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Join date : 2011-06-29
 | | Subject: Women Tell of Coverting to Islam 2 Mon Jul 11, 2011 2:49 pm | |
| | Maryam Jameelah(formerly Margaret Marcus) | Q: Would you kindly tell us how your
interest in Islam began?
A: I was Margaret (Peggy) Marcus. As a small
child I possessed a keen interest in music and was particularly fond of
the classical operas and symphonies considered high culture in the West.
Music was my favorite subject in school in which I always earned the
highest grades. By sheer chance, I happened to hear Arabic music over
the radio which so much pleased me that I was determined to hear more. I
would not leave my parents in peace until my father finally took me to
the Syrian section in New York City where I bought a stack of Arabic
recordings. My parents, relatives and neighbors thought Arabic and its
music dreadfully weird and so distressing to their ears that whenever I
put on my recordings, they demanded that I close all the doors and
windows in my room lest they be disturbed! After I embraced Islam in
1961, I used to sit enthralled by the hour at the mosque in New York,
listening to tape-recordings of Tilawat chanted by the celebrated
Egyptian Qari, Abdul Basit. But on Jumha Salat (Friday Prayers), the
Imam did not play the tapes. We had a special guest that day. A short,
very thin and poorly-dressed black youth, who introduced himself to us
as a student from Zanzibar, recited Surah ar-Rahman. I never heard such
glorious Tilawat even from Abdul Basit! He possessed such a voice of
gold; surely Hazrat Bilal must have sounded much like him!
I traced the beginning of my interest in
Islam to the age of ten. While attending a reformed Jewish Sunday
school, I became fascinated with the historical relationship between the
Jews and the Arabs. From my Jewish textbooks, I learned that Abraham was
the father of the Arabs as well as the Jews. I read how centuries later
when, in medieval Europe, Christian persecution made their lives
intolerable, the Jews were welcomed in Muslim Spain and that it was the
magnanimity of this same Arabic Islamic civilization which stimulated
Hebrew culture to reach its highest peak of achievement.
Totally unaware of the true nature of
Zionism, I naively thought that the Jews were returning to Palestine to
strengthen their close ties of kinship in religion and culture with
their Semitic cousins. Together I believed that the Jews and the Arabs
would cooperate to attain another Golden Age of culture in the Middle
East.
Despite my fascination with the study of
Jewish history, I was extremely unhappy at the Sunday school. At this
time I identified myself strongly with the Jewish people in Europe, then
suffering a horrible fate under the Nazis and I was shocked that none of
my fellow classmates nor their parents took their religion seriously.
During the services at the synagogue, the children used to read comic
strips hidden in their prayer books and laugh to scorn at the rituals.
The children were so noisy and disorderly that the teachers could not
discipline them and found it very difficult to conduct the
classes.
At home the atmosphere for religious
observance was scarcely more congenial. My elder sister detested the
Sunday school so much that my mother literally had to drag her out of
bed in the mornings and it never went without the struggle of tears and
hot words. Finally my parents were exhausted and let her quit. On the
Jewish High Holy Days instead of attending synagogue and fasting on Yom
Kippur, my sister and I were taken out of school to attend family
picnics and parties in fine restaurants. When my sister and I convinced
our parents how miserable we both were at the Sunday school they joined
an agnostic, humanist organization known as the Ethical Culture
Movement.
The Ethical Culture Movement was founded late
in the 19th century by Felix Alder. While studying for rabbinate, Felix
Alder grew convinced that devotion to ethical values as relative and
man-made, regarding any supernaturalism or theology as irrelevant,
constituted the only religion fit for the modern world. I attended the
Ethical Culture Sunday School each week from the age of eleven until I
graduated at fifteen. Here I grew into complete accord with the ideas of
the movement and regarded all traditional, organized religions with
scorn.
When I was eighteen years old I became a
member of the local Zionist youth movement known as the Mizrachi
Hatzair. But when I found out what the nature of Zionism was, which made
the hostility between Jews and Arabs irreconcilable, I left several
months later in disgust. When I was twenty and a student at New York
University, one of my elective courses was entitled Judaism in Islam. My
professor, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Katsh, the head of the department of
Hebrew Studies there, spared no efforts to convince his students--all
Jews, many of whom aspired to become rabbis--that Islam was derived from
Judaism. Our textbook, written by him, took each verse from the Quran,
painstakingly tracing it to its allegedly Jewish source. Although his
real aim was to prove to his students the superiority of Judaism over
Islam, he convinced me diametrically of the opposite.
I soon discovered that Zionism was merely a
combination of the racist, tribalistic aspects of Judaism. Modern
secular nationalistic Zionism was further discredited in my eyes when I
learned that few, if any, of the leaders of Zionism were observant Jews
and that perhaps nowhere is Orthodox, traditional Judaism regarded with
such intense contempt as in Israel. When I found nearly all important
Jewish leaders in America supporters for Zionism, who felt not the
slightest twinge of conscience because of the terrible injustice
inflicted upon the Palestinian Arabs, I could no longer consider myself
a Jew at heart.
One morning in November 1954, Professor
Katsh, during his lecture, argued with irrefutable logic that the
monotheism taught by Moses (peace be upon him) and the Divine Laws
reveled to him were indispensable as the basis for all higher ethical
values. If morals were purely man-made, as the Ethical Culture and other
agnostic and atheistic philosophies taught, then they could be changed
at will, according to mere whim, convenience or circumstance. The result
would be utter chaos leading to individual and collective ruin. Belief
in the Hereafter, as the Rabbis in the Talmud taught, argued Professor
Katsh, was not mere wishful thinking but a moral necessity. Only those,
he said, who firmly believed that each of us will be summoned by God on
Judgement Day to render a complete account of our life on earth and
rewarded or punished accordingly, will possess the self-discipline to
sacrifice transitory pleasure and endure hardships and sacrifice to
attain lasting good.
It was in Professor Katsh's class that I met
Zenita, the most unusual and fascinating girl I have ever met. The first
time I entered Professor Katsh's class, as I looked around the room for
an empty desk in which to sit, I spied two empty seats, on the arm of
one, three big beautifully bound volumes of Yusuf Ali's English
translation and commentary of the Holy Quran. I sat down right there,
burning with curiosity to find out to whom these volumes belonged. Just
before Rabbi Katsh's lecture was to begin, a tall, very slim girl with
pale complexion framed by thick auburn hair, sat next to me. Her
appearance was so distinctive, I thought she must be a foreign student
from Turkey, Syria or some other Near Eastern country. Most of the other
students were young men wearing the black cap of Orthodox Jewry, who
wanted to become rabbis. We two were the only girls in the class. As we
were leaving the library late that afternoon, she introduced herself to
me. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family, her parents had migrated to
America from Russia only a few years prior to the October Revolution in
1917 to escape persecution. I noted that my new friend spoke English
with the precise care of a foreigner. She confirmed these speculations,
telling me that since her family and their friends speak only Yiddish
among themselves, she did not learn any English until after attending
public school. She told me that her name was Zenita Liebermann but
recently, in an attempt to Americanize themselves, her parents had
changed their name from "Liebermann" to "Lane." Besides being thoroughly
instructed in Hebrew by her father while growing up and also in school,
she said she was now spending all her spare time studying Arabic.
However, with no previous warning, Zenita dropped out of class and
although I continued to attend all of his lectures to the conclusion of
the course, Zenita never returned. Months passed and I had almost
forgotten about Zenita when suddenly she called and begged me to meet
her at the Metropolitan Museum and go with her to look at the special
exhibition of exquisite Arabic calligraphy and ancient illuminated
manuscripts of the Quran. During our tour of the museum, Zenita told me
how she had embraced Islam with two of her Palestinian friends as
witnesses.
I inquired, "Why did you decide to become a
Muslim?" She then told me that she had left Professor Katsh's class when
she fell ill with a severe kidney infection. Her condition was so
critical, she told me, her mother and father had not expected her to
survive. "One afternoon while burning with fever, I reached for my Holy
Quran on the table beside by bed and began to read and while I recited
the verses, it touched me so deeply that I began to weep and then I knew
I would recover. As soon as I was strong enough to leave my bed, I
summoned two of my Muslim friends and took the oath of the "Shahadah" or
Confession of Faith."
Zenita and I would eat our meals in Syrian
restaurants where I acquired a keen taste for this tasty cooking. When
we had money to spend, we would order Couscous, roast lamb with rice or
a whole soup plate of delicious little meatballs swimming in gravy
scooped up with loaves of unleavened Arabic bread. And when we had
little to spend, we would eat lentils and rice, Arabic style, or the
Egyptian national dish of black broad beans with plenty of garlic and
onions called "Ful".
While Professor Katsh was lecturing thus, I
was comparing in my mind what I had read in the Old Testament and the
Talmud with what was taught in the Quran and Hadith and finding Judaism
so defective, I was converted to Islam.
Q: Were you scared that you might not be
accepted by the Muslims?
A: My increasing sympathy for Islam and
Islamic ideals enraged the other Jews I knew, who regarded me as having
betrayed them in the worst possible way. They used to tell me that such
a reputation could only result from shame of my ancestral heritage and
an intense hatred for my people. They warned me that even if I tried to
become a Muslim, I would never be accepted. These fears proved totally
unfounded as I have never been stigmatized by any Muslim because of my
Jewish origin. As soon as I became a Muslim myself, I was welcomed most
enthusiastically by all the Muslims as one of them.
I did not embrace Islam out of hatred for my
ancestral heritage or my people. It was not a desire so much to reject
as to fulfill. To me, it meant a transition from parochial to a dynamic
and revolutionary faith.
Q: Did your family object to your studying
Islam?
A: Although I wanted to become a Muslim as
far back as 1954, my family managed to argue me out of it. I was warned
that Islam would complicate my life because it is not, like Judaism and
Christianity, part of the American scene. I was told that Islam would
alienate me from my family and isolate me from the community. At that
time my faith was not sufficiently strong to withstand these pressures.
Partly as the result of this inner turmoil, I became so ill that I had
to discontinue college long before it was time for me to graduate. For
the next two years I remained at home under private medical care,
steadily growing worse. In desperation from 1957 - 1959 my parents
confined me both to private and public hospitals where I vowed that if
ever I recovered sufficiently to be discharged, I would embrace
Islam.
After I was allowed to return home, I
investigated all the opportunities for meeting Muslims in New York City.
It was my good fortune to meet some of the finest men and women anyone
could ever hope to meet. I also began to write articles for Muslim
magazines.
Q: What was the attitude of your parents and
friends after you became Muslim?
A: When I embraced Islam, my parents,
relatives and their friends regarded me almost as a fanatic, because I
could think and talk of nothing else. To them, religion is a purely
private concern which at the most perhaps could be cultivated like an
amateur hobby among other hobbies. But as soon as I read the Holy Quran,
I knew that Islam was no hobby but life itself!
Q: In what ways did the Holy Quran have an
impact on your life?
A: One evening I was feeling particularly
exhausted and sleepless, Mother came into my room and said she was about
to go to the Larchmont Public Library and asked me if there was any book
that I wanted? I asked her to look and see if the library had a copy of
an English translation of the Holy Quran. Just think, years of
passionate interest in the Arabs and reading every book in the library
about them I could lay my hands on but until now, I never thought to see
what was in the Holy Quran! Mother returned with a copy for me. I was so
eager, I literally grabbed it from her hands and read it the whole
night. There I also found all the familiar Bible stories of my
childhood.
In my eight years of primary school, four
years of secondary school and one year of college, I learned about
English grammar and composition, French, Spanish, Latin and Greek in
current use, Arithmetic, Geometry, Algebra, European and American
history, elementary science, Biology, music and art--but I had never
learned anything about God! Can you imagine I was so ignorant of God
that I wrote to my pen-friend, a Pakistani lawyer, and confessed to him
the reason why I was an atheist was because I couldn't believe that God
was really an old man with a long white beard who sat up on His throne
in Heaven. When he asked me where I had learned this outrageous thing, I
told him of the reproductions from the Sistine Chapel I had seen in
"Life" Magazine of Michelangelo's "Creation" and "Original Sin." I
described all the representations of God as an old man with a long white
beard and the numerous crucifixions of Christ I had seen with Paula at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But in the Holy Quran, I
read:
"Allah! There is no god but He,-the
Living, The Self-subsisting, Supporter of all. No slumber can seize Him
nor sleep. His are all things in the heavens and on earth. Who is thee
can intercede in His presence except as He permiteth? He knoweth what
(appeareth to His creatures as) before or after or behind them. Nor
shall they compass aught of His knowledge except as He willeth. His
Throne doth extend over the heavens and the earth, and He feeleth no
fatigue in guarding and preserving them for He is the Most High, the
Supreme (in glory)." (Quran S.2:255)
"But the Unbelievers,-their deeds are like
a mirage in sandy deserts, which the man parched with thirst mistakes
for water; until when he comes up to it, he finds Allah there, and Allah
will pay him his account: and Allah is swift in taking account. Or (the
unbelievers' state) is like the depths of darkness in a vast deep ocean,
overwhelmed with billow topped by billow, topped by (dark) clouds: depth
of darkness, one above another: if a man stretches out his hand, he can
hardly see it! for any to whom Allah giveth not light, there is no
light!" (Quran S.24: 39-40)
My first thought when reading the Holy Quran
- this is the only true religion - absolutely sincere, honest, not
allowing cheap compromises or hypocrisy.
In 1959, I spent much of my leisure time
reading books about Islam in the New York Public Library. It was there I
discovered four bulky volumes of an English translation of Mishkat ul-
Masabih. It was then that I learned that a proper and detailed
understanding of the Holy Quran is not possible without some knowledge
of the relevant Hadith. For how can the holy text correctly be
interpreted except by the Prophet to whom it was revealed?
Once I had studied the Mishkat, I began to
accept the Holy Quran as Divine revelation. What persuaded me that the
Quran must be from God and not composed by Muhammad (PBUH) was its
satisfying and convincing answers to all the most important questions of
life which I could not find elsewhere.
As a child, I was so mortally afraid of
death, particularly the thought of my own death, that after nightmares
about it, sometimes I would awaken my parents crying in the middle of
the night. When I asked them why I had to die and what would happen to
me after death, all they could say was that I had to accept the
inevitable; but that was a long way off and because medical science was
constantly advancing, perhaps I would live to be a hundred years old! My
parents, family, and all our friends rejected as superstition any
thought of the Hereafter, regarding Judgment Day, reward in Paradise or
punishment in Hell as outmoded concepts of by-gone ages. In vain I
searched all the chapters of the Old Testament for any clear and
unambiguous concept of the Hereafter. The prophets, patriarchs and sages
of the Bible all receive their rewards or punishments in this world.
Typical is the story of Job (Hazrat Ayub). God destroyed all his
loved-ones, his possessions, and afflicted him with a loathsome disease
in order to test his faith. Job plaintively laments to God why He should
make a righteous man suffer. At the end of the story, God restores all
his earthly losses but nothing is even mentioned about any possible
consequences in the Hereafter.
Although I did find the Hereafter mentioned
in the New Testament, compared with that of the Holy Quran, it is vague
and ambiguous. I found no answer to the question of death in Orthodox
Judaism, for the Talmud preaches that even the worst life is better than
death. My parents' philosophy was that one must avoid contemplating the
thought of death and just enjoy as best one can, the pleasures life has
to offer at the moment. According to them, the purpose of life is
enjoyment and pleasure achieved through self-expression of one's
talents, the love of family, the congenial company of friends combined
with the comfortable living and indulgence in the variety of amusements
that affluent America makes available in such abundance. They
deliberately cultivated this superficial approach to life as if it were
the guarantee for their continued happiness and good-fortune. Through
bitter experience I discovered that self-indulgence leads only to misery
and that nothing great or even worthwhile is ever accomplished without
struggle through adversity and self-sacrifice. From my earliest
childhood, I have always wanted to accomplish important and significant
things. Above all else, before my death I wanted the assurance that I
have not wasted life in sinful deeds or worthless pursuits. All my life
I have been intensely serious-minded. I have always detested the
frivolity which is the dominant characteristic of contemporary culture.
My father once disturbed me with his unsettling conviction that there is
nothing of permanent value and because everything in this modern age
accept the present trends inevitable and adjust ourselves to them. I,
however, was thirsty to attain something that would endure forever. It
was from the Holy Quran where I learned that this aspiration was
possible. No good deed for the sake of seeking the pleasure of God is
ever wasted or lost. Even if the person concerned never achieves any
worldly recognition, his reward is certain in the Hereafter. Conversely,
the Quran tells us that those who are guided by no moral considerations
other than expediency or social conformity and crave the freedom to do
as they please, no matter how much worldly success and prosperity they
attain or how keenly they are able to relish the short span of their
earthly life, will be doomed as the losers on Judgement Day. Islam
teaches us that in order to devote our exclusive attention to fulfilling
our duties to God and to our fellow-beings, we must abandon all vain and
useless activities which distract us from this end. These teachings of
the Holy Quran, made even more explicit by Hadith, were thoroughly
compatible with my temperament.
Q: What is your opinion of the Arabs after
you became a Muslim?
A: As the years passed, the realization
gradually dawned upon me that it was not the Arabs who made Islam great
but rather Islam had made the Arabs great. Were it not for the Holy
Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), the Arabs would be an obscure people today. And
were it not for the Holy Quran, the Arabic language would be equally
insignificant, if not extinct.
Q: Did you see any similarities between
Judaism and Islam?
A: The kinship between Judaism and Islam is
even stronger than Islam and Christianity. Both Judaism and Islam share
in common the same uncompromising monotheism, the crucial importance of
strict obedience to Divine Law as proof of our submission to and love of
the Creator, the rejection of the priesthood, celibacy and monasticism
and the striking similarity of the Hebrew and Arabic
language.
In Judaism, religion is so confused with
nationalism, one can scarcely distinguish between the two. The name
"Judaism" is derived from Judah-a tribe. A Jew is a member of the tribe
of Judah. Even the name of this religion connotes no universal spiritual
message. A Jew is not a Jew by virtue of his belief in the unity of God,
but merely because he happened to be born of Jewish parentage. Should he
become an outspoken atheist, he is no less "Jewish" in the eyes of his
fellow Jews.
Such a thorough corruption with nationalism
has spiritually impoverished this religion in all its aspects. God is
not the God of all mankind but the God of Israel. The scriptures are not
God's revelation to the entire human race but primarily a Jewish history
book. David and Solomon (peace be upon them) are not full-fledged
prophets of God but merely Jewish kings. With the single exception of
Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement), the holidays and festivals
celebrated by Jews, such as Hanukkah, Purim and Pesach, are of far
greater national than religious significance.
Q: Have you ever had the opportunity to talk
about Islam to the other Jews?
A: There is one particular incident which
really stands out in my mind when I had the opportunity to discuss Islam
with a Jewish gentleman. Dr. Shoreibah, of the Islamic Center in New
York, introduced me to a very special guest. After one Jumha Salat, I
went into his office to ask him some questions about Islam but before I
could even greet him with "Assalamu Alaikum", I was completely
astonished and surprised to see seated before him an ultra-orthodox
Chassidic Jew, complete with earlocks, broad-brimmed black hat, long
black silken caftan and a full flowing beard. Under his arm was a copy
of the Yiddish newspaper, "The Daily Forward". He told us that his name
was Samuel Kostelwitz and that he worked in New York City as a diamond
cutter. Most of his family, he said, lived in the Chassidic community of
Williamsburg in Brooklyn, but he also had many relatives and friends in
Israel. Born in a small Rumanian town, he had fled from the Nazi terror
with his parents to America just prior to the outbreak of the second
world-war. I asked him what had brought him to the mosque? He told us
that he had been stricken with intolerable grief ever since his mother
died 5 years ago. He had tried to find solace and consolation for his
grief in the synagogue but could not when he discovered that many of the
Jews, even in the ultra-orthodox community of Williamsburg, were
shameless hypocrites. His recent trip to Israel had left him more
bitterly disillusioned than ever. He was shocked by the irreligiousness
he found in Israel and he told us that nearly all the young sabras or
native-born Israelis are militant atheists. When he saw large herds of
swine on one of the kibbutzim (collective farms) he visited, he could
only exclaim in horror: "Pigs in a Jewish state! I never thought that
was possible until I came here! Then when I witnessed the brutal
treatment meted out to innocent Arabs in Israel, I know then that there
is no difference between the Israelis and the Nazis. Never, never in the
name of God, could I justify such terrible crimes!" Then he turned to
Dr. Shoreibah and told him that he wanted to become a Muslim but before
he took the irrevocable steps to formal conversion, he needed to have
more knowledge about Islam. He said that he had purchased from
Orientalia Bookshop, some books on Arabic grammar and was trying to
teach himself Arabic. He apologized to us for his broken English:
Yiddish was his native tongue and Hebrew, his second language. Among
themselves, his family and friends spoke only Yiddish. Since his reading
knowledge of English was extremely poor, he had no access to good
Islamic literature. However, with the aid of an English dictionary, he
painfully read "Introduction to Islam" by Muhammad
Hamidullah of Paris and praised this as the best book he had ever read.
In the presence of Dr. Shoreibah, I spent another hour with Mr.
Kostelwitz, comparing the Bible stories of the patriarchs and prophets
with their counterparts in the Holy Quran. I pointed out the
inconsistencies and interpolations of the Bible, illustrating my point
with Noah's alleged drunkenness, accusing David of adultery and Solomon
of idolatry (Allah Forbid) and how the Holy Quran raises all these
patriarchs to the status of genuine prophets of God and absolves them
from all these crimes. I also pointed out why it was Ismail and not
Isaac who God commanded Abraham to offer as sacrifice. In the Bible, God
tells Abraham: "Take thine son, thine only son whom thou lovest and
offer him up to Me as burnt offering." Now Ismail was born 13 years
before Isaac but the Jewish biblical commentators explain that away be
belittling Ismail's mother, Hagar, as only a concubine and not Abraham's
real wife so they say Isaac was the only legitimate son. Islamic
traditions, however, raise Hagar to the status of a full-fledged wife
equal in every respect to Sarah. Mr. Kostelwitz expressed his deepest
gratitude to me for spending so much time, explaining those truths to
him. To express this gratitude, he insisted on inviting Dr. Shoreibah
and me to lunch at the Kosher Jewish delicatessen where he always goes
to eat his lunch. Mr. Kostelwitz told us that he wished more than
anything else to embrace Islam but he feared he could not withstand the
persecution he would have to face from his family and friends. I told
him to pray to God for help and strength and he promised that he would.
When he left us, I felt privileged to have spoken with such a gentle and
kind person.
Q: What Impact did Islam have on your life
?
A: In Islam, my quest for absolute values
was satisfied. In Islam I found all that was true, good and beautiful
and that which gives meaning and direction to human life (and death);
while in other religions, the Truth is deformed, distorted, restricted
and fragmentary. If any one chooses to ask me how I came to know this, I
can only reply my personal life experience was sufficient to convince
me. My adherence to the Islamic faith is thus a calm, cool but very
intense conviction. I have, I believe, always been a Muslim at heart by
temperament, even before I knew there was such a thing as Islam. My
conversion was mainly a formality, involving no radical change in my
heart at all but rather only making official what I had been thinking
and yearning for many years.
Taken from The Islamic Bulletin, San Francisco, CA
94141-0186 |
<blockquote> | Afrah Alshaibani | May 2,
1996.
Ever since I can remember, my family attended
a non-denominational conservative Christian church (Church of Christ). I
grew up in the church, taught bible school and sang in the choir. As a
young teenager I began asking questions (as I think everyone does at one
point in their lives): Why was I a member of the Church of Christ and
not say Lutheran, Catholic or Methodist? If various churches are
teaching conflicting doctrine, how do we know which one is right? Are
they all right? Do `all paths lead to God' as I had heard some say?
Others say that as long as you are a good person it doesn't matter what
you believe - is that true?
After some soul searching I decided that I
did believe that there was an ultimate truth and in an attempt to find
that truth I began a comparison study of various churches. I decided
that I believed in the Bible and would join the church that best
followed the Bible. After a lengthy study, I decided to stay with the
Church of Christ, satisfied that its doctrines were biblically sound
(unaware at this stage that there could be various interpretations of
the Bible).
I spent a year at Michigan Christian College,
a small college affiliated with the Churches of Christ, but was not
challenged academically and so transferred to Western Michigan
University. Having applied late for student housing, I was placed in the
international dorm. Although my roommate was American, I felt surrounded
by strange people from strange places. It was in fact my first real
experience with cultural diversity and it scared me (having been raised
in a white, middle class, Christian community). I wanted to change dorms
but there wasn't anything available. I did really like my roommate and
decided to stick out the semester.
My roommate became very involved in the dorm
activities and got to know most everyone in the dorm. I however
performed with the marching band and spent most of my time with band
people. Marching season soon ended and finding myself with time on my
hands, I joined my roommate on her adventures around the dorm. It turned
out to be a wonderful, fascinating experience! There were a large number
of Arab men living in the dorm. They were charming, handsome, and a lot
of fun to be around. My roommate started dating one of them and we ended
up spending most of our time with the Arabs. I guess I knew they were
Muslims (although very few of them were practicing). We never
really discussed religion, we were just having fun.
The year passed and I had started seeing one
of the Arabs. Again, we were just enjoying each other's company and
never discussed our religious differences. Neither of us were practicing
at this time so it never really became an issue for us. I did, deep
down, feel guilty for not attending church, but I pushed it in the back
of my mind. I was having too much fun.
Another year passed and I was home for summer
vacation when my roommate called me with some very distressing news:
she'd become a Muslim!! I was horrified. She didn't tell me why she
converted, just that she had spent a lot of time talking with her
boyfriend's brother and it all made sense to her. After we hung up, I
immediately wrote her a long letter explaining that she was ruining her
life and to just give Christianity one more chance. That same summer my
boyfriend transferred to Azusa Pacific University in California. We
decided to get married and move to California together. Again, since
neither one were practicing, religion was not discussed.
Secretly I started reading books on Islam.
However I read books that were written by non-Muslims. One of the books
I read was Islam Revealed by Anis Sorosh. I felt guilty about my
friend's conversion. I felt that if I had been a better Christian, she
would have turned to the church rather than Islam. Islam was a man-made
religion, I believed, and filled with contradictions. After reading
Sorosh's book, I thought I could convert my friend and my husband to
Christianity.
At APU, my husband was required to take a few
religion courses. One day he came home from class and said: "The more I
learn about Christianity, the stronger my belief in Islam becomes." At
about this same time he started showing signs of wanting to practice his
religion again. Our problems began. We started talking about religion
and arguing about our different beliefs. He told me I should learn about
Islam and I told him I already knew everything I needed to know. I got
out Sorosh's book and told him I could never believe in Islam. My
husband is not a scholar by any stretch of the imagination, yet he had
an answer for everything I showed him in Sorosh's book. I was impressed
by his knowledge. He told me that if I really wanted to learn about
Islam it must be through Islamic sources. He bought a few books for
me from an Islamic bookstore and I started taking classes at a local
mosque. What a difference the Islam I learned about from Muslim sources
from the Islam I learned about from non-Muslims!
It was so difficult though when I actually
decided to convert. My pride stood in the way for awhile. How could I
admit to my husband and my friend that they were right all along? I felt
humiliated, embarrassed. Soon though, I could deny the truth no longer,
swallowed my pride, and alhamdulilah, embraced Islam - the best decision
I ever made.
A few things I want to say to the non-Muslim
reader:
- When I originally began my search for the
truth all those years ago, I made a few wrong assumptions. First, I
assumed that the truth is with Christianity only. It never occurred to
me at that time to look outside Christianity. Second, I assumed that
the Bible was the true Word of God. These were bad assumptions because
they prohibited me from looking at things objectively. When I began my
earnest study of Islam, I had to start at the very beginning, with no
preconceived ideas. I was not a Christian looking at Islam; I looked
at both Islam and Christianity (and many other religions) from the
point of view of an outsider. My advice to you is to be a critical
thinker and a critical reader.
- Another mistake that many people make when
talking about Islam is that they pick out a certain teaching and judge
the whole of Islam on that one point. For example, many people say
that Islam is prejudiced towards women because Islamic laws of
inheritance award the male twice as much as the female. What they fail
to learn, however, is that males have financial responsibilities in
Islam that females do not have. It is like putting a puzzle together:
until you have all the pieces in the right places, you cannot make a
statement about the picture, you cannot look at one little piece of
the puzzle and judge the whole picture.
- Many people said that the only reason I
converted was because of my husband. It is true that I studied Islam
because he asked me to - but I accepted Islam because it is the truth.
My husband and I are currently separated and plan to divorce in June,
insha' Allah. My faith in Islam has never been stronger than it is
now. I look forward to finding a practicing Muslim husband, insha'
Allah, and growing in my faith and practice. Being a good Muslim is my
number one priority.
May Allah lead all of us
closer to the truth. | </blockquote>
<blockquote> | Helena | Growing up in
a supposedly Christian, but in fact non-religious family, I never heard
the name of God being uttered, I never saw anyone pray and I learned
early on that the only reason for doing things was to benefit yourself.
We celebrated Christmas, Easter, Mid-summer and All Saints Day and even
though I never knew why, I never questioned it. It was part of being
Swedish. As a Christian (protestant) you can go through something called
confirmation when you are about 15 years of age. This is meant to be a
class to take to learn about your religion and then confirm your belief.
I wanted to do this to learn about Christianity so I was signed up for
this 3-week camp which was a combined golf-and confirmation camp. In the
mornings we had classes with a senile priest and our thoughts wandered
off to the upcoming game of golf. I didn't learn anything.
I went through high-school with a breeze. I
felt that nothing could harm me. My grades were the best possible and my
self confidence was at the top. Religion never came to my mind. I was
doing just fine. Everyone I knew that was "religious" had found "the
light" after being either depressed or very sick and they said that they
needed Jesus in their life to be able to live on. I felt that I could do
anything that I put my mind to and that religion only was an excuse to
hide from reality.
In college, I started thinking about the
meaning of life. I had a hard time accepting any religion because of all
the wars and problems relating to them. I made up my own philosophy. I
was convinced that some form of power created everything but I couldn't
say that it was God. God for me was the Christian image of an old man
with a long white beard and I knew that an old man could not have
created the universe! I believed in a life after death because I just
couldn't believe that justice wouldn't be served. I also believed that
everything happens for a reason. Due to my background and schooling I
was fooled to believe in Darwin's theory, since it is taught as a fact.
The more I thought about the meaning of life, the more depressed I
became, and I felt that this life is like a prison. I lost most of my
appetite for life.
I knew a lot about Buddhism and Hinduism
since I was interested in these things in school. We learned in detail
about their way of thinking and worship. I didn't know anything about
Islam. I remember my high-school text book in Religion showing how
Muslims pray. It was like a cartoon strip to show the movements but I
didn't learn about the belief. I was fed all the propaganda through mass
media and I was convinced that all Muslim men oppressed their wives and
hit their children. They were all violent and didn't hesitate to
kill.
In my last year of college I had a big
passion for science and I was ready to hit the working scene. An
international career or at least some international experience was
needed to improve my English and get an advantage over fellow job
hunters. I ended up in Boston and was faced with four Muslims. At that
point I didn't know who Muhammad was and I didn't know that Allah was
the same god as "God". I started asking questions and reading books, but
most importantly, I started socializing with Muslims. I never had any
friends from another country before (let alone another religion). All
the people that I knew were Swedish. The Muslims that I met were
wonderful people. They accepted me right away and they never forced
anything on me. They were more generous to me than my own family. Islam
seemed to be a good system of life and I acknowledged the structure and
stability it provided but I was not convinced it was for me.
One of my problems was that science
contradicted religion (at least from what I knew about Christianity). I
read the book "The Bible, The Quran and Science" by Maurice
Bucaille and all of my scientific questions were answered! Here was a
religion that was in line with modern science. I felt excited but it was
still not in my heart.
I had a period of brain storming when I was
thinking over all the new things I learnt. I felt my heart softening and
I tried to imagine a life as a Muslim. I saw a humble life full of
honesty, generosity, stability, peace, respect and kindness. Most of all
I saw a life with a MEANING. I knew I had to let go of my ego and humble
myself before something much more powerful than myself.
Twice, I was asked the question "What is
stopping you from becoming Muslim?". The first time I panicked and my
brain was blocked. The second time I thought for awhile to come up with
any excuse. There was none so I said the shahada,
Al-Hamdulillah. | </blockquote> | |
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