Path to Islam
My path to Islam was very easy, Alhamdulillah. Islam didn’t seem strange to me. Belief in Allah, Alone, had been preserved in my heart from a very early age. I had always believed in One God, although I was raised in a Catholic home. I was more concerned with the “God the Father” aspect of our belief than I was the other parts of the trinity from the beginnings of realization that worship was part of our reason for being.
From the time I was about five or six years old I used to have a recurring dream. It was when I began to go to the Sunday religion classes known as CCD classes. These were weekly religious instruction given to Catholic children who attended public schools rather than private Catholic school. I used to tell my mother that I didn’t need to attend religion classes that week because I already had my lesson. She asked me what lesson I took. I told her, “I went to my class and was waiting for everyone to come. The classroom was dark still. Then a bright light came and I couldn’t see who turned it on. I asked if it was Miss Bonnie (my teacher) but there was no answer. Then the lesson began. I was being told that ‘God is only One. He has no father, mother, sister, brother, son or daughter. He is One. He is the beginning, and the end, the first and the last, the origin of all that exists…’.” My mother would tell me each time, “just eat and get dressed, you have to go to class.” I did not like CCD classes.
This dream came to me continuously throughout my life up until I became a Muslim. It was more frequent as I was younger, but it became a familiar dream and one I found comforting. As I grew older, I wished I had it as often as I did when I was younger. Waking up, I would think, “There is my dream.”
I liked religion, and was rather a “religious” person even in those difficult “teenage” years. I was a member of the church choir and was active in church activities. I enjoyed studying religion and it was a very easy subject for me. Learning it was a lot like learning history, and the stories made mental images. I disappeared into the era of the lessons.
From sixth to ninth grades I attended Catholic school. Therefore I was studying religion as part of the curriculum and not on Sundays anymore. As part of our World History course while in ninth grade in the Catholic high school, we took the region of the Middle East where I was introduced to the religion of Islam and what its beliefs were and the basics of the religion. I didn’t really give the religion that much attention beyond what was being taught in the book. However, we were also taking church history in our own religion classes, and these lessons raised some serious questions in my mind. Alongside that, in the spring of that year during the Easter season in the church, I began to realize that we were reading things in the Bible that were in direct opposition to what we professed as faith–essentially in the part of Jesus being the son of God. I noticed that over and over again, Jesus was saying “this is as you claim” when the blasphemy charges were being brought against him claiming to be the son of God. He claimed to be the “son of man”. I remember looking around and wondering why no one else was having this same epiphany that I was. Why weren’t these hundreds of other people noticing what they, themselves, were reading right there in the scripture? This continued each Easter season for the next couple of years, and while I was going to church, the transformation in my faith began. I began to search for the light and the truth of God, wanting to worship yet wanting to do it “the right way”.
During one of my church visits, I was trying to introduce a friend of mine to “belief” because she was raised in a house basically without any formal religion. We went into an old church in the center of the city and I was showing her the basics of the church and we were going to sit and pray. I found a card with a “novena” on it. I had never heard of a novena before, and read it. It explained that a novena was a series of prayers offered in sets of nine: either once a day for nine days, once a week for nine weeks or once a month for nine months. Although this particular novena was to be offered to the Virgin Mary, I started praying. I decided I wanted it to be answered in nine days, so I made my offering to be once a day for nine days. Returning to the church for nine days, I offered this novena asking that I be guided to the right way of worship. It was after praying this novena that I met the first “real live Muslims” of my life at the local college where friends were taking classes. I met them when I was seventeen years old, and I was placed upon the most major test of my life: Islam or American life. And as everyone knows, American life opens upon graduation from high school at 17 or 18 years of age.
I began learning about Islam from the couples who I met. I met families with young children. I learned how they interacted with each other, in their families and with us as Americans. Some of the students in the college began telling us about Islamic events and history. It was the first time I realized that Muslim women actually still wear hijab and it wasn’t something of two-thousand years ago as it was in the church. The five-times daily prayers were a reality that was practiced as compared to our once a week service that we didn’t really even pay attention to.
When I learned about Suratul Ikhlaas, this was all I needed to accept Islam. This small chapter of Quran resounded in my heart! It was the exact same creed of my dream since childhood. It was very easy to follow this religion as it embodied the beliefs that I had held from the beginnings of realization of belief. I always knew God existed and this chapter confirmed that for me along with the essence of that belief: that He is One and has no parents, siblings or offspring.
