Ramblings

When I meet people, they often ask me, “Why did you embrace Islam?”

I usually respond with either a short answer like ‘it is the religion that made the most sense to me’ or I attempt to give an account of some events prior to my shahadah. Neither is satisfying, because the first response begs the question of why I was looking to embrace any religion at all, and the second one is inconsistent. I pick a few events that seem linked and run with them.

The reality is that religious conversion is very personal thing and in many ways it is mysterious. Allah SWT guides whom He wishes.

But without getting lost in the details I think you can start by saying something like this: I moved to Australia at an age when most people are closing their selves up as their identity solidifies and in doing so they lose the childhood sense of wonder and curiosity about the world around them. This allowed me to question the status quo, but with a strong sense of loyalty to the Creator, who remained my reliance through all the changes and uncertainties, and pursue the truth wherever it took me. I looked into all the major alternatives, and the one that won out was Islam.

Here’s the slightly longer version:

Soon after moving, aged 16, I began to question if the Australian Dream we had bought into by migrating here was really all it was cracked up to be. It just seemed like we were a vestige of the settler colonialism that had reproduced all the problems of Western culture I had known in Britain in an exotic location, and had for the last 200 + years been reducing the adventurous wild beauty of a pristine natural environment that had attracted me in the first place. My childish idea of moving to Australia was less Neighbours and Home and Away and more Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin.

I learned about (Plato’s) philosophy around the same time I began to really question Christianity. Probably through that, I managed to keep a sense of relationship with the Absolute despite some intellectual problems with Christian theology. Then when I went to university I started to learn about the reality of the world’s diversity in religions and worldviews. Suddenly I knew Muslims, Marxists, Buddhists, LGBT and not just as fellow students or sports players in a secular environment, but in a place where people accosted you with pamphlets and had debates.

I went through a stage of exploring different religions. Like many people from my background who have that openness, it was someone relativistic and I was open to hearing from any self-proclaimed guru, no matter how new age and weird. I even looked into Marxism and realised that it is also a kind of belief system, with an imminent eschatology of utopia in this world. It has many links to other flawed movements of our times, like the feminist agenda and the push for LGBT ‘liberation’.

After my degree I took a gap year working as an English teacher in South East Asia, spending most of my time in Malaysia where all major world faiths are practiced devotedly. I got to see, in all their amazing public festivity, the Chinese Mid Autumn Festival and Taoist and Buddhist Hungry Ghost Festival, Buddhist Vesak, Hindu Holi and Deepavali, and Tamil Hindu Thaipusam, as well as the Muslim Eids and Ramadan and seeing how non-European Christians celebrate Christmas and Easter.

Seeing the Indic religions in practice made me realise how absurd it had been to even consider them. Holi was fun, as a secularised music festival for throwing paint at people. But everything else had a frightening and sinister air to me. I saw people in crazed trances sticking hooks into their body, and I suspect they were possessed. I saw burning effigies of demonic entities.

This contrasted so, so sharply with the simple beauty of Islam, with it’s time-honoured practices of sober fasting and generous feasting, and uncompromising belief in a pure monotheism that made perfect sense and connected me more authentically with Almighty God and all of those incredible stories of the prophets of old that I had learned about as a child.

And so, not long after Hari Raya in 2015, after trying out a month of fasting for God in solidarity with my Muslim friends, I took the plunge and embraced the Deen of Islam.

Alhamdulilah