I was once talking to a friend of mine who was a fan of a mid-table football team. I tried to convince him, using logic and reason, numbers, and statistics, that his team deserved to lose a specific game. Finally, he stopped me saying “Ahmed, don’t waste your time, soccer fandom is based on irrationality”
Although I knew that already, him saying it like that made me think.
“To belong”—it’s one of the essential needs for humans, an instinct so deep that people would apply it to literally anything. Sports teams, music bands, crime families, cults, and even companies, these last ones always try to convince low-level, 12-dollar-an-hour employees that they are a part of a family and an essential component of a huge success story, etc.
so, why am I telling you this? Because I always hear atheists, agnostics, and religion-haters say that religions divide people, and only if people abandoned all religions everybody would get along. Nothing could be farther from the truth. On the contrary, if people didn’t belong to a religion, they would belong to something else that’s less rational, makes less sense, and divides them more, while providing them with no value or benefit.
If you are reading this while visiting Qatar for the World Cup, you are probably a hardcore soccer fan, and you have a team that you root for, which is OK, but if you feel like being a fan of that team is part of your identity, if you feel a sense of loyalty, or if you are willing to fight other people for your team, I regret to inform you that your need of belonging is misplaced. You know why, because when the hardships of life hit you like a wrecking ball, you won’t be able to find comfort in belonging to that club and definitely no one said the club would provide any help for you. Because they don’t know that you exist.
But Allah does, Allah is watching you at all times and knows the intricacies of your life and belonging to him will make a tangible difference in your life.
Belonging to Islam is NOT based on irrationality, Allah ordered Muslims in the Quran to think and use their minds more than 180 times, isn’t that an amazing piece of information? Belonging to Islam isn’t blind faith, but rather a logical conclusion, that it is the right religion from the one true God.
If human beings are going to belong to something anyway, they should belong to the one thing that would give them comfort and meaning when they are going through hard times in their lives and rewards them for it in the afterlife.
