Karima
Eight years ago I met my former husband in North Africa. We fell in love and decided to live together in Holland. He is Muslim but I did not really see him practising anything except for Ramadan. I wanted to marry him and have children together. I understand Muslims want to bring up their children in an Islamic way so I started to read about Islam. I found it important to know much about this religion so I also did Ramadan together with my husband. In this time I also took some Arabic lessons, the teacher had a lot of knowledge about Islam so I could ask him a lot of questions.
I still was afraid aboutIslam,
Dutch people believe Islam is a violent religion. But the more I read about it the more I felt good about it. I was brought up Catholic, go to church at least one time every week and do a lot of things inside of the church. However the last years I have not felt at my place in the Catholic religion, it seemed old fashioned and far away from my normal life. In Islam I found answers to the questions of my daily life. For me it is a more practical and modern religion.
When my husband finally wanted to marry (this was more because otherwise we couldn’t stay in a hotel in his country together than for something else) I also decided to do the Shahada.
I didn’t know before they would ask me some questions and I was surprised by the question: Do you think Jesus is the son of God? Of course not, I never believed that this is symbolic, it means you are close to God because you are a prophet. I never see this literally. After three years our marriage ended and there I was a Dutch Muslim woman alone. How I can be a good Muslim with only a few Muslim girlfriends around? How I can find a good Muslim husband? Why I decided to become Muslim? Why I not just marry a nice Dutch man, Muslim or not Muslim?
This was a very difficult time in which I prayed a lot. And I feel I get support from God, I feel I decided for myself to become Muslim not for my husband. Now I see this time as a test of my religion, I am very happy, I search for support in praying to God because he gives me answers. Not long after this I found a new husband.A man who is very serious about Islam.
Who, like me, still needs to learn a lot butwho
also can help and support me and live with me in an Islamic way. He gives me new energy to study more about Islam.
I always say religion is something in which you believe, you shouldn’t need to ask for proof because then it is not religion but a fact. But God is everywhere and he support me in my life, I had some difficult times but he never gave me more then I can handle. I have one other very strong example in which God directly communicated with me:
After five months of pregnancy our baby died, the doctors couldn’t hear any heartbeat and they sent me home to come back two days later for the delivery. I didn’t want to loose our baby, I thought it was better he stayed inside me, dead or alive, this is our baby nobody can touch him. I talk about him because I was sure it was a boy, I never see myself with a baby daughter. In these difficult days I prayed a lot, in one of these prayers I suddenly saw a girl about 4 years old playing on a green hill (like in the Teletubbies) and I am sure this is our daughter. She was very beautiful and happily playing. Then I heard or understand there is somebody behind the hill, an old man, I did not see but feel this. This man told me I shouldn’t worry he would take care of our daughter. After this I was not stressed anymore for the delivery, already our daughter was with God. It makes me feel quiet. After the delivery I was not surprised our baby was a girl, already I was sure for this.
In this relatively short time I am a practising Muslim I have three moments in which God directly helped me. Although my daily life can be very busy and stressful I know I can give everything in the hands of God, Islam.
Holy Quran 31:3A
guidance and a mercy for the doers of goodness.
ShezreenMubarak ,
What moved me to embrace Islam My family are Roman Catholic but my mother doesn’t practise as she felt oppressed by it as a child in school. So she never got me christened but she planned to get me christened as a Protestant... I believed in God and I had a go at reading the Bible and listened to the stories at school (I went to a mixed school; not one of those strict Catholic ones with the statues etc like my mum went to) but I was never settled and I always wanted to be something else. In school I wasn’t accepted by the “popular” group and I always tried to be individual and different, on the whole I felt confused and I hated myself. We had religious education lessons in school but we were never taught the truth, we were taught that Islam was a religion for Asian people and the Bible is our book and the Qur’an is theirs. Still I enjoyed the Islamic parts more than the others. Then when I was only thirteen, I started a pen friendship with a boy in Pakistan, he was nineteen and Muslim and my mother wasn’t to keen on the idea as I was very young at the time and she was worried that because he was Muslim, he might be pushy about his religion in the same way the people were in her school. But I saw that he was so different and so polite, he showed me that Islam wasn’t just a religion for Asian and Black people (like they said in school), it was a religion for everybody, and slowly I started changing my ways (eating, dressing etc) and Alhamdulillah when I was sixteen she gave us permission to get married, I did the Shahada then too and now I’m happy with my life, I don’t feel sad and confused anymore and I don’t hate myself now. When I reverted, I didn’t know much about Islam, and even though I learned more afterwards, I never came across anything that I’m not happy with or not sure about. Islam is the perfect way of life. Once a man who reverted to Islam was on TV and he said that when you become Muslim, you get a feeling that you have ‘come home’, and I really agree with that. Now my mother is happy about me becoming a Muslim, she was against it at first but after we went to Pakistan and met his family she started getting used to it. She didn’t become a Muslim though, Insha Allah one day.
Holy Quran 40:54A
guidance and a reminder to the men of understanding.
Maryam
In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate! My Journey to Allah
I always feel somewhat tongue-tied whenever anyone asks me why or how I ended up embracing the religion of Islam. How do you fit a life-time of seeking God into a few sentences? The most truthful answer I can give is that I believe God has called me to Him and asked me to follow His Messenger Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of God be upon him.
I was born in Melbourne and raised in a Baha’i family; myparents both converts
to a religion which originally began as a breakaway Islamic revival sect before evolving into an independent religious movement. I grew up believing in God and wanting to make the world a better place. This was the beginning of my Muslim journey, even if I didn’t know it back then.
Conversion, I once read, is not a single event: it’s a lifetime process. It has peaks and troughs, leaps forward and steps backward. There may have been a moment when I first became conscious of my duty to submit to God and follow His Messenger, but my first tender steps towards my Beloved Creator began way before my adulthood.
As a teenager I was an active Baha’i, I prayed and fasted regularly and kept to a fairly strict code of personal morality. I was a normal teenager, of course, and enjoyed going to the movies and gossiping on the phone with my girlfriends. But I also did volunteer work within the religious organisation, and it was during my ‘youth year of service’ that I experienced a brief lifting of the veil in what seemed like an amazing burst of other-worldly love. During an intense prayer session in which I had devoted my life to God, He grasped my soul and gently flooded me with His tender loving mercy.
I developed an intense urge to study Arabic and enrolled in a course the next year. This brought me into contact with Muslims and I quickly became interested in the religion ‘behind’ the language. As a Baha’i I believed that the Prophet Muhammad was sent by God, and that the Qur’an was His Word, but now I began to learn what Muslims themselves had to say about their religion. Instead of Islam being a legalistic religion encrusted with outdated rules and regulations, I began to see it as a living faith with the ability to spiritually enrich the lives of those who truly sought to implement it. One of my teachers had a quiet humility for which I longed. Through him, by the will of the All-Merciful, I began to see Islam as a peaceful, beautiful and gentle religion. My inner world was thrown into turmoil as I began to contemplate leaving the religion of my parents and heeding the inner call of God.
It took me a number of years to finally come to terms with the reality that I wanted to be a Muslim, during which I developed a mental depression which brought me to the edge of the abyss. A great Muslim called al-Ghazali once wrote that depression is one method that the Beloved chooses to bring His servants to Him, and for me this was true. Becoming conscious of my calling to Islam meant alienating myself from my perplexed family, struggling with the collective sins of a less-than-perfect Muslim community, and finding my spiritual feet like a new baby. It was a humbling experience: I went from being a knowledgeable Baha’i, active in the religion’s organisational structure, to being shown how to wash myself and pray. More than once I faltered in my new baby steps and fled to the safety of the comfortable old world that I knew. I even rejoined the Baha’i organisation, after quitting it for a year, but could not make myself feel happy there.
Finally, three years ago, I surrendered myself to God and accepted Islam as my religion. I took the scarf as a symbol of my Muslim identity and from that point on began to implement the teachings of the Qur’an and my beloved Prophet Muhammad in my life. In answer to a half-spoken prayer, God filled my life with wonderful sisters and brothers who help me walk along this path: He is the Generous! I still struggle with the trials of life, but feel I have found my spiritual home and a Muslim community which provides me with the opportunity to give a little of myself.
All praisebe
to God, the Lord of all the worlds! Holy Quran 47:17And
(as for) those who follow the right direction, He increases them in guidance and gives them their guarding (against evil).
Ibrahim
A time comes in everyone’s life, or at least I hope it comes, when they realize that they have to not only believe what they believe in, whatever it may be, but get out there and proclaim it to the world. Luckily, that time came early for me. I am 17, and Islam is the belief that I’m proclaiming. I was raised Catholic. Not internally as much as externally. I went to Catholic Sunday school, called CCD, but the Catholic view of God never played a major roll in my childhood. It was a Sunday thing. Anyhow, I started to enjoy Mass around 7th grade. It made me feel good to do the right thing. I was always a rather moral person, but I never really studied the fundamentals of Catholicism. I just knew that I felt good worshipping my creator.
I really liked Catholicism, but I always saw it as us (the Catholics) with Jesus worshipping God, not us worshipping God and Jesus as one. I saw Jesus (peacebe
upon him) as my example on how to be a good follower of and submitter to God’s will, but not as God himself. Before I was confirmed in 8th grade, in the fall of 1999, I learned a lot about what Catholicism was. The Catholicism of the Church had a lot on viewing Jesus as God in it.Nothing like my “undivided God being worshipped by me with Jesus as an example” train of thought.
It was like they just opened up a can of cold, illogical confusion and tried to feed it to me. It didn’t feel right.
I continued with the Catholicchurch
, and kept on worshipping. But I talkedto
many in the church about my feelings that Jesus wasn’t God but more of a Prophet, an example. They told me that I had to accept him as God and as a sacrifice, and so on. I just wasn’t buying it. I tried to buy it but I guess God withhold the sale for my own benefit. There was a better car out there for me. I continued at the church.
Sometime in mid-December of 1999, for no reason that I can recall I started reading up on Islam in encyclopedias. I remember making a list of bolded words in the entry for “Islam” in an old 1964 Grolier World Book that I found in my closet, and studying them. For some reason I was amazed by this faith and that it was all about God and that it was everything that I believed all my life - right here. Previously, I had accepted that there was no faith like I felt inside of me. But I was amazed that I had found this faith. I found out that “my” faith had a name, and millions of other adherents!
Without ever reading a Qur’an or talking to another Muslim, I said shahada (declaring your belief in no god but God) on 31 December 1999. As the months passed, I learned more. I went through many periods of confusion, happiness, doubt and amazement. Islam took me on an enlightening tour of me, everyone else, and God.
The transition was slow. I was still attending Mass five months into my change of faith. Each time I went, I felt more and more distant from the congregation, but closer and closer to Prophet Jesus and God. During Ramadan 2001, the second time I fasted (the first year, I converted during Ramadan and did not fast), I went to the library during lunch period. It was better than sitting at a table with my friends, because I got work done in the library. I swear my grades went up. I started talking to the only other Muslim at my school, John. We talked about Islam a little more each day. He’s an awesome brother and he took me to the mosque on the last Friday of Ramadan. Going was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. God really answered my prayers this time. I thought I would be nervous, but I wasn’t at all. It was the most natural thing I ever did in my life.I felt home.
I realized something before leaving. As I sat there on the floor, praying to God, I realized that the room was full of others but it was OK. See, at home when someone asks me what I am doing, I never say I am praying. I never admit it to anyone. It is too awkward. But there, at the masjid, I was praying to God in front of a score of other Muslims and I felt perfectly fine. Better than fine! I felt natural and safe. It was the most liberating thing since I accepted God into my heart that cold New Year’s Eve almost two years ago.
I never told my parents right out. In fact, I don’t plan to. The most significant clue that I gave came around 1:00 AM on 16 December 2001, when I finally told my dad I was going to the mosque in the morning with a friend when he asked me why I was setting my alarm. He chewed me out, to say the least. I never told them straight out because I figured it was best to test the waters by revealing clues bit by bit; I didn’t want to send a shockwave through the family. I can only imagine what my dad would do if he knew I was actually a practicing Muslim. I understand that my dad is a depressed man, so I don’t really hold this all against him. I mean, it is his fault for thinking himself so smart that he doesn’t need God. That thought is what got him so depressed. But I don’t think he realized how hard one’s heart can be when you deny your human need for a relationship with your Creator. So I don’t hold it all against him. He didn’t know what he was getting into. My mom doesn’t know that I am a Muslim, but at least she hasn’t shown her anger over me going to the mosque. As God commands, I’ll continue to try my best to be nice to my parents as long as they don’t attempt to take away my Islam. The best thing that I can do for them is to be a good example so that maybe one day, inshallah, they can see that there is a better way of living than living in the dark world of God-denial.
I’ve never been to the Mid-East, but I am studying Islam every day. I read books from every point of view. Sufi, Shia, Sunni, books on the Qur’an alone... The Muslims view sects as haram, so no matter what you believe you are always a Muslim and nothing extra. You may have completely different views than another Muslim, but as long as you both believe that there is no god but God, you are both Muslims and that’s that. I read a lot on-line, and discuss a lot with other Muslims on-line and on the phone. I’ve met some really great people on-line who have taught me a lot about life, Islam and God.
Right now, I am 100% a Muslim and that will neverchange,
inshallah. I thank God that I’ve gone through so many periods of doubt. When I look back I see that it was not God leaving me but God telling me that it was time that I asked myself how much I loved God, and what I was willing to go through to understand my faith. A week of crying, depression, prayer, reading to the extreme, and ignoring most other things in life sounds harsh...but the reward - knowing so much more about yourself, God, and the relationship between you (Islam) - is worth more than any material things. Through my interrogation of Islam I gained God’s most precious gift - Islam, or surrender to the peace. I’ve heard Christians say that with Christianity you “know God on a personal level.” In Islam, your relationship with God is so much deeper than that. God is with me every moment, guiding me, teaching me, loving me, protecting me, liberating me, enlightening me, comforting me... Alhamdulilah for Islam!
Islam has done a lot for me. More than I could have ever guessed. And every day, it just gets better. At first it was like Allah was turning on lights where it was dark. Now, He is shining light into places that I never KNEW were dark! It is just total enlightenment and consolation at the same time I feel like I’m getting the warmest, truest hug. I went from living my life on a trial-and-error basis to embracing guidance, and now knowing what the best choices are for me to make. From seeking who I am and spending a life in confusion, I am being guided. I can’t find the words to say what its like, but I’ll try again: God reveals to me what life is. I don’t have to guess anymore.
Sura 93, “The Morning Hours”
By the morning hours
By the night when it is still
Your lord has not abandoned you
and
does not hate you
What is after will be better
than
what came before
To you the lord will be giving
You will be content
Did he not find you orphaned and give you shelter
Find you lost and guide you
Find you in hunger and provide for you
As for the orphan, do not oppress him
And one who asks, do not turn him away
And the grace of your lord -- proclaim
That is what I went through, what God did for me - what I am. So here is my proclamation to the world. Islam is more than you think it is, in fact more liberal than most would wish it to be. But do not only listen. Study all views for yourself...and come to your own conclusion. God says “let there be no compulsion in religion” because faith in God is a choice made by the heart, and it can’t be forced.
Holy Quran 2:185The
month of Ramazan is that in which the Quran was revealed, a guidance to men and clear proofs of the guidance and the distinction…
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Author: Zainab
