My journey from Islam to agnosticism and then back to Islam again, has been an intellectually stimulating, fascinating, and humbling, 15 year long journey! Join me on this story of my intellectual tryst with religion, science, and philosophy, to find answers to the disturbing questions that threaten your faith!

As a short formal intro, I’m a biomedical-electronics engineer by training but worked as a software developer in a Fortune 500 American IT multinational for four years before switching to the education industry in 2019.

I struggled as a teacher-entrepreneur for two years before joining vedantu.com, India’s one of the top ed-tech firms, as a Physics expert and content creator. Then in 2022, I made a move to the world’s largest ed-tech firm, Byju’s, at Bangalore, wherein I worked for a year as a Physics educator and content creator; finally moving to Narayana Educational Institutions, Bangalore, as a Senior Lecturer on JEE Advanced Physics.

Although I dream of becoming a full-time researcher and writer on Islam-Philosophy-Science, Physics remains one of my hard-to-leave first loves, and right now my job as a Physics teacher affords me the peace of mind to write this blog after I’m done with my daily office work! My passion for the study of Islam, philosophy, and science, gives me life, and sharing my findings with you will make this life worth living!

Do check my long bio below to understand the background behind the website’s narrative as I build up from my intellectual trysts to the what and why of the content here.

MY LONG BIO: WHY THIS BLOG?

“Is Islam the main cause of terrorism in the world today?”

These were words from the BBC that rang in my ears as I woke up in the morning of a fateful day in the aftermath of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks in the USA. It was a vigorous debate between some intellectuals on the BBC channel wherein the Muslim defenders were weakly but passionately arguing for the case of Islam as a peaceful religion. These words struck me hard! And my first article on Islam that I wrote a year and a half later dealt with this very topic! Why did this issue strike me so deep at that tender age of thirteen?

Coming from a religious family, Islam has been my lifeblood since early childhood. My father was a community leader and active member of the Jamaat-at-Tabligh or the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) as it’s commonly called, the international missionary movement founded in Mewat in UP, by Maulana Ilyas in the early 20th century.

I vividly remember myself as a seven year old in grade I, going to our local masjid (mosque) with my dad for maghrib salaah (or sunset prayer) and for monthly TJ meets. Fast forward five years and I was at times leading the prayers in our masjid! At that tender age of 12 years, in grade 6 then, I was already in close association with the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ), attending their weekly meetings on a regular basis.

In grade IX, as a 15 year old, I went on a three day Tablighi tour with a group of TJ members – from Mumbai – to the TJ headquarters (or Markaz) in Kolkata and there I got to witness their functioning on a large scale, met foreign TJ volunteers, and became a hardcore TJ member as a result of the impact this three day tour had on me! Returning from the tour, I gave my first public speech in our masjid at our weekly TJ meeting. I remember moving the audience to tears! Around the same time, I wrote my first essay on Islam, dealing with terrorism, just a year and a half after the September 11 attacks in New York.

DEALING WITH THE ISLAMOPHOBIA
The noise and propaganda against Islam after 9/11 had turned me from just a religious TJ boy to an avid reader and learner of Islam, at the tender age of fifteen, accumulating in the defense of Islam and our vilified community whatever material I could scrape from newspaper articles and a few borrowed books at a time when we had no access to the internet or Islamic libraries in my hometown!

“Our community is not backward!”, I used to say to myself and my people; “we were the world’s number one community for a thousand years from the 7th to the 17th century”, “we would become number one again if only we follow our Deen (the Islamic way of life) perfectly”, “Islam doesn’t support terrorism”, “Islam is a peaceful religion!”. These and similar issues took the center stage in my intellectual struggle with the outside world. I had a burning desire in me to shout these out to the entire world and wished that they believed me! And in order to corroborate these emotionally charged ideas, I would cut out and preserve any newspaper article that would even remotely support these claims. I would make diligent notes of the statements and data from these articles; and even after more than a decade now, I still have those bunch of cutouts and write-ups with me, preserved!

IN COLLEGE: ASSOCIATION WITH OTHER ORGANIZATIONS
By the time I reached the second year of my undergrad in biomedical engineering, I had delivered scores of public lectures, attended hundreds of TJ gatherings, led prayers regularly, managed and delivered TJ reading sessions and weekly door-to-door preaching tours, monthly three-day tours, monthly meetings, really leading the TJ movement in Barrackpore, my hometown, a historic place – in Kolkata – famous for the legendary Mangal Pandey who sparked off the Sepoy Mutiny or the First War of Independence of India in 1857.

In second year of college in 2008, came a major turn in my life. I was awarded the Islamic Development Bank’s (IsDB) scholarship from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for my undergrad engineering studies, awarded annually to a very few people from amongst hundreds of applicants. This exposed me to a wonderful group of people, Islamists from the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH), the Indian wing of the Sayyid Abul ala Maududi founded Jamaat-e-Islami, as well as its student wing named the Student’s Islamic Organization of India (SIO). The members of the JIH managed the IsDB Scholarship program in Eastern India, including my city Kolkata. While I continued being a TJ volunteer, my horizon widened as I interacted with the members of the JIH and SIO and read dozens of books by Maulana Maududi and other prominent figures of the Ikhwaan-al-Muslimeen or the Muslim Brotherhood (the Egyptian forerunner of the Jamaat-e-Islami!).

Then occurred another mega episode in my intellectual story, towards the end of 2008, when I was still in my second year of college. My cousin brother introduced me to the entire set of DVDs of Dr. Zakir Naik’s lectures and debates and all hell broke loose as I got smitten by the da’wah bug! I also started reading and listening to other prominent activists of Islam like Ahmed Deedat, Jamal Badawi, Abdur Raheem Green, Yusuf Estes, Bilal Philips, Yasir Qadhi, etc.

Zakir Naik had a tremendous influence on me and turned me into an ardent defender and preacher of Islam! I listened to, transcribed, and learnt all of Zakir Naik’s lectures and used them in my da’wah interactions with my non-Muslim friends in college and over Facebook! It still seems surreal when I recall that I was actually so fascinated by the da’wah movement that I went on to deliver a lecture/presentation in my college, attended by my classmates, on the topic titled ‘Islam: The solution to mankind’s problems’, my version of a similar lecture delivered by Zakir Naik in Malaysia in 1998. I went on to deliver hundreds of lectures on the defense of Islam in IsDB Scholarship Program’s monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings, and in mosques of my locality and towns neighboring my own. Da’wah had become my passion and primary focus in life while my studies and career got relegated to a secondary status!

IN DEFENSE OF MY FAITH
With access to unlimited mobile internet in my third year of college, I was minutely studying and critically analyzing the popular anti-Islamic websites like faithfreedom.org of the firebrand critique of Islam, Ali Sina, and other websites critical of Islam namely answeringislam, wikiislam (also founded by Ali Sina), etc.; taking notes of their arguments, and then writing down my responses to them. I studied the entire debates that Ali Sina had with Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, Hamzah Tzortzis and other prominent Islamic figures. This is when my Islamic apologetics (if you don’t mind this word!) became strong and intense. And although not published as formal responses to or on these sites, these handwritten responses of mine are still preserved with me in writing!

In these 15 years since 2008, I have studied and taken notes from close to a hundred books, cover to cover, thousands of articles, audios, and videos, an effort amounting to nearly ten thousand hours of studies! Penned down hundreds of pages of handwritten notes, a million words of notes and articles on software sheets, authored two books (self-published on amazon), dozens of articles on the internet on quora.com and academia.edu, and spoken to thousands of people in public meetings and at personal levels. My listeners have testified firsthand to having goosebumps listening to my talks. Al-hamdu-lillaah for all of these! I taught myself some Quranic Arabic too, with help from local ulema, books, and free online Arabic courses. I can now understand, albeit quite primitively, the Quran’s Arabic text directly!

– Note that my articles and books currently published on the internet in the above mentioned platforms were penned during my faithless days and thus reflect my agnostic thoughts, so please don’t get agitated by these as of now!

END OF COLLEGE: ATTEMPT TO ENTER FULL-TIME DA’WAH
When I was in the final year of my college, in 2011, I decided to take up da’wah as a full-time career! I wanted to make my city Kolkata the primary centre of my efforts since not much was being done in Kolkata on the da’wah front (and the same continues to this day!). So I went to seek full time work in a da’awah organization that had come up in Kolkata several years prior, named the Islamic International Foundation (IIF) who were people well known to Zakir Naik’s Islamic Research Foundation (IRF). My interview, a casual one, went well with its founder but I was informed, to my dismay, that IIF didn’t have any full-time da’wah employees. They received and preserved my CV for any future correspondence regarding full time job offerings.

My first fulltime job offer from a da’wah organization came in July 2012 from none other than Dr. Zakir Naik’s IRF in Mumbai! Prior to that I had enrolled for my master’s in engineering and had appeared for IRF’s United Islamic Aid (UIA) Scholarship exam which I topped from Kolkata and was called for an interview in IRF headquarters in Mumbai. Reaching IRF was like a dream come true then. The interview was intense and exhaustive with questions on almost everything, from Quran, hadith, fiqh, aqeedah, qirat, to da’wah, atheism, theory of evolution, etc.

Nisaar Nadiadwala, one of the senior most aides of Zakir Naik and a speaker on Peace TV, interviewed me, and surprised me with an informal job offer with the words “you can join IRF, paanch saal ka bond dena parega lekin (you would have to sign a five year bond but)”! I was completely taken aback with the sudden offer as I had gone there for a scholarship interview, least expecting a dream job offer, from none other than IRF! I told him that as I had already enrolled for a master’s degree program in engineering, I would love to join IRF after completing my studies. He said “engineer toh bangaye ho! Kya karoge abb MTech karke? IRF join karlo, you will have a bright future with us!” (You have become an engineer already, why go for graduate studies again? Join IRF, you will have a bright future with us!). It still feels like a dream and hard to believe that I had declined the offer! I regret that decision to this day! I’m still looking for ways to redeem that mistake of mine and turn into a full-time researcher and writer on Islam, this website being a step in that direction!

A NEW JOURNEY BEGINS: POST GRADUATION, COGNIZANT AND APOSTASY!
Moving on from there, I went to Chennai in August 2012, for my ME in electronics engineering. My studies on Islam continued, I kept learning and taking notes on Islamic law and Islamic Apologetics (if you don’t mind this word!), learning Arabic, and giving lectures in the mosques of my localities in Chennai and Kolkata. Two years went by and I passed my ME first class with distinction, produced original research on renewable energy, got a decent job offer as a programmer-analyst in Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTS), an American Fortune 500 IT multinational. But all this could not satisfy me and I longed to move to a full-time career in Islamic research and writing.

By this time I had dropped my plan to join IRF as I had realized that IRF was not doing a good job in the field of academic research and defense of Islam. It was more of a popular platform for addressing the doubts of laymen than answering academic objections to Islam. So I decided to join CTS for the time being, in 2014, and enroll in the Islamic studies program of Bilal Philip’s International Online University (then called the Islamic Online University) to make myself eligible for PhD programs in Islamic studies in universities of the USA and UK, but then my life’s most tragic incident occurred in the last quarter of 2014. I apostatized! And this was real apostasy, which remained until the end of 2020, for more than six years!

BACK TO FAITH
I formally got back to Islam in February 2021, al-hamdu-lillaah! Of course, in this article, I won’t delve into the reasons behind the loss of faith and the reasons which again led me to finally come back with unprecedented certainty to my beautiful religion of Islam, a long intellectual and spiritual journey that I would be slowly sharing with you through this website for a long time to come, in-shaa-Allaah! I hope my story would help others like me to regain their faith in Islam in particular, and in God and religion in general.

My articles and books that are currently published on the internet came during my faithless days, thus reflect my thoughts accordingly. While my first book ‘God Examined’ posits an agnostic viewpoint on God, my second book ‘The scourge of terrorism: Does Islam promote it?’ argues that apart from dirty geopolitics and Western hegemony, terrorism committed by Muslims in the name of Islam has theological basis also! My forthcoming books would now be in the defense of faith in God and the validity and relevance of religion in the 21st century despite the developments in science and technology which many believe undermines religion while I would argue otherwise as I have discovered through my intellectual journey of more than 15 years!

I have been an influencer since my teenage days as a preacher of Islam, having brought several of my relatives and friends to the understanding and practice of Islam, maa-shaa-Allaah. Consequently, when I turned away from religion, I took several of my friends and relatives away with me! That’s another tragedy that I’m working to nullify now; another reason why I seek to become a full-time researcher and communicator of Islam and remain so for the rest of my life, in-shaa-Allaah, this website being a step in that direction!

On a side note, I changed track from IT/software programming to education, becoming a full-time teacher of higher grade Physics in 2019, set up a small institute of my own named FaZo Institute in Kolkata, where I taught physics to advanced students of grades 11 and 12, for two years, 2019 and 2020. This change in career was driven by my desire to become an educator of science and religion. I studied physics very hard for a period of two years, 2018 and 2019, to make this switch from IT to Physics teaching and also to build a solid foundation for my future studies on advanced theoretical physics. Currently I’m employed full-time as a Senior Lecturer on JEE Advanced Physics at Narayana Educational Institutions, Bangalore.

I have a sound understanding of advanced physics at the qualitative level, gaining the core mathematical understanding being one of my future goals, so as to become an authoritative speaker and writer on both science and religion, otherwise, it’s common to see real scientists degrade and insult those commentators on religion who don’t have a solid background in science, especially in physics or biology! Keeping this mind, I have also devoted around six months, from April to October 2017, to the academic study of the theories of the origins of life as well as the evolution of life. I would be devoting some of my articles on this website to these topics also.

My personal journey from Islam to agnosticism and then to Islam again, has allowed me to look at these worldviews as an ardent insider and puts me in a solid position to analyze and navigate the global debates on science versus religion, atheism versus theism, naturalism versus theism, etc.; and I earnestly hope that you would love this ride of intellect and faith as I take you with me on this roller coaster from Islam to godlessness and then back to Islam!

Voila, let’s start the voyage!