Supermum Revert Spreads Inspiration of Islam

She’s sassy. She’s outspoken. She’s opinionated.

And she wears the hijab.

Heather Sandouga is one of those women who constantly defy the stereotype of the so-called ‘oppressed’ Muslim woman – an image we have all grown to expect from mainstream media. Of course, like most Muslim women, Heather doesn’t live her day-to-day life for the purpose of deliberately dispelling misconceptions; her blog posts, YouTube videos and social media content do this effortlessly.

Heather’s highest-viewed YouTube video is titled Why I Chose Islam. It is a sincere account of her life prior to reverting to Islam, and the brief snippets of information that she gives about this time – of her teenage pregnancy and decision to give the baby up for adoption – give the sense of a woman who has persevered through much difficulty and heartache. But Heather’s story isn’t told with a tone of pity or of sorrow or even regret. Instead, she takes the past in her stride and appears to have strengthened her soul with it.

Alongside her YouTube channel, Heather also manages her blog, Delusional Mom, which she regularly updates. It is one of my favourite blogs and always manages to make me laugh, nod in agreement, or feel inspired. Her posts are personable and witty, with a ‘Delusional Mom’ writing style and tone that has readers hooked. From her musings on everyday life events to her son Adam’s hilarious antics, Heather covers topics realistically and candidly. She’s a mum, a writer and a daycare provider, juggling enough to warrant a ‘Supermum’ title!

I ask Heather (an inspiring woman herself) who inspires her in her day-to-day life. To me, the most beautiful part of her response is that the first person she mentions is someone who inspires love for her faith:

‘My mother in law,’ she says, ‘manages to keep her heart bursting with Islam day in and day out – teaching my kids Qur’an as she cooks and cleans.’ Then, in her own, endearing story-telling style, she mentions others:

‘I could then move on to my own mother, who is able to take what most people would consider junk and turn it into something of beauty. Her ability to look beyond the rusted and dusty exteriors of people, places and things – to see their beautiful possibilities – is something I strive for.’

After mentioning her close friends, Heather next moves on to a point that brings a smile to my face as I read her heart-warming words:

‘Of course, there are my children. Those I’ve born of my own body and those I take care of daily. They inspire me with the everlasting wonder of a child at seeing the dew in the morning or watching a butterfly as it flutters past. My daughter, who’s becoming more and more of a woman every day, reminds me that I am her example and to live my life accordingly. My middle son, who has a quiet presence, reminds me to take a moment to just be and not be constantly on the run. And who could forget my Adam! This child reminds me daily that no amount of planning really matters in the end. The excitement, the energy, the pure curiosity that lives in this child gives me ample inspiration for my blog.

‘Finally, there’s my husband. He is my rock, my pillar of strength when I most need it. Without him, I don’t know where I would be. Those long days of Ramadan when I just want to zone out and watch some TV, I’ll come into my living room and see him quietly reading Qur’an – inspiring me to do the same. Or when I hear him wake in the early morning hours to offer his Fajr prayer, inspiring me to do the same. His devotion to his family is infallible – and I admire that. Being with him makes me a better person.’

Whilst it’s always a joy to be moved by characters in books, often we find individuals who are just as inspiring (if not more) in our real lives. Source

How I Discovered & Converted To Islam: My Conversion Story♥

American Female Converts To Islam Facing Growing Scrutiny

When Karen Hunt Ahmed and her Muslim husband divorced four years ago, many friends asked her, "Now you can stop this Islam stuff, right?"

Some friends, she thought.

"Like it was a hobby I took up when I got married and now I'm supposed to drop it," said Hunt Ahmed, president of the Chicago Islamic Microfinance Project, which she founded with two colleagues in 2009.

Hunt Ahmed, 45, is part of a growing sorority of female American converts to Islam, especially those who are or were married to Muslim men, who must deal with the perception that they converted to Islam because of domineering boyfriends or husbands.

The stereotype was revived in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, when news emerged that the wife of bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Katherine Russell, converted to Islam after meeting Tsarnaev in 2009 or 2010 when she was about 21.

Tsarnaev, 26, was shot and killed during a standoff with Boston police while his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, was taken into custody and now faces a raft of terrorism charges.

"It's not just Fox. A lot of the media have portrayed her as someone who was brainwashed and who didn't know what she was doing," said Edlyn Sammanasu, who was born to Catholic parents and started studying Islam when she met her Muslim husband in college, and converted when she was 21.

"When I saw the coverage, I thought this was ridiculous," said Sammanasu, now 32, a technical writer in Fremont, Calif.

Seema Imam, an education professor at National Louis University in Lisle, Ill., has seen the same thing. She grew up as an observant Methodist but converted to Islam 40 years ago at age 17.

"Whenever someone talks about Muslim converts being involved in something negative, it's done in a way in which people say, 'Be careful, look what happens when you become Muslim,'" she said.

Converts to Islam are as diverse as the rest of America, racially and ethnically, as well as in their interpretations of the faith. Some female converts wear a headscarf, some don't. What they share is the perception from others that they are incapable of making their own choice in a decision that involved substantial spiritual wrestling.

It's as insulting as it is inaccurate, they say.

"These reports are misogynous in nature, reducing women to creatures who cannot think for themselves," said Malika MacDonald Rushdan, who converted in 1995 after divorcing her Christian husband. She made her "shahada," or declaration of faith, at the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, which the Tsarnaev brothers occasionally attended.

"My faith, by definition, is for the Creator, not for my husband," wrote Ohio attorney Sarah Anjum, who converted almost 10 years ago, while she was in college studying Islamic political movements and Arabic, and four years before she met her husband.

While some American Muslim women converted while single, those who started reading about Islam after meeting future husbands are incredulous over the idea that they converted to please them.

When Kelly Wentworth, 35, told her Yemeni boyfriend that she was interested in learning about Islam, he pointed her to a Muslim professor who taught at Tennessee Tech, where the two were students at the time. When she later told him she wanted to convert, he didn't celebrate.

"He was worried people would think that I converted because of him, or that I was being forced to convert," said Wentworth, a software engineer in Atlanta and board member of Muslims for Progressive Values, a national advocacy group. "The stereotype is out there. That's something I fight with now."

Wentworth became so worried about how friends and family would judge her after the Katherine Russell stories that she couldn't sleep for several nights.

A 2011 study from the Pew Research Center found that about 20 percent of an estimated 1.8 million Muslims in America are converts, while a 2007 Pew study found that 49 percent of converts converted by the age of 21. The 2007 study also found that 58 percent of converts converted for religious reasons, and 18 percent for family and marriage reasons.

Female Muslim converts acknowledge that they have heard about Muslim women trapped in abusive relationships, but say that such relationships affect women of other faiths as well.

"That has nothing to do with religion," Wentworth said. "That's a problem with personality."

Katherine Wilson, a convert and Rhode Island resident who works with female victims of violence and sexual assault, said the media, by focusing on Russell's faith, missed a chance to speak about domestic violence. She believes Muslim women converts are perceived negatively because some people see their choice of faith as a knock against their own decisions.

"I believe this is partially due to white privilege in that there is not an understanding why an 'all-American girl' would give up her privilege-assumed, carefree lifestyle," said Wilson. "I think it bothers people that an 'all American woman' would walk away from what they think is a great life, which is a stereotype within itself."

While such stereotypes still annoy these women, many say they have grown tired of having to explain their decisions to convert. Which doesn't mean they aren't trying to change minds.

"There will always be those who judge based upon ignorance. They are of no concern to me," said MacDonald Rushdan. "I will keep on doing what I've always done. I will not apologize for being a God-fearing woman whose faith provides her with inner peace and contentment." Source

Not 'brainwashed': American converts to Islam speak out

When an American convert to Islam was revealed as the wife of the dead Boston bombing suspect, Lauren Schreiber wasn't surprised at what came next.

Comments from former acquaintances and complete strangers immediately suggested that 24-year-old Katherine Russell, a New England doctor's daughter, must have been coerced and controlled by her husband, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died last week in a firefight with police.

"She was a very sweet woman, but I think kind of brainwashed by him," reported the Associated Press, quoting Anne Kilzer, a Belmont, Mass., woman who said she knew Russell and her 3-year-old daughter.

That kind of assumption isn't new to Schreiber, 26, a Greenbelt, Md., woman who became a Muslim in 2010.

"The moment you put on a hijab, people assume that you've forfeited your free will," says Schreiber, who favors traditional Islamic dress. 

The Boston terror attack and the questions about whether Russell knew about her husband's deadly plans have renewed stereotypes and misconceptions that U.S. women who have chosen that faith say they want to dispel.

"It's not because somebody made me do this," explains Schreiber, who converted after a college study-abroad trip to West Africa. "It's what I choose to do and I'm happy."

Her view is echoed by Rebecca Minor, 28, of West Hartford, Conn., a special education teacher who converted to Islam five years ago. When her students, ages 5 to 8, ask why she wears a headscarf, she always says the same thing: "It's something that's important to me and it reminds me to be a good person," says Minor, who is secretary for the Muslim Coalition of Connecticut. 

Muslims make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, according to studies by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. In 2011, about 1.8 million U.S. adults were Muslim, and about 20 percent had converted to the faith, Pew researchers say. Of those converts, about 54 percent were men and 46 percent were women. About 1 in 5 converts mentioned family factors, including marrying a Muslim, as a reason for adopting the faith. 

Accusations are 'harsh'
Women convert for a wide range of reasons - spiritual, intellectual and romantic - says Yvonne Haddad, a professor of the history of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations at Georgetown University.

"Islam is attractive to women that the feminist movement left behind," says Haddad, who co-authored a 2006 book, "Muslim Women in America: The Challenge of Islamic Identity Today."

Women like Lindsey Faraj, 26, of Charlotte, N.C., say that wearing a headscarf and other traditional Islamic garb in public often leads people to assume she sacrificed her American life to please a man.

"'You must have converted in order to marry him,' I hear it all the time," says Faraj, who actually converted simultaneously with her husband, Wathek Faraj, who is from Damascus, about four years ago.

She's also heard people say that her husband is allowed to beat her, that she's not free to get a divorce, that she and her two children, ages 4 months and 2, are subservient to the man. Such concepts are untrue, of course, she says.

"In the beginning, it did offend me a lot," says Faraj, who grew up in a Christian family in Florida. "But now as my sense of my new self has grown, I don't feel offended."

She's able to joke, for instance, about the woman who screamed insults from a passing car.

"They screamed: 'Go back to your own country' and I thought, 'It doesn't get more white than this, girl,'" says Faraj, indicating her fair features.

Like all stereotypes, such views are steeped in fear, says Haddad.

"Accusations of brainwashing are harsh," she says. "They cover up the fact that we don't comprehend why people like 'us' want to change and be like 'them.'"

All three women say they came to Islam after much thought and spiritual searching.

Islam 'entered my heart'
Schreiber, who is a community outreach and events coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says she was drawn to the religion after meeting other Muslims on her trip abroad before graduating from St. Mary's College of Maryland in 2009.

She grew up in an agnostic family where she was encouraged to discover her own faith.

"It was, whatever you decide to do - temple, church, mosque - I support you finding yourself," says Schreiber. She's now married to a Muslim man, Muhammad Oda, 27, whose parents were both converts to Islam. She said came to the faith before the relationship.

Faraj, a stay-at-home mom, says she never saw herself "as a religious person, in the least," but became enthralled after trying to learn more about Islam before a visit to see her husband's family.

"The concept of Islam hit me," Faraj recalls. "It was just something that entered my heart."

Minor, who is single, says she was intrigued by Islam in college, when she was close friends with a deployed American Marine but had Muslim friends at school.

"I saw a huge discrepancy in the negative things I heard coming from my (friend) and the actions I could see in my co-workers," she recalls. After spending 18 months learning about Islam, she decided to convert.

The response from family and friends has been overwhelmingly supportive, Minor says.

"The more you can do to educate people about Islam, not by preaching, but by actions, the better," she says.

Reports that Katherine Russell might have been embroiled in an abusive relationship, or that her husband intimidated her aren't an indictment of Islam, Haddad says.

"Abusive men come in all colors, nationalities, ethnicities and from all religions," she says. "No one says that Christianity teaches abuse of women because some Christian men are abusive."

Schreiber says she frequently gets comments from people surprised to see her fair skin and hear her American accent from beneath a scarf. She says she appreciates it when people actually ask questions instead of making assumptions.

"I just want people to know that there are American Muslim women who wear hijab by choice because they believe in it and it feels right to them, not because anyone tells them to."

Source: NBC News - JoNel Aleccia, Senior Writer, NBC News

BLAME THE TERRORISTS

Park 51 - NYU Thesis Film

Source

The Echoes of God's Word - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf

Where are the Healthy Gender Relations in the Muslim Community?

We have failed in engendering healthy gender relations in our community. Face it. I travel throughout the United States, and I see troubling signs of Muslim women unable to get married, primarily because Muslim men have abdicated their social responsibilities.

Muslim men can marry non-Muslims– so they oblige — and Muslim women are stuck.  There are usually few young men around in Muslim community events. You attend any Muslim gathering and find young Muslim women outnumbering young Muslim men usually by a 3:1 ratio.  The young men are non-existent, coping with their own psychosis passed down from our community in their dysfunctional practices. Nothing wrong in integrating within the larger society, as long as it’s not at the expense of fleeing your own community.

I put the majority of the blame on us, their parents, for failing to remove the awkwardness when Muslim guy meets Muslim girl. They never developed healthy interpersonal relationships as adolescents because mosques just aren’t built to do that. The second a family walks into a mosque, the father and sons go to one side and the mother and daughters go to the other. My mosque is different, but it is the exception that proves the rule. The second a young man leaves the mosque, he’s free. The young woman, on the other hand, is stuck.

I was speaking at a university event of Muslim students, and as I was walking into the room, I saw young men and women chattering, chuckling, and just being normal. That’s right, just normal. There was no sex taking place and no inappropriate behavior. So those who act as our religious police, get a grip — just talking. That normalcy is missing in our mosques. We turn into abnormal, asexual and agitated beings when we enter a mosque. Anyway, when I entered the meeting of Muslim students, the guys went to the furthest side of the room away from the women. When I asked why, the answer was that throughout their Muslim upbringing, in Muslim schools nonetheless, it was always awkward for young women and men to mingle. In one Muslim school in Sacramento, the the boys claimed the Imam decreed it haram to talk to girls.

I put the rest of the blame on young Muslim men. Yes, we put enough pressure on them. They were punished in schools because they couldn’t sit still or had so much pent up energy. But parents, and especially mothers, have babied them too much. They are copping out. Here’s the issue now: More young Muslim women are achieving in academics and careers at higher rates than young Muslim men. You find more women doctors, lawyers and even engineers in our community. That intimidates the guys. They can’t handle women achieving when they are struggling in their schools or in finding a profession acceptable to their parents, which typically means being a doctor or lawyer or engineer.

But this idea of the man being the sole breadwinner in the family is very rare, folks. Financial responsibilities are shared now between husband and wife, and so should parental responsibilities. So guys, get over it. If you want to develop machismo, there is nothing more endearing to a woman than a man who can take care of her children and her home. It’s not about taking her out to the fanciest restaurant any more. It’s about taking the kids out so mom can relax, cleaning the dishes after meals and making a gourmet meal for your lover. But still take her out to a fancy restaurant once in a while.

Some guys have another idea on how to manage in finding a wife. Pick one from “back home” and bring her to America, where she will be happy and indebted to you for life. Ah, that doesn’t work all the time — actually, rarely does it work–but to each his own.

If Islam’s essence is justice, then aren’t we violating the essence of Islam when we accept Muslim men marrying non-Muslims while we violently reject Muslim women doing the same? I’m not saying I have the answers, but what I am saying is there needs to be more conversations about this crisis.

Masculinity in this era requires us men to have the courage to weather emotional storms and to confront danger from unhealthy relationships.  The days of exerting physical supremacy and financial prowess are over. Grow some juevos and be a man, as Malcolm X said, by becoming more responsible towards the women in your lives.

Source

Death by brown skin

Sunando Sen, a 46-year-old Indian immigrant, recently opened a small copying and printing business in New York City’s Upper West Side with his hard-earned savings. Described by friends as “very educated” and “so quiet, so gentle, so nice,” Sen’s American dream ended in tragedy last Thursday when Erika Menendez fatally pushed him in front of an oncoming subway train.

Menendez admitted the hate crime, explaining she “pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.”

Never mind that Sen was raised Hindu and the 9-11 terrorist attacks were coordinated by 19 foreign hijackers primarily from Saudi Arabia.

An unbalanced, paranoid mind marinated in our oversaturated Islamophobic environment is numb to such cultural specifics and susceptible to conflate anyone appearing “Muslimy” as the “enemy.”

Although Islamophobes did not cause the NYC murder, they contaminate civil society with their toxic ideological fuel and remain a beacon for bigots, hate-mongers, and the mentally unhinged, all of whom emerge from the same diseased infrastructure.

Citizens of this dangerous, fringe minority include Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 individuals last summer to punish Europe’s alleged leniency towards Muslims and multiculturalism. Upon reviewing Breivik’s 1,500 page anti-Muslim manifesto, which frequently cites notable American Islamophobes, counter-terrorism expert Marc Sagemen concluded thisIslamophobic  rhetoric is “not cost free.”

The cost of such hate is mostly borne by members of the AMEMSA (Arab Middle Eastern Muslim South Asian) communities, however the tainted profit is collected by bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, co-founders of the “hate group” Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), part of the lucrative  “Islamophobia network” subsidized by inciting fear-mongering and misinformation against Muslims.

SIOA claims that it is a “human rights organization dedicated to freedom of speech, religious liberty, and individual rights; no special rights for special classes.” However, the Anti Defamation League reviewed SIOA’s activities and concluded SIOA “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the guise of fighting radical Islam. The group seeks to rouse public fears by consistently vilifying the Islamic faith and asserting the existence of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy ‘American’ values.”

In the fall, SIOA purchased inflammatory anti-Muslim ads that continue to appear in New York City and Washington D.C. metro stations and buses.  One ad reads: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel, Defeat jihad,” suggesting all Muslims are savages. Another ad features a picture of the World Trade Center towers burning next to two Quran quotes.

In light of SIOA’s recent propaganda in NYC subway stations, it is not far-fetched to wonder if Menendez’s hate toward Sen was in some way influenced by these ads.

After news broke of Sen’s murder, Robert Spencer tweeted what sounded like a justification for senseless, anti-Muslim hate crimes: “If Muslims would stop doing evil in name of Islam and jihad, no one would respond with evil to them.”

This is typical rhetoric from Spencer, a hack whose writings are so toxic they reverberate globally and damage both national security and our relationship with Muslim communities abroad. Before her death, Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazhir Bhutto name-checkedSpencer in her biography as an individual who “uses the Internet to spread misinformation and hatred of Islam…he presents a skewed, one-sided, and inflammatory story that only helps sow the seeds of civilizational conflict.”

Spencer’s blog “Jihad Watch” was cited more than 162 times in mass murderer Breivik’s manifesto.  Spencer has published the writings of Serge Trifovic, one of the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs during the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. Spencer believes the neo-Nazi group English Defense League “deserves the support of all free people.”

Spencer’s colleague in hate, Pam Geller, who never met an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory she didn’t immediately publish as fact, believes “devout Muslims should be prohibited from military service. Would Patton have recruited Nazis into his army?” She also thinks President Obama is a Muslim, illegitimate son of Malcolm X who once went to Pakistan for drugs and jihad, and that the Arabic language is a spearhead for anti-Americanism. She believes stealth jihadists have infiltrated Disneyland because employees wear headscarves to work. Like Spencer, Pamela Geller once strongly endorsed the English Defense League writing, “I share the EDL’s goals… We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose the Islamisation of the West.”

In a perfect world, these rantings would be amusing fodder for an amateur comic.  However, when over 60% of Americans say they do not know a Muslim and Islam has its lowest favorability rating ever, extremists like Geller and Spencer disproportionately inform and influence the nation’s conversation and perceptions about Islam and Muslims.

According to a new quantitive analysis published by the American Sociological Review, sociologist Christopher Bail mentions Stop Islamization of America as one of the “angry and fearful fringe organizations” that “not only exerted powerful influence on media discourse about Muslims in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, but ultimately became some of the most influential mainstream groups in the field. By 2008, these fringe organizations not only permeated the mainstream but also forged vast social networks that consolidated their capacity to create cultural change.”

These Islamophobic memes do not exist in a victimless vacuum. There is a cost to such dissemination of hate.

In 2012, The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported a 300 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate groups. In 2010, the FBI reported unprecedented 50 percent rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes, with 160 reported cases. In 2011, the number dipped slightly to 157.

SPLC mentions the 2010 Ground Zero Mosque debate as the key driver for the recent surge in anti-Muslim sentiment. The controversy and subsequent protests against the Park 51 community center, which is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero, was directly manufactured and orchestrated by Pamela Geller and SIOA. Now, there are over 50 ongoing nationwide movements against allowing Muslims to build their constitutionally protected houses of worship.

Recently, a man convicted of setting fire to an Ohio mosque said Fox News convinced him all Muslims are “terrorists.”

Last August, recently defeated Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) told a town hall in Chicago that Muslims in America are “trying to kill Americans every week.” A few days later, air rifle shots were fired at a mosque in north suburban Morton Grove, Illinois. Soon after, someone hurled a 7-Up bottle filled with acid and other unspecified materials at an Islamic school in Chicago during nighttime Ramadan prayers.

Nearly 31 states have introduced an anti-sharia bill, which is about as necessary as a bill banning big-foot or unicorns.  Yet, 6 states have passed it (Louisiana, Arizona, Tennessee, Kansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma.)  The author of the bill is attorney David Yerushalmi, who serves as counsel to none other than Pamela Geller.

Islamophobia is not just a “Muslim” issue. It never was. Sadly, it is a cancer affecting all our communities.

Sen’s horrific death was yet another episode in which an innocent individual’s brown skin tragically caused him to be mistaken as an anti-American threat. Last August, White supremacist Wade Michael Page murdered six Sikh Americans at their Wisconsin temple. The first post 9-11 hate crime murder was of Arizona gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American specifically chosen by the murderer because he was “dark-skinned, bearded and wore a turban.”

A senseless tragedy like this affords an opportunity, requires necessity and demands urgency for diverse American communities, especially Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus, to unite in solidarity against hate and intolerance. In America, there exists space for legitimate criticism, debate, and discussion about  religion, race, and ethnicity. But we must finally confront ourselves and ask how do we, as a society, benefit from hysteria, fear and scapegoating? What do these Islamophobes inspire except division and lucrative, personal paychecks?

Yes, we give the KKK a freedom to speak their nonsense, but we as citizens and as a nation have disempowered them, denied them a mainstream platform and silenced their megaphone.

The question now at hand is how many Sens and Sodhis will it take to expose these fringe Islamophobic voices, marginalize them, and move onward, together, as they slither in shame and eventually drown in their own irrelevance. 

Source

Average Muslim guy??

So, a lot of people have this pretentious bio that they have to use for conferences and events and the like. If you’re looking for that, click here. If you’re looking for who I really am, read on.

I grew up a pretty typical Muslim guy, to be honest. Besides the fact that I had a ton of non-Muslim relatives, because my dad is an Irish-American convert, everything was pretty standard. I used to go to weekend Islamic school, though my mom was pretty active at home with teaching. I have three sisters (two older, one younger) and a brother (older) that really molded a lot of who I am today.

I remember going to Islamic school for middle school. I remember Islamic studies class, Quran and Arabic class, the Muslim atmosphere. I remember going abroad to study with my brother in a program in Makkah during some summers. I remember going to Islamic conferences, I remember praying because I was told to, fasting because everyone else in the family was, going to taraweeh prayers at night. I remember it all, very vividly, like someone remembers the exactly indescribable flavor of a beautifully baked vanilla cupcake.

And, like a lot of young Muslims, I remember hating it. A lot.

I wanted to be who I was, I wanted to do what I wanted. I knew my limits, and I was sick and tired of the rules. I wasn’t going to hurt anyone else, I just wanted to live life, and the laundry list of religious things I had to do (and the list of things I couldn’t do) really made it tough.

So, when I got expelled from Islamic school midway through my freshman year in high school, I entered into the promised land - public high school. All of the fantasies that us private school kids dreamed about were there - and more! Girls, friends, parties, being on a real sports team, dances, not having to do anything religious. It felt awesome, it really did.

But living at home was still hampering my fun. It’s hard to come back from a friends house smelling like smoke when you live in a Muslim household. My relationship with my parents deteriorated to near nonexistence. Forced hellos, forced goodbyes - I always had love for them, but didn’t want to play the role of a good son. So, I did what a lot of us do when we don’t like dealing with reality - I ran away.

For a few years, actually, I lived away from home. Stayed with friends and their families, perpetuating this sob story about how Islam is too tough and how I just wanted to be a normal American kid. Even tried other religions. Church was interesting, wasn’t used to singing in a place of worship, and it was kinda embarrassing that everyone else knew the words except for me. But, I’ll admit, not being judged was nice.

So, after years of living a lifestyle of hedonism (serving the self, following desires blindly), I felt a new feeling. I had become accustomed to feeling awesome, feeling carefree, feeling fun. But this new feeling felt different. It felt empty. It felt tired. It felt dead.

I think it was my heart. Actually, I know it was my heart.

I tried to shake it, the dead weight in my chest, holding me back from furthering who I had become. I remember sitting in the parking lot of Woodfield Mall after work, one day. I went to buy a Christmas gift for my friend Tori. The deafening silence of the Chicago snowfall giving me a rare clarity. I had a weird, fleeting thought of who I’d become in the past 4 years, and I realized that I had taken my relationship with my Creator, and shattered it. I was destroying my heart, like sweets that taste delicious destroy the teeth of someone who eats them a lot - all for the sake of pleasing myself. 

The social scene, the girls, the popularity, the parties, the drinking, the smoking - all that had become my God. And so, the meaning of the phrase we were taught since we were kids “There is nothing worthy of worship except for Allah,” came to life. I had sacrificed worshiping the Lord that created and continued to bless me, and instead began to worship myself. My desires took precedence, sacrificing any and everyone who loved me along the way. A lot of you know exactly what I mean.

Tears didn’t fall, actually, but my heart did. Right into my stomach, giving me a sharp pain, something I hadn’t felt in a long time. It was there, in the middle of retail purposelessness that I realized - we have a purpose.

I’m not writing this to gain sympathy, or to impress anyone with a history that I really regret. I just want people to know where I’ve come from. A lot of people see me in person, or on a stage or minbar somewhere, or (the worst) on YouTube, and they think “he has no idea what I’m going through.” I may not know exactly what you’re going through, but I’m willing to bet that we can have a conversation about it.

I look back and regret what I’ve done. I really do. That’s part of the reason that I try to serve. I feel that if I don’t do my best to serve my community and our humanity, that I will be held to severe account by Allah.

After Prophet Musa went through his entire life of test and trial and tribulation, a difficult path to Allah, when he finally met Him in the Valley of Tuwa, Allah told him that all of the events in his life were preparation for something bigger.

“And I’ve prepared you for myself.” 20:41  Source