Shaha - The Young Atheists Handbook: Lessons for Living a Good Life Without God
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Praise for
The Young Atheists Handbook
A touching personal account that makes for a courageous and compelling read. This is among the most powerful and convincing arguments against religion that I have come across, and it is written in a way that is never patronising or trivialising.
Professor Jim Al-Khalili OBE, physicist and broadcaster
A book that destroys the clich of the atheist as joyless rationalist and shows the humanity, love, and concern that often lies behind godless thinking.
Robin Ince, writer and comedian
More than just a great handbook, this is an honest and often very moving story about valuing truth over hope, even in the face of grief.
Tim Minchin, comedian and writer
Like many bright and curious children before and since, kind teachers, books and school provided the young Alom Shaha with a ladder out of inner-city poverty and an escape from his abusive, feckless father. But The Young Atheists Handbook is no anti-Muslim misery memoir. Rather its strength is the way he explores his life and faith scientifically, through a series of thought experiments. From its taboo-busting opening, when, in a simple experiment, he eats pork for the first time, Alom Shahas rational exploration of the corrosive power of religious indoctrination is refreshingly down to earth, heartfelt and deeply moving. It combines a raw personal story of his Bangladeshi Muslim background with the understated and carefully researched honesty of a scientist seeking the truth, and of a teacher wanting to free young minds. An inspiring and brave book that speaks for thousands who dare not admit their atheism. Samira Ahmed, journalist and broadcaster
Alom Shahas The Young Atheists Handbook is moving, heartwarming, and thoughtful Many today are despairing, grappling with doubt, or fearful for their lives for wanting to leave Islam and religion. Apostasy is still punishable by death in a number of countries worldwide. Aloms honest journey of why and how he has freed himself from religions hold will be essential reading for many of them, and it will surely empower and inspire.
Maryam Namazie, human rights activist
Alom Shaha has shrugged off the shackles of poverty, racism, and, most of all, religious superstition, to begin to fulfil his potential as a human being. In this wise, compassionate, honest, and often heartbreaking book, he tells of his remarkable journey from a tough inner-city council estate to the rejection of the Islamic beliefs of his Bangladeshi immigrant community. It took a lot of guts to come out as a nonbeliever, but Shaha did it to show others who harbour severe doubts about their faith that they are not alone. This is an important and courageous book that needed to be written.
Marcus Chown, author and broadcaster
Aloms circumstances will be shared by many young people from Muslim backgrounds growing up today. His personal account of his own experiences will be an indispensable source of comfort for them, and a movingly written insight for any reader.
Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association
Insightful, conversational, intelligent, enlightening, intimate, and just plain eye-opening. Shaha opens his life, his heart, and his mind to us in a compelling journey towards unbelief.
Dr Leslie Cannold, author of The Book of Rachael
This is all very annoying. While most of us struggle to put two coherent sentences together, Alom Shaha seems to have knocked out this beautifully written and important book at the same time as teaching physics, and making films. Atheists and religious people alike should read this to see that the path to enlightenment is not always easy, especially if you come from a culture in which being faithless is derided. But more importantly, young people who are working out their own path should read it to see that you can be free to think for yourself. Dr Adam Rutherford, science writer and broadcaster
For Aslom, Morium, Shahajahan, Shalim, and Lizzie. Thank you for giving me so much to believe in, and for believing in me.
Foreword
by A.C. Grayling
I mean, what
What if no ones watching
What if when were dead
We are just dead
I mean, what
What if its just us down here
What if God is just an idea
Someone put in your head
A NI D I F RANCO
O NE OF THE hardest things for any human being to do is to break free from an all-encompassing belief system, and to deal with the response of the community he or she thereby leaves behind. Alom Shaha has done this, with courage and clarity of mind; and in these pages, he tells how he did it. It is a moving story, and a painful one at times, but it is also an optimistic one because it shows how people can free themselves from tradition, superstition, and powerful pressures to conform, even against formidable odds. Alom Shahas story is about how an individual achieved this, and thereby gained the greatest kind of liberty there is: liberty of mind.
Of course, some will say that Alom had certain advantages: he had a scholarship to a fine school, went on to university, became a physics teacher (a good one, too: Ive seen him with his pupils). But note that these things were made possible by his intellect, and the use to which he put it. He learned, and he thought; and early in life he began to think for himself about what his Muslim community in the Elephant and Castle area of London expected him to think. Family and community circumstances, and the circumstances of life in that part of London during his early years, raised high barriers to the independent exercise of mind, but he achieved that independence , and here is the result: a book that tells other people that they can think for themselves and question orthodoxies, thus freeing themselves from tradition and expectation, and gaining the same liberty of mind that Alom found.
Unbeknown to Alom, he and I were neighbours during his childhood. For many years I lived in Trinity Church Square near the Elephant and Castle, very close to the little Harper Road library now, alas, gone where his early reading helped him on the road to freedom. I too had a ticket for that library; perhaps we were frequently in there at the same time. At election times, I undertook political canvassing for the Labour Party through the neighbouring estates, in one of which he lived. For a while, one of my daughters went to the primary school next to the Harper Road library. I think about the coincidences in the overlapping lives of people whose paths must often have crossed, thinking about the same things, questioning, looking for a true and meaningful forward path in life that was not overshadowed by the crushing bulk of outdated thought systems. Without any doubt there are other Aloms in those Elephant and Castle estates, and likewise in other parts of London, in other parts of the United Kingdom, and in other parts of the world; other Aloms thinking and doubting and seeking liberation of mind. His book will be an inspiration to them, and a guide.
His book will be a guide because in telling the story of his own journey, Alom gives the reasons why he is confirmed in his atheism, the reasons that reflection, science, and philosophy offered him, and offer anyone with a clear and open mind. It frequently happens that people revise their attitude to the belief system which, when they were children, the adults in their lives obliged them to accept, though not for reasons that they could then articulate in logical order, but instead because they felt that there was something wrong and hollow about that belief system, something which did not ring true. And then, as they proceed to read, discuss, learn, and think, they begin to see the underlying reasons for their intuition, and to build the arguments that confirm their suspicions. This happened to Alom, too. What is admirable about his book is how it presents the logic and evidence along with the story of his development, so that the reader sees how, in Aloms retrospect , the intellectual case for his atheism presented itself to him. He organises that case very cogently and clearly, and I am confident that his account will help many others to a shorter and less painful journey than the one that he had to make. And that, of course, is precisely why he wrote this book.
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