George Anthony - Former Catholic priest

Fr. Antony was a Catholic priest in Sri Lanka. His tale of becoming a true believer and adopting a name Adulrahman for him is quite interesting. Being a Christian priest he was well versed with the teachings of the Bible. He quotes the Bible frequently as he sits to narrate his journey to Islam. While reading the Bible he found many contradictions in it. He goes on quoting verses from the Bible in Sinhalese language and points out the ambiguity.
"He quotes Esaiah 9:12 which reads like this." And the book is delivered to him that is not learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith; I am not learned." This verse is a prophecy towards prophet Mohammed (pbuh), because Mohammad (pubh) was an unlettered prophet and when he was an unlettered prophet and when he was asked by Angel Gabrielto read out the first divine revelation upon him he said, "I am not learned" Contrary to the Christian belief that Jesus is God, Acts 2:22 of the Holy Bible considers Jesus as a man. It says, "Ye men of Israel, hear these words, jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourself also know."
Christianity and the other religions, do not define the prophehood according to him. Nor does Bhudda and is silent about the other prophets. Contrary to this it is compulsory in Islam to believe in all the formaer Prophets and to revere them. According to Abdulrahman this belief is quite convincing and appealing to every body.
Abdulrahman says that there is no reason for the restriction that a Roman Catholic priest cannot marry, when the priests of many other sects of Christianity can marry. Abdulrahman was pondering over the confusions of Christian belief. Meanwhile he got an Audio Cassette of a converted Christian priest Sri Lanka Shareef D Alwis. Cassettes of Ahmad Deedat also attracted him. His continuous efforts to find the truth finally resulted in reversion to Islam. Fr. George Antony
Abdulrahman, hails from the Rathnapura village of Sri Lanka. He was rendering his services as a priest in Katumayaka church. He has ten years of training of the priesthood to his credit.
He wrote letters to his mother introducing Islam. After months of studies she followed the path of her son and embraced Islam. Abdurahman’s only sister is working in Greece. His father and sister still remained Christians.
Abdurahman gave up his highly respected career as a priest for the sake of truth. He happily sacrificed all material gains for the spiritual triumph. He is now working as a trainee in Islam Presentation Committee of Kuwait.
www.erfan.ir

Mohammad al-Tijani al-Samawi

Mohammad al-Tijani al-Samawi was a Tunisian student who, upon making Hajj, was influenced by orthodox Saudi teachings, against saint veneration and tomb visitation, which were central to the North African Sufi tradition.
A few years later, al-Samawi was in Egypt on an Islamic tour of the Middle East and ran into an Iraqi student, Mun'im, who invited him to Iraq to see shia Islam with his own eyes, and forget what he had heard of them through reputations. Al-Samawi spent several weeks with Mun'im and visited Baghdad, and Najaf, and met with several leading Shi'a scholars, including Grand Ayatollah Abul-Qassim Khoei (al-Khu'i), Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (Grand Ayatollah to-be) and Allameh Tabatabaei, who spent hours teaching him about Shia Islam. [1]. Eventually, he considered himself converted to the Shi'i school of thought.
The middle name al-Tijani in his full name comes from his grand parents who were tijani sufis but he himself is not associated with it. But he likes to keep it with his name. He is never or never was the follower the Tariqa Tijania but his grand parents who were sunniis in there aqidah were the followers of the Tariqa Tijania Sufi Order.
Works
He wrote five books:
Then I was Guided
Ask those who know
To be with the truthful
The Shi'ah are (the real) Ahl al-Sunnah
Fa siru fi al-Ard
Three of his books are also available in Urdu titled as
1. 'Aur Mein Hidayat Pa Gia'
2. 'Hukm-may-Azan'
3. 'Ho Jao Sachchon Ke Saath'
Shi'a view
Muhammad al-Tijani became a respected Shi'a scholar.
www.erfan.ir

Raphael - Former Jehovah's Witness minister

A forty-two-year-old Latino, Raphael, is a Los Angeles-based comic and lecturer. He was born in Texas where he attended his first Jehovah's Witness meeting at age six. He gave his first Bible sermon at eight, tended his own congregation at twenty, and was headed for a position of leadership among the 904,000 Jehovah's Witnesses in the United States. But he traded in his Bible for a Qur'an after having braved a visit to a local mosque.
On November 1, 1991, he embraced Islam, bringing to the Muslim community the organizational and speaking skills he developed among Jehovah's Witnesses. He speaks with the urgency of a new convert, but one who can make immigrant Muslims laugh at themselves.
He told his story mimicking a cast of characters.
I remember vividly being in a discussion where we were all sitting in my parents' living room and there were some other Jehovah's Witnesses there. They were talking about: "It's Armageddon! The time of the end! And Christ is coming! And you know the hailstones are going to be out here as big as cars! God is going to use all kinds of things to destroy this wicked system and remove the governments! And the Bible talks about the earth opening up! It's going to swallow whole city blocks!"
I'm scared to death! And then my mother turned around: "See what's going to happen to you if you don't get baptized, and if you don't do God's will? The earth is going to swallow you up, or one of these huge hailstones is going to hit you on the head [klonk], knock you out, and you will not exist ever again. I'll have to make another child."
I wasn't going to take a chance of being hit by one of those big hailstones. So I got baptized. And of course Jehovah's Witnesses don't believe in the sprinkling of the water. They submerge you completely, hold you there for a second, and then bring you back up.
I did that at the age of thirteen, September 7, 1963, in Pasadena, California, at the Rose Bowl. It was a big international assembly. We had 100,000 people. We drove all the way from Lubbock, Texas.
Eventually I started giving bigger talks - ten minutes in front of the congregation. And a circuit servant recommended me to give the hour lectures that are done on Sunday when they invite the general public. They usually reserved those [sermons] for the elders of the congregation.
[In an authoritarian voice:] "Sure he's young. But he can handle it. He's a good Christian boy. He has no vices, and he's obedient to his parents and seems to have pretty good Bible knowledge."
So at the age of sixteen I started giving hour lectures in front of whole congregations. I was assigned first to a group in Sweetwater, Texas, and then, eventually, in Brownfield, Texas, I got my first congregation. At age twenty, I had become what they call a pioneer minister.
Jehovah's Witnesses have a very sophisticated training program, and they also have kind of a quota system. You have to devote ten to twelve hours a month to door-to-door preaching. It's like sales management. IBM has nothing on these guys.
So when I became a pioneer minister, I devoted most of my full time to doing the door-to-door ministry. I had to do like 100 hours a month, and I had to have seven Bible studies. I started lecturing other congregations. I began to get a lot of responsibility, and I was accepted at a school in Brooklyn, New York, a very elite school that Jehovah's Witnesses have for the crème de la crème, the top one percent. But I didn't go.
A few things no longer made sense to me. For example, the quota system. It seemed like every time I wanted to turn a corner and get into another position of responsibility, I had to do these secular material things to prove my godliness. It's like if you meet your quotas this month, God loves you. If you don't meet your quotas next month, God doesn't love you. That didn't make very much sense. One month God loves me and one month He doesn't?
The other thing I started noticing is tunnel vision. Jehovah's Witnesses are the only ones who are going to be saved in God's new order, nobody else, because all of them are practicing false religions. Well, I thought, Mother Teresa's a Catholic. That's our dire enemy. So I said, Wait a minute, Mother Teresa has spent her entire life doing things that Jesus said: take care of the poor, the sick, the orphans. But she's not going to have God's favor because she's a Catholic?
We criticized the Catholic Church because they had a man, a priest, to whom they had to confess. And we'd say, "You shouldn't have to go to a man to confess your sins! Your sin is against God!" And yet we went to a Body of Elders. You confessed your sins to them, and they put you on hold, and said [Elder as telephone operator:] "Hold on just a minute . . . What do you think, Lord? No? . . . Okay, I'm sorry, we tried our best but you're not repentant enough. Your sin is too big, so you either lose your fellowship in the church or you're going to be on probation."
If the sin is against God, shouldn't I directly go to God and beg for mercy?
Probably the nail that hit the coffin was that I noticed that they started reading their Bible less. Jehovah's Witnesses have books for everything that are put out by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. The only people on the entire planet who know how to interpret Bible Scripture correctly are that group of men, that committee in Brooklyn, who tell Jehovah's Witnesses worldwide how to dress, how to talk, what to say, what not to say, how to apply Scripture and what the future is going to be like. God told them, so they can tell us. I appreciated the books. But if the Bible is the book of knowledge and if it's God's instructions, well, shouldn't we get our answers out of the Bible? Paul himself said find out for yourself what is a true and acceptable word of God. Don't let men tickle your ears.
I started saying, "Don't worry so much about what the Watchtower says - read the Bible for yourself." Ears started to prick up.
[Old Southerner's drawl:] "I think we got us an apostate here, Judge. Yup. I think this old boy's one taco short of something."
Even my father said, "You better watch it, young man, that's the demons talking right there. That's the demons trying to get in and cause division."
I said, "Dad, it's not the demons. People don't need to read so much of these other publications. They can find their answers with prayer and in the Bible."
Spiritually I no longer felt at ease. So in 1979, knowing that I could not make headway, I left, disgruntled and with a bad taste in my mouth, because all my life I had put my soul, my heart, my mind into the church. That was the problem. I didn't put it in God. I put it in a man-made organization.
I can't go to other religions. As a Jehovah's Witness, I had been trained, through the Scriptures, to show that they are all wrong. That idolatry is bad. Trinity doesn't exist.
I'm like a man without a religion. I was not a man without a God. But where could I go?
In 1985, I decided to come to Los Angeles and get on the Johnny Carson show and make my mark as a great comedian and actor. I have always felt like I was born for something. I didn't know whether it was going to be finding the cure to cancer or becoming an actor. I kept praying and it got frustrating after a while.
So I just went to the Catholic church close to my house, and I tried it. I remember on Ash Wednesday I had that ash cross on my forehead. I was trying anything I could. I went for about two or three months, and I just couldn't do it anymore, man. It was:
Stand up. Sit down.
Stand up. Sit down.
Okay, stick your tongue out.
You got a lot of exercise. I think I lost about five pounds. But that's about it. So now I'm more lost than ever.
But it never passed through my mind that there is not a Creator. I have His phone number, but the line's always busy. I'm doing my little movie shots. A film called Deadly Intent. A telephone commercial in Chicago. An Exxon commercial. A couple of bank commercials. In the meantime I'm doing construction work on the side.
We're working on this mall. It's the holiday season, and they put these extra booths in the hallways. There was a gal at one, and we had to pass right in front of her. I'd say, "Good morning, how are you?" If she said anything, it was "Hi." And that was it.
Finally, I said, "Miss, you never say anything. I just wanted to apologize if there was something I said wrong."
She said, "No, you see, I'm a Muslim."
"You're what?"
"I'm a Muslim, and Muslim women, we don't talk to men unless we have something specific to talk about; otherwise we don't have anything to do with men."
"Ohhhhh. Muslim."
She said, "Yes, we practice the religion of Islam."
"Islam - how do you spell that?"
"I-s-l-a-m."
At the time, I knew that Muslims were all terrorists. She doesn't even have a beard. How could she possibly be Muslim?
"How did this religion get started?"
"Well, there was a prophet."
"A prophet?"
"Muhammad."
I started some research. But I just came from one religion. I had no intention of becoming Muslim.
The holidays are over. The booth moves. She's gone.
I continued to pray, and asked why my prayers weren't being answered. In November of 1991, I was going to bring my uncle Rockie home from the hospital. I started to empty his drawers to pack his stuff and there was a Gideon Bible. I said, God has answered my prayers. This Gideon Bible. (Of course, they put it in every hotel room.) This is a sign from God that He's ready to teach me. So I stole the Bible.
I went home and I started praying: O God, teach me to be a Christian. Don't teach me the Jehovah's Witness way. Don't teach me the Catholic way. Teach me Your way! You would not have made this Bible so hard that ordinary people sincere in prayer could not understand it.
I got all the way through the New Testament. I started the Old Testament. Well, eventually there's a part in the Bible about the prophets.
Bing!
I said, Wait a minute, that Muslim lady said they had a prophet. How come he's not in here?
I started thinking, Muslims - one billion in the world. Man, one out of every five people on the street theoretically could be a Muslim. And I thought: One billion people! C'mon now, Satan is good. But he's not that good.
So then I said, I'll read their book, the Qur'an, and I'll see what kind of pack of lies this thing is. It probably has an illustration on how to dissemble an AK-47. So I went to an Arabic bookstore.
They asked, "What can I help you with?"
"I'm looking for a Qur'an."
"Okay, we have some over here."
They had some very nice ones - thirty dollars, forty dollars."
"Look, I just want to read it, I don't want to become one, okay?"
"Okay, we have this little five-dollar paperback edition."
I went home, and started reading my Qur'an from the beginning, with Al-Fatihah. And I could not get my eyes off of it.
Hey, look at this. It talks about a Noah in here. We have Noah in our Bible too. Hey, it talks about Lot and Abraham. I can't believe it. I never knew Satan's name was Iblis. Hey, how about that.
When you get that picture on your TV set and it's got a little bit of static and you push that button [klop] - fine tune. That's exactly what happened with the Qur'an.
I went through the whole thing. So I said, Okay, I've done this, now what's the next thing you got to do? Well, you gotta go to their meeting place. I looked in the yellow pages, and I finally found it: Islamic Center of Southern California, on Vermont. I called and they said, "Come on Friday."
Now I really start getting nervous, `cause now I know I'm going to have to confront Habib and his AK-47.
I want people to understand what it's like for an American Christian coming into Islam. I'm kidding about the AK-47, but I don't know if these guys have daggers under their coats, you know. So I come up to the front, and sure enough, there's this six-foot-three, 240-pound brother, beard and everything, and I'm just in awe.
I walked up and said, "Excuse me, sir."
[Arabic accent:] "Go to the back!"
He thought I was already a brother.
I said, "Yessir, yessir" [meekly].
I didn't know what I was going back for, but I went back anyway. They had the tent and the rugs were out. I'm standing there, kind of shy, and people are sitting down listening to the lecture. And people are saying, Go ahead, brother, sit down. And I'm going, No, thanks, no, thanks, I'm just visiting.
So finally the lecture's over. They're all lined up for prayer and they go into sajdah. I was really taken aback.
It started making sense intellectually, in my muscles, in my bones, in my heart and my soul.
So prayers are over. I say, hey, who's going to recognize me? So I start to mingle like I'm one of the brothers, and I'm walking into the mosque and a brother says, "Assalaamu alaikum." And I thought, Did he say "salt and bacon"?
"Assalaamu alaikum."
There's another guy who said "salt and bacon" to me.
I didn't know what in the world they were saying, but they all smiled.
Before one of these guys noticed that I was not supposed to be there and took me to the torture chamber, or beheaded me, I wanted to see as much as I could. So eventually I went to the library, and there was a young Egyptian brother; his name was Omar. God sent him to me.
Omar comes up to me, and he says, "Excuse me. This is your first time here?" He has a real strong accent.
And I said, Yeah, it is.
"Oh, very good. You are Muslim?"
"No, I'm just reading a little."
"Oh, you are studying? This is your first visit to a mosque?"
"Yes."
"Come, let me show you around." And he grabs me by the hand, and I'm walking with another man - holding hands. I said, These Muslims are friendly.
So he shows me around.
"First of all, this is our prayer hall, and you take your shoes off right here."
"What are these things?"
"These are little cubicles. That's where you put your shoes."
"Why?"
"Well, because you're approaching the prayer area, and it's very holy. You don't go in there with your shoes on; it's kept real clean."
So he takes me to the men's room.
"And right here, this is where we do wudu."
"Voodoo! I didn't read anything about voodoo!"
"No, not voodoo. Wudu!"
"Okay, because I saw that stuff with the dolls and the pins, and I'm just not ready for that kind of commitment yet."
He says, "No, wudu, that's when we clean ourselves."
"Why do you do that?"
"Well, when you pray to God, you have to be clean, so we wash our hands and feet."
So I learned all these things. He let me go, and said, Come back again.
I went back and asked the librarian for a booklet on prayer, and I went home and practiced. I felt that if I was trying to do it right, God would accept it. I just continued to read and read and visit the mosque.
I had a commitment to go on a tour of the Midwest on a comedy circuit. Well, I took a prayer rug with me. I knew that I was supposed to pray at certain times, but there are certain places where you are not supposed to pray, one of which is in the bathroom. I went into a men's room on a tourist stop and I laid out my carpet and I started doing my prayers.
I came back, and when Ramadan was over, I started getting calls from different parts of the country to go and lecture as a Jehovah's Witness minister who embraced Islam. People find me a novelty.
[Two immigrants converse:]
"This guy like apple pie and he drives a Chevy truck. He is a red-blooded American boy. He was a Jehovah's Witness."
"Those people that come in the morning?"
"Yeah, those."
"That never let us sleep on Sundays?"
"Yeah, this guy was one of them. Now he's one of us."
Eventually somebody would come up to me and say [Pakistani accent], "Oh, brother, your talk was so good. But you know, in the Shafi'i school of thought.."
The only thing I could do was turn to them and say, "Gee, brother, I'm so sorry, I wish I knew about that, but I don't know anything about Islam except what's in the Qur'an and Sunnah.
Some of them are taken aback and say, "Ha-ha! Poor brother. He doesn't know anything. He only knows the Qur'an."
Well, that's what I'm supposed to know. And it's been a very loving protection. I think it's all in Allah's hands."
www.erfan.ir

Sheikh Ahmed Amin al-Antaki

Sheikh Ahmed al-Antaki’s birth and upbringing

The full name of Sheikh al-Antaki is Ahmed son of Yousif son of Ali son of Qanbar al-Haza . Sheikh al-Antaki was born in a village called ‘Ensow’ on the outskirts of Antakia. The village of Ensow comprises of two words, one of the words being in Arabic and the other in Turkish, the literal meaning of Ensow means eye of water, this name was given to it due to its watery riches and resources.

The Sheikh was born Sunni to a Shafeei sect, he underwent his first classes under the teaching of his father. Sheikh Antaki was born in the year 1893(1311 in the Islamic calendar).

Sheikh Ahmed al-Antaki’s academic life

-Sheikh Ahmed was brought up as a Shafeei and obtained his knowledge from his father at the beginning, he then went to study under the guidance of one of the Sheikhs in their village where he studied the basis of his education such as grammar, logic ,etc.
After, Sheikh Ahmed directed his way towards Antakia where he attended classes under the teachings of one of the Sheikhs in the area known as Shiekh Ahmed al-Taweel, furthermore Sheikh Ahmed al-Antaki and his brother attended additional classes which included studying under the teachings of Sheikh Saed al-Arfei.
After spending many years attaining his educational foundations, Sheikh Ahmed decided to travel to the ‘city of knowledge’- the Holy Azhar, to continue his strive for attaining knowledge and build upon his education. Upon deciding to travel to Azhar, his brother Sheikh Mohammed agreed to join him on the quest of gaining knowledge.
The Sheikh attended in al-Azhar many classes such as Islamic Theology, Arabic grammar, etc. Sheikh Ahmed received his Islamic theology teaching from the Theologian Mohammed Abu Taha and al-Sheikh Mohammed Bakhit. Both of whom were the teachers in Egypt in the past. Mohammed al-Samloot and Sheikh Hasanian were also teachers of Sheikh al-Antaki.
In the same period of time, the Sheikh of the al-Azhar institute was the deceased Sheikh Mohammed Abu al-Fatheel. After completing his studies at al-Azhar, the Sheikh decided to return back to his homeland and spread the knowledge which he had obtained on his quest to al-Azhar to his friends and family. The sheikh returned to Antakia, however, the Sheikh did not prolong his stay there due to continuous occupation of the area by French forces.

Sheikh al-Antaki’s journey to Hijaz:

The sheikh was invited to a trip to Hijaz, the sheikh received knowledge that the city of Hijaz implements Islamic Sharia at the best of levels.
The sheikhs teaching were generally accepted and appreciated in Syria where he received an invitation from Abdul Aziz al-Saudi where he was given an opportunity to accept a position as Judge of Sharia, however what he observed on his trip from the Salafie’s and Wahabee’s disbelief towards other Muslims generally was the main reason for him not accepting the position as Islamic Judge (which was a position which couldn’t be rejected).

Sheikh Ahmed al-Antaki resided in a city in Syria called Halab after the occupation of the evil Mustafa Atartork. The sheikh was appointed as representative in the area by Sheikh Saed Areif who was the head of the Islamic Council at the time.

Sheikh al-Antaki’s conversion to Shia Ithna Ashari faith:

Reason for the change

The change from faith to faith or from sect to sect requires a balance between the two extremes. So whenever the facts become apparent of the faith or the sect, apparent to the logic that is, then a change is required. This is exactly what happened with sheikh Ahmed when he figured that the truth is with the Shia with a the reality of logic used between the two extremes: Shia-Sunni.

It was because of reasons of doubtfulness that the Sheikh first realised about the Shafiee school of thought and the Sunni faith in general. The faith contained disagreements as well as contradictions which disregard the fundamental bases. The sheikh notes this in his book ‘The way I became Shia’ the following:

“we realised that the Shafiee school of thought for example allows the marriage of a girl who is a prostitute to her father, the bases of this argument is that the water of a prostitute is not haram, as the daughter is not linked to the father so its allowable for the father to marry her. Abu Hanifa forbids this.” ( The way I became Shia-page 16).

A further reason of why the Sheikh converted to Shia Ithna Ashari sect was because of his ability to obtain a book by the name of “Morajaat- The right path” by Sayed Abdul Hussain Sharf al-Deen al-Amili, he says about this:

“ I took and browsed through the pages astonished at the literature I was reading, I was really happy with what I was reading, it made me think about this book and its contents from its discussions between Sayed Abdul Hussain Sharf al-Deen (may Allah bless his soul) and Sheikh Saleem al-Bashree. Sheikh Saleem al-Bashree was a scholar at al-Azhar institute, he was asking Sayed Abdul Hussain many questions which the Sayed was answering in the book…..”

When the sheikh was initially given the book, he first rejected it, as it was known to him to be a bias Shia book. The sheikh says about this:

“ my brother sheikh Moraeey must have come across it and said: take this book and read it you will be surprised about it, think about it. I replied to him: from which sect is he from? He replied to me that he is from Jaffari, so I said to him : take this book away from me as I am not interested in it, as I hate the Shia. He told me to read it and not to implement any of its words and he emphasised that reading it will not affect me. Prior to this incident a discussion arose between us in the village of ‘al-Faewa’ and this is the incident took place in a area called ‘adalab’ ‘’ (about his book-page 17).

Another reason which had an impact on his conversion ot the Shia school of thought was to due to reading the book entitled “Abu Horayra” whose author is also Sayed Abdul Hussain Sharf al-Deen al-Amili, where he found out that many hadiths were made up as they did not obey logic neither did it comply with the Quran or the teaching of the Prophet (PBUH). An example is that Prophet Muse (PBUH) slapped the face of the angel of death Izrael and so He opened his eyes. Or for example Musa (PBUH) was walking naked between the children of Israel (bani Israel), or that Allah (SWT) created Adam (PBUH) like his picture?! And many more alike. The author of the book has written it in such a way which allows the reader to realise that “Abu Horayra” who befriended the Prophet (PBUH) for three years or less, was the companion of the Prophet who spread his teachings to the greatest. However the proportion of what the four khailafs saw in comparison to what Abu Horayra saw was only 27% from his traditions!!!.

The availability of strong facts which were not created and which are accepted by both Shia and sunna

- there exists many traditions in regards to household of the Prophet (PBUH), however one tradition which especially caught the Sheikhs attention was about the ark which the Prophet (PBUH) says: “My Household to you is like Noah’s ark, whosoever got on the ark survived, and who neglected the ark drowned” (‘Mostadreek Al Hokom- The book of Laws’ chapter 2, page 342 and Ibin Hijir ‘Sawaiqa’ page 153’)

Also the tradition of the “Thaqalaayn’ where the Prophet (PBUH) says “ I have leave for you two weighty things, the Holy Book of Allah and My household, whosoever keeps with them will never go astray. The two weighty things will not separate until they return to the pond in paradise, so observe how you will do contrary to what I have stated”( tradition contained in Sahih Muslim ch.2 page 238 also contained in Ahmed Ibin Hanbal ch.3 page 17 and Sahih Tarmadi ch.2 page 308).

The Holy Prophet (PBUH) has compared his household to (who comprise of Ali, Fatemah , Hasan, Hussain and the nine infallibles sons of Hussain) to Noah’s ark as the survival is only guaranteed with them as the ark was the only means of survival to the people at the time.

The Holy Prophet (PBUH) also compared his household to the Holy Quran which is the strongest proof that his Household are the most knowledge of people in the contents of the Holy Quran, and that they are all infallible.

For more guidance we highly recommend you to read the book ‘Morajaat- The right Path’ whose author is Sayed Abdul Hussain Sharf al-Deen al-Amili who has noted the most important references against the sunna’s and the truth of the household of the Holy Prophet(PBUH).

These are some of the reasons why Sheikh Ahmed al-Antaki converted to the Shia Inthna Ashari school of thought.

The above was a short piece of literature belonging to a humble individual who was guided to the correct path. Sheikh Ahmed al-Antaki has a book called “the way I became Shia” where he outlines the exact procedure of how he converted. Sheikh Mohammed Moraeey al-Antaki also has a book called “why I chose the Shia school of thought” both books are available at all good Islamic bookstores.
www.erfan.ir

Iran Armenian actress Mahaya converts to Islam

Written by IranMania
LONDON, October 24 (IranMania) - The well-known Armenian actress of Iranian origin, Mahaya Petrossian converted to Shia Islam last week.
According to the Sunday issue of the Persian morning daily of Tosse'e quoting Khurshid website, she converted to Islam following her marriage to a Muslim young man.

Speaking to Khurshid reporter, she confirmed the report and said that she had been in doubt for a long time whether to remain a Christian or convert to Islam.

"However, what happened in my personal life, namely my marriage to a Muslim man, put an end to my doubt and I eventually became a Muslim," added the actress.

It is not yet clear whether Petrossian would change the name by which she is known
www.aimislam.com/advent

My Journey to Islam

I once knew an atheist who claimed he\'d never believed in God\'s existence. In his view, believers were supposed to be people of weak character who felt the necessity to find a crutch for their inability and laziness, so they attended church. He felt agitated if, when the debating religion, he could not persuade the opponent with his arguments. He despised believers in an almost hysterical way. He had, however, a very good friend who believed in God. They agreed to refrain from discussing religion whenever together.
One day this man, probably in a rare moment of weakness, accepted the invitation of his friend to visit his church. To himself, he laughed at the thought of speaking out in the middle of mass and laughing and pointing his finger at the believers from the pulpit. However, as we know, God works in mysterious ways. He went to church, stood in the back benches, and stared at the people praying.
The mass service started and he gave all of them a sarcastic glance. Then the sermon began, lasting about 15 minutes. Suddenly, in the middle of the sermon, tears welled in his eyes. A strange feeling of joy and happiness washed away his animosity, a feeling that engulfed his entire body. After mass, the two friends left together. They were silent until the moment they were to part ways, when he asked his friend whether they could go to church together again. They agreed to go again the next day.
It\'s possible some of you might have guessed that I was that stubborn atheist. I had felt nothing but contempt and hatred towards people of faith. But after that sermon in 1989, when the priest discussed how we should not judge others if we don\'t want to be judged, my life suddenly took a dramatic turn.
I started attending church services regularly and was thirsty for any information on God and Jesus Christ. I took part in meetings with Christian youngsters where we exchanged our spiritual experiences. I felt resurrected. Suddenly I felt the need to be in the company of believers. I needed to make up for the past 18 years.
I was brought up in an atheist family, who except for having me baptized, did not exercise any attempt to guide my spiritual development. I remember being in sixth grade when a comrade was sent by the Communist Party to explain to us why God does not exist. I remember myself absorbing his every word. In my case, I needed no convincing. I believed everything he said. His arrogance, contempt, and hatred towards believers became mine. But now I had to make up for all those years.
I met with a priest and others who guided me in this new direction. I was full of so many questions, to which they responded. Later I was to realize a big mistake: I accepted everything without contemplation or reflection. I could say that they explained things to me in a "take-it-as-is" manner, but that would not be fair to them. It was, in fact, my mistake. I didn\'t reflect upon their words, nor did I think critically. This would cause me a lot of complications later. In retrospect, I believe an important factor that influenced my behavior was age. I was too young to properly comprehend matters as serious and complicated as faith.
I wished to become a good Christian, and God knows I tried very hard. Yet over time, I could not reconcile the contradictions found in the Bible, such as the divine nature of Prophet Jesus and the concept of inherited sin. Priests tried to respond to my questions, but eventually, their patience began to run thin. I was told that such matters should be accepted on faith and that these questions were a waste of time and would only serve to distance me from God. Till this day, I recall myself quarreling with a spiritual leader, an event that restarted my self-destructive tendencies. Maybe I wasn\'t right after all. I was young.
How I Became Muslim
My path toward Islam wasn\'t easy at all. You may think that since I was disappointed with Christianity, I would have immediately accepted Islam as my faith. This could have been very simple, but all I knew about Islam at the time were things like Muslims refer to God as Allah, they read the Qur\'an instead of the Bible, and they worship somebody called Muhammad. Also, I think I was not yet ready to accept Islam.
So I withdrew from the church community and claimed to be a soloist Christian. I found out, however, that even though I didn\'t miss the community of believers or church, God was "settled" so deep in my heart that I couldn\'t let Him go. I didn\'t even try. Quite the opposite. I felt happy to have God around and hoped He was on my side.
Later I began to engage in one stupidity after another, living a life of luxury and lust. I did not realize that such a road would lead me away from God and towards hell. A friend of mine says that you need to hit rock bottom in order to feel the ground beneath your feet. This is exactly what happened to me. I fell really deep. I can just imagine how Satan must have been waiting for me with open arms, but God did not give up on me and gave me another chance.
In July 2001, I met a young man from Iraq. His name was Ibrahim. We very quickly struck up a conversation. He told me that he was Muslim, and I responded that I was Christian. I was worried that my being Christian would be a problem, but I was wrong. I was glad to be wrong. It was interesting that I did not want to become Muslim and he did not try to convert me.
Although I considered Muslims an exotic group, I had been interested to learn more about Islam. It was a good opportunity to learn more. I realized that I had in front of me a man who could teach me a lot about Islam, so I mustered the courage to ask him to do just that. That was my first meeting with Islam, indeed my first step. After some time we parted ways, and I did not see him again, but the seed had been sown.
I remember once reading an interview with Mohammad Ali Silhavy (an old Czech Muslim) and being eager to find his address and write him a letter. Then came September 11. Because of the political climate, I thought it might not be an appropriate time to contact Mr. Silhavy. So I found myself at a dead end.
About two months later I found the courage to write a long letter to Mr. Silhavy. After a while he replied and sent a package including Islamic literature and leaflets. He told me that he had informed the Islamic Foundation in Prague about me and asked them to send me the translation of the Qur\'an. So this was my beginning. Step by step, I learned that not only is Islam not a militant religion, but to the contrary, it is a religion of peace. My questions were answered.
Because of certain circumstances, it wasn\'t until three years later that I decided to visit Mr. Silhavy. He showed a lot of patience while explaining to me different issues, and suggested that I visit the mosque of Brno (Czech Republic). When I went to the mosque of Brno, I was afraid that I would be seen as a stranger, an outsider. How surprised I was to find quite the opposite. I met K. and L., who were the first persons to help me. Of course, I met other brothers who welcomed me in the warmest way possible way.
I began to delve into all aspects of Islam, and found how understandable and logical Islam is. I gradually started to learn how to pray, and today I master prayer with no problem, even in Arabic. I gave up a bad habit of mine that was not compatible with Islam. I was a gambler and a very good one indeed. It was a difficult struggle with myself, but with God\'s help I won that battle.
If I ever doubted my interest in Islam or whether I could live as a Muslim, I know now that my interest is permanent and I consider myself one of them. Maybe it looks very simple, but again with God\'s help I won this internal struggle. I thought carefully before I definitively decided to embrace Islam. To be honest, throughout 2003 and the beginning of 2004, I was not completely sure if I could manage this. Finally I decided definitively. I am not that young man from the early \'90s anymore.
That\'s why today I feel very happy that I am Muslim. I finally feel free. I still have my imperfections but I am trying to improve upon them. I believe that God will help me. Now, listen to what I want to tell you and consider this my obligation: I believe in my heart and declare by word that there is no other god but Allah and Muhammad is God\'s Messenger.
imamreza.net

Christian youths become rightly guided through Holy Qur’an

There were two persons formerly Christians but later on they became Muslim. They lived in a city called Taleetah, perhaps in Morocco. I asked them the cause of their conversion. I asked them how you, former Christians, are now in deep search of Islamic truths. They replied: A few years ago, we were imprisoned in a jail. An Iraqi Muslim was also with us in our cell. Everyday he used to read Qur’an. As we did not know Arabic language, by and by we learned some words from that gentleman and began to understand a little from what he recited. One day he recited the verse:
﴿
وَاسْأَلُوا اللَّهَ مِنْ فَضْلِهِ
﴾
"…and ask Allah of His grace…
Then he also recited the verse:
﴿
ادْعُونِي أَسْتَجِبْ لَكُمْ
﴾
"Call upon Me, I will answer you…"
And he said that it was God’s Word. God also says:
﴿
وَإِذَا سَأَلَكَ عِبَادِي عَنِّي فَإِنِّي قَرِيبٌ أُجِيبُ دَعْوَةَ الدَّاعِي إِذَا دَعَانِ
﴾
"And when My servants ask you concerning Me, then surely I am very near; I answer the prayer of the suppliant when he calls on Me…"
If you want anything, say: O Allah, yourself. You don’t have to come to the Mosque. He does not order to come and to give hand in the hand of a scholar, but He says: "Anyone from My servants who wants Me, I am near him." God is not far. He even does not want you to complain. He only asks to seek from Him whatever you want. You can even remember Him from your heart. He knows what is there in your heart. He says it is better if you recite supplication, as it is more effective.
When I heard these two or three verses of the Holy Qur’an, I told my companion, "See what the Prophet of Islam says; being Christians, we do not have such belief. The Christian faith has ceremonies, protocols, and formalities. They say that man cannot approach God unless he comes to the priests and the priests seek forgiveness for his sins. So the helpless person is compelled to come to the church priests, who is the representative of their religion and makes a confession of his sin and gives him money of getting pardoned (whereas this priest himself has no approach to God)."
They also have lengthy machinery for this purpose in all Christian cities. One of the companions said, "Once I had gone to a Church in Paris to observe things. It is a very big church." He said the segments of pardoning were worth seeing. First were people who had sinned. They sat with humility in that section of the church having a pen and paper in their hands. They wrote about the sin committed by them and took that piece of paper to another section from where they got instructions about the amount of money to be paid for the forgiveness of his sin. Then he pays the amount and gets a receipt for it and then proceeds to the last place where he is informed that his sin has been pardoned!
Those two Christian gentlemen said that when they heard the above two or three verses of Qur’an wherein Almighty God conveys through His Prophet, that God is very near; that He needs no mediation; that He is not far; that ask for whatever you want from God, Who answers your request, we became very much astonished. Does Muhammad really tell the truth? Can everybody reach God? We were wondering about this matter in jail when we became very thirsty. There was no water and our thirst was very hard. There was no one to come to our help. We wished to die rather than remain in that condition. Then I recalled this verse and said: O God! If this verse:
﴿
وَاسْأَلُوا اللَّهَ مِنْ فَضْلِهِ
﴾
"…and ask Allah of His grace…"Is Your Word, and if Muhammad has told the truth:
﴿
ادْعُونِي أَسْتَجِبْ لَكُمْ
﴾
"Call upon Me, I will answer you…"
Then O Almighty! Help us as we are dying of severe thirst. Suddenly, before our eyes, from the wall in front of us, water began to flow. We drank it and quenched our thirst with full gratification. Then and there, we decided to become Muslims. So, after our release from jail, we embraced Islam and put total faith in the Holy Qur’an.
Guidance for some and misguidance for others
The so-called Muslim who used to recite the Holy Qur’an and who had taught some Arabic grammar, saw that these two Christians, who were thirsty got water from an unexpected place in the wall. So he put the Qur’an aside and thought that the Christian faith was true; that truth was with Christianity and hence this miracle. The unwise fellow could not realize that it was due to the Qur’an. He thought that, as they were Christians, their prayer was answered. He fell down in front of them saying: I want to embrace your religion. They asked, "Why?"
The man replied, "I saw, with my own eyes that water flew for you from this wall. So it seems your religion is true." They (the two former Christians) replied, "We were helpless and we clung to the Holy verse of Qur’an." That fellow said, "I do not accept your word. Do you want deprive me and to prevent me from becoming a Christian?" In short, that fellow converted to Christianity and put the Holy Qur’an aside. It was all because of a faulty imagination and an imaginary illusion.
End of a learned Haji
These two gentlemen again said: O God! By the truthfulness of Qur’an and by the honor of Muhammad guide us on the true path. That night, in a dream they were told: Go to Syria and contact scholars of Islam. Subsequently they became very nice people. In one moment two Christians become true Muslims but a Muslim becomes a disbeliever. Man is unaware of his end.
Fortunate is one who looks at his end. (Persian saying)
One of my friends once told me: I myself have seen a man who used to stand in the first row in Mosque for prayer, in those hard days, he had also performed Hajj. He also had religious knowledge and used to answer relevant problems to people. The same Haji gentleman, after some years was seen engaged in house construction work. I was also there. Laborers and masons were busy doing building work in a corner of his garden. Then we saw the Haji was passing water standing facing Qibla. See what is this? I could not restrain myself from asking. I asked him, "O Haji! What are you doing?" He replied, "O sir! We actually did not understand. For several years we prayed in mosque and went to Hajj where Arabs usurped our money." In short, he spoke up his disbelief himself. This man was once praying in the first row. He had performed Hajj. No one knows what and how his end will be. How he can lose Faith!
Pray, so that we die in a good condition
I have repeatedly heard that whenever students and scholar used to visit the late great scholar Mirza Hujjatul Islam Shirazi and also to visit graves, the said gentleman was recommending and requesting everyone: Please pray so that Allah may make my end a good end. How do you know what is going to happen the next moment, or after two days or after two years? In your own view you are a very good person and you look at others with contempt. You are not afraid that maybe in a slip your heart becomes stony and dark. Then you may, by and by, stop attending the mosque and give up supplications and the recitations of Qur’an etc.
We should always seek God’s refuge against a bad end. O the one who mocks others! How do you know, he may be better than you. You may not recognize him. How do you know, he may be a friend of God. Woe unto the one who mocks a friend of God. None except God knows a friend of God. There also is no criterion to know who is nearer to God? No one knows. Only God does.
Three things hidden in three things
Allah has kept three things hidden in three things: First, he has kept his friends hidden from the eyes of the creation so that no one may not mock others and look at them with contempt for fear of the possibility of the other being God’s friend. For the preservation of one’s honor He has kept His friend hidden from the eyes of people. Second, God has concealed His anger in sins. There are some sins, which draw God’s anger. It is mentioned in al-Kafi. There comes a voice: O one who committed this sin! Now you will not be forgiven. The late Majlisi says explaining this tradition: It means that after committing this sin you will not able to repent. It is not that one repents but is not forgiven. What is meant is that, that person is not inclined to repent. Now what is that sin? Neither the Imam tells it nor anyone else knows it. It is kept hidden. Just know only that among sins there are some which, if one commits them it is certain that one will have a bad end and that his Hereafter is destroyed. God’s mercy is not to reach him.
But what sin is that? I do not know. Nor the Imam has pointed it out. Why? So that people may fear all sins and may not go near any sin fearing that it could be the sin which attracts God’s wrath and anger and then man may not be able to find a way to salvation.
Thirdly, among worships also there are some worship acts, which if performed, will give one salvation for sure. What is that act of God’s obedience? It is also not clearly mentioned. We do not know anything. Nor should we know, as it is a hidden matter.
In short, a friend of God (Wali of Allah) is hidden. Nobody is able to find him out. Why? So that man may look at everyone and imagine that perhaps he is a friend of God. Of course, one has no right to imagine that one (he himself) is the friend of God. God forbid, we may be friends of Satan instead! But we must imagine about others that God might like them and they might love God; that they might be obeying God in the right way. So they are better.
O Women! You have no right to look with contempt at other women. You should not mock other women. How do you know? It is quite likely that some of them, who have sinned, may get guidance to repent. They might be having good deeds in their scroll of deeds, which draw Allah’s mercy. How do we know her actual condition? You see that a lady has no veil that she moves in streets and markets without her head wear. Do prevent her, but never mock her. Never consider yourself higher than her. It is possible that her condition may change with God’s guidance and she may become righteous after repenting and may become much better than a number of old women who are ashamed of showing their gray hair.
On the other hand, it is likely that this lady who is not wearing Islamic modest dress (Hijab) may make amends after repentance and conceal her breast, head, legs and feet of God’s sake and may become more honorable in the sight of God than that aged woman who mocked others. The old lady may rank behind the young woman in the most supreme court of Almighty Allah.
Those whose grief will be more
There are three groups of people whose grief in the grand gathering field (Mahshar), tomorrow on the Judgment Day will be more than that of the entire gathering. Firstly, those scholars and orators who advise people to do good and refrain from evil, but who do not act according to what they say. You can see that such and such Haji lady admonished another woman to wear veil or Hijab. That lady did accept her advice and acted accordingly, wearing a veil. But the adviser lady proved so unlucky that she did not conceal herself from a stranger male. Tomorrow, on the Judgment Day, she burns in fire, but the lady who accepted her advice is in a high bliss. Most fear some burning is for the scholars whose sermons made many people benefit and provided salvation to them but they (the admonishers) went to hell, as they did not act themselves in the way desired by God Almighty.
Secondly, in a more severe grief is a rich man who, till he was in this world, did not pay dues from his wealth but only kept it in front of his eyes and finally all of it went to his heirs. Then the latter spent it as liked by God and helped the needy. Tomorrow, on Judgment Day, the former will look at his heirs and see that they are in Paradise. But with the help of whose wealth? With the riches of their unfortunate father! The father burns in hell. He is most grievous and terribly unhappy.
The unwise man only bore the burden and the wise benefited fully. (Persian saying)
He fanned fire for himself with this wealth. How fortunate was his heir who acted wisely and got full benefit from his wealth.
The third group: The master and his servant, the lady and her mistress, the employer and his employee. O Master and servants, you ladies and your maidservants, employers and employees, workers, students! Know that, tomorrow in the Hereafter, the lower cadre will be in Paradise and the higher ups in hell. The master who looked with contempt in this world at his servant will see that the servant is on a high rank and he himself is in the lowest pits. How much he himself burns! How much sorrowful and in grief! So these are the three kinds of groups you are told about. Their grief is terrible. So never look down at your servant, peon, worker or slave.
﴿
عَسَى أَنْ يَكُونُوا خَيْرًا مِنْهُمْ
﴾
"Perchance they may be better. (49:11)"
The lowly became high
I shall relate another narration. Waram, teacher of Sayyid bin Tawus has, in his compilation Majmae Waram written that a Messenger of God, in olden days asked God to show him His friend and, as per another quotation, he asked Almighty Allah to inform him as to who will be his (the Prophet’s) companion in the Hereafter. A revelation reached the Prophet indicating that such and such shoemaker would be his companion in the other life; that he was God’s friend. This messenger went to the person indicated in the revelation, sat by his shop to observe what special virtues he had which made him a friend of God. Then he talked with him and asked some questions only to find that neither he has much knowledge nor any intelligence.
Also, he was not a great worshipper either. In short, he could not find any extraordinary virtue in him. At last, the Prophet asked, "My friend! I want to know what virtue is there in you?" The man replied, "Sir, I do not possess anything. I have no knowledge and no specialty in my deed. I am what you see." The Prophet again asked, "No, it cannot be so. You must be having something very extraordinary in your character. Please tell me truly." Finally that man replied, "I have neither any knowledge nor perfection. My condition is that whenever I meet anyone, I imagine that he has much higher rank in the sight of God." The Prophet replied, "This is the virtue which made you high-ranking in the Hereafter."
Such is the humility, lowliness, and courtesy for God. Man considers himself low, weak and servile in front of Almighty Allah. Since he considers God as the greatest, he imagines himself to be nothing. Then, seeing anyone, he says, "Perhaps he is better than me; that he may have a standing in the sight of God." One who is a friend of God considers himself worthless.
Once, angel Jibraeel came to Prophet Ibrahim and gave him good tidings that he was a friend of God. Ibrahim expressed wonder saying, "Me and God’s friend?" The angel replied, "Yes, you are God’s friend." Ibrahim asked again, "I do not have any special deed at my credit. How is it that God made me His friend?" The angel said, "O Ibrahim! You have two virtues, which God likes very much and hence He made you His friend (Khalil). (These two virtues make one lovable). First, you do not ask anything from anyone except God. You seek help only from Him. You never put your need before His creation. Secondly, you never turned away any beggar from your door. You never turned away a needy person empty-handed from your door."
O Lord! It is now known that You do not like the one who turns away the needy empty handed. We also have extended our begging hands before You. Please do not deprive us.
Imam Zainul Abideen, in Dua Abu Hamzah, which you recite in these holy nights, prays: O Lord! You have ordered us not to turn away a needy from our door. Now, we are the needy beggars who have come to Your Door of Mercy. Your Honor will certainly not make us return empty handed. Our need is that kindly, do not leave any of our sins unforgiven by Your Mercy.
"O you who believe! Let not (one) people laugh at (another) people perchance they may be better than they, nor let women (laugh) at (other) women, perchance they may be better than they; and do not find fault with your own people nor call one another by nicknames; evil is a bad name after faith, and whoever does not turn, these it is that are the unjust. O you who believe! Avoid most of suspicion, for surely suspicion in some cases is a sin, and do not spy… (49:11-12)"
They mocked her for her short stature and a lengthy dress
The summary of the explanation of this verse is that God Almighty, the Lord of the Universe has issued three commands: First: It is unlawful for a Muslim to belittle any Muslim, to look at him with contempt, to consider him lower. He, sometimes, utters a word or gestures, which indicates that he is mocking or humiliating someone. For example, suppose he points his finger indicating that he wants others to look at that person’s stature; how short it is!
As mentioned with regard to Ayesha and Hafsa who pointed out towards Umme Salma, indicating what a short stature she had! Umme Salma was thus humiliated.
Or, for instance, they said that Umme Salma had put on a long dress; that her clothing dragged on the ground behind her when she walked. Ayesha and Hafsa uttered, "Look, her apparel is dragging behind like a dog’s tongue! Her covering sheet is touching the ground."
To mock someone either by gesture or twinkling of the eye, all of it is unlawful. It is possible that one whom you mocked is better than you in the sight of God. As explained earlier, your imagination is not the criterion for measuring people’s rank.
To disgrace others is to disgrace oneself
Second:
﴿
وَلا تَلْمِزُوا أَنفُسَكُمْ
﴾
"…and do not find fault with your own people…"
The Arabic word ‘Lumz’ means defect. Do not find faults or disgrace yourselves. This is worth pondering upon. God says: Do not disgrace yourselves. He does not say: Do not disgrace others, do not disgrace a Muslim or do not disgrace a community etc. He says: Do not point out to your own faults and defects. This means that to disgrace a Muslim amounts to disgracing your own self. Outwardly, you humiliated others. But inwardly you yourself have become blameworthy and faulty.
How and why? This requires deep thinking. Those who have intelligence can see how meaningful and effective are the wordings of Qur’an. They deal with deep meaning in brief, clear and eloquent phrases. Qur’an is the word of the Lord of Worlds. It is very high and great. Here He says: When one finds fault with another. He, in fact, has made himself faulty. He says about another person: He is miserly and shameless. The Holy Qur’an says: By so saying, you have pointed to your own defects. So do not disgrace yourselves. Apparently, there are three reasons for saying so.
All are to meet the same one and hence are equal
The first reason indicated is that all of you are united together. Your spiritual father is same, that is, Muhammad Mustafa. The spirits of all the believers have a kind of unity and sameness. Their father is Muhammad and Ali, from the spiritual viewpoint. From physical point of view also they have one father and one mother, that is, Adam and Eve. But from the spiritual aspect, their father is one, that is, Muhammad and also Ali as they are one soul. So now, if one disgraces another, he has disgraced his own brother. There is no difference. All are from one source and origin.
There are some narrations from Imams. One of them says: Ours is a holy tree. Its root and origin is, our grandfather, Muhammad Mustafa. It has twelve branches, that is the Imams, the first being Ali and the last, the awaited Mahdi. Leaves of this holy tree are the general Shias. All believing men and women are the leaves of this holy tree. Due to common leaves and common branches they are all united and one.
According to another narration: Tomorrow, on the Day of Judgment, there would be the holy tree, Tuba. Rooted in the house of Ali, its branches will extend to the houses of all the Shias in Paradise. Thus every believer is connected with the Tuba tree. Thus if one of them becomes faulty, it means all have become faulty. If you want to understand this fully, remember that by disgracing a believer Shia of Ali, you have hurt Ali, especially if that person whom you disgraced was a real and true Shia.
imamreza.net

New Muslims from All the Corners of the World

Iman (Monica) Aparicio Christianity to Islam This sister became Muslim after her daughter started questioning her about various beliefs such as the trinity and she asked why she had to pray to the cross. So Monica started on her path to find the truth, and alhamdulilah she found Islam. This is a really amazing story about how someone found guidance in Islam. She also talks about her own experience in Arab countries with what she sees as problem, with their lack of understanding about Islam.
Turning Muslim in Texas George W Bush may be backed by Christian fundamentalists but in his home state of Texas, Islam is the latest big draw.
Eric was a Baptist preacher before he became a Muslim 14 years ago. Now he prays five times a day – even in the middle of watching a football game. His wife, Karen, also a convert, is covered from head to toe in the traditional Muslim Clothes. Islam, says Eric, ‘is everything I wanted Christianty to be’. His mother has found it hard to come to terms with her son’s conversion and believes he will return to the Christan faith: ‘Then he will be a dynamic preacher.’ Eric says: ‘Maybe some day she’ll embrace Islam.’
Muslim in the Family UK In the current climate, converting to Islam is not an obvious choice or an easy one, either for converts or their families. So, why have 14,000 Brits (and counting) now taken that leap of faith? In A Muslim in the Family, Rageh Omaar tries to find out.
For the four converts featured in the documentary, conversion is a positive step - but one that demands sacrifices of them and can cause worry and confusion for those closest to them.
Ultimately, though, it is a hopeful film. At a time when many people talk about "a clash of civilisations" between Islam and the West, converts just might become a living bridge between Islam and the West.
Sister Amy was a student at Birmingham University. This video shows how she has become Muslim and interviews her family as they find out about her changing from Christianity to Islam. Her father and Brother speak about how she has changed positively. That she never used to like going out to clubs or getting drunk, she was always looking for a better way. Her family realise that she is a lot happier now that she has found Islam. Video also shows Amy discussing her previous life, her views on marriage, finding the right hijab and the way Muslims live.
Spanish Muslim Woman Talks about Islam and Women\'s Rights. Bismillah, Assalamu alaykum, this is a Spanish Muslim sister, she talks about Women\'s rights in Islam. This sister\'s name is Fatimah Milla - Rumayor. She is educated and bought up in Spain, she works as a linguist and is from Spain.
She points out some useful information about Islam and she addresses the misconceptions that many people have about Islam and the role of women in it.
Sister Carolyne in England accepts the truth and becomes Muslim, Love for Islam. Carolyne decided to become Muslim. Carolyne says> "if any human being doesnt question why we\'re here, then... i think there is something wrong in that.One part of me was saying that it might upset people if i did this, it got to the stage in January, three years ago, when i just thought i have to follow this, this is the right way. I like to identify myself as a muslim........ I do think i really should be covering my head......"
She talks about how she first told her parents that she was Muslim. How and Why she became Muslim, as well as her thoughts on Hijab.
Yvonne Ridley Explains the Role of Women in Islam. She Talks about How She was an Active Feminist and how she came to Choose Islam as her way of life.
Clears Misconceptions, She used to believe that the Quran advocated beating of women, subjudation and intolerance. However, when she actually looked in the Quran and read it, She became convinced it was truly a message from God. She left Church of England and Christianity to become a Muslim.
She explains Islam quite well in this video and it is a recommended video to watch for anyone Muslim or non Muslim.Also She Critisises Muslim Haters like Irshad Manji.
Aminah\'s Story. A Revert Sister from England and her family Aminah\'s Story. A Revert Sister from England and her family. She explains how she became Muslim as a teenager, how she knows over 50 Muslim revert sisters like herself.
The film is set just after the september 11 NYC terrorist attacks, and shows the family and how they live. It also shows their decision to go and make Hijrah (immigration) to a Muslim country, the Yemen.
Latifa (Rachel) and her Parents Talk about Islam. Latifa (Rachel) Became Muslim whilst still studying in University as a Teenager. Her family were shocked by her decision. But, as they come to terms with it, they realise that their ideas about it were completely wrong.
Her Mother Says regarding her daughter\'s reversion to Islam, "And Now We have a Very forthright, intelligent, independent young lady as a daughter. And i am so proud of her!"
The Life of Cat Stevens and How he Became Muslim. The Life of Cat Stevens and How he Became Muslim.
This Documentary follows the life of Yusuf Islam, from his family background, his early life and aspirations.. his career and his change to the beautiful faith of Islam and the great benefits it gave his life. It also shows some of the work that he does today.
It is a nice documentary which shows how a famous Pop Star became Muslim. His family and other people from the music industry are interviewed.
Latest Yusuf Islam Interview Assalamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullah, This is A new Yusuf Islam Interview, talks about Islam.
He mentions how he was always searching for answers to life. Also talks about his new charity work. And his past and present dawah projects, how he is calling people to Islam.
Yusuf Islam formerly known as Cat Stevens in a recent interview.
A nice interview with a once famous Pop Star who became Muslim after finding the beauty of Islam.
Yusuf Islam in his latest TV interview with the ex-BBC Director Alan Yentob. A recent Video which was made earlier this year.
They Discuss Yusuf\'s Life and how he came from being Cat Steven World Famous Popstar to him finding Islam. Also interviewing his brother and they speak about their family life. They come across as a very close family.
Susan Carland (Australian Muslim of the Year 2004) and her journey to Islam. This short film made and supplied by Sister VerityP. It was made before she became Muslim.
It follows Susan Carland (Australian Muslim of the Year 2004) and her journey to Islam, why she decided to become a muslim. It shows Susan before she was Muslim and shows her family. She talks about Islam and what Islam means to her.
Verity, who was filming this video before she became a Muslim says: "It was the first film I ever made, I converted to Islam shortly after making it."
Malcolm X Story of him Coming to True Islam Malcolm went on the Hajj and found True Islam. This documentary shows how Malcolm Renounced his past with Nation of Islam and had become a True Muslim following Sunni Islam.
Malcolm talks about his experience on the hajj, and what it means to be a Muslim. He suprises everyone on his return from Makkah, and unfortunately just before he could make an even greater impact by calling people to Islam he was assassinated. May Allah bless him, one of the most important people in 20th Century Politics and American History.
Islam in Nederland (Netherlands
Video about Revert Muslim women in Holland. This video focuses on the lives of some Dutch Muslim women and their families. Their life as Muslims in Europe.
MashaAllah, they really love and practise their deen as much as they can. They try their best to make their families be comfortable and understand why they took the decisions that they did to become Muslim and to worship Allah alone. Thanks to sister Hajar for translation.
Sister Crystal Talks about her life Before and After Islam Sister Crystal Talks about her life Before and After Islam. The sister is from Canada. She was from Christian background, she found many inconsistencies in her Religion. She had always wanted to know more about who her creator was. When she was at college she met Muslims and found what they said was interesting. She had a Muslim boyfriend and had relationship with him. A Christian Arab tried to make her stop from becoming a Muslim by giving her biased anti-Islam literature. He would even give the literature to her mother. This made the Sister interested, so she went to the Mosque and tried to discover more about ISlam, she found that what the Arab man was telling her was wrong.
Muslim in the Family UK In the current climate, converting to Islam is not an obvious choice or an easy one, either for converts or their families. So, why have 14,000 Brits (and counting) now taken that leap of faith? In A Muslim in the Family, Rageh Omaar tries to find out.
For the four converts featured in the documentary, conversion is a positive step - but one that demands sacrifices of them and can cause worry and confusion for those closest to them.
Ultimately, though, it is a hopeful film. At a time when many people talk about "a clash of civilisations" between Islam and the West, converts just might become a living bridge between Islam and the West.
British man and French Woman, Two New Muslims! An Englishman recounts his life how he grew up and found Islam. Also he recounts a story of how he went to his childhood home in France and got in contact with a woman he used to know whilst he was a teenager.
They went on to get married. She however, was still a Christian. They adopted an Islamic lifestyle, and she learnt a lot about Islam from him during this time.
Although she was skeptical of Islam at first, partly due to the French style of secularism she was used to. she later saw that Islam was indeed perfect and the true message from God so she too became a Muslim.
This is An interesting story. indeed.
Islam French woman talks about becoming Muslim and Marriage A French Muslim sister talks about Islam, and How she became Muslim.
She explains how her decision to become a Muslim had nothing to do with her husband or anyone else.
So, It was her own decision and this is what Islam teaches
English Brother Yusuf Adam Explains Why He Became Muslim! Yusuf recalls how he spoke to a neigbour about Islam in 1997. She had asked if he had ever read the Quran. At first Yusuf thought this was stupid, but, he decided to read it "just to shut her up", so he could have "an intellectual discussion with her"anyway. It took him six weeks to study the Quran and he was amazed and interested by its beauty and truth. The brother read about the Prophets Abraham, Jesus and others and read about Tawheed, Correct belief monotheistic belief in God.This affected the brother and he became Muslim. Alhamdulillah.
Brother Abu Hafsa Entering Islam! Brother\'s name is Abu Hafsa ( it means Father of Hafsa), Abdul Malik (Servant of God), formerly Jerome is the first 100% blind person who was accepted into ... professional wrestling!!
He came to Islam after reading about the beautiful story of Malcolm X, and then later he studied Islam and began to read the Quran in Arabic Braille.
Walhamdulilah
People who became Muslim Due to 9/11 (i.e. Researching About Islam):
Jewish And Catholic Women Women Become Muslim After September 11. AlJazeera Interviews some American New Muslim women who became Muslim after 9/11. Aljazeera and FoxNews both interviewed Angela Colins, an ex-Catholic from sunny California. Safiya, who used to be an American Jew... Lost 8 of her relatives in September 11, however, this did not make her blame Islam for the actions of the perpetrators of September 11. Instead, she loved Islam and became Muslim. Having studied Islam and the Quran both women found out, that it has little to do with the extremist actions of a few lone people..... but it gives true meaning to worshipping God alone and not associating any partners with him. It is God\'s true message to mankind.
Angela Colins Muslim After September 11 on Fox News - She Became Muslim After 9/11. She had many of her family members who died on September 11th. She studied Islamand came to find it to be quite different from what other people told her. . and the way the media percieved it to be. She reverted to Islam from her Catholic Faith. Now she is a Muslim teacher.
Be sure to check out the Aljazeera interview, which also has an American Jew who turned to Islam after September 11.
New Muslim Reverts This Ramadan! ( Allison Poole& Barbara Cartabuke) in New York, post-9/11 CNN Interview: More And More People are Turning to Islam, especially after 9/11. September 11 has led to the media giving Islam a lot of attention. Although, the media has mostly reported negatively about Muslims and Islam, it has made people research about Islam. This has led to many to find the Truth about Islam and readily accept it as their faith.
CNN states that 1/4 of the 6 Million Muslims in the United States are Revert Muslims (Converts).
Allison Poole was Raised as a Southern Baptist Christian. She became Muslim this Ramadan. Alhamdulilah! Since becoming Muslim, she feels more at peace and finds Islam has made he life much better as she has the right belief in God. Her family is completely behind her decision, but she finds fellow Americans still misunderstand Islam and say bad things.
Barbara Cartabuke is also an American who has found Islam post 911. She was a Catholic who always felt praying to Jesus and reading Hail Mary\'s was wrong. When she found Islam, it was a breath of fresh air and answered all her questions regarding the reality of her existence and of true belief in God.
Youngest Muslim Reverts in The World. Children in England Turn To Islam. This video just Shows kids who were interested in Islam. They were attracted to the Mosque and wanted to learn more about the Religion of Islam.
Nobody has gone around to actually tell these kids what to do, it is by their own free choice and they just like going to the Mosque and like Muslim culture.. This documentary tells their story and how the children miss not being able to go to the mosque. This is juxtaposed to the views of their siblings and family.
4 New Muslims from 4 Corners of the World This is A great Documentary telling the story of Four people who have Reverted to the beautiful and true religion of Islam and how their life has changed for the better. They give accounts of their lives from before Islam and after reverting to Islam.
This is an interesting video for those who want to know more about Islam and what it means to people who follow it.
Brother Rasid from Christianity to Islam Bismillah, Brother Rasheed used to be a Christian and God was always important to him, he grew up and was influenced heavily by the hiphop culture in his teen years and he became materialistic. Alhamdulilah he later found Islam. In This video he talks about his life before Islam and how he became Muslim and why. Interesting story about how he forgot to pay for an item and whilst on his way back to return the good, was caught for shoplifting. This made him embarrassed as he was from a kind and good family, even though he was innocent. It made him think about God and Islam.
Yusuf Estes Journey to Islam. How he became Muslim. Brother Yusuf Estes was a Christian Preacher, but Alhamdulillah he found the light of Islam and became a Muslim.
He gives a very interesting little talk here about his life.. Infact, he looked at Arabs and Muslims in a negative light and only knew what the media presented to him.
It was through his interaction with Muslim people and from studying Islam that he came to understand Islam and know that it was definitely the Truth.
He became enlightened with regards to the true belief in God and in Jesus.
Its quite funny too. Islamic information Video.
Sister Jan is an English Revert to Islam. She explains why she loves Islam so much. She converted from Christianity, "my friends say you were a Good Christian, why have you sold out?, almost is what they would imply.. my answer to that is well i didnt know about the Prophet (Muhammad) so its been enriching of my faith" ..........
..........."It was only in the 1960s (in England), when we (women) could open a bank account without having our husband sign the bank cheque. Islamic Women have always had those rights. If i stick to what the Quran says to me, and what the message is, it is very clear to me, that i have total equality. Just do what it says, and nobody can argue with me on that."..............
New Muslims and Islam in the Phillipines. Discusses Origins of Islam in the Asia Pacific. Historical evidence that Islam was NOT Spread by the Sword!! Islam came by the way of Muslim traders from Yemen.
Many Christian Catholic people from the Phillipines are turning to Islam in their hundreds. Infact, they account for the largest percentage of Reversions in the Middle East as well as in the Phillipines.
This video has interview with a Lawyer who became Muslim after studing Islamic Law. He became convinced Islam was the Truth as he was suprised by the justice that Islamic law gave.
www.imamreza.net

Becoming Muslim

Born in 1954 in the farm country of the northwestern United States, I was raised in a religious family as a Roman Catholic. The Church provided a spiritual world that was unquestionable in my childhood, if anything more real than the physical world around me, but as I grew older, and especially after I entered a Catholic university and read more, my relation to the religion became increasingly called into question, in belief and practice.
One reason was the frequent changes in Catholic liturgy and ritual that occurred in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1963, suggesting to laymen that the Church had no firm standards. To one another, the clergy spoke about flexibility and liturgical relevance, but to ordinary Catholics they seemed to be groping in the dark. God does not change, nor the needs of the human soul, and there was no new revelation from heaven. Yet we rang in the changes, week after week, year after year; adding, subtracting, changing the language from Latin to English, finally bringing in guitars and folk music. Priests explained and explained as laymen shook their heads. The search for relevance left large numbers convinced that there had not been much in the first place.
A second reason was a number of doctrinal difficulties, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, which no one in the history of the world, neither priest nor layman, had been able to explain in a convincing way, and which resolved itself, to the common mind at least, in a sort of godhead-by-committee, shared between God the Father, who ruled the world from heaven; His son Jesus Christ, who saved humanity on earth; and the Holy Ghost, who was pictured as a white dove and appeared to have a considerably minor role. I remember wanting to make special friends with just one of them so he could handle my business with the others, and to this end, would sometimes pray earnestly to this one and sometimes to that; but the other two were always stubbornly there. I finally decided that God the Father must be in charge of the other two, and this put the most formidable obstacle in the way of my Catholicism, the divinity of Christ. Moreover, reflection made it plain that the nature of man contradicted the nature of God in every particular, the limitary and finite on the one hand, the absolute and infinite on the other. That Jesus was God was something I cannot remember having ever really believed, in childhood or later.
Another point of incredulity was the trading of the Church in stocks and bonds in the hereafter it called indulgences. Do such and such and so-and-so many years will be remitted from your sentence in purgatory that had seemed so false to Martin Luther at the outset of the Reformation.
I also remember a desire for a sacred scripture, something on the order of a book that could furnish guidance. A Bible was given to me one Christmas, a handsome edition, but on attempting to read it, I found it so rambling and devoid of a coherent thread that it was difficult to think of a way to base one\'s life upon it. Only later did I learn how Christians solve the difficulty in practice, Protestants by creating sectarian theologies, each emphasizing the texts of their sect and downplaying the rest; Catholics by downplaying it all, except the snippets mentioned in their liturgy. Something seemed lacking in a sacred book that could not be read as an integral whole.
Moreover, when I went to the university, I found that the authenticity of the book, especially the New Testament, had come into considerable doubt as a result of modern hermeneutical studies by Christians themselves. In a course on contemporary theology, I read the Norman Perrin translation of The Problem of the Historical Jesus by Joachim Jeremias, one of the principal New Testament scholars of this century. A textual critic who was a master of the original languages and had spent long years with the texts, he had finally agreed with the German theologian Rudolph Bultmann that without a doubt it is true to say that the dream of ever writing a biography of Jesus is over, meaning that the life of Christ as he actually lived it could not be reconstructed from the New Testament with any degree of confidence. If this were accepted from a friend of Christianity and one of its foremost textual experts, I reasoned, what was left for its enemies to say? And what then remained of the Bible except to acknowledge that it was a record of truths mixed with fictions, conjectures projected onto Christ by later followers, themselves at odds with each other as to who the master had been and what he had taught. And if theologians like Jeremias could reassure themselves that somewhere under the layers of later accretions to the New Testament there was something called the historical Jesus and his message, how could the ordinary person hope to find it, or know it, should it be found?
I studied philosophy at the university and it taught me to ask two things of whoever claimed to have the truth: What do you mean, and how do you know? When I asked these questions of my own religious tradition, I found no answers, and realized that Christianity had slipped from my hands. I then embarked on a search that is perhaps not unfamiliar to many young people in the West, a quest for meaning in a meaningless world.
I began where I had lost my previous belief, with the philosophers, yet wanting to believe, seeking not philosophy, but rather a philosophy.
I read the essays of the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, which taught about the phenomenon of the ages of life, and that money, fame, physical strength, and intelligence all passed from one with the passage of years, but only moral excellence remained. I took this lesson to heart and remembered it in after years. His essays also drew attention to the fact that a person was wont to repudiate in later years what he fervently espouses in the heat of youth. With a prescient wish to find the Divine, I decided to imbue myself with the most cogent arguments of atheism that I could find, that perhaps I might find a way out of them later. So I read the Walter Kaufmann translations of the works of the immoralist Friedrich Nietzsche. The many-faceted genius dissected the moral judgments and beliefs of mankind with brilliant philological and psychological arguments that ended in accusing human language itself, and the language of nineteenth-century science in particular, of being so inherently determined and mediated by concepts inherited from the language of morality that in their present form they could never hope to uncover reality. Aside from their immunological value against total skepticism, Nietzsche\'s works explained why the West was post-Christian, and accurately predicted the unprecedented savagery of the twentieth century, debunking the myth that science could function as a moral replacement for the now dead religion.
At a personal level, his tirades against Christianity, particularly in The Genealogy of Morals, gave me the benefit of distilling the beliefs of the monotheistic tradition into a small number of analyzable forms. He separated unessential concepts (such as the bizarre spectacle of an omnipotent deity\'s suicide on the cross) from essential ones, which I now, though without believing in them, apprehended to be but three alone: that God existed; that He created man in the world and defined the conduct expected of him in it; and that He would judge man accordingly in the hereafter and send him to eternal reward or punishment.
It was during this time that I read an early translation of the Qur\'an which I grudgingly admired, between agnostic reservations, for the purity with which it presented these fundamental concepts. Even if false, I thought, there could not be a more essential expression of religion. As a literary work, the translation, perhaps it was Sales, was uninspired and openly hostile to its subject matter, whereas I knew the Arabic original was widely acknowledged for its beauty and eloquence among the religious books of mankind. I felt a desire to learn Arabic to read the original.
On a vacation home from school, I was walking upon a dirt road between some fields of wheat, and it happened that the sun went down. By some inspiration, I realized that it was a time of worship, a time to bow and pray to the one God. But it was not something one could rely on oneself to provide the details of, but rather a passing fancy, or perhaps the beginning of an awareness that atheism was an inauthentic way of being.
I carried something of this disquiet with me when I transferred to the University of Chicago, where I studied the epistemology of ethical theory how moral judgments were reached reading and searching among the books of the philosophers for something to shed light on the question of meaninglessness, which was both a personal concern and one of the central philosophical problems of our age.
According to some, scientific observation could only yield description statements of the form X is Y, for example, The object is red, Its weight is two kilos, Its height is ten centimeters, and so on, in each of which the functional was a scientifically verifiable is, whereas in moral judgments the functional element was an ought, a description statement which no amount of scientific observation could measure or verify. It appeared that ought was logically meaningless, and with it all morality whatsoever, a position that reminded me of those described by Lucian in his advice that whoever sees a moral philosopher coming down the road should flee from him as from a mad dog. For such a person, expediency ruled, and nothing checked his behavior but convention.
As Chicago was a more expensive school, and I had to raise tuition money, I found summer work on the West Coast with a seining boat fishing in Alaska. The sea proved a school in its own right, one I was to return to for a space of eight seasons, for the money. I met many people on boats, and saw something of the power and greatness of the wind, water, storms, and rain; and the smallness of man. These things lay before us like an immense book, but my fellow fishermen and I could only discern the letters of it that were within our context: to catch as many fish as possible within the specified time to sell to the tenders. Few knew how to read the book as a whole. Sometimes, in a blow, the waves rose like great hills, and the captain would hold the wheel with white knuckles, our bow one minute plunging gigantically down into a valley of green water, the next moment reaching the bottom of the trough and soaring upwards towards the sky before topping the next crest and starting down again.
Early in my career as a deck hand, I had read the Hazel Barnes translation of Jean Paul Sartres "Being and Nothingness", in which he argued that phenomena only arose for consciousness in the existential context of human projects, a theme that recalled Marx\'s 1844 manuscripts, where nature was produced by man, meaning, for example, that when the mystic sees a stand of trees, his consciousness hypostatizes an entirely different phenomenal object than a poet does, for example, or a capitalist. To the mystic, it is a manifestation; to the poet, a forest; to the capitalist, lumber. According to such a perspective, a mountain only appears as tall in the context of the project of climbing it, and so on, according to the instrumental relations involved in various human interests. But the great natural events of the sea surrounding us seemed to defy, with their stubborn, irreducible facticity, our uncomprehending attempts to come to terms with them. Suddenly, we were just there, shaken by the forces around us without making sense of them, wondering if we would make it through. Some, it was true, would ask Gods help at such moments, but when we returned safely to shore, we behaved like men who knew little of Him, as if those moments had been a lapse into insanity, embarrassing to think of at happier times. It was one of the lessons of the sea that in fact, such events not only existed but perhaps even preponderated in our life. Man was small and weak, the forces around him were large, and he did not control them.
Sometimes a boat would sink and men would die. I remember a fisherman from another boat who was working near us one opening, doing the same job as I did, piling web. He smiled across the water as he pulled the net from the hydraulic block overhead, stacking it neatly on the stern to ready it for the next set. Some weeks later, his boat overturned while fishing in a storm, and he got caught in the web and drowned. I saw him only once again, in a dream, beckoning to me from the stern of his boat.
The tremendousness of the scenes we lived in, the storms, the towering sheer cliffs rising vertically out of the water for hundreds of feet, the cold and rain and fatigue, the occasional injuries and deaths of workers these made little impression on most of us. Fishermen were, after all, supposed to be tough. On one boat, the family that worked it was said to lose an occasional crew member while running at sea at the end of the season, invariably the sole non-family member who worked with them, his loss saving them the wages they would have otherwise had to pay him.
The captain of another was a twenty-seven-year-old who delivered millions of dollars worth of crab each year in the Bering Sea. When I first heard of him, we were in Kodiak, his boat at the city dock they had tied up to after a lengthy run some days before. The captain was presently indisposed in his bunk in the stateroom, where he had been vomiting up blood from having eaten a glass uptown the previous night to prove how tough he was.
He was in somewhat better condition when I later saw him in the Bering Sea at the end of a long winter king crab season. He worked in his wheelhouse up top, surrounded by radios that could pull in a signal from just about anywhere, computers, Loran, sonar, depth-finders, radar. His panels of lights and switches were set below the 180-degree sweep of shatterproof windows that overlooked the sea and the men on deck below, to whom he communicated by loudspeaker. They often worked round the clock, pulling their gear up from the icy water under watchful batteries of enormous electric lights attached to the masts that turned the perpetual night of the winter months into day. The captain had a reputation as a screamer, and had once locked his crew out on deck in the rain for eleven hours because one of them had gone inside to have a cup of coffee without permission. Few crewmen lasted longer than a season with him, though they made nearly twice the yearly income of, say, a lawyer or an advertising executive, and in only six months. Fortunes were made in the Bering Sea in those years, before over fishing wiped out the crab.
At present, he was at anchor, and was amiable enough when we tied up to him and he came aboard to sit and talk with our own captain. They spoke at length, at times gazing thoughtfully out at the sea through the door or windows, at times looking at each other sharply when something animated them, as the topic of what his competitors thought of him. "They wonder why I have a few bucks", he said. "Well I slept in my own home one night last year."
He later had his crew throw off the lines and pick the anchor, his eyes flickering warily over the water from the windows of the house as he pulled away with a blast of smoke from the stack. His watchfulness, his walrus-like physique, his endless voyages after game and markets, reminded me of other predatory hunter-animals of the sea. Such people, good at making money but heedless of any ultimate end or purpose, made an impression on me, and I increasingly began to wonder if men didn\'t need principles to guide them and tell them why they were there. Without such principles, nothing seemed to distinguish us above our prey except being more thorough, and technologically capable of preying longer, on a vaster scale, and with greater devastation than the animals we hunted.
These considerations were in my mind the second year I studied at Chicago, where I became aware through studies of philosophical moral systems that philosophy had not been successful in the past at significantly influencing peoples morals and preventing injustice, and I came to realize that there was little hope for it to do so in the future. I found that comparing human cultural systems and societies in their historical succession and multiplicity had led many intellectuals to moral relativism, since no moral value could be discovered which on its own merits was transculturally valid, a reflection leading to nihilism, the perspective that sees human civilizations as plants that grow out of the earth, springing from their various seeds and soils, thriving for a time, and then dying away.
Some heralded this as intellectual liberation, among them Emile Durkheim in his "Elementary Forms of the Religious Life", or Sigmund Freud in his "Totem and Taboo", which discussed mankind as if it were a patient and diagnosed its religious traditions as a form of a collective neurosis that we could now hope to cure, by applying to them a thoroughgoing scientific atheism, a sort of salvation through pure science.
On this subject, I bought the Jeremy Shapiro translation of "Knowledge and Human Interests" by Jurgen Habermas, who argued that there was no such thing as pure science that could be depended upon to forge boldly ahead in a steady improvement of itself and the world. He called such a misunderstanding scientism, not science. Science in the real world, he said, was not free of values, still less of interests. The kinds of research that obtain funding, for example, were a function of what their society deemed meaningful, expedient, profitable, or important. Habermas had been of a generation of German academics who, during the thirties and forties, knew what was happening in their country, but insisted they were simply engaged in intellectual production, that they were living in the realm of scholarship, and need not concern themselves with whatever the state might choose to do with their research. The horrible question mark that was attached to German intellectuals when the Nazi atrocities became public after the war made Habermas think deeply about the ideology of pure science. If anything was obvious, it was that the nineteenth-century optimism of thinkers like Freud and Durkheim was no longer tenable.
I began to re-assess the intellectual life around me. Like Schopenhauer, I felt that higher education must produce higher human beings. But at the university, I found lab people talking to each other about forging research data to secure funding for the coming year; luminaries who wouldn\'t permit tape recorders at their lectures for fear that competitors in the same field would go one step further with their research and beat them to publication; professors vying with each other in the length of their courses syllabuses. The moral qualities I was accustomed to associate with ordinary, unregenerate humanity seemed as frequently met with in sophisticated academics as they had been in fishermen. If one could laugh at fishermen who, after getting a boatload of fish in a big catch, would cruise back and forth in front of the others to let them see how laden down in the water they were, ostensibly looking for more fish; what could one say about the Ph.D.\'s who behaved the same way about their books and articles? I felt that their knowledge had not developed their persons, that the secret of higher man did not lie in their sophistication.
I wondered if I hadn\'t gone down the road of philosophy as far as one could go. While it had debunked my Christianity and provided some genuine insights, it had not yet answered the big questions. Moreover, I felt that this was somehow connected I didn\'t know whether as cause or effect to the fact that our intellectual tradition no longer seemed to seriously comprehend itself. What were any of us, whether philosophers, fishermen, garbagemen, or kings, except bit players in a drama we did not understand, diligently playing out our roles until our replacements were sent, and we gave our last performance? But could one legitimately hope for more than this? I read "Kojves Introduction to the Reading of Hegel", in which he explained that for Hegel, philosophy did not culminate in the system, but rather in the Wise Man, someone able to answer any possible question on the ethical implications of human actions. This made me consider our own plight in the twentieth century, which could no longer answer a single ethical question.
It was thus as if this century\'s unparalleled mastery of concrete things had somehow ended by making us things. I contrasted this with Hegel\'s concept of the concrete in his "Phenomenology of Mind". An example of the abstract, in his terms, was the limitary physical reality of the book now held in your hands, while the concrete was its interconnection with the larger realities it presupposed, the modes of production that determined the kind of ink and paper in it, the aesthetic standards that dictated its color and design, the systems of marketing and distribution that had carried it to the reader, the historical circumstances that had brought about the readers literacy and taste; the cultural events that had mediated its style and usage; in short, the bigger picture in which it was articulated and had its being. For Hegel, the movement of philosophical investigation always led from the abstract to the concrete, to the more real. He was therefore able to say that philosophy necessarily led to theology, whose object was the ultimately real, the Deity. This seemed to me to point up an irreducible lack in our century. I began to wonder if, by materializing our culture and our past, we had not somehow abstracted ourselves from our wider humanity, from our true nature in relation to a higher reality.
At this juncture, I read a number of works on Islam, among them the books of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who believed that many of the problems of western man, especially those of the environment, were from his having left the divine wisdom of revealed religion, which taught him his true place as a creature of God in the natural world and to understand and respect it. Without it, he burned up and consumed nature with ever more effective technological styles of commercial exploitation that ruined his world from without while leaving him increasingly empty within, because he did not know why he existed or to what end he should act.
I reflected that this might be true as far as it went, but it begged the question as to the truth of revealed religion. Everything on the face of the earth, all moral and religious systems, were on the same plane, unless one could gain certainty that one of them was from a higher source, the sole guarantee of the objectivity, the whole force, of moral law. Otherwise, one man\'s opinion was as good as another\'s, and we remained in an undifferentiated sea of conflicting individual interests, in which no valid objection could be raised to the strong eating the weak.
I read other books on Islam, and came across some passages translated by W. Montgomery Watt from "That Which Delivers from Error" by the theologian and mystic Ghazali, who, after a mid-life crises of questioning and doubt, realized that beyond the light of prophetic revelation there is no other light on the face of the earth from which illumination may be received, the very point to which my philosophical inquiries had led. Here was, in Hegel\'s terms, the Wise Man, in the person of a divinely inspired messenger who alone had the authority to answer questions of good and evil.
I also read A.J. Arberrys translation "The Qur\'an Interpreted", and I recalled my early wish for a sacred book. Even in translation, the superiority of the Muslim scripture over the Bible was evident in every line, as if the reality of divine revelation, dimly heard of all my life, had now been placed before my eyes. In its exalted style, its power, its inexorable finality, its uncanny way of anticipating the arguments of the atheistic heart in advance and answering them; it was a clear exposition of God as God and man as man, the revelation of the awe-inspiring Divine Unity being the identical revelation of social and economic justice among men.
I began to learn Arabic at Chicago, and after studying the grammar for a year with a fair degree of success, decided to take a leave of absence to try to advance in the language in a year of private study in Cairo. Too, a desire for new horizons drew me, and after a third season of fishing, I went to the Middle East.
In Egypt, I found something I believe brings many to Islam, namely, the mark of pure monotheism upon its followers, which struck me as more profound than anything I had previously encountered. I met many Muslims in Egypt, good and bad, but all influenced by the teachings of their Book to a greater extent than I had ever seen elsewhere. It has been some fifteen years since then, and I cannot remember them all, or even most of them, but perhaps the ones I can recall will serve to illustrate the impressions made.
One was a man on the side of the Nile near the Miqyas Gardens, where I used to walk. I came upon him praying on a piece of cardboard, facing across the water. I started to pass in front of him, but suddenly checked myself and walked around behind, not wanting to disturb him. As I watched a moment before going my way, I beheld a man absorbed in his relation to God, oblivious to my presence, much less my opinions about him or his religion. To my mind, there was something magnificently detached about this, altogether strange for someone coming from the West, where praying in public was virtually the only thing that remained obscene.
Another was a young boy from secondary school who greeted me near Khan al-Khalili, and because I spoke some Arabic and he spoke some English and wanted to tell me about Islam, he walked with me several miles across town to Giza, explaining as much as he could. When we parted, I think he said a prayer that I might become Muslim.
Another was a Yemeni friend living in Cairo who brought me a copy of the Qur\'an at my request to help me learn Arabic. I did not have a table beside the chair where I used to sit and read in my hotel room, and it was my custom to stack the books on the floor. When I set the Qur\'an by the others there, he silently stooped and picked it up, out of respect for it. This impressed me because I knew he was not religious, but here was the effect of Islam upon him.
Another was a woman I met while walking beside a bicycle on an unpaved road on the opposite side of the Nile from Luxor. I was dusty, and somewhat shabbily clothed, and she was an old woman dressed in black from head to toe who walked up, and without a word or glance at me, pressed a coin into my hand so suddenly that in my surprise I dropped it. By the time I picked it up, she had hurried away. Because she thought I was poor, even if obviously non-Muslim, she gave me some money without any expectation for it except what was between her and her God. This act made me think a lot about Islam, because nothing seemed to have motivated her but that.
Many other things passed through my mind during the months I stayed in Egypt to learn Arabic. I found myself thinking that a man must have some sort of religion, and I was more impressed by the effect of Islam on the lives of Muslims, a certain nobility of purpose and largesse of soul, than I had ever been by any other religions or even atheisms effect on its followers. The Muslims seemed to have more than we did.
Christianity had its good points to be sure, but they seemed mixed with confusions, and I found myself more and more inclined to look to Islam for their fullest and most perfect expression. The first question we had memorized from our early catechism had been Why were you created? to which the correct answer was To know, love, and serve God. When I reflected on those around me, I realized that Islam seemed to furnish the most comprehensive and understandable way to practice this on a daily basis.
As for the inglorious political fortunes of the Muslims today, I did not feel these to be a reproach against Islam, or to relegate it to an inferior position in a natural order of world ideologies, but rather saw them as a low phase in a larger cycle of history. Foreign hegemony over Muslim lands had been witnessed before in the thorough going destruction of Islamic civilization in the thirteenth century by the Mongol horde, who razed cities and built pyramids of human heads from the steppes of Central Asia to the Muslim heartlands, after which the fullness of destiny brought forth the Ottoman Empire to raise the Word of Allah and make it a vibrant political reality that endured for centuries. It was now, I reflected, merely the turn of contemporary Muslims to strive for a new historic crystallization of Islam, something one might well aspire to share in.
When a friend in Cairo one day asked me, Why don\'t you become a Muslim?, I found that Allah had created within me a desire to belong to this religion, which so enriches its followers, from the simplest hearts to the most magisterial intellects. It is not through an act of the mind or will that anyone becomes a Muslim, but rather through the mercy of Allah, and this, in the final analysis, was what brought me to Islam in Cairo in 1977.
Is it not time that the hearts of those who believe should be humbled to the Remembrance of God and the Truth which He has sent down, and that they should not be as those to whom the Book was given aforetime, and the term seemed over long to them, so that their hearts have become hard, and many of them are ungodly? Know that God revives the earth after it was dead. We have indeed made clear for you the signs, that haply you will understand. (Qur\'an 57:16-17)
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More Hispanic Americans are Converting to Islam

Steve Mort, 9th February, 2007, Voice of America, The number of Hispanic Americans converting to Islam is growing rapidly -- particularly in New York, California, Texas and Florida, which have the greatest concentration of Hispanic residents. Muslim leaders say interest in Islam has increased in the past few years, and they also note that Muslims and Hispanics, many of whom are immigrants, share a number of common concerns.
Steve Mort reports from a mosque in Florida that has seen a steady increase in Latino worshippers.
The al-Rahman mosque in Orlando opened in 1975 and is the oldest Muslim place of worship in the city.
But over the years its membership has changed, and now increasing numbers of Hispanics, like Jesus Marti, are joining the congregation. "It\'s the right way to be worshipping God, and I love the Islamic religion. It really has given me a lot of knowledge, and I have learned so many things from Islam."
Jesus, a Puerto Rican living in Florida, converted to Islam only a year ago. He is one of tens of thousands of Hispanic Muslims in the United States: estimates range from around 70,000 to 200,000.
He says that while he has faced criticism for converting to Islam, he has found broad acceptance as a Muslim in America. "Islam is not a country. Islam is a religion. Islam is definitely a way of life, for discipline where you follow and you try to enhance yourself to get the most positive things out of yourself for the benefit of your own self and for the benefit of your own family and the society as a whole."
Muslim leaders say Jesus Marti and other Hispanics choose Islam for a variety of reasons. They say Muslims and Hispanics face common issues and concerns, like finding their way in a new, unfamiliar country. The media focus on Islam since September 11th has also been factor.
Imam Muhammad Musri is president of the Islamic Society of Central Florida. The society has about 40,000 members. Iman Musri says Latinos and Muslims find they have a lot in common. "There are so many common denominators between immigrant Muslims and immigrant Hispanics who see the issues common to both of them -- immigration issues, as it is a big discussion in the United States, and there are other issues of trying to find a job, keep a job, buy a home -- all the same struggles two groups of people happen to be going through creates this bond between them".
Hundreds of worshippers attend Imam Musri\'s mosque, and there is an increasing demand for religious literature in Spanish.
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