children. It felt right, even righteous, to teach them what my parents had taught me. Faith, after all, begins as inheritance before it becomes choice. But over the years, questions began to surface, quiet at first, then louder. My children's curiosity became the echo of my own long-suppressed doubt. Why does a God, who needs nothing, demand endless ritual? Why do we claim paradise for ourselves while living with the same corruption, greed, and division as everyone else? Why has the Muslim world, once a beacon of knowledge, culture, and moral refinement, become a shadow of itself; reactive, fractured, and spiritually barren?

The dissonance between what I had been taught and what I observed in life grew unbearable. Islam, once a living current of transformation, felt petrified, reduced to symbols, slogans, and sects. The faith of my childhood had become a fossil.

A Ritualised Machine

When religion becomes institutionalised, its purpose shifts. Ritual takes precedence over remembrance. Authority replaces understanding. The collective performance becomes more important than personal transformation. As a child, I was told that salvation belonged only to Muslims, that the prayers, fasts, and declarations would weigh the scales on the Day of Judgment. But as I grew older, that claim felt increasingly hollow, especially when those performing the loudest rituals were often the quickest to lie, cheat, or exploit.

Even mysticism which I experienced second hand, and once seemed a refuge from rigid legalism, had hardened into hierarchy. Sufism’s spiritual depth had fossilised into the cult of the sheikh, where followers surrendered intellect and inquiry for belonging and emotional comfort. The Qur'an was often quoted but rarely read in context. It had become a ritual object, recited, framed, kissed, but never lived. This is what I call the fossilisation of Islam, the slow replacement of revelation with ritual, of sincerity with ceremony, of divine simplicity with institutional complexity. It is a religion that still speaks of God, but seldom to Him.

Reading the Book for the First Time

It wasn't until I turned forty that I read the Qur'an properly, not as a charm, not as a tradition, but as revelation. It wasn't easy and it took a few attempts to really delve into its message. The book I thought I knew turned out to be something else entirely. It was neither a storybook of prophets nor a manual of ritual obedience. It was a mirror, fierce, unflinching, and alive. It exposed corruption, hypocrisy, and illusion across every age.

Almost nothing I had been taught was in that Book. And more importantly, much that was in it had never been taught. The realisation shook me. I began to research, to read beyond the lines, and to ask: how did Islam, a revelation that came to liberate the human mind, become a system that discourages thinking? Then came a historical jolt: discovering that the hadith, the vast body of sayings attributed to the Prophet, was compiled more than 150 years after his death. Having spent my career in fields where accuracy and evidence matter, I knew what time does to truth. Transmission distorts. Power edits. Memory serves the master who keeps it.

I realised that much of what I'd accepted as divine had been filtered through centuries of human opinion, empire, and ego. I'd grown up hearing tales of Gog and Magog, of the Dajjāl, of cosmic signs and end-times drama; yet in the Qur'an, these stories were either absent or presented utterly differently. The Book and the tradition were not seamlessly aligned; they had been interlocked; one as revelation, the other as reinforcement; until no one dared separate them.

That discovery rocked my faith but also renewed it. Because even as my inherited Islam began to crumble, God did not. The Qur'an, miraculously preserved and profoundly direct became my anchor. It stopped being an object of reverence and became a conversation. I could so easily have drifted into other ideologies or belief systems, but the Qur'an pulled me back. It showed me that I wasn't far from truth, only surrounded by its shadows. For the first time, I saw the Qur'an as something pure, untouched by politics or priesthood, a direct conversation with God, unmediated by men.

When Questioning Becomes Heresy

When I began to share my thoughts, I quickly learned that questioning inherited religion is the last taboo. Friends distanced themselves. Family worried for my "soul" and my mother told me that only God could save me from my "new beliefs". Others said I had fallen into arrogance or been led astray. But what they called arrogance, I knew as awakening. And what they called heresy, I recognised as hunger for truth.

The fossilisation of Islam isn't about bad people or broken mosques. It's about what happens when revelation becomes tradition, when generations repeat words they never read, defend doctrines they never verified, and fear questions that might bring them closer to God. We claim to defend the faith, but often we defend our comfort. We claim to love the Prophet, but we build walls around his message. We claim to revere the Qur'an, but it gathers dust on our shelves.

The Fossil and the Flame

The Qur'an speaks not only of nations destroyed for arrogance and disbelief, but of communities that lost their vitality by replacing revelation with imitation. This is the fossilisation I write about, when the form of Islam survives but its essence departs. Mosques still stand, rituals still echo, scholars still debate, yet the spark is gone. The religion of truth has been replaced by a religion of appearance. Like all fossils, it preserves the outline but not the life.

In my book, The Qur'an and the Age of Deception, I describe how this spiritual fossilisation mirrors the decay of civilisation itself, how the same pattern of corruption, denial, and self-righteousness repeats across empires, priesthoods, and ideologies. Revelation is not lost overnight; it is replaced gradually by commentary, convenience, and clerical control. The modern Muslim world is not faithless, it is faith-numb. The rituals remain, but their meaning has been extracted.

From Fossil to Living Word

When I finally approached the Qur'an without intermediaries, I found something that no scholar, cleric, or mystic could provide, a voice that was alive, timeless, and uncompromising. It spoke of sincerity, justice, and remembrance. It called out hypocrisy, not just in others, but within myself. The Qur'an does not demand blind ritual. It demands remembrance, reflection, and righteousness. It does not privilege tribes, sects, or clerics. It calls each soul to stand accountable before the One who created it. That is not heresy, it is faith in its purest form.

Writing The Qur'an and the Age of Deception was my attempt to reclaim that living connection, for myself, and for my children. They may one day inherit my doubts before they inherit my beliefs, but if they inherit the courage to question sincerely, then I will have given them something true. Because faith that cannot be questioned is not faith, it is programming. And a programmed religion cannot save humanity; it can only fossilise it.