First and foremost I would say it was because fundamentally I had always been a
Muslim without being aware of it.
Very early in my life I had lost faith in Christianity for many
reasons, the major one being that whenever I questioned any Christian, whether
it was a person belonging to the so called Holy Orders or a layman, regarding
any point that puzzled me in regard to the Church teachings, I invariably
received the monotonous answer : `You must not question the teachings of the
Church; you must have faith.' I did not have the courage in those days to say :
`I cannot have faith in something that I do not understand', and, from my
experience, neither do most of the people who call themselves Christians. What
I did do was to leave the Church (Roman Catholic) and its teaching and to place
my faith in the one true god in whom it was much easier to believe, than in the
three gods of the Church. By contrast with the mysteries and miracles of the
Christian teaching, life took on a new and wider meaning, no longer cramped
with dogma and ritual. Everywhere I looked I could see God's work. And
although, in common with greater minds than my own, I could not understand the
miracles that happened before my eyes, I could stand and marvel at the wonder
of it all --- the trees, flowers, birds and animals. Even a new born babe
became a beautiful miracle, not the same thing that the Church had taught me to
believe at all. I remembered how, when a child, I gazed at newborn babies and
thought, 'It's all covered in black sin', I no longer believed in ugliness;
everything became beautiful.
First and foremost I would say it was because fundamentally I had always been a Muslim without being aware of it.
Very early in my life I had lost faith in Christianity for many
reasons, the major one being that whenever I questioned any Christian, whether
it was a person belonging to the so called Holy Orders or a layman, regarding
any point that puzzled me in regard to the Church teachings, I invariably
received the monotonous answer : `You must not question the teachings of the
Church; you must have faith.' I did not have the courage in those days to say :
`I cannot have faith in something that I do not understand', and, from my
experience, neither do most of the people who call themselves Christians.
What
I did do was to leave the Church (Roman Catholic) and its teaching and to place
my faith in the one true god in whom it was much easier to believe, than in the
three gods of the Church.
By contrast with the mysteries and miracles of the
Christian teaching, life took on a new and wider meaning, no longer cramped
with dogma and ritual. Everywhere I looked I could see God's work. And
although, in common with greater minds than my own, I could not understand the
miracles that happened before my eyes, I could stand and marvel at the wonder
of it all --- the trees, flowers, birds and animals.
Even a new born babe
became a beautiful miracle, not the same thing that the Church had taught me to
believe at all.
I remembered how, when a child, I gazed at newborn babies and
thought, 'It's all covered in black sin', I no longer believed in ugliness;
everything became beautiful.
Then one day my daughter brought home a book about Islam.
We
became so interested in it that we followed it up with many other books on
Islam. We soon realized that this was really what we believed.
During the time
I had believed in Christianity I had been led to believe that Islam was only
something to joke about.
Thus all that I then read was a revelation to me.
After a while I looked up some Muslims and questioned them on some of the
points that were not quite clear to me.
Here again there was yet another
revelation.
My questions were all answered promptly and concisely, so different
from the frustration I had experienced when questioning Christianity.
After
much reading and studying of the religion of Islam both my daughter and myself
decided to become Muslims, taking the names of Rashida and Mahmuda respectively.
If I were asked what impressed me most in the religion of Islam, I
would probably say the prayers, because prayers in Christianity are used wholly
in begging God (through Jesus Christ) to grant worldly favours, whereas in
Islam they ar used to give praise and thanks to Almighty God for all His
blessings since He knows what is necessary for our welfare and grants us what
we need without our asking it.
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