Becoming Religiously Empowered

Grab a cup of the beverage of your choice and sit back, because this is going to be a long read and mostly conversational.

Through my many conversations with women seeking potential partners, I have noticed a common highlighted theme running through all of them. A theme that plays out differently but has diverse ramifications.

That theme is Religion.

Religiousness, piety, religious specifications, religious ratio; whatever you might have heard of it as.

This begins as a positive healthy specification to have; a choice or personal preference. You might want someone with a familiar understanding of what the religion outlines, someone who might be swinging to extreme ends or someone balanced, someone with a full intellectualized understanding of it, or someone else who has a better execution capacity of it. Nevertheless, it becomes an important theme of unison, as for most people it is what constitutes their core values.

The core values that hold our entire existence together, taut, and something to always return to once you have wandered off a bit.

Now, if I am to understand this, my seeking bracket will definitely look for the same. Someone with similar beliefs regarding religion and someone who also appreciates this quality in this ever atheistically inclined world. 

However, my vexation lies with the misunderstanding of this concept. Or rather the convenient molding of it by the opposite person to suit their needs. This core thing then becomes the very source of unhappiness because now it is polluted and difficult to return back to.

Too cryptic? 

Let me explain.

What is the first thought that comes to your mind when someone describes a person as being ‘religious’?

Especially in the Indian Muslim and Arab Muslim culture.

Someone modest, pure, timid, subservient, conforming, shy, and always obliging? 

No? Ask your parents.

I despise this very shallow bracket women like me and others have been confined to. Like my best friend remarked, “Religious is NOT a personality type.” It isn’t. It is an aspect of a person’s entire being full of desires and demands.

This misunderstanding of religious women (here I speak for religious women of all kinds) being meek and subordinate is dangerous. It is a blunt reduction of wholesome beautifully smart and ambitious women to mere tick boxes. This needs to change immediately!

We need to normalize women being religious as well as outgoing, religious as well as ambitious, religious as well as opinionated, religious as well as imperfect, religious as well as public figures, religious as well as bold, religious as well as horribly not domestic, and finally religious BUT not your version of religiousness. This needs to begin at home, by conversing with parents who were exposed to such a mindset, and by talking to friends that labelling a woman who might claim to be moderately religious as ‘improper’ is plain wrong. 

Allow men and women who are struggling to be religious, or have achieved a certain level of piety or are barely there the space to exist without rushing them into either one. You seek a practicing Muslim or a devout Hindu or a God-fearing Christian; great! but also remember they cannot just be this. Seek exactly the kind of partners you desire, walk away from those who don’t fit your bill, but stop using a conditioned perceptive of what we have grown up with to ask them to shrink their worth.

Although this preference definitely outlines what a person can be on the basis of their beliefs, but presuming that they are God forbid (the irony) anything other than your version and to use this fallacy to guilt them into becoming better – I am going to have to come at you with a saber! 

And then there’s the culture-religion interlocking that we Indians seemed to have mastered.

“How can we conveniently incorporate what we like culturally and pass it off as religion?”, thought some wise old beings.

Of course, let us claim our tradition is religion. Yes, let us teach that our values and culture are the same as religion and leave confused children to go about unable to understand why people aren’t black and white. Religious perspectives differ geographically, subjectively, culturally, and emotionally; it is a massive inclusive umbrella that we can all belong or choose to not belong.

It would benefit everyone greatly if we accepted that everyone feels they are being religious, in this case, one cannot measure everyone to the same parameter, and neither can you shove your beliefs down their empowered throats.

Religion personally has always been an important standpoint for me, and I hate to see it becoming a complex bar to pass. If we actually read, learned, and imbibed the good that religion itself advocates, we would realize its a beautiful thing to bond over, not a stifling one. Because it demands you to be kind and compassionate above all else, so if we are failing at that, then heck what do we even have to hang on to?

TL;DR – Being religious isn’t a personality type, it isn’t a cultural tradition and it ain’t the only thing that defines a human being. We all need to stop corrupting it with selfish needy requirements because it is not our weapon to use in the first place.