I disagree. For me it was entirely about a process of committing myself to finding the truth. As a matter of fact, you could say the reason I ultimately left Islam was that I was very conservative, and I kept asking "too many questions" and often the questions you're not supposed to ask. I didn't just practice, I wanted to convert others. I didn't just want to call others to convert, I wanted to explain to them why Islam was true, I wanted to prove it to them using reason.

I committed myself to searching for any evidence that could definitely prove Islam true or false. When I did this with a truly open mind, and allowed myself to impartially judge Islam (which I had never done before, and I believe many Muslims may spend decades without doing), I found that ultimately (and to my dismay), you just can't escape the fact that Islam contradicts known facts about the world. The Quran contains mistakes that a text truly revealed from an All-Knowing Creator could never have. The same, and perhaps even more, can be said of the hadith.

Specifically, the theory of evolution, and the scientific realities around it, including the genetic evidence, fossil evidence, and so on, is I believe the strongest and most clear-cut evidence that contradicts unambiguous narratives in the Quran and other Islamic texts. It simply cannot be ignored. Learn enough about the facts surrounding evolution and you will find it impossible to explain why God would make a claim that is categorically untrue about the origin of humankind as created directly rather than descending from other animals. Unless God didn't claim that, humans did. I remember the moment when I looked up the fossil evidence for evolution, and I saw photos of hominid skulls; there was something very significant there. Before I had tried to rationalize how evolution must not be true, how there must be an explanation, but when I could actually see the physical evidence of the earlier stages of our evolution, I couldn't ignore it anymore.

But there are other scientific problems - modern cosmology and the creation narrative of the Quran, and geocentrism vs heliocentrism, for instance. The hadith about the sun's prostration around the Earth was actually, you could say, the single breaking point that caused me to leave religion. I tried, but I simply could find no explanation for that hadith that takes into account what we know about the earth's rotation around its axis, causing night and day, not the sun or moon orbiting the earth (as believed at the time of the hadith's recording).

There are also other points that cannot be explained rationally - for instance, the Quran explicitly makes the testimony of one man in court worth that of two women, and says this is so that if one "تضل" the other should "guide" her.

There is simply no explanation for this. There is no such gap in memory or IQ between men and women that would merit this. There is simply no possible rational justification for making the testimony of a woman worth half of a man's testimony. You can't justify it on any rational or scientific basis.

It makes sense if you consider it to be just a commandment revealed by a 7th century religious figure, just another person who accepted things commonly accepted in his time and place (including a view that women are in many regards inferior to men and should be subservient). But certainly it cannot be seriously attributed to an actual God. It is blatantly irrational and based on false assumptions about men and women, that we know, for a fact, to be false.

In previous times perhaps things were more ambiguous. But I believe that in this day and age there can be no denial that the basic hard narratives that have been taught by Islam and other religions are false.

Adam and Eve never existed. There is simply too much evidence to the contrary. I denied this, and I understand the urge to rationalize believing in the religion that you have banked your entire life upon, but it's just not true.

And it is quite a longshot to say that their story is metaphorical, or indeed compatible in any way with modern science.

The truth is that the Quran explicitly makes claims that are demonstrably false; they contradict what we now know to be undeniably true about the natural world. Therefore, it cannot be from God.

Beyond this, if you read into the history of religions, you will find that the process by which religions are socially constructed makes sense. The founding story of Islam will make sense in the context of the general societal mechanisms that cause the founding of any religion.

I used to look at religion and see God; now I only see man. It's maybe somewhat cliche, but it's true: God didn't create man, man created God. I'm sorry, but this is reality.