How I Came to Islam by Yahya M

How I Came to Islam by Yahya M

Italian-American man who became a Muslim when a graduate student in 1984 recalls the milestones on his journey to Islam - years of academic study, the influence of pious but non-preachy Pakistani friends and the autobiography of Malcolm X.

All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds. The single most important thing that happened in my life was my entry into Islam. That is at the summit and everything else follows from it and is subordinate to it. Writing my story is a way of responding to Allah's command:

And as for the blessing of thy Lord, declare it.

To explain how I came to Islam, I must begin by giving credit to my parents for trying their best to raise me as a good Catholic. They taught me to believe in God and to pray. They made me attend Mass every Sunday and receive the sacraments, and they sent me to Catholic schools from kindergarten all the way through college. Although I found myself unwilling to remain in communion with the Catholic Church, the essential belief in God that my parents inculcated in me has remained constant all through my life and naturally found its fulfillment in Islam.

I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1959. Growing up in the 1960s I had no direct exposure to Islam whatever, unlike today when Muslims are very much in evidence all over the United States. Thirty years ago American Islam was unknown to the society at large. In 1966 I read an account of the National Geographic writer Thomas Abercrombie's visit to Mecca, in which he wrote that he could go there only because he had converted to Islam. This was my first inkling that an American could be Muslim, as odd as the idea seemed at first. When I was eight and I heard of Cassius Clay becoming a "Black Muslim" I wondered what it meant, but no one around had much of an idea either, for in those days Islam was not something that most Americans ever had a reason to think about--to our minds it was something over in the exotic Middle East that had no relevance to our daily lives. I never saw a Muslim in person until my last year of high school in 1976. Once when I was in fifth grade I found the words of the adhân in Arabic in a drawing of a mu'adhdhin in the World Book Encyclopedia. Interested in languages and alphabets, I began trying to copy the Arabic into my notebook. A classmate of Lebanese ancestry passed by and told me her father could read it. I expressed an interest in learning to read it, although it was to be quite a few years before I got to do so. A small premonition of my future destiny.

About the time I began college I began to drift away from the Catholic Church and pursued my growing interest in Eastern mysticism, although I still did not know enough about Islam to interest me. My freshman year of college at Saint Louis University in 1977 brought me into contact with many Iranian students, who sometimes took me for one of them. I remember from that time the first Muslim lady I ever saw wearing hijâb. She was from Shiraz. Although I did not get to know her, the look of inner peace that showed on her face was so unusual in the American environment that it remained in my memory; perhaps this was the beginning of my real learning about Islam. (The one other thing I remember about this lady was her talking about doing yoga in Iran! She was my first Muslim Yogini.)

In the fall of 1978 I took a course on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam taught by John Renard, who has since published several studies on the finer aspects of Islamic civilization. Professor Renard was able to recite the Qur'ân in Arabic with perfect tajwid; he quoted the Sufi poetry of ‘Attâr and Rûmi and conveyed a sincere appreciation of the whole of Islamic spirituality and practice. This made no impression on me at the time, for my attention was taken up by other interests. The course would have been a fine entree to Islam had I only been able to appreciate it (I earned an A in it). We were assigned to read passages from Pickthall's translation of the Qur'ân, but they conveyed nothing to me. Now I understand that the reality of the verses--

... and We have put before them a barrier and behind them a barrier; and We have covered them, so that they do not see. Alike it is to them whether thou hast warned them or thou hast not warned them, they do not believe--

was being manifested on me. Still, looking back I consider that this course planted a seed in my intellect that would sprout in due time. Allah is the Best of Planners.

In 1982 I graduated and got married, and that summer we moved to Denver and began attending the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Here I made friends with a large number of people from Muslim countries, and through them I gradually became acquainted with some of the various forms of Muslim culture. I remember one evening meeting one of the students, an older gentleman from Egypt, who gave me a simple greeting with such grace and courtesy that I felt myself quite the gauche and ill-mannered American in comparison. I perceived that his graciousness of manner was an expression of the essential grace of his soul. Perhaps it made me wonder at some level how it was that, for all my spiritual pursuits, I had not developed a similar quality of soul.

On the whole, though, the mental environment at GSIS did nothing to advance me spiritually, for it was a godless place where nearly everyone was Marxist. Africa, along with Central Asia, held the greatest cultural interest for me. In the fall of 1983 I was deeply absorbed in studying Africa; unlike the other students, I was interested less in political mass movements than in finding ways to help villagers to empower themselves on the decentralized, local level with appropriate technology, the better to preserve their traditional culture. I was predicting that in the coming year my life would undergo a radical transformation (little did I dream how it would take place). On my twenty-fourth birthday I climbed to the summit of Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park; I always found a sense of spiritual exaltation in the mountains.

Then my marriage broke up, and I suddenly found myself living alone. It was the most trying time I had ever known. I felt quite isolated and friendless. Nothing in the spiritual hodgepodge I had been living served to improve my state, as I sank deeper and deeper into misery.

Soon afterward a new student arrived at GSIS. She was an aristocratic lady from Lahore, Pakistan. The circle of people I hung out with included several Pakistanis who began visiting her apartment to keep her company and help her get used to life there. Over the next several months I became fast friends with this lady, in whom at last I found an ally. She counseled me to respect myself and be strong, and her advice really did have a good effect on me over time. It was through her that the reality of Islam finally began to reach my heart. She never preached Islam to me, but simply manifested its essence through her gracious, dignified manner. I began to see how a traditional Islamic upbringing produced an excellent refinement of the human soul. This was entirely new to me. The Islamic attitude of adab--respect for all beings--revealed itself to my understanding as a door opening into the highest realms of the spirit, and ultimately knowledge of God. When she would serve dinner and say "In the name of God--bismillâh" or use the phrase "in shâ' Allâh" in everyday conversation, it gave me occasion to think deeply on the meaning of such expressions, and what a valuable approach to life they signaled. Here was a thorough, existential spirituality grounded in lived reality, a genuine realization of the higher potential of the human state, which put to shame the fantasies I had been pursuing. When her fiance came to visit from Pakistan, a gentleman from the diplomatic service who later became an ambassador, I was even more deeply impressed with his refined manners and ethics. The lady told me he was a Sufi and was teaching her about Sufism. I decided I would have to learn more about this.

I knew another Pakistani who was completely Americanized, whose manners were coarse and abrasive. He was like a mirror from the East held up to show the ugliness of the modern Western world I came from. The stark contrast with the beauty of traditional Islam could not have been clearer or more explicit.

Meanwhile, I was searching for a new and better way to live my life, since the life I had been living was rapidly crashing down in ruins--the pain that Allah allowed me to suffer was a blessed mercy in disguise. My interest in Africa led me to investigate my Sicilian heritage--because the Muslims in Sicily had come from North Africa, that meant I was partly of African ancestry. I read A History of Islamic Sicily by Aziz Ahmad and Storia dei musulmani di Sicilia by Michele Amari. I discovered to my great delight that the two to three centuries of Islamic civilization in Sicily were the most brilliant moment out of its 3,000 years of history. It made me reflect that I had already learned all I would ever want to know about Greek and Roman civilization, but the third part of my heritage--the magnificent Arabic and Islamic civilization--had been ignored throughout my education. On the map of Tunisia, directly opposite Sicily, I found the town of Monastir. Must have been the source of my family name! Like my African-American and Latino brothers, I realized that I had been deprived of my birthright because of the West's blind spot toward Islam. Immediately I began studying the Arabic language, to recover what I had been missing. Despite its difficulty, I enjoyed the study of Arabic immensely!

So far, the idea of my entering Islam still had not occurred to me, though the more I learned about Islam the more interested I became. In the spring of 1984 I decided that I had been playing around with religion long enough, and it was time to make a serious commitment to God. I began making ablution, getting on my knees, and praying twice every day, seeking remission of sins, praising and glorifying God for His greatness, and asking His help and guidance in serving Him all the days of my life. I tried to pray simply and plainly from my heart, just opening my heart to God, without any thought of religious denomination. At first I addressed my prayers to either God or Jesus indiscriminately, but as the months went by I began to wonder why. The thought grew very gradually that if my prayers were addressed to God, what was the need of addressing Jesus in the same way? It was less a theological speculation than an attempt to find the right way to pray. Once I was reading an Arabic phrasebook and in the first conversation, I found that the Arabic way to answer the question "how are you?" was "al-hamdu lillâh--praise be to God." I began saying out loud, al-hamdu lillâh, al-hamdu lillâh, al-hamdu lillâh, and the more I repeated it, the higher my spirit took flight in the heavens, and all at once I felt my soul's hurt being healed, and the more so I repeated God's praise.

During this time I went back to reading the Qur'ân and now found much meaning in it, for Allah was unlocking my heart. The last thing I did before leaving Denver that summer was to find the Arabic text of the Qur'ân in the public library, painstakingly copy out Sûrat al-Fâtihah in Arabic, and memorize it. I then incorporated it into my daily prayer. By this time Islam was looking increasingly attractive to me; if asked, I couldn't have said exactly why, but I knew I was finding solace and joy from it. Back home in Cleveland, I began frequenting the library at nearby John Carroll University and reading all I could find on Islam. The next passage from the Qur'ân I chose to memorize in Arabic was the first revelation, the first five verses of Sûrat al-‘Alaq--

Recite: in the name of thy Lord who created,
created Man of a blood-clot.
Recite: And thy Lord is the Most Generous,
who taught by the Pen,
taught Man what he knew not.--

and next I memorized the Verse of Light:

God is the Light of the heavens and the earth
the likeness of His Light is as a niche
wherein is a lamp
the lamp in a glass,
the glass as it were a glittering star,
kindled from a Blessed Tree,
an olive that is neither of the East nor of the West
whose oil wellnigh would shine, even if no fire touched it
Light upon Light;
God guides to His Light whom He will,
and God strikes similitudes for men,
and God has knowledge of everything.

The spiritual majesty and beauty of these verses brought me face to face with the mysterium tremendum, and to my great wonder I found an immense new universe of Reality and Joy opening up before me. I could perceive Allah's words transmuting the substance of my soul into something better. In my reading at the library I found that it was most of all the literature of Sufism that pointed in the direction I was seeking to go, which was to travel on the path of love closer to God. The works of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, such as Ideals and Realities of Islam and Sufi Essays, helped more than others to satisfy my hunger and thirst for Islamic knowledge.

Late in September I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and having read it I was fully convinced that I wanted to be Muslim. I was especially impressed by Malcolm's observation:

"America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white--but the 'white' attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color."

My study showed me that Jesus Christ, as a prophet of Allah, was just as much a part of Islam as he was of Christianity. Since I had come to believe in Prophet Muhammad, that removed the last obstacle between me and Islam. In my prayers, now offered thrice daily, I added the prostration (sujûd) I had seen in pictures of the Islamic prayer.

At dawn on October 10, 1984 (it was the 15th of Muharram of 1405), when I had been praying steadily for six months, my seeking came to a culmination. I said, "O Jesus, you know I love you and I could never forsake you. Islam has become irresistibly attractive to me. What should I do?" The answer appeared in my heart with serene clarity, as if Jesus himself were saying it: "Do as I do--be Muslim." I said, "Thank you, that was all I was waiting to hear."

Straight away I set myself to learning the Islamic prayer from books in the library: the ablution, the postures of prayer, the five times a day to perform salât. I continued memorizing more verses of the Qur'ân to recite in salât, and ever since then I have kept up the prayer. Since I was then reciting as part of the salât the attestation of faith,

I bear witness that there is no god but Allah
and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah,

my entry into Islam became effective from that moment. I prayed on my own without telling anyone at first; two and a half months later I attended a mosque for the first time and there made the public profession of faith, so that I formally entered the Islamic community. As a result of joining with other Muslims I was eventually able to meet and marry my good Muslim wife.

After I converted a few more months passed before I told my parents, but as they saw my life was now in order and I was showing them more honor and respect than ever before, they raised no objection to my Islam. During the years I had been a nominal but non-practicing Catholic, I had shown much disrespect toward my parents' Church; once in Islam and formally severed from the Church, I followed the commandments of Allah and the Sunnah of His blessed Prophet and behaved with respect toward it at last. It took Islam to teach me respect toward all beings. I am still learning.

I would like to emphasize that at no time during the year it took me to convert did any Muslim preach Islam to me. The pious, mosque-attending Muslims took no notice of the likes of me, raggle-taggle beatnik. I remember seeing Muslims on the University of Denver campus, and saying al-salâm ‘alaykum to them; they would pretend not to hear me. Thank God, verbal dialectic is not the only way to convey religious truth. As al-Ghazzâli wrote in his spiritual autobiography, al-Munqidh min al-dalâl, about the restoration of his faith:

"This did not come about by systematic demonstration or marshaled argument, but by a light which God Most High cast into my breast. This light is the key to the greater part of knowledge. Whoever thinks that the understanding of things divine rests upon strict proofs has in his thought narrowed down the wideness of God's mercy."

The way that the light of Islam actually opened my heart was through the simple, everyday example of kindness, of how to be a good human being, that was set by my Pakistani friends. It was the light shining from their hearts that illuminated my heart when preaching with words would have had no effect. When my heart was at last unlocked, and I investigated Islam with an open mind, I found it very easy to assent to its doctrine, for I discovered that deep down I had always believed it. Allah chose Islam for me and brought me to it gently, and made it easy for me, in the most beautiful way, with the means that were the most effective.