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I am a new Muslim woman from Richmond, VA. I had never even met Muslims
before last year, and had no idea that there was an Islamic center in my own
city. However, at that time, I was very interested in Islam, but I could find
nothing to read. I read encyclopedias and any books I could get my hands on, but
they were all written by non-Muslims. They said that Muhammad (saws) wrote the
Qur'an in the 7th centruy, that Muslims worshipped the black stone, and that
Islam bred hatred towards women. They also said that Muhammad (saws) copied the
Bible, that Islam was spread with the Qur'an in one hand and the sword in the
other, and implied (if not stated directly) that all Muslims were Arab. One book
even said that the word "Allah" came from al-lot, the moon god of the
pagan Arabs. These are just some of the lies I read.
Then, one day, two Pakistani Muslim women (who were also muhajjabas [wearing
hijab -ed.]) came to my college. I befriended them, and then I started
asking them all kinds of questions. I had already left Christianity when I was
12, so I felt no challenge to my personal beliefs. I was a biology major and had
basically no religion. I was amazed at what they told me, and I realized that
all of my previous knowledge was lies.
Then, I came home for the summer. I got my own apartment and started working
at 7-11. While I was working, a black muhajjaba came in the store. I asked her
where she worshipped and when she told me there was an Islamic center on the
same street I was working on, I was amazed.
I went the next day, but no one was there. So I went the day after that day
(which happened to be Friday) and found some people there. A man told me to come
the next week at noon so I could meet some of the ladies. But when he said
"noon," he meant "dhuhr," not 12. I didn't know that. So I
came at 12 the following week, but no one was there. For some reason, I decided
to wait, Subhan-Allah. And wait I did, for an hour and a half (jumaa' [Friday
prayer -ed.] is at 2), and finally I meet some people. A lady there gave me
a copy of Maurice Bucaille's The Bible, Qur'an, and Science. When I read
it, I knew that I wanted to become a Muslim. After all, I was a biology major. I
knew that the things in the Qur'an had to be from Allah (swt), and not
from an illiterate, uneducated man. So I went the next week and took shahaada [i.e.
stated and accepted the creed of Islam -ed.]
When my dad found out, he went crazy. He came to my apartment and tore up
everything in it, including my Qur'an. I called the police, and they came out.
But they refused to help. They said "Don't you think he's right?" and
so on. So I fled to Nashville, TN.
I have continued to talk with my dad, though, because the Qur'an says to
honour your parents (it does not distinguish between Kaafir and Muslim parents),
and because I remember the story of Umar Ibn Al-Khattab (raa). He hated Islam so
much that he used to beat his slave girl until his arm grew tired. Al-Hamdu
Lillah, Allah (swt) has rewarded me for my efforts. I saw my father for the
first time this summer, in full hijaab. He accepted it without too much
commentary. I think he realizes now that he can't bully me into renouncing
Islam.
Interview with Maryam Jameelah(formerly
Margaret Marcus) - Taken from The
Islamic Bulletin, San Francisco, CA 94141-0186
Q: Would you kindly tell
us how your interest in Islam began?
A: I was Margaret (Peggy) Marcus. As a small child I possessed a keen
interest in music and was particularly fond of the classical operas and
symphonies considered high culture in the West. Music was my favorite subject in
school in which I always earned the highest grades. By sheer chance, I happened
to hear Arabic music over the radio which so much pleased me that I was
determined to hear more. I would not leave my parents in peace until my father
finally took me to the Syrian section in New York City where I bought a stack of
Arabic recordings. My parents, relatives and neighbors thought Arabic and its
music dreadfully weird and so distressing to their ears that whenever I put on
my recordings, they demanded that I close all the doors and windows in my room
lest they be disturbed! After I embraced Islam in 1961, I used to sit enthralled
by the hour at the mosque in New York, listening to tape-recordings of Tilawat
chanted by the celebrated Egyptian Qari, Abdul Basit. But on Jumha Salat (Friday
Prayers), the Imam did not play the tapes. We had a special guest that day. A
short, very thin and poorly-dressed black youth, who introduced himself to us as
a student from Zanzibar, recited Surah ar-Rahman. I never heard such glorious
Tilawat even from Abdul Basit! He possessed such a voice of gold; surely Hazrat
Bilal must have sounded much like him!
I traced the beginning of my interest in Islam to the age of ten. While
attending a reformed Jewish Sunday school, I became fascinated with the
historical relationship between the Jews and the Arabs. From my Jewish
textbooks, I learned that Abraham was the father of the Arabs as well as the
Jews. I read how centuries later when, in medieval Europe, Christian persecution
made their lives intolerable, the Jews were welcomed in Muslim Spain and that it
was the magnanimity of this same Arabic Islamic civilization which stimulated
Hebrew culture to reach its highest peak of achievement.
Totally unaware of the true nature of Zionism, I naively thought that the
Jews were returning to Palestine to strengthen their close ties of kinship in
religion and culture with their Semitic cousins. Together I believed that the
Jews and the Arabs would cooperate to attain another Golden Age of culture in
the Middle East.
Despite my fascination with the study of Jewish history, I was extremely
unhappy at the Sunday school. At this time I identified myself strongly with the
Jewish people in Europe, then suffering a horrible fate under the Nazis and I
was shocked that none of my fellow classmates nor their parents took their
religion seriously. During the services at the synagogue, the children used to
read comic strips hidden in their prayer books and laugh to scorn at the
rituals. The children were so noisy and disorderly that the teachers could not
discipline them and found it very difficult to conduct the classes.
At home the atmosphere for religious observance was scarcely more congenial.
My elder sister detested the Sunday school so much that my mother literally had
to drag her out of bed in the mornings and it never went without the struggle of
tears and hot words. Finally my parents were exhausted and let her quit. On the
Jewish High Holy Days instead of attending synagogue and fasting on Yom Kippur,
my sister and I were taken out of school to attend family picnics and parties in
fine restaurants. When my sister and I convinced our parents how miserable we
both were at the Sunday school they joined an agnostic, humanist organization
known as the Ethical Culture Movement.
The Ethical Culture Movement was founded late in the 19th century by Felix
Alder. While studying for rabbinate, Felix Alder grew convinced that devotion to
ethical values as relative and man-made, regarding any supernaturalism or
theology as irrelevant, constituted the only religion fit for the modern world.
I attended the Ethical Culture Sunday School each week from the age of eleven
until I graduated at fifteen. Here I grew into complete accord with the ideas of
the movement and regarded all traditional, organized religions with scorn.
When I was eighteen years old I became a member of the local Zionist youth
movement known as the Mizrachi Hatzair. But when I found out what the nature of
Zionism was, which made the hostility between Jews and Arabs irreconcilable, I
left several months later in disgust. When I was twenty and a student at New
York University, one of my elective courses was entitled Judaism in Islam. My
professor, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Katsh, the head of the department of Hebrew
Studies there, spared no efforts to convince his students--all Jews, many of
whom aspired to become rabbis--that Islam was derived from Judaism. Our
textbook, written by him, took each verse from the Quran, painstakingly tracing
it to its allegedly Jewish source. Although his real aim was to prove to his
students the superiority of Judaism over Islam, he convinced me diametrically of
the opposite.
I soon discovered that Zionism was merely a combination of the racist,
tribalistic aspects of Judaism. Modern secular nationalistic Zionism was further
discredited in my eyes when I learned that few, if any, of the leaders of
Zionism were observant Jews and that perhaps nowhere is Orthodox, traditional
Judaism regarded with such intense contempt as in Israel. When I found nearly
all important Jewish leaders in America supporters for Zionism, who felt not the
slightest twinge of conscience because of the terrible injustice inflicted upon
the Palestinian Arabs, I could no longer consider myself a Jew at heart.
One morning in November 1954, Professor Katsh, during his lecture, argued
with irrefutable logic that the monotheism taught by Moses (peace be upon him)
and the Divine Laws reveled to him were indispensable as the basis for all
higher ethical values. If morals were purely man-made, as the Ethical Culture
and other agnostic and atheistic philosophies taught, then they could be changed
at will, according to mere whim, convenience or circumstance. The result would
be utter chaos leading to individual and collective ruin. Belief in the
Hereafter, as the Rabbis in the Talmud taught, argued Professor Katsh, was not
mere wishful thinking but a moral necessity. Only those, he said, who firmly
believed that each of us will be summoned by God on Judgement Day to render a
complete account of our life on earth and rewarded or punished accordingly, will
possess the self-discipline to sacrifice transitory pleasure and endure
hardships and sacrifice to attain lasting good.
It was in Professor Katsh's class that I met Zenita, the most unusual and
fascinating girl I have ever met. The first time I entered Professor Katsh's
class, as I looked around the room for an empty desk in which to sit, I spied
two empty seats, on the arm of one, three big beautifully bound volumes of Yusuf
Ali's English translation and commentary of the Holy Quran. I sat down right
there, burning with curiosity to find out to whom these volumes belonged. Just
before Rabbi Katsh's lecture was to begin, a tall, very slim girl with pale
complexion framed by thick auburn hair, sat next to me. Her appearance was so
distinctive, I thought she must be a foreign student from Turkey, Syria or some
other Near Eastern country. Most of the other students were young men wearing
the black cap of Orthodox Jewry, who wanted to become rabbis. We two were the
only girls in the class. As we were leaving the library late that afternoon, she
introduced herself to me. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family, her parents had
migrated to America from Russia only a few years prior to the October Revolution
in 1917 to escape persecution. I noted that my new friend spoke English with the
precise care of a foreigner. She confirmed these speculations, telling me that
since her family and their friends speak only Yiddish among themselves, she did
not learn any English until after attending public school. She told me that her
name was Zenita Liebermann but recently, in an attempt to Americanize
themselves, her parents had changed their name from "Liebermann" to
"Lane." Besides being thoroughly instructed in Hebrew by her father
while growing up and also in school, she said she was now spending all her spare
time studying Arabic. However, with no previous warning, Zenita dropped out of
class and although I continued to attend all of his lectures to the conclusion
of the course, Zenita never returned. Months passed and I had almost forgotten
about Zenita when suddenly she called and begged me to meet her at the
Metropolitan Museum and go with her to look at the special exhibition of
exquisite Arabic calligraphy and ancient illuminated manuscripts of the Quran.
During our tour of the museum, Zenita told me how she had embraced Islam with
two of her Palestinian friends as witnesses.
I inquired, "Why did you decide to become a Muslim?" She then told
me that she had left Professor Katsh's class when she fell ill with a severe
kidney infection. Her condition was so critical, she told me, her mother and
father had not expected her to survive. "One afternoon while burning with
fever, I reached for my Holy Quran on the table beside by bed and began to read
and while I recited the verses, it touched me so deeply that I began to weep and
then I knew I would recover. As soon as I was strong enough to leave my bed, I
summoned two of my Muslim friends and took the oath of the "Shahadah"
or Confession of Faith."
Zenita and I would eat our meals in Syrian restaurants where I acquired a
keen taste for this tasty cooking. When we had money to spend, we would order
Couscous, roast lamb with rice or a whole soup plate of delicious little
meatballs swimming in gravy scooped up with loaves of unleavened Arabic bread.
And when we had little to spend, we would eat lentils and rice, Arabic style, or
the Egyptian national dish of black broad beans with plenty of garlic and onions
called "Ful".
While Professor Katsh was lecturing thus, I was comparing in my mind what I
had read in the Old Testament and the Talmud with what was taught in the Quran
and Hadith and finding Judaism so defective, I was converted to Islam.
Q: Were you scared that
you might not be accepted by the Muslims?
A: My increasing sympathy for Islam and Islamic ideals enraged the other Jews
I knew, who regarded me as having betrayed them in the worst possible way. They
used to tell me that such a reputation could only result from shame of my
ancestral heritage and an intense hatred for my people. They warned me that even
if I tried to become a Muslim, I would never be accepted. These fears proved
totally unfounded as I have never been stigmatized by any Muslim because of my
Jewish origin. As soon as I became a Muslim myself, I was welcomed most
enthusiastically by all the Muslims as one of them.
I did not embrace Islam
out of hatred for my ancestral heritage or my people. It was not a desire so
much to reject as to fulfill. To me, it meant a transition from parochial to a
dynamic and revolutionary faith.
Q: Did your family object
to your studying Islam?
A: Although I wanted to become a Muslim as far back as 1954, my family
managed to argue me out of it. I was warned that Islam would complicate my life
because it is not, like Judaism and Christianity, part of the American scene. I
was told that Islam would alienate me from my family and isolate me from the
community. At that time my faith was not sufficiently strong to withstand these
pressures. Partly as the result of this inner turmoil, I became so ill that I
had to discontinue college long before it was time for me to graduate. For the
next two years I remained at home under private medical care, steadily growing
worse. In desperation from 1957 - 1959 my parents confined me both to private
and public hospitals where I vowed that if ever I recovered sufficiently to be
discharged, I would embrace Islam.
After I was allowed to
return home, I investigated all the opportunities for meeting Muslims in New
York City. It was my good fortune to meet some of the finest men and women
anyone could ever hope to meet. I also began to write articles for Muslim
magazines.
Q: What was the attitude
of your parents and friends after you became Muslim?
A: When I embraced Islam, my parents, relatives and their friends regarded me
almost as a fanatic, because I could think and talk of nothing else. To them,
religion is a purely private concern which at the most perhaps could be
cultivated like an amateur hobby among other hobbies. But as soon as I read the
Holy Quran, I knew that Islam was no hobby but life itself!
Q: In what ways did the
Holy Quran have an impact on your life?
A: One evening I was feeling particularly exhausted and sleepless, Mother
came into my room and said she was about to go to the Larchmont Public Library
and asked me if there was any book that I wanted? I asked her to look and see if
the library had a copy of an English translation of the Holy Quran. Just think,
years of passionate interest in the Arabs and reading every book in the library
about them I could lay my hands on but until now, I never thought to see what
was in the Holy Quran! Mother returned with a copy for me. I was so eager, I
literally grabbed it from her hands and read it the whole night. There I also
found all the familiar Bible stories of my childhood.
In my eight years of primary school, four years of secondary school and one
year of college, I learned about English grammar and composition, French,
Spanish, Latin and Greek in current use, Arithmetic, Geometry, Algebra, European
and American history, elementary science, Biology, music and art--but I had
never learned anything about God! Can you imagine I was so ignorant of God that
I wrote to my pen-friend, a Pakistani lawyer, and confessed to him the reason
why I was an atheist was because I couldn't believe that God was really an old
man with a long white beard who sat up on His throne in Heaven. When he asked me
where I had learned this outrageous thing, I told him of the reproductions from
the Sistine Chapel I had seen in "Life" Magazine of Michelangelo's
"Creation" and "Original Sin." I described all the
representations of God as an old man with a long white beard and the numerous
crucifixions of Christ I had seen with Paula at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But in the Holy Quran, I read:
"Allah! There is no god but He,-the Living, The Self-subsisting,
Supporter of all. No slumber can seize Him nor sleep. His are all things in the
heavens and on earth. Who is thee can intercede in His presence except as He
permiteth? He knoweth what (appeareth to His creatures as) before or after or
behind them. Nor shall they compass aught of His knowledge except as He willeth.
His Throne doth extend over the heavens and the earth, and He feeleth no fatigue
in guarding and preserving them for He is the Most High, the Supreme (in
glory)." (Quran S.2:255)
"But the Unbelievers,-their deeds are like a mirage in sandy deserts,
which the man parched with thirst mistakes for water; until when he comes up to
it, he finds Allah there, and Allah will pay him his account: and Allah is swift
in taking account. Or (the unbelievers' state) is like the depths of darkness in
a vast deep ocean, overwhelmed with billow topped by billow, topped by (dark)
clouds: depth of darkness, one above another: if a man stretches out his hand,
he can hardly see it! for any to whom Allah giveth not light, there is no
light!" (Quran S.24: 39-40)
My first thought when reading the Holy Quran - this is the only true religion
- absolutely sincere, honest, not allowing cheap compromises or hypocrisy.
In 1959, I spent much of my leisure time reading books about Islam in the New
York Public Library. It was there I discovered four bulky volumes of an English
translation of Mishkat ul- Masabih. It was then that I learned that a proper and
detailed understanding of the Holy Quran is not possible without some knowledge
of the relevant Hadith. For how can the holy text correctly be interpreted
except by the Prophet to whom it was revealed?
Once I had studied the Mishkat, I began to accept the Holy Quran as Divine
revelation. What persuaded me that the Quran must be from God and not composed
by Muhammad (PBUH) was its satisfying and convincing answers to all the most
important questions of life which I could not find elsewhere.
As a child, I was so mortally afraid of death, particularly the thought of my
own death, that after nightmares about it, sometimes I would awaken my parents
crying in the middle of the night. When I asked them why I had to die and what
would happen to me after death, all they could say was that I had to accept the
inevitable; but that was a long way off and because medical science was
constantly advancing, perhaps I would live to be a hundred years old! My
parents, family, and all our friends rejected as superstition any thought of the
Hereafter, regarding Judgment Day, reward in Paradise or punishment in Hell as
outmoded concepts of by-gone ages. In vain I searched all the chapters of the
Old Testament for any clear and unambiguous concept of the Hereafter. The
prophets, patriarchs and sages of the Bible all receive their rewards or
punishments in this world. Typical is the story of Job (Hazrat Ayub). God
destroyed all his loved-ones, his possessions, and afflicted him with a
loathsome disease in order to test his faith. Job plaintively laments to God why
He should make a righteous man suffer. At the end of the story, God restores all
his earthly losses but nothing is even mentioned about any possible consequences
in the Hereafter.
Although I did find the Hereafter mentioned in the New Testament, compared
with that of the Holy Quran, it is vague and ambiguous. I found no answer to the
question of death in Orthodox Judaism, for the Talmud preaches that even the
worst life is better than death. My parents' philosophy was that one must avoid
contemplating the thought of death and just enjoy as best one can, the pleasures
life has to offer at the moment. According to them, the purpose of life is
enjoyment and pleasure achieved through self-expression of one's talents, the
love of family, the congenial company of friends combined with the comfortable
living and indulgence in the variety of amusements that affluent America makes
available in such abundance. They deliberately cultivated this superficial
approach to life as if it were the guarantee for their continued happiness and
good-fortune. Through bitter experience I discovered that self-indulgence leads
only to misery and that nothing great or even worthwhile is ever accomplished
without struggle through adversity and self-sacrifice. From my earliest
childhood, I have always wanted to accomplish important and significant things.
Above all else, before my death I wanted the assurance that I have not wasted
life in sinful deeds or worthless pursuits. All my life I have been intensely
serious-minded. I have always detested the frivolity which is the dominant
characteristic of contemporary culture. My father once disturbed me with his
unsettling conviction that there is nothing of permanent value and because
everything in this modern age accept the present trends inevitable and adjust
ourselves to them. I, however, was thirsty to attain something that would endure
forever. It was from the Holy Quran where I learned that this aspiration was
possible. No good deed for the sake of seeking the pleasure of God is ever
wasted or lost. Even if the person concerned never achieves any worldly
recognition, his reward is certain in the Hereafter. Conversely, the Quran tells
us that those who are guided by no moral considerations other than expediency or
social conformity and crave the freedom to do as they please, no matter how much
worldly success and prosperity they attain or how keenly they are able to relish
the short span of their earthly life, will be doomed as the losers on Judgement
Day. Islam teaches us that in order to devote our exclusive attention to
fulfilling our duties to God and to our fellow-beings, we must abandon all vain
and useless activities which distract us from this end. These teachings of the
Holy Quran, made even more explicit by Hadith, were thoroughly compatible with
my temperament.
Q: What is your opinion of
the Arabs after you became a Muslim?
A: As the years passed, the realization gradually dawned upon me that it was
not the Arabs who made Islam great but rather Islam had made the Arabs great.
Were it not for the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), the Arabs would be an obscure
people today. And were it not for the Holy Quran, the Arabic language would be
equally insignificant, if not extinct.
Q: Did you see any
similarities between Judaism and Islam?
A: The kinship between Judaism and Islam is even stronger than Islam and
Christianity. Both Judaism and Islam share in common the same uncompromising
monotheism, the crucial importance of strict obedience to Divine Law as proof of
our submission to and love of the Creator, the rejection of the priesthood,
celibacy and monasticism and the striking similarity of the Hebrew and Arabic
language.
In Judaism, religion is so confused with nationalism, one can scarcely
distinguish between the two. The name "Judaism" is derived from
Judah-a tribe. A Jew is a member of the tribe of Judah. Even the name of this
religion connotes no universal spiritual message. A Jew is not a Jew by virtue
of his belief in the unity of God, but merely because he happened to be born of
Jewish parentage. Should he become an outspoken atheist, he is no less
"Jewish" in the eyes of his fellow Jews.
Such a thorough corruption with nationalism has spiritually impoverished this
religion in all its aspects. God is not the God of all mankind but the God of
Israel. The scriptures are not God's revelation to the entire human race but
primarily a Jewish history book. David and Solomon (peace be upon them) are not
full-fledged prophets of God but merely Jewish kings. With the single exception
of Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement), the holidays and festivals
celebrated by Jews, such as Hanukkah, Purim and Pesach, are of far greater
national than religious significance.
Q: Have you ever had the
opportunity to talk about Islam to the other Jews?
A: There is one particular incident which really stands out in my mind when I
had the opportunity to discuss Islam with a Jewish gentleman. Dr. Shoreibah, of
the Islamic Center in New York, introduced me to a very special guest. After one
Jumha Salat, I went into his office to ask him some questions about Islam but
before I could even greet him with "Assalamu Alaikum", I was
completely astonished and surprised to see seated before him an ultra-orthodox
Chassidic Jew, complete with earlocks, broad-brimmed black hat, long black
silken caftan and a full flowing beard. Under his arm was a copy of the Yiddish
newspaper, "The Daily Forward". He told us that his name was Samuel
Kostelwitz and that he worked in New York City as a diamond cutter. Most of his
family, he said, lived in the Chassidic community of Williamsburg in Brooklyn,
but he also had many relatives and friends in Israel. Born in a small Rumanian
town, he had fled from the Nazi terror with his parents to America just prior to
the outbreak of the second world-war. I asked him what had brought him to the
mosque? He told us that he had been stricken with intolerable grief ever since
his mother died 5 years ago. He had tried to find solace and consolation for his
grief in the synagogue but could not when he discovered that many of the Jews,
even in the ultra-orthodox community of Williamsburg, were shameless hypocrites.
His recent trip to Israel had left him more bitterly disillusioned than ever. He
was shocked by the irreligiousness he found in Israel and he told us that nearly
all the young sabras or native-born Israelis are militant atheists. When he saw
large herds of swine on one of the kibbutzim (collective farms) he visited, he
could only exclaim in horror: "Pigs in a Jewish state! I never thought that
was possible until I came here! Then when I witnessed the brutal treatment meted
out to innocent Arabs in Israel, I know then that there is no difference between
the Israelis and the Nazis. Never, never in the name of God, could I justify
such terrible crimes!" Then he turned to Dr. Shoreibah and told him that he
wanted to become a Muslim but before he took the irrevocable steps to formal
conversion, he needed to have more knowledge about Islam. He said that he had
purchased from Orientalia Bookshop, some books on Arabic grammar and was trying
to teach himself Arabic. He apologized to us for his broken English: Yiddish was
his native tongue and Hebrew, his second language. Among themselves, his family
and friends spoke only Yiddish. Since his reading knowledge of English was
extremely poor, he had no access to good Islamic literature. However, with the
aid of an English dictionary, he painfully read "Introduction to
Islam" by Muhammad Hamidullah of Paris and praised this as the best book he
had ever read. In the presence of Dr. Shoreibah, I spent another hour with Mr.
Kostelwitz, comparing the Bible stories of the patriarchs and prophets with
their counterparts in the Holy Quran. I pointed out the inconsistencies and
interpolations of the Bible, illustrating my point with Noah's alleged
drunkenness, accusing David of adultery and Solomon of idolatry (Allah Forbid)
and how the Holy Quran raises all these patriarchs to the status of genuine
prophets of God and absolves them from all these crimes. I also pointed out why
it was Ismail and not Isaac who God commanded Abraham to offer as sacrifice. In
the Bible, God tells Abraham: "Take thine son, thine only son whom thou
lovest and offer him up to Me as burnt offering." Now Ismail was born 13
years before Isaac but the Jewish biblical commentators explain that away be
belittling Ismail's mother, Hagar, as only a concubine and not Abraham's real
wife so they say Isaac was the only legitimate son. Islamic traditions, however,
raise Hagar to the status of a full-fledged wife equal in every respect to
Sarah. Mr. Kostelwitz expressed his deepest gratitude to me for spending so much
time, explaining those truths to him. To express this gratitude, he insisted on
inviting Dr. Shoreibah and me to lunch at the Kosher Jewish delicatessen where
he always goes to eat his lunch. Mr. Kostelwitz told us that he wished more than
anything else to embrace Islam but he feared he could not withstand the
persecution he would have to face from his family and friends. I told him to
pray to God for help and strength and he promised that he would. When he left
us, I felt privileged to have spoken with such a gentle and kind person.
Q: What Impact did Islam
have on your life ?
A: In Islam, my quest for absolute values was satisfied. In Islam I found
all that was true, good and beautiful and that which gives meaning and direction
to human life (and death); while in other religions, the Truth is deformed,
distorted, restricted and fragmentary. If any one chooses to ask me how I came
to know this, I can only reply my personal life experience was sufficient to
convince me. My adherence to the Islamic faith is thus a calm, cool but very
intense conviction. I have, I believe, always been a Muslim at heart by
temperament, even before I knew there was such a thing as Islam. My conversion
was mainly a formality, involving no radical change in my heart at all but
rather only making official what I had been thinking and yearning for many
years.
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