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That's a good one.

I wrote a reply to a reddit thread a while back that covered this. The thread was about a Muslim comrade being told he can't both be Muslim and a Marxist:

Because they're rife with "new atheist" mindset from the early 2000s. Christopher Hitchens was a former Trot and was a willing agent of the empire during that time waging "war" against "Islam" under the cloak that he wasn't attacking people, but their "religion". People regularly misunderstand, or deliberately chose to reinterpret what Marx was talking about in Marx's Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does n ot make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man -- state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

In the first paragraph Marx establishes a few things:

1. Religion does not make man.
2. Man does not sit outside the world, meaning, he is not separate from the State or Society at large.
3. The state and society produce religion. It is "inverted consciousness of the world", meaning religion is itself a reflection of the conditions under which we live.
4. Religion is the popular understanding of the world, and how it works, and it's history. It's worth remembering that in Marx's time, State and Religion still had very tight bonds. The idea of the "secular" state was still emerging.

He goes on to describe religion as "the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality". By "fantastic realization" Marx identifies religion as a "fantasy", but he then identifies that this "fantasy" is constructed out of the "human essence", in other words, out of all the internal aspects and relations between humans, who have "not yet acquired any true reality". He is saying that religion exists as the absence of collective truth and understanding of our own reality.

Marx then makes this simple observation: "The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion." What he is identifying here is a twofold misalignment with reality. To struggle against religion, something that is created through a collective misunderstanding of the workings of our reality, which in Haggle's time was deeply connected with the state, is to miss the forest for the trees. The State, and the states chosen theology, acts to cloud peoples perception of how the world works which, in turn protects the State, and reinforces the existence of religion. To struggle against religion is to then an indirect struggle against the state.

The paragraph is the one that is the most quoted, and without the above context is often misunderstood. It begins:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

People suffer and the hands of the State, a state which creates the conditions for religion to develop. It is natural for people to seek relief from this suffering, and seek comfort from it. Religion provides that comfort, and relief. It lives, however, in contradiction with itself. It is created by real suffering, but it protests against that same suffering which creates it. Without the ability to recognize the State as the source of suffering, which religion often masks in various ways through its own teachings about the world, the cycle of suffering can only continue. So will the development of the people's protest against it. Like opium, religion can only mask the suffering, it can never abolish the conditions that are the source of that suffering, as Marx explains in the next part of this paragraph:

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

It's important to understand what the vale of tears is in this section. The vale of tears is a phrase from Christianity, which refers to the tribulations of life that Christian doctrine says are left behind only when one leaves the world and enters Heaven. He points out that, to call for the abolition of religion is again, to indirectly abolish the conditions which create religion. This is the part that many atheists miss, especially those of the new-atheist camp. The next paragraph makes this very clear:

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

The first line of this paragraph illustrates that, the goal of the critique of religion isn't to remove the opium from the masses, and allow them to suffer under the same bondage without it. It is to reveal the chains in which they are bound to. By adopting Marxist philosophy, you have begone the process of dissolution, since Marxism demands a rigerious investigation into the reality we live in. In the Christian context, there is a notion that everything you do in this life is in service of entering the Kingdom of Heaven, which by its very nature means there is very little room for reason to improve the conditions of this life for others. What constitutes the requirements for entry into Heaven changes with the times and places Christianity is practiced. Which is how you end up with the things like Prosperity Gospel and Liberation Theology. They are expressions of the same conditions and contradictions underwhich we currently live.

Many people take this section as the call to action by Marx. It gets distorted from a critique of religion broadly as the expression of the explosive conditions maintained by the state, into a critique of the unwashed masses for believing in an "illusory happiness", a critique of the people who the state under educates and and exploits deliberately, hamstringing their ability to see through the illusion.

The real call to action is in the final paragraph:

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

Here, Marx is establishing two points of change, one which will take place over the long road of history, and one which is a task that needs to happen now. The immediate task, as marks puts it, is "to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked", which means that once we illuminate that the suffering of people happens at the behest of man, not God, then we can illuminate the ills of man more clearly. Which leads us to Marx's final conclusion:

Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

For a very long time the lines between religion and law, as well as theology and politics were heavily blurred. The divine right of kings is explicitly this contradiction in action. None of this excludes you, a Muslim, from being a Marxist in my view. In Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx had this to say about the emergence of a post wage-labor society:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.

I believe this also applies to the individual as well. You do not emerge as a fully formed Communist, but as a person who still holds in them the contradictions of capitalist society. This includes the contradictions of religion. You, as an individual may never fully contest with this contradictions, none of us will. However, your participation in the Marxist world view places you in service of history that eventually will abolish the conditions which require the masses to be soothed by religion.