"I took my shahada in 2011, after having known for 6 months that I would be becoming a Muslim in 2011.
The start of my spiritual quest started in 2004 when after a long phase of being unsure about faith and God.
As a catholic child, I was fascinated by God and Angels. My aunt remembers me running into shops if I saw an angel in the window sail, or on their logo.
Catholicism didn’t grow well on me, however. The more I had questions, the less I got answers. Until I just stopped asking questions all together.
I stopped thinking about religion until I was 17 and studied Philosophy at school. When it came to the subject of faith, my teacher really got me thinking about creation and the purpose of life. On the way home one evening, my attention got caught on some flowers on the side of the road. They looked absolutely beautiful. Too beautiful to have been the random combination of molecules. They were colorful, gave a home to insects, smelt divine and had the power to make humans smile. Not two of them were the same. Surely they were the work of God. Surely.
That was the moment my faith was sparked back up. I did a lot of self searching and enquiring before I came to Islam. When I moved to London, I looked into Church of England beliefs, I felt I was on the right path, as they emphasized on your relationship with God, but yet the trinity confused me, and they seemed to be so many discrepancies between different bibles that I carried on drifting and searching. By then, I had made a couple of Muslim friends and I had acknowledged that there really was a man called Mohammed(pbuh) who had started this religion. I believed in him. And I believed that he must have been talking to God to be able to write a whole book about Faith and Practices without having ever been taught to write or read.
At the same time 7/7 happened, I was about to start my last year of Film Studies at Uni and needed to come up with an idea for an end of year project. I decided to make a film about terrorism, but with an angle showing how the media makes things worse and can distort the reality about faith.
We auditioned many actors but the lead role for the Muslim part in our script remained free for a long time. Eventually an actor applied. He was brilliant and got the part immediately. A and I became friends straight away, we just clicked… To make a long story short, he inspired and pushed me to research and understand what faith really meant to me. I believed in God 100%, but couldn’t relate to Christianity 100% and never went to church. Eventually, what really pushed me across the line was the day my little sister, she who had never even considered Faith, had been reading about Islam and told me she wanted to convert.
Today, I have been Muslim a year and a bit, so has my sister and A. and I are getting married at the end of 2012" .
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