The Masked Arab

Hello world (one of the rare times that expression's used outside of beginner programming lessons).

That's right. Still alive (thankfully).

If my calculations are correct, today marks 10 years to the day the channel was started or when I first uploaded a video (one of those!)

So it feels like the right time to offer a long overdue update.

Firstly, apologies for basically going into the equivalent of a YouTube coma.

I never really saw the channel as something that I would make into a job as I only wished to tackle some of the most commonly used arguments from apologetics and that would be it, leave the channel as a reference for anyone looking for counter arguments to the most popular arguments in favour of Islam.
I was never really interested in offering any constant commentary on the topic as I felt there's only so much I can put out without resorting to repeating myself.

I did however have more content that I had planned to put out (and maybe I still will one day). But life has been busy for me these years and interests sometimes change. For me, I'd done the research and found Islam to be false, wanted to share what I learnt and then let everyone make their own choices based on what they find convincing. While I still find religious-based discussions fascinating to some degree, I have a lot more topics I'm more interested in these days and hence it makes it difficult for me to commit whatever little free time I get to getting those videos in my to do list done.

Anyway, I hope everyone reading this (whatever your background or belief) is in a good place.

I'll make this into an "Ask me anything" and I'll answer all questions replying to this post for the next week. I was asked to do one of those long ago but never got to it.

Ask at your peril. Maybe some of my responses won't be to your liking! But hopefully we can all move past an often toxic internet and always give the benefit of the doubt to people we disagree with and look more at what we have in common rather than what we pushes us apart.

Enough of the philosophy & virtue signalling. Take care all, and I'll be checking comments every day or two for the next week.

Ciao.

9 months ago | [YT] | 114

The Masked Arab

It’s been a while since I’ve wanted to update everyone on my MIA (Missing in action) status. Also, two days ago the channel turned 5 years old, wanted to time this message for then but bloody slow as usual!

First, quick answers to some FAQs:

Are you still alive? Yes.

Have you retired from the channel? No.

Do you still plan on producing videos? Yes.

Do you want me to set you up with my hot cousin? Yes.

I’ll try to keep this brief. When you first realise that your religion is false, you might go one of two ways, you might think “Oh! Interesting… Now I can enjoy the finer things in life and not hold a prejudice against people who have different beliefs or lifestyles,” or you may go down my route which was “I can’t believe I was told this lie for so long. People need to know the truth here and it may even help us reduce sectarianism and violence in our regions of the world if people can understand they’re fighting over nonsense.” - I fell into the second category following my apostasy, and to some extent, I still do.

However, after a few years, your interests and attention may shift into other areas, that's normal. My YouTube feed is no longer filled with videos discussing theology, I’ve rarely been logging in to my TMA social media accounts as I’ve preferred my own personal accounts where I see other stuff that keeps me entertained.

I think the only reason I wish to continue doing a few more videos for this channel is out of a feeling of obligation that what I do helps people. It helps Muslims open up their minds a little about the possibility that their faith may not be perfect and hence may not be something worth discriminating over others for, hampering your everyday life for, or worse harming others for.
It's also useful I'm told for those who are still passionate about fighting back against theology and wishing to be much more active in helping counter the incredibly well-funded spread of Islamic ideology, especially Salafism.

So I do have more videos I plan to do. I’ve already scripted the women and Islam series (finished scripting that over a year ago to be frank), but I’ve yet to translate it to other language, record audio, edit video etc.

I plan on doing one on the so-called mathematical miracle of the Quran, the signs of judgment day arguments and a few others too. Basically, if I feel there's something I can add to a particular topic that hasn't been highlighted very well already, I'd like to be able to produce a video on it.

The reason why I’m getting super slow in producing content is primarily a little laziness and also some disinterest. I can make excuses about my busy work schedule (which is still insane hours), my commitments to ensuring I can be a decent parent and put a lot of time in for the kids and their studies and hobbies. But ultimately, I find it hard to find the motivation to do certain parts of the video production process in my workflow.
I still enjoy the research part (which is great), I enjoy the scripting in whatever language I’ve done most of the research in, I don’t enjoy the translating part, I don’t enjoy the voice recording part (though can’t get around that!), I don’t enjoy the voice track editing part, and I’m ok with the rest.

So here’s a shout for a little help if you have the time and enthusiasm to help me speed up the process of producing content. You will need to be bilingual Arabic-English. I may need your help with some tedious translations of scripts and a little audio editing too! If you feel you can help me out with this, DM me on Twitface.

My long term plans are to try and keep my main channel as some form of online video library. I don’t want to create content on there unless it’s a direct resource for counter-dawah apologetics.

Maybe once I get through the ones I want to focus on, I might be able to kick start my second channel TMA
www.youtube.com/channel/UCGKY... Longer-term I’ll likely start up a new channel which focuses on entertaining education (edutainment) on a very wide range of topics (sports, politics, history etc). That will be called “Explained in Five” where I try to explain things in 5 minutes, no more, no less.
Here's the link if you're interested, though I won't be talking as much about Islam there, so have different expectations! www.youtube.com/channel/UCCva...
Anyway, that’s me trying to keep it “brief” and failing! So I’ll probably struggle with that 5 minute explanation channel concept and regularly go way over!

Look forward to hearing from some of you peeps in my DMs, and hopefully as a result, I'll be able to have a bit more production in 2020.

Ciao.

5 years ago | [YT] | 583