These days, when ever you say you are Muslim by choice, you get people asking about your conversion. Mostly they want to know why. This curiosity comes equally from those who are already Muslim and those who are not. I used to tell the same basic steps—although I hardly think my own individual door lights up any bulbs of excitement. Maybe because no lightbulbs went off for me either.
I was a seeker. I was raised in a loving Christian environment and to this day, may they rest in peace, I was closer to my dad, the minister, than I was to my mom. In fact, I was fascinated with the light of faith in my father’s life. Yes, everything he did private and public exuded that light. It would have been devastating, I think, for him to profess to faith in the public, but then do horrendous ungodly things in private.
I adored my father. I also had my first experience of transcendence sitting with him. I was deathly afraid of thunderstorms when I was little. I used to think there was a special message for me from an angry God. Oddly enough it wasn’t the lightening, which could actually do some harm, but the roaring noise that upset me. One evening, my father sat me on his knee and told me the biblical story of Noah’s ark. Then he told me God had promised never again to destroy the world by water. The symbol of that promise, he said, is the rainbow. For a brief moment, everything in this world disappeared. Nothing remained except for the joy and the mercy of that divine promise.
Still, by the time I was a teenager, I had ventured to other churches to seek the varieties of Christian faith expressions. In high school, I lived with Jewish, Catholic, Unitarian Universalists. By the time of my first years in college, I was studying traditions from the Far East. Eventually I lived as a Buddhist in an ashram and practiced meditation each morning and evening. I was already a vegetarian, part of my transforming consciousness about toxins and waste for the body and the spirit.
Entering Islam was partially an accident. I was still reading about traditions other than the one of my birth. Likewise I began to read about Islam. I knew I understood only a part of it from books alone. So I finally took myself to a mosque to investigate the other part: the lived reality. Although I had no intention at that time of becoming a Muslim, I think the fact that I already dressed covering my legs, arms, and hair was taken to mean otherwise.
Once I pronounced the shahadah, the declaration of faith in only one God and the Prophet Muhammad, the first pillar, I was Muslim. Here too, I began the practices, but only from books, doing the best I could. Then several months after the shahadah, I was coincidently given a copy of the Qur’an. Then I was hooked. I count my dates of entry from these two points: Thanksgiving day 1972 when I said shahadah, and March 1973, when I was began reading the Qur’an. For some time after that, all I read was Qur’an. Still today if things get freaky I return to just reading the Qur’an.
Knowing it was originally in Arabic, I began studying Arabic through the local mosques until I could register for a course at my undergraduate University of Pennsylvania. In fact, the study of Arabic would go on actively for the next three years until I moved to an Arabic speaking country. It would resume with graduate school and culminate with living in Egypt specifically for the study of Arabic at an intensive level. This was ten years later and by then I had attained fluency. Still, Arabic is for me a means to an end, not the end in itself. The end—and still my on going quest—is greater and greater understanding of the Qur’an.
Of course in the ten years between the shahadah and attaining a proficiency in Arabic, the politics of conversion were in full force. One aspect of these politics has to do with what to call oneself as a convert. Some Muslims are adamant about self-identifying as “revert to Islam.” I don’t know when the politics of this refusal to be considered a convert came about, but I do know why. There is a popular misunderstanding that the Prophet said, “Everyone was born Muslim… and then their parents make them Jew or Christian (or whatever)…” Actually, the Arabic of that popular misunderstanding says, “kullun ‘ala al-fitrah.” Everyone was born ‘ala al-Fitrah. The word “Muslim” does not occur in that statement.
Al-Fitrah, according to the Qur’an, is a primordial predisposition toward faith. The commentators contend that it is also a primordial predisposition to surrender, which is another word for Islam. Unfortunately, this is then concluded to mean, “Every one was born in Islam,” or Muslim, collapsing the primordial state with the historical and anthropological state of Muslims. Then it loses the point altogether. So I stay away from that designation and the sometimes arrogance that it causes.
The point seems to be for some converts to claim they are returning to their origins, and that origin is Islam in the primordial sense. It is a very convincing discourse, but only by Western Muslims. Muslims born and in generations of Islam anthropologically don’t really care as much how the newbies identify. Besides, once I learned that my slave ancestors on my mother’s side were Muslims, anthropologically speaking, the gusto was taken out of that claim for origins. Mostly because when I discussed this amongst Muslims of generations, even my friends, I was surprised how many determined that by this fact of ancestral anthropology alone, then I was really Muslim. As one friend put it, “You are really one of us.”
So I take another approach (no surprises there). I reason that if the prophet was already 40 years old before he received the first Qur’anic revelation, and then he died after the last at age 63, then historically speaking he was only Muslim for 23 years. Any person who chooses Islam and remains faithful for more than 23 years has qualified for an unconditional status as Muslim. No defense, no wordplay, and no anthropology needed.
But what does it mean to ‘remain faithful’? As is evident from even this blog, if I say something contrary to a very conservative norm, my “faith” is questioned. Well, we already know that only those persons who perceive of Islam under siege will work so hard to protect it. I don’t have that siege mentality. Instead, I have confidence that Islam will live through these torrential times, as it has lived through other torrential times in history. I believe not in peripheral issues, diversity of perspectives, or even core issues to such as an extent as to over look a simple order of the universe. And that’s what makes me Muslim after having lovingly practiced Buddhism and Christianity.
The universe is organized around the principle of God’s abiding and residing unity, or tawhid.
Have you ever seen the computer-generated image of a fractal? A pattern that adheres to its unity and form at the tiniest, most minute level as well as when projected out toward its largest manifestation at the mega level. They call it the handprint of God.
To see such a visual depiction of a metaphysical idea was both a relief and a challenge to me. It almost took the mystery out of the whole idea of being a believer. It was no longer just an abstract idea for things Unseen. It was the manifestation of the Unseen in everything seen, known, tasted, touched, or otherwise perceived. Then suddenly, there was no other way for me to see the universe, or to see my role in it. I am primordially predisposed to acknowledge the underlying unity in all creation as a manifestation of the unity of the Creator. But then, I am also predisposed by this to respond in my actions, thoughts, and emotions in such a way as to operate along the lines of this unity in everything. It is the Ultimate order of the Universe both visible and invisible.
Although I identify as Muslim by choice, at this juncture in my life, there is no other choice for me. It is the way I see the world. However—and this needs to be stated explicitly, because of the tendency for some people to forget—this is not a condemnation of other worldviews or responses to the Sacred and Ultimate. On the contrary; once I felt I clear in my vision of the world, I also came to mercy, love, and tolerance (although I don’t particularly like that word) for the endeavors of others in faith.
The Qur’an says, “There can be no compulsion in religion.” Then it goes on to say, “Truth is manifestly evident from Falsehood.” For sure, Truth cannot be forced. What is more, a person cannot see if not with complete volition; otherwise, it is just corruption. Coercion then, is antithetical to faith. I have only greater love for any perspective of faith that one attains to work by actions of devotion for the coherence they perceive in the Universe.
The only place I draw the line is where someone takes their faith, including Muslims, to close off the exploration of goodness and grace in the universe from another. I came across an excellent quote the other day from Ibn Qayyim, a medieval thinker “the root of Islam is “love for God, intimacy with Him, and yearning to encounter Him.”
Obviously there is no room for petty prejudices in that perspective.
