Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter, Ex-Christian, UK -1-

by **samirisaoui** Tue Oct 22, 2013 3:40 am

Description: Islam evolving in the heart. Part 1.
By Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter
Published on 06 Sep 2010 - Last modified on 26 Oct 2010
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Category: Articles > Stories of New Muslims > Men

My disbelief before Islam
When I married my Portuguese wife, Anabela, I had a philosophy which, though I believed in God as the Creator and Power that drove the universe, did not acknowledge that I was obliged to worship Him (I conceived the Power as It – that is, sexless).
I had been born a Roman Catholic, and brought up believing in Jesus as my God and Mary as my God’s mother – but this did not sit well with me. Rather, I saw Jesus and Mary as a means through which to reach God, who was the God of the Old Testament.
As I grew older, I began to despair at understanding vast tracts of the Old Testament. The material was dense, and so called ‘prophetic’ passages appeared to be in the present tense – addressed to those people thousands of years ago, as happening to them or in their lifetimes. More confusion arose because personal addresses or actions sometimes seemed to be assigned or directed not to people, but to cities and nations. God, for example, seemed to regard Jerusalem as his wife, and the actions of her people congruent with her actions. God called her a whore, and appealed frequently for her to repent and turn back, and become His queen again. The same was true of people, such as Jacob, who assumed the name of a nation, so passages addressed to Israel sometimes meant Jacob. Jacob often symbolized his descendents, which were split into two camps: the camp of Ephraim and the camp of Judah. Again, the names of these descendents of Jacob reflected the split in the children of Israel, between the city state of Zion and Samaria.
Other passages seemed to refer to supernatural events, and supernatural encounters. The raising up of Elijah and the appearance of God before Israel seemed to describe events that could be explained as meetings between races of advanced technologies and simple, non technological, men. Given that many other religions described the same kind of encounters with their ‘gods’, I began to suspect these stories of the Bible were but legends, gathered together, and made to seem coherent for the sake of a constructed hierarchy, the Church.
On top of this suspicious view I had begun to hold, I also learned of the historical persecutions that took place during and since mediaeval times, particularly the events of the crusades and the inquisition, which followed them. In fact, the ethos of the inquisition was exported to the New World by Spanish and Portuguese ‘Conquistadores’, and the Roman Popes manoeuvred to establish riches and power in Europe by a reign of Machiavellian terror. The Family of Borgia[1] were particularly exemplary figures in this respect.
Finally, I learned of the attempt of the Church to stifle and deny scientific advancement well into the reformation, and that change only manage to establish itself through the renaissance at a later date.
All these factors led me to believe that the God of the Bible and the descriptions of Heaven and Hell taught by the Church were forgeries, designed to subjugate and pacify the vast majority of the population under the rule of a minority elite.
Tortuous Confusion
There is a primal urge in men to worship that which created them, and turn to Him when in need and nothing but Him can be appealed to sort out ones peril or confusion. I have heard people exclaim in extremus, “For the Love of God,” “Oh, God!”, “For God’s sake,” and the like, appealing for succour. Yet when aid comes, and they feel secure again, they thank the living agents who helped them in this world, or their favourite deities in the world of the unseen. In my own sense trackless waste, my lack of orientation, I took refuge in the concept of the Force, or Power I described earlier – the single and non-material Creator, whom men (individually) interacted with at a personal level, with neither mediation fromunseen agencies, nor help from other human beings.
The route took in coming to this conclusion was long and tortuous, concepts building on one another from my reading of science fiction and primitive conspiracy theories. I read, for example, Erich Von Däniken’s “Chariots of the Gods?”[2] and “The Philadelphia Experiment”[3] by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, the first of which gave credence to religion being ‘made up’, and the second of which opened my eyes to what can be covered up by the elite society and their governments in the world. However, not every nation and government can be in on the grand conspiracy, if such a thing exists, so the natural place to look for confirmation or contradiction was other religions. To me, the ‘other religions’ were Hinduism and its offshoots, in particular Buddhism, so I sought to find out more about them from the inside.
The most visible of the branches of Hinduism in London, where I lived, was the orange coloured monks from the temple of Krishna[4], so I duly found myself recruited into their sect. Although the ritual meditation felt good, its wide use definitely provided a calming effect on the devotees – confirming that it preached a kind of placation of the people. Its creation story was also rather repulsive; who wants to acknowledge the origin of the world being a vast, but dead, cosmic cow, or that we evolved from her excretions? I soon left the sect as abruptly as I entered it, and read up on Buddhism. I knew the latter was an offshoot of the mother of the other, so I wasn’t tempted to try and practice Buddhism. Instead I tried to discover its key concept of life and life after death. I soon discovered that, like Hinduism, the hereafter was conceived to be a series of reincarnations, and that we were bound to our lives on the wheel of fate. However, instead of seeking unity with the cosmic mind of God, the perfection of Nirvana, the Buddhist seeks to attain enlightenment and freedom from the cycle of birth and death. This enlightenment negates the ego because it must surrender its jurisdiction over time to achieve it and let the infinite and unknowable take over. Strictly speaking, Buddhism is a religious philosophy, taking the human ego as the only god that dominates life, whose way is to a Godlessness goal in the afterlife.
Again, in seeking to eliminate ego orientation, Buddhism can be seen as the Marxist concept of “opium for the people”[5]. It makes them tractable and controllable by the elite in society; but what about ways of ‘bucking the system’? What about, pre-historical religions, or religions that had died out? One of the earliest forms of religion I learnt about is totemism[6]. Totemism postulates the existence of a spirit equivalent to a sign in the real world, usually an animal. A whole tribe can have a collective spirit totem, such as the cave bear, whilst individuals may possess an individual totem, such as the grey wolf. Furthermore, if one is seeking help in a particular endeavor, such as hunting, the totem of the hunted animal can be consulted for signs of where the quarry might be.
There is a clear connection to magical oracles in the use of totemistic rituals, pointing to the existence of unseen forces existing in the world. There are also other avenues to these forces, such as astrology and nature worship. One of the latter means of worship envisages the earth as Gaia[7], the mother of everything in nature, and the patterns of interaction between creatures of the ecological system. I rather liked this idea that earth was a viable individual who must be respected, and was capable of guiding us and protecting the guided, while punishing those who work against her and will not take guidance. Not long ago, a man named James Lovelock was able to express how I felt then in a book called “The Revenge of Gaia”[8], which he published in 2006.
However, the earth is too narrow a canvass for a universal creator, so the second avenue was even more attractive to me. It pertains to the heavens, and the heavens are much wider. Astrology[9] assigns meanings and influences to celestial bodies and their position in the skies at the time of birth to determine the fate of an individual being. They also rely upon the position of the celestial sphere at any given point of time and space on the earth’s surface to venture predictions of what might occur on the path of fate, and therefore give advice on decisions of the people within the sphere of influence from those predicted events. For a while, I became an amateur astrologer, because I felt I was in touch with a universal, rather than local, force.
Then I met a man who turned me back towards my religion of birth in order to seek universal answers. I can’t remember his name, unfortunately, but his origin was Ireland, and his religion Roman Catholic, as I had been. His outlook, however, was not as hidebound as some staunch Roman Catholics I would meet later. He happened to meet me while I was reading a book called Omega by Stewart Farrar[10], which gave me an insight into witchcraft and the religion of Wicca. We had a huge discussion that lasted nearly a day, while sitting on a beach in the Algarve, Portugal. He was trying to describe the concept of God, and readily agreed with me that Jesus was not God. God was something immaterial and invisible power and Lordship over everything. With the input I had from Stewart Farrar, I described what I felt was the essence of Divinity and my relation, or the worlds relation, to it. I felt that “God” was the Devine initiator, whose “way” was the Laws of the natural world. I said I believed that every world was different and behaved after its own proper laws, but that there was a general guiding Law of the Universe, which was God and His Guidance: working ‘with the flow” signified “good” while working across the flow signified evil. Examples of working “with the flow” is using nature’s medicines for healing, whilst “across the flow” is manufacturing chemical agents that mimic the effect of nature’s medicine; working with the flow would be environmentally friendly whilst across the flow would cause pollution; etc.
This was my state when I married my Portuguese wife. She was Roman Catholic, but largely non-practicing. Before long, she was pregnant, and my first child came into the world.
[ltr] [/ltr]

Footnotes:
[1]( http://www.reformation.org/in-the-pillory.html)
[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F)
[3] (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0449214710/stevejacksongame)
[4] (http://www.iskcon-london.org/temple.html)
[5] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people)
[6] (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/totemism)
[7] (http://www.pantheon.org/articles/g/gaia.html)
[8] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revenge_of_Gaia)
[9] (http://www.scribd.com/doc/2578598/Encyclopedia-of-Astrology-Nicholas-deVore)
[10] (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/f/stewart-farrar/omega.htm)

Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter, Ex-Christian, UK (part 2 of 7)

Description: Islam evolving in the heart. Part 2.
By Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter
Published on 13 Sep 2010 - Last modified on 26 Oct 2010
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Category: Articles > Stories of New Muslims > Men

Returning to God
Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter, Ex-Christian, UK -1- Jeremy_Ben_Royston_Boulter__Ex-Christian__UK_(part_2_of_7)_001

During my early years of marriage, I was friends with a man who loved hiking in the mountains and going nude in seclusion. He was both naturalist[1] and naturist[2] in outlook, and he took me and my wife in that direction. Naturally, when Andrei Micael was born, I advocated a more natural baptism than one with ‘holy water’ from a cold stone basin being poured onto his head by a Roman Catholic priest. Instead, I wanted to trek into the mountains and dip him in a stream, just as John the Baptist[3] baptized the repentant Jews in the River Jordan. Of course I did not realize that baptism was something one should do when an adult, rather than a child, for how can children repent? They have done nothing to repent from. My true baptism I would make on myself, when I bathed away my past state in ritual purification on becoming Muslim.
My wife’s mother started to visit us in the summer, the first time just to see Andrei, I think. Like my wife, she was a Roman Catholic. Unlike her, however, she was an avid believer in the mediation of Mary, the mother of ‘God’, the saints in their graves, and the boy Jesus. To this end, she wore a crucifix around her neck and assiduously visited the shrines of Mary (including the Sanctuary of Fatima[4]and Our Lady of Lourdes[5]) at least once a year, and made pilgrimage to theSanctuary de Saint Benedict[6] every time she came to Braga, where my wife and I lived. She had a small statue of Mary with child that she used to set up on its own special table (like an altar) in the corner of her bedroom, and she kept a battered old photograph of a fresco of Mary (the mother of Jesus), holding a cup with a bleeding heart, in her wallet. The former she used to kneel to before going to bed every night, and the latter she would keep while travelling, taking it out to kiss when she wanted to pray.
To me, all these actions were abhorrent, totally against both my primitive concept of the Universal Force or Power, a Unique Creator and Sustainer that permeated the Universe, and also to God as He is described in the Bible. I became determined to persuade my mother-in-law to stop her idolizing worship of (dead) human beings as mediators to the One Who Hears. But how?
Back to the Bible
I first tried by using logic. How can dead men hear? How do we know their piety? Was it not men who made them ‘saints’? And by whose authority were they made saints? Were they not men, like us? But all to no avail. So finally I decided I would use the weapon of her own scripture because I knew that the First Commandment[7] in the Bible was,
“I am the Lord your God, Who took you out of Egypt and from bondage. And you shall not take any gods besides Me. You will not make graven images or likenesses of any creature that lives in the heavens above or the earth below, or in the water under the earth, nor will you bow down to them, or serve them.” (Exodus 20:2-5[8])
If that were the case, then there would be more evidence that God is only One, and immaterial, and only He could hear us.
Over the years that I sustained my regular (summer) persuasion with her, I began to appreciate that the Bible actually contradicted what the Church taught about the ‘god-ship’ of Jesus, and affirmed clearly that God was One. It completely denied the license[9] we have taken to worship idols[10] or use them as a focus of our prayer. So my belief in the God of Abraham slowly increased until my only fear was that I might be wrong. What if, despite my strong belief that it was not true, it was Jesus who sat on the Throne of Judgment on the Last Day? Then I would be in a pickle. The evidence in the Bible was ambiguous on this point, since ‘The Revelation of St John[11]’ seemed to indicate that it would be him.
Debts
This was my state when I found the need to look for a job that would help me escape my heavy debts at home. During this period, I decided to give up my job at the British Council in Portugal and venture a language school of my own in Braga. I wanted to be near at hand for the raising of my son. At the same time, I decided to buy a home, which would be like renting a flat, except that I would own the place at the end of the process. My school, however, did not work out, and I ended up not only owing a lot of money to the bank for my house, but also for the starting capital I had borrowed. When I closed my school two years after I opened it, I foolishly did not declare bankruptcy, instead using my ‘business card’ to become a freelance English teacher. Although this helped me keep my feel I might just be able to survive, the capital I owed did not diminish appreciably. I needed some get out plan. My wife then suggested that I look for a well paid job abroad to deal with the problem, pointing out that many acquaintances had husbands abroad, and had amassed enough money to build homes for their families in the home country.
The day I decided I needed to find such a lucrative job abroad was a black day indeed. I was in deep gloom because things were coming to a head. I was unable to keep up with the interest repayments on loans from domestic appliances, the mortgage, our cars and the debts I had accumulated running a language school for three years at a loss, I saw blackness ahead of me – and no local means to climb out of the debt hole I was in. I felt almost suicidal, thinking death would allow me to escape from debt. I didn’t know, at the time, that debt was one of the things a person could be barred from paradise for, and that death did not mean you escaped your obligations.
One night I knelt by my bedside, facing the east, and poured out my trouble to God. I told him I was in despair, at my tether’s end, and could not see myself able to support my wife and children, let alone myself. I begged him to give me a way out, a way to a good life for us all. Somehow, I knew he was listening, and my heart eased as I prayed. Eventually, I felt comfortable enough to lay my head down again, and fall back to sleep.
The next few events proved He had answered my prayer. The very next day, I was looking through the EFL Gazette and found several advertisements for British Council placements abroad. When I pointed them out to her, my wife advised me to look for work in the Middle East or Far East where salaries were relatively high. There and then, I applied to institutions in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Taiwan, Japan and Korea. The British Council gave me an interview, but I was not chosen for any of their places. An employer in Taiwan chose me and offered me a job, but when I accepted, the process was never followed up by them. Just as I was beginning to feel all the doors were closing in my face, one of my last choices, a university in Saudi Arabia, offered me a position as a lecturer of English, and I took it. Praise be to God! I thought He had answered me financially, but his real gift was to come from an unexpected direction.

Footnotes:
[1] (http://religiousnaturalism.info/)
[2] (http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturism)
[3] (http://www.abu.nb.ca/courses/ntintro/lifej/johnbaptist.htm)
[4] (http://www.santuario-fatima.pt/)
[5] (http://www.our-lady-of-lourdes.com/sanctuary)
[6] (http://www.sbento.pt/index.html)
[7] (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%205:6-9&version=NIV)
[8] (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020:2-5&version=NIV)
[9] (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%20115:3-8&version=NIV)
[10] (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah%2010:1-16&version=NIV)
[11] (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%2022:3&version=NIV)

Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter, Ex-Christian, UK (part 3 of 7)

Description: Islam evolving in the heart. Part 3.
By Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter
Published on 20 Sep 2010 - Last modified on 07 Nov 2010
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Category: Articles > Stories of New Muslims > Men

A New Beginning
Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter, Ex-Christian, UK -1- Jeremy_Ben_Royston_Boulter__Ex-Christian__UK_(part_3_of_7)_001

When my friends learnt that I would be going to the Gulf, I was deluged with advice. I was told that I would find nothing to do in Saudi Arabia, and would feel hedged in. I was warned that I would be cheated and treated like a slave. The culture would not be conducive, and I would be bored to tears. However, I knew this was my way out, so, like I always do when I go to a new place, a culture different from my own, I tried to offload my cultural prejudices and intended to test the society I would be part of on its merits.
I was pleasantly surprised on arrival to note the general friendliness I met with from Saudis. Instead of the proud aloofness, shady ethics and touchy honour I expected, I was greeted with warmth, curiosity and open doors. My hosts went out of their way to please me, a stranger in their land. Not that I didn’t meet with a fair share of hypocrisy. The foreigners from Pakistan, Bangladesh and other Far Eastern countries were seriously exploited, and unfairly treated, in my eyes, by the Arab majority. But I saw none of that condescension when they applied their society to me. However, it was not their culture or society that attracted me to Islam. In fact, if I were to judge Islam by the culture, I would have stepped in the opposite direction, I think. It was another thing.
The Motivation
The impetus or catalyst that changed me from vaguely religious to fully submissive to God started with a seemingly innocuous event. Stepping out onto Saudi Arabian soil early in the morning for just the second time (in 24 hours) at Ha’il Airport, a small, hick aerodrome rather than fully fledged passenger terminus, I was confronted by a big green sign with the words “The Ha’il Islamic Propagation and Guidance Office”, followed by the office phone number, in English. I remember being surprised the sign was in English, but I didn’t take much more conscious notice of it than that.
The University pick-up arrived and took me to the College, where I had to check in my passport and fill in an arrival form. Then I was sent to the head of the English Department. When I entered his office, I was confronted with a man in Saudi dress. But he did not look like an Arab, to my untrained eye. He must have felt a bit uncomfortable having me stare at him, trying to figure out his origins, but he handled it well. Later, I was to find out he was Welsh and had converted in Brunei before he came to Saudi Arabia. He told me that I had the rest of the week to settle in, which meant I had five days before I officially started teaching. I was sent back to the man in charge of personnel reception and housing, who took me in the pick-up to choose my digs. I soon settled in, and found I had nothing to do and four days to do it in. Then, with the memory of the strange looking ‘non-Arab Saudi’ still in my mind’s eye, I remembered the sign in English and began to think of the religion of the country.
Now, I knew of the Bible[1] and that the Torah[2] was part of it. I had read some of the Book of the Hindus, the Bhagwad Gita[3], and also read not scriptures, but practical books for other religions and non-religious theories about religion. However, I had never read the Talmud[4], nor had I read any of the Book of the Muslims, which I knew was called the Quran[5]. Somehow I had always had the impression that these two books were ‘off limits’ to non-Jews and non-Muslims. And I had thought they were exclusively in the Semitic languages, which I didn’t know. However, the sign in English pushed the thought into my mind that perhaps I could find an English translation of the Arabic Quran at the institute it advertised. Perhaps this would be the opportunity to read it and judge the source of the religion for myself.
I immediately set off for the centre of town to look for the place. The centre of Ha’il had a six storey office block which they called Al-Bourj, which means “the tower”, the only ‘high rise’ building in town. The road I walked down went straight past it, leaving it on the left, ending in the down town shopping souk. On the right side of the road opposite the bourj, was the vegetable market, which I later learned doubled as an execution ground. Where my road and the high-street crossed at the bourj, I found the same sign I had seen at the airport. It was conveniently written in a direction sign with the pointed end pointing diagonally across the street, but as hard as I looked at the shop fronts, all in Arabic lettering which I was unable to read, I was unable to locate my goal. The shops were all shut, it being the afternoon, so I couldn’t even make enquiries. I had no idea when the shops would open again, so I decided to go to my new home, buy some supplies in, rest up and try again the in the morning.
The next day was Tuesday, and I went into town again as soon as I had breakfast. On the way, I passed several bookstores, and mindful how difficult it had been to find the propagation office, I stopped in every one. None of them had any books in English, let alone the Quran, and, as far as I could make out, they directed me onward towards the bourj. This time I took station directly under the sign and waited until a policeman came by on a motorbike. As he passed by, on the other side of the road, I waved at him madly. He swept into the crossroads and made a left, stopping his bike at the start of the vegetable market. I called him over, and by dint of gesticulation and pointing at the sign, managed to convey I wanted to know where it was. He pointed across the road and, when I still couldn’t spot it, to the roof of a house where a copy of the sign I had seen at the airport was placed. How stupid I felt. I had strained my eyes at the signs above the shop fronts, and the place had been staring me in the face! At last I had my target, and I went over to the shops below it, finding a bookshop full of people from all over south-east Asia and Oceania. I took it to be the bookshop belonging to the centre.
The Encounter
As I said before, the bookshop was full of people, and books in many different languages, but I was too shy to ask anything lest I be misunderstood; I couldn’t speak any of their languages. Glancing through the shelves, I could see no thick tomes, and all the titles in English seemed to be about Jesus or explanations of particular religious areas. I noticed that there were some stairs at the back next to the shop counter, leading up to the next floor. The Policeman had indicated the offices of the Guidance Centre were upstairs, so, on the vague hope I may come across a reading room, or something, I climbed the stairs at the back of the bookshop, smiling hard at the people behind the counter in lieu of speaking because of being so self-consciously tongue-tied.
At the top of the stairs was a huge empty room that looked like a meeting hall. Adjoining it, I found a room that had a huge table in its centre and shelves all around, but only a very, very few, battered books – perhaps that reading room I had hoped for. Unfortunately, the books were all in a foreign language, or languages – foreign lettering I could not make head or tail of. I began to despair of locating what I wanted on my own, or getting what I wanted in a land that could speak my language. Luckily, one of the office staff found me and asked me what I wanted, or what I was doing there, or something of that nature (he was speaking in his language, which I could not understand). I replied in English, telling him I was looking for a copy of the Quran to read. He indicated that I should to wait, because he was going to fetch someone. So I waited; perhaps a solution was about to come my way.
A tall, handsome bearded man came into the room I was waiting in. I was to know him later on as Brother Abu Abdurrahman, my teacher and mentor, but at the time, he was just another ‘Saudi’ who might be able to help me get what I wanted. He asked me in English what I wanted, and I told him I wanted to read the Quran.
“Why do you want to do that?” he asked me.
“I want to compare it to the Bible.” I replied.
“What for?”
“You know, to see if it is like it.”
“Do you want to know about Islam?”
“Well, yes, I suppose.”
“Why don’t you read this pamphlet?” He said, showing me a pamphlet that said ‘Who is God?’ I didn’t really want to know the Muslim view of theology or religion. That wasn’t what I was after. I wanted to look at their scripture, to see if it compared to what was in the Bible.
“No. I don’t really want to read about Islam. I want their book,” I said.
“Really? It is better if you learn more about the religion before,” he wheedled.
“I’m not interested in the religion, per say,” I said, trying not to offend, “I just want to read their book.”
“The book isn’t a game,” he said.
“I’m not playing,” I said. “I am seriously interested in what it says.”
“OK. I will see what I can do,” he said, giving way. I thanked him and he walked out of the room.

Footnotes:
[1] http://quod.lib.umich.edu/r/rsv/about.html
[2] http://bible.ort.org/intro1.asp?lang=1
[3] http://www.bhagavad-gita.us/
[4] http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/talmud.htm
[5] http://quran.com/

please if you want to read the part 2 second just click here