It is a mild Saturday morning in February when we meet at Hasan Askari’s Columbia home to talk about Islam. He is over 6 feet tall, lean, almost like a stick figure, with salt-and-pepper hair and a trim beard. He wears light brown slacks and a black collarless button-down shirt wrapped tight around his neck. The shadows under his eyes betray the few — if any — hours of sleep. He flew in late from Bethesda, Md., where he does research on strokes at the National Institutes of Health. He commutes about twice a month to spend the weekend with his family.
He sketches the world’s religions in my notebook.
“Everybody has a religion, because everybody traverses a path in their life,” he says. “This path might be based on faith or it might be based on a rejection of faith.”
Over the next two hours, he morphs into Hasan Askari the scholar, the mentor, the doctor, the historian, the believer, the conversation partner, a volcano that erupts every time he opens his mouth. Religion, politics or family — nothing is off-limits. His life is the journey of a Pakistani man who, as a teenager, began questioning the faith he was born into, souring relations with his parents. In college, he split his time between medical studies and trying to prove or disprove the existence of God. Without God, he says, there was no point in following any religion. His proof of God and his choice of Islam are based on logic, and explained in drawings and diagrams. His interpretation is uncommon even among Muslims, few of whom would dare to overtly challenge the existence of God.
Hasan, whose name means pious or handsome, is a humble man. He admits he doesn’t possess the ultimate truth, but the best possible version found on his journey. Everything remains open to questioning.
“If you can bring a better argument, I will yield,” he says. “And I would expect the same from you.”
Below is his quest to find God, as recorded in our conversations over the past three months.
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Here is Hasan’s story, as told to Cristian Lupsa.
I grew up in Pakistan during the 1960s and 1970s when socialism was the dominant political ideology. My father, mother and the rest of the family would go to the mosque, listen to the sermons and participate in the celebrations. They were religious at the mosque, but when they came home they resumed their life as if nothing had happened.
By the time I was 9 or 10 I started to wonder what was going on. What was the point of people’s belief in Islam? They would go out, do all the religious activities and then would come back and the same life would continue. The same corruption would continue.
Socialism was very much part of my family, so my father was socially oriented. The problem was that what they were preaching in the mosques did not reflect on the society, which became more intolerant and dogmatic.
At home, I saw propagation of a socialist ideology based on negation of God and a proclamation of faith in Islam, which revolves around God. So I told myself: “This is not going to work.”
At 16, I asked my dad what the point of the religion was. If it was the right way to go, I should have seen some impact on his life.
“There is a clear dichotomy between what you are saying and what you are doing,” I told him. “Either the foundations of religion make sense or they are senseless — which would give me no reason to adhere to them.”
This clash led me to question the core of their beliefs, and it did not sit well with them. The premise of any religion has to be God. If there is no God, forget about the rest. There were questions they couldn’t answer for me: Do you believe in God? Why? If it’s a fact, I need proof. If God created everybody, then who created God?
That was the beginning of my troubles. I wasn’t an only child, but I was the only one who did this. Because I was young, I was probably more blunt and confrontational in my approach to my elders. Thinking back, I could have done it better — asked the same questions but in a more respectful way.
After high school, my parents were moving out of Pakistan, and I was about to enter medical school. During that time I also had an accident, getting hit by a field hockey ball. I became paralyzed on my left side. By then, my parents had already left and I was under emotional stress, alone for the first time. Everything happened at once during that period, when I also started letter writing to my future wife. We fell in love writing letters. So I was crazy to begin with, and then I got crazier when I fell in love.
I never hid my love for Farhat from my parents and told them not to seek anyone for me because I had already made a choice. That went badly, maybe because they thought she wasn’t right for me. They asked how I could fall in love with someone who I only met in letters.
Five years later, I showed up at Farhat’s door and told her parents, “I’m here to get married.”
“You must be out of your mind,” they said.
“No,” I replied. “I’m here to get married.”
Within a week we got married and went to Pakistan. My mom came, took care of affairs and was very generous. Things improved, but the ideological differences remained.
So my quest for answers started the summer my parents left. I began by studying the premise of God and the premise of no God. The premise of no God would be a material explanation of the universe, where matter is the only thing that can be proven. This can be found in two systems: mechanical materialism, which leads to capitalism, and dialectic materialism, which leads to communism and socialism. The two never added up because they left the main question unanswered: What started it all?
This is how I answered the question of God. There are general concepts we use when we compare things, two of the most important being opposition and contradiction. Opposition is like having night and day at the same time in different spaces. Contradiction is mutually exclusive, which means when one thing is present, the other cannot be present — if you’re here, you can’t be anywhere else. To the best of one’s ability to understand, we live in a material universe which exhibits constant change, a process with a beginning and end. The universe can be finite or infinite; it can’t be both because it would be a contradiction. We know the universe has dimensions — they may be ever expanding but there is always a boundary. That means it’s finite.
At the same time, you can’t say the process of change is infinite because you can’t have an infinite process in a finite realm. That is also a contradiction. So if the universe is finite and the process of change is finite, then obviously the question is what started it all? There has to be a conceptual start point.
The universe cannot have created itself because then you’re saying effect is equal to cause. You are saying non-existence becomes existence, but that’s not possible because it’s a contradiction. So, if the point of beginning can’t be within the realm of a finite universe, it can’t have attributes of the universe. That means it cannot have dimension, it cannot be material, it cannot have change and it cannot be finite. This is the conceptual infinity.
We know something happened because we are here today. The universe couldn’t have caused it itself so it must have been caused by this infinity. Infinity is an independent entity because if it’s dependent on something it can’t be infinity. If it’s independent it must be intelligent.
I am trying to understand infinity to the best of my ability. I’m not saying, “this is what infinity is,” because the moment I say this, I box it. It’s not infinity anymore. So instead, I say this is what I understand to the best of my ability. By logical deduction there is no way that infinity wouldn’t exist. I call this infinity God.
By the time I finished medical school I proved the existence of God to myself. I could have stopped here, but I didn’t want to. I had concluded there is a God, and I had to test my argument.My parents didn’t know what to make of me anymore. They thought, what is this? What’s wrong with you, man?
I had already discarded the secular systems of communism and capitalism because they said there is no infinity, which was contrary to my logical proof. Then I studied the non-material systems, which emphasize thought and spirituality. I looked at all religions and asked: How many allow logical analysis of their core? If your religion is for everybody, it has to be able to satisfy everybody, and logic is the only common ground in humanity.
Islam — and even here, only certain sects — was the only one that allowed questioning. Islam is a monotheistic heavenly religion, just like Judaism and Christianity. The founding pillar of the latter two religions is faith, and their foundation of faith, by definition, is based on non-questioning. This means faith is an entity given per se and exists as such. You cannot question why one should believe in God. You cannot ask whether there is a God or not, or who created God. You just believe because you believe. That is what it is. If a system says it’s not open to logical critique, I won’t spend further time with it.
Islam is very unique. It says “no.” The founding principle of Islam is also faith, but the foundation of faith is completely different. The foundation of faith is questioning and logic. The Qur’an says early on: La ikraha fi’d-dini. “There is no compulsion in religion.” The letter “a” in the negation – ikraha – changes the semantics of the word “compulsion,” which becomes understood as the “concept of compulsion.” Thus when the Qur’an says there is no compulsion in religion, it says the concept of compulsion is not existent. Unless you are grounded in reason you cannot have a passion that will be directed to God.
My next step was to find the application of my conclusions to my daily life as a Muslim. I proved the principle of Islam, tawhid, the oneness of God. Once you love and understand this principle cognitively, that is called faith. Faith in Arabic is aqd, meaning knot. Faith is a knot between cognition and passion, which in turn propels you towards action and becomes the foundation of piety, the most important quality of a Muslim.
The Qur’an, as it says in the second chapter, is a guide for those who are pious, meaning they have done their homework, understood the foundations and developed a love for them. This foundation is propelling them toward seeking the guidance from the divine in order for them to act upon that guidance. That is piety.
It is extremely important to understand that Islam is a religion in which by logic, understanding and questioning you can acquire satisfactory answers to all your questions. I believe Islam is a whole way of life. And life encompasses pleasure, leisure, helping, growing, teaching, and at the end of the day, it’s all about making someone a better person than he was a minute ago or a day ago.
It’s not that my dad didn’t understand this, but he took it for granted without questioning. If you take things for granted you don’t know why you are doing something and you create a shell to defend it.
I know there are Muslims critical of me and my interpretation. They ask me how I dare question my religion. I have only one response for them: If you can’t question, how can you claim this religion is for all of humanity? There is no common ground in the entire humanity but logic and no better way to explore and understand ideas but dialogue.