By Dr. Magda Mahmoud
Media Scholar•Author•Strategic Communication Expert
Editor’s Note
This English edition is published at the request of Professor Jeffrey Lang. After his wife read the Arabic article to him, he expressed his wish to read the complete series in English.
Commenting on the series, Professor Jeffrey Lang said: “The author understands me. Most people don’t realize that the books are a continuation, but the author does. Smart lady.”
This translation is published in appreciation of Professor Jeffrey Lang’s remarkable intellectual journey and his enduring contribution to the dialogue between reason, faith, and the search for truth.
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Losing My Religion… How Can a Person Lose Himself While Believing He Has Found Everything?
A person may possess money, status, and fame, live in a beautiful home, and be surrounded by every form of comfort, yet still wake up every morning feeling that something is missing—something he cannot see with his eyes, but can feel weighing heavily on his heart.
He may smile in front of people while carrying within him a silence that no one can hear.
This is the state that Jeffrey Lang attempts to approach in his book Losing My Religion—not merely as a religious crisis, but as a human crisis experienced by millions of people in a world that continues to advance while human beings increasingly experience loneliness and confusion.
Lang did not mean by “losing religion” that a person abandons his faith or stops going to places of worship. He meant something much deeper.
A person may lose meaning while still praying. He may grow distant from God while continuing to utter His name with his tongue, because the real problem does not begin when the words disappear, but when the presence of the heart disappears.
Jeffrey Lang believes that one of the most dangerous things that has happened to modern humanity is that people have begun to measure themselves by what they possess rather than by who they are.
Value has come to be measured by bank accounts, numbers of followers, positions, and the images people publish of their lives, while the value of honesty, serenity, compassion, and contentment has declined.
And as time passes, life becomes filled with noise while becoming increasingly empty of meaning.
He pauses at a painful question: Why are rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide rising in some of the most advanced and affluent societies?
He does not offer a single answer, but he believes that if a person learns how to create things without knowing why he is living, he will continue to feel empty no matter how many achievements he accomplishes.
Science gives us the means, but it does not give us the purpose.
Technology shortens distances, but it cannot fill the emptiness created by the absence of meaning.
One of the most beautiful ideas he discusses is that a person does not die only when his heart stops beating. He may also die inwardly while continuing to live his daily life.
He walks, works, laughs, and talks, yet he has lost his passion, his sense of wonder, and his relationship with himself and with his Creator.
Here, religion, in Lang’s view, is not merely a collection of commandments and prohibitions. It is the force that restores the soul to the heart and gives a person the feeling that he is part of a mission greater than the limits of his short life.
For this reason, he emphasizes that the Qur’an does not address human beings as machines designed merely to produce and consume. It addresses them as souls that need nourishment just as the body needs food.
That is why the Qur’an repeatedly calls upon human beings to reflect, remember, humble themselves, and seek tranquility.
For when a person becomes preoccupied with everything except himself, he may lose himself without even realizing it.
Jeffrey Lang also warns against a dangerous illusion experienced by many people: the illusion of postponing real life.
A person says, “I will rest when I have accumulated enough money,” or “when I reach a certain position,” or “when I grow older.”
Yet each time he reaches his goal, he discovers that the goal has opened the door to another goal.
And so he keeps running without knowing where he is going.
Success itself becomes an endless race, while the heart continues to wait for a moment of peace that will not come until a person understands why he was created and where he is going.
Perhaps the message repeated throughout the pages of the book is that a person does not need a new religion; rather, he needs to rediscover the religion that awakens his heart and frees his soul from servitude to material things. Faith is not an escape from life.
It is the path that gives life meaning.
It makes work an act of worship, knowledge a mission, success a means rather than an end, and hardship a doorway to maturity rather than a reason for despair.
Jeffrey Lang does not write in this book only about Muslims, nor does he write only about the West.
He writes about the human being, wherever he may be.
He writes about that heart that searches for tranquility in the marketplace but does not find it; searches for it in fame but does not find it; searches for it in power but does not find it.
Then, perhaps too late, the person discovers that the peace he had spent his life pursuing outside himself had been waiting for him from the very beginning—within him, on the day he came to truly know his Lord.
Perhaps the deepest message Jeffrey Lang wanted to leave us with is that a person’s loss does not begin on the day he moves away from religion.
It begins on the day he moves away from himself.
At that moment, everything around him becomes greater than what is within him: work, money, positions, noise, and the endless race.
Until he forgets the one question he was created to answer:
Who am I? And why am I here?
Humanity has managed to reach the moon, to compress the world into a small screen, and to increase life expectancy.
Yet we remain unable to purchase a single moment of genuine tranquility or manufacture lasting peace for the human heart.
Because tranquility is not a human invention.
It is a divine gift, granted by God to those who know Him, find peace in Him, and become certain that the value of life is not measured by what we possess, but by what we carry within our hearts.
For this reason, Jeffrey Lang was not, at the end of his journey, searching for new answers.
He was searching for a new heart.
A heart that sees the world as it truly is: a path, not a homeland; a means, not an end; a test, not a permanent residence.
And when he found that heart, he realized that the greatest discovery of his life was not the discovery of an idea.
It was the discovery of God.
Perhaps all of us, regardless of how different our paths and experiences may be, will one day arrive at the same truth: A person may lose his way in the world and eventually find it again.
But if he loses his way to God, he will never truly find himself, no matter how much power or success he possesses.
And in our next journey, we will not read another book. Instead, we will stand before the entire experience itself, to discover how the journey of a mind searching for proof was transformed into the journey of a heart that found certainty—and how Jeffrey Lang became a witness to the truth that:
A sincere mind does not lead away from God… but leads toward Him.
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