I’m not Muslim but I’m a religious person (I follow a Brazilian-African religious tradition called Umbanda) so I think I can try to respectfully chime in with my perspective.
For me personally it all boils down to recognizing that different spheres of your experience can be governed by different processes, with different rules.
When it comes to material interaction with the sensible world, I’m thoroughly and 100% materialistic. I don’t attribute metaphysical explanations to material processes.
And honestly I think presuming that religion necessarily means attributing metaphysical explanations to stuff is a very stubborn miscomprehension of how religions other than Christianity works. Most religions are really not very interested in building systems of reasoning about the world and doctrinal orthodoxy like European Christianity is.
They are much more focused on ritual, on human connection, on sociality, and experience of the divine. And those things aren’t at all incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how the sensible world works.
EDIT:
Sorry for editing, but I think my answer wasn’t complete enough.
I think looking at religion as a system of beliefs is a fundamental eurocentric misunderstanding of those things we call religion that aren’t western european Christianity. Specially protestant Christianity, which is a very specific practice, extremely focused on belief, and rationalistic systems of thought.
Most of the things we call religions: eastern varieties of Christianity, Buddhism, a lot of branches of Islam, Judaism, etc, etc are decidedly not about belief, but about practice, sociality and experience.
Think like this: what you have to do to be a good protestant christian? You have to have specific beliefs about who Jesus was, what he did, the significance of his actions, what is sin, what is salvation, what is grace, etc, etc, etc. It’s a whole system of thought.
What do you have to do to be a good Muslim? Practice the tenets of Islam. Practice the pillars. It’s not a person who adheres to a long list of beliefs. As a system of belief it can be summarized in a single phrase: there’s only one God and a specific person is a prophet of this god. That’s it. The rest is about practice, ritual, sociality and experience.
That is not incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how society organizes, of the processes that create exploitation in capitalism, etc, etc.
EDIT 2:
That’s the last edit I promise.
Just a quick comment that there are those who argue that the word “religion” is a bad category. That lumping together all those different human experiences as instances of the same phenomenon is kind of unhelpful. Precisely because it necessarily draws an eurocentric comparison with Christianity which is prone to cause misunderstanding of those phenomena.
This makes a lot of sense to me. The sterile belief based system of Christianity, followed by the spiritually dead and toxic atheism, played a big part in me becoming a bad person. When you put religion the way you just did, then I think that should be promoted to drive out the soulless atheism so common in western left wing circles.
I’m not Muslim but I’m a religious person (I follow a Brazilian-African religious tradition called Umbanda) so I think I can try to respectfully chime in with my perspective.
For me personally it all boils down to recognizing that different spheres of your experience can be governed by different processes, with different rules.
When it comes to material interaction with the sensible world, I’m thoroughly and 100% materialistic. I don’t attribute metaphysical explanations to material processes.
And honestly I think presuming that religion necessarily means attributing metaphysical explanations to stuff is a very stubborn miscomprehension of how religions other than Christianity works. Most religions are really not very interested in building systems of reasoning about the world and doctrinal orthodoxy like European Christianity is.
They are much more focused on ritual, on human connection, on sociality, and experience of the divine. And those things aren’t at all incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how the sensible world works.
EDIT:
Sorry for editing, but I think my answer wasn’t complete enough.
I think looking at religion as a system of beliefs is a fundamental eurocentric misunderstanding of those things we call religion that aren’t western european Christianity. Specially protestant Christianity, which is a very specific practice, extremely focused on belief, and rationalistic systems of thought.
Most of the things we call religions: eastern varieties of Christianity, Buddhism, a lot of branches of Islam, Judaism, etc, etc are decidedly not about belief, but about practice, sociality and experience.
Think like this: what you have to do to be a good protestant christian? You have to have specific beliefs about who Jesus was, what he did, the significance of his actions, what is sin, what is salvation, what is grace, etc, etc, etc. It’s a whole system of thought.
What do you have to do to be a good Muslim? Practice the tenets of Islam. Practice the pillars. It’s not a person who adheres to a long list of beliefs. As a system of belief it can be summarized in a single phrase: there’s only one God and a specific person is a prophet of this god. That’s it. The rest is about practice, ritual, sociality and experience.
That is not incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how society organizes, of the processes that create exploitation in capitalism, etc, etc.
EDIT 2:
That’s the last edit I promise.
Just a quick comment that there are those who argue that the word “religion” is a bad category. That lumping together all those different human experiences as instances of the same phenomenon is kind of unhelpful. Precisely because it necessarily draws an eurocentric comparison with Christianity which is prone to cause misunderstanding of those phenomena.
This makes a lot of sense to me. The sterile belief based system of Christianity, followed by the spiritually dead and toxic atheism, played a big part in me becoming a bad person. When you put religion the way you just did, then I think that should be promoted to drive out the soulless atheism so common in western left wing circles.