My parents raised me with no religion. I remember, as a child, being mortified with embarrassment whenever I had to set foot in a church. I couldn’t even look at books on  religion for fear someone would see me. Somewhere I got the idea that it was wrong to be religious. I think it was all that kneeling I’d see people doing. Why were they humbling themselves in front of someone who obviously wasn’t there? I couldn’t understand it. And I suspected that the Christians didn’t understand it either. At least the children didn’t. They repeated the old words out of the Bible as if they were programmed zombies. I was glad I wasn’t part of a religious family. I hated to eat dinner at relatives’ houses when they would say “grace.” I never knew what to do with my hands, and I feel awkward to bow my head to something I didn’t understand or believe in.

I think it was the Tao Te Ching which opened my heart to religious thinking, when I was about 15. This book, which I stumbled upon in the library, was different and seemed “safe” to read. I also explored Buddhism around the same time. My father told me these were philosophies, not religions. All the same, the concept of nirvana or “enlightenment” stirred something in me which I later classified as the rudimentary beginnings of spiritual feelings in my life.

When I was around 16 I was watching a physics programme on PBS about the creation of the universe. There was a moment during the show when I had a bit of revelation. It occurred to me that God was everywhere, in everything, somehow. I imagined He was in the nucleus of every atom, perhaps. I was captivated by the ‘All in One, One in All’ idea, and for the first time grasped the notion that there is a unity that ties together all the loose pieces of our lives into a coherent whole; we may not understand or see the wholeness of our lives, but God does, because God is intimately intertwined with everything, and yet stands outside our world like the author of a book.

From here it was a short step for me to become interested in Gnostic Christianity, Hasidic Judaism, and Sufi Islam. It was the mystical traditions which attracted me, because they seemed to seek the truth behind the mask. Also, the mystical thinking challenged me to use my mind to “find” God, rather than require me to blindly follow the steps of others and recite zombie-like some words that seemed to have no relevance for my life as a young American living in the 20th century.

I remember the first day I picked up the Bible and tried to read it. I was in high school I think. I expected to hate it and disagree with it and find fuel in my fight against “mainstream” Christianity. To my surprise, I found that the words of Jesus made sense to me. I later met a man wearing a big crucifix who told me, basically, that “Jesus was a wonderful man, but the Church distorted his teachings.” This echoed what I had suspected, and I was fascinated because I realised that perhaps many Christians believed in that religion because of Jesus himself, and in spite of the Church.

I began to learn that all religions had, at their root, a universal essence. Yahweh God and Allah were the same. Buddhist nirvana was like realisation of the oneness of all life in God. The clearest expression of this oneness was best described for me in the poems of Islamic Sufi mystics like Jallaludin Rumi. I began to have romantic notions about joining a Sufi order, but felt tied down by my obligation to finish college. In addition, I didn’t see how I could possibly be a Muslim, which was a requirement for being a Sufi. I couldn’t see myself kneeling and praying and all that. I still didn’t understand what prayer meant.

When I looked at the history of religious thinking on earth, I came up with a theory about mankind. In the beginning, there was only darkness. This is like the void before the creation of the universe, or the nothingness of un-consciousness. And then...there was light! Now we are conscious, awake. We can see things, we can discern dark from light, good from evil. This is like eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Our human-ness is based on our ability to distinguish the opposites, and trying to find a balance. Taoism is the balancing of the opposites. Hinduism is trying to find unity in multiplicity. Buddhism is the realisation of our impermanence in this world. And then came the monotheistic traditions. These represented, in my mind, a full flowering of spirituality, because for the first time people seemed to realise that it was one God who created them as well as the universe. We are all part of a big unity. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all share a common heritage, a belief in the One God who created us. I later learned that all the thousands of prophets mentioned in the Old and New Testaments, and the Final Testament (the Holy Quran) speak about the same religion, the religion which calls us to worship God, the One God. Prophet Mohammed is the final messenger of God. The religion for humanity was perfected in the ways and practices of Islam, which are explained in the Holy Quran and by the Prophet.

But for a few years, I didn’t study much religion. I thought that I was too cynical to ever be truly religious. I was an art student, and cultivating an observer’s outlook on life. When I graduated, I concentrated on learning how be a responsible citizen, to have a full-time job and an apartment to take care of. Then my interest in Islam was sparked again by seeing an issue of Gnosis magazine which featured articles on Sufism. I also read the book, The History of God, which put Islam in a positive light, as the culmination of the history of the One God. I started reading the Usenet news group forum <soc.religion.islam> through the Internet.

Then I felt compelled to buy a copy of the Holy Quran, the Ahmed Ali English translation. When I first started reading it, I started to get a good feeling and I felt like something in me was changing and would never be the same again. There were so many things in Islam and the Holy Quran which I felt drawn to, and could see that for years my life seemed to be building up to these moments. I had always been modest, especially as a child, and I had been wearing scarves and hats on my head on and off for years. I could see how the trees and mountains were Muslim, and how we are all born Muslim but later make a choice to turn towards Islam or away from it. It all made so much sense, somehow. When I read the words of God in the Holy Quran I felt as if He had been reading my mind! I looked hard at my life and realised I was basically a 20-something armchair philosopher, surrounded by slackers and cynics, and clinging to books and music as facsimiles of the life I was meant to live. I spent my spare time playing video games, and fantasising about being a different kind of person. I had a yearning to do something with my life, but until now had no motivation.

When I took Shahadah, I felt I had a purpose, and that was to worship God, do what He asked us to do, and avoid what He told us to avoid. And by the miracle of God, when I did my best to achieve this goal, I started to find that other things came easy now. Through the strength of God, I was able to quit my job and move across the country to start a new life as part of a Muslim community. I have had incredible success in finding jobs and an apartment, and feel like I have been blessed because of my striving for God. And when things don’t go the way I would have wanted them to, I realise that God has other plans for me, and if I suffer at all, there is a reason for it and a lesson to be learned from it. If something is not easy for me I try to see it as a challenge, and goal in my new, more complete attempt at becoming a better person. Before Islam came into my life, I was obsessed with the idea of “self-improvement” and I tried to do this through eating healthy foods, exercising, and so on. But something was missing, and that was the spiritual aspect. In addition, I found that different health books contradicted each other. There was no one I could trust to give me complete truth about what was best for me. Now I feel that God is like the best of doctors. He knows what is best for you, and gives you exercises to do, like prayer and fasting and charity. If you do what He says, you will be helping yourself, and if you don’t listen, you will be hurting yourself. Islam also made me realise that there is more to life than our physical bodies.

Islam is the only religion I’ve found that intertwines the spiritual with the physical, everyday world. We are not supposed to deny our bodies, by living an ascetic life of celibacy, starvation, and flagellation. Yet we do not worship the things of this life, like celebrities, cars, money, career, or government leaders. It is not so arcane and intellectual that the average person cannot understand it, yet not so ritualistic that you have to leave your brains at the door to be Muslim. Islam is for everybody: it is not so based on one culture that you have to abandon your heritage to practise it.