This post was originally published on the main website on Apr 8
2026.
I am reposting it here for SEO reasons and enabling humble bumble discussions with the DEV community.
Feel free to engage with this post and i am available to respond during weekends.
Sorry about the spam posting all the blogs in one day.
I forgor about my dev account <3! 🚨 Important Note: Discussing religions is considered a taboo/sensitive topic by some, and I want to make it clear that I am not here to offend anyone or to claim that one religion is superior to another.
I am simply sharing my personal journey and my thoughts on the matter.
I am not a theologian, but I am a software engineer.
Hey everyone 👋, I want to begin with something I never thought I would say out loud, because for most of my life I assumed I would stay exactly where I started, believing what I was given without ever stepping outside of it.
I was born and raised as a Muslim, and for many years I carried that identity the way a person carries a home they have never questioned, simply because it was always there.
I was taught that faith should be simple, that certainty was strength, and that asking too many questions could pull you away from truth instead of bringing you closer to it.
But even as a child, as I shared in Just Don't Pick Up the Brush, while repeating words I had memorized without fully understanding them, I could not stop feeling that real truth should not need silence or fear to survive.
That quiet feeling was the first crack in something I once thought would never move.
As I grew older, that crack did not go away, it slowly widened as I began to see the difference between repeating something and actually understanding it.
I could say many things with confidence and still not know why they were true, and that created a tension in me that I could not ignore anymore.
I started to feel that I was performing faith instead of living it, and that difference became too important for me to dismiss.
Because if something is true, it should not need performance to appear real, it should stand on its own.
I did not want a belief that depended on me avoiding hard questions; I wanted something honest enough to survive the cold logic of the world.
The more I thought, the more I saw that fear keeps many people from questioning what they have always known.
Fear of being wrong, fear of disappointing others, and fear of losing belonging can quietly shape how far a person is willing to think.
I felt that fear too, but I also felt something stronger, which was the need to know what is actually true.
Living with unanswered questions began to feel heavier than facing difficult answers.
I started to understand that avoiding questions does not protect truth, it only protects comfort, and comfort, while useful in small ways, can never replace the solid ground of reality when the stakes are this high.
That realization pushed me forward, even when I did not yet know where the search would lead.
Growing Up Under the Weight of Unanswered Questions When I was younger, I believed that religion was mainly about obedience, about doing what you are told and staying within clearly defined boundaries that were already accepted by everyone around me.
I learned early on that saying the right words and following the expected actions mattered more than fully understanding what those words meant.
At the time, I did not question this deeply, because when you are surrounded by certainty, it feels natural to trust it without resistance.
But even then, there was a quiet part of my mind that kept noticing the gap between knowing something and simply repeating it.
That gap did not feel dangerous at first, but it did feel unfinished, like a signal that had been sent but never received.
Over time, that unfinished feeling began to grow, because understanding is something the mind naturally seeks whether you allow it or not, even if the signal has gone dark.
I was often taught, directly or indirectly, that doubt was som