What Drew Me to Islam

7/29/2019 What Drew Me to Islam

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What Drew Me to Islam

By Andrew Howie

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficientevidence.

- William K. Gifford

Let there be not compulsion in religion; truth stands out clearly from error. [Qur'an 2:256]

Most Christian parents of college-age students with whom I have been personally acquaintedexpress great fear that their son or daughter will lose faith in college. This fear even ranksabove that of many of the more obvious temptations of college life, such as drug use, alcoholuse, or promiscuity. Concern about the appeal of atheism and agnosticism in secular American

universities is widespread in East Texas, where I was born and which I still call home. Theairwaves (of Christian radio stations) frequently feature stories about formerly-devout Christianteens going off to major universities and having their faith debunked by Ivory Toweracademics intent on luring young adults away from their roots.

My family is typically East-Texan in most ways. Having become known as the smart one in thefamily (I say this in all humility), I was seen off to college with both great anticipation and greatanxiety. As I progressed through college, I was closely scrutinized and frequently admonished tokeep on the lookout for rogue professors, lest I fall into their trap and become too smart tobelieve.

In college, I began to question and re-examine my religious-cultural background. Where did Istand as an individual? What kind of person would I choose to be? Would I follow that which Ihad always been taught, settle close to home and live the same life I had always lived? Would Ibecome an atheist or an agnostic like my family feared I would? But why does being a rational,scientific, intellectually honest person mean I have to be an atheist or an agnostic? Who can usescience to debunk God? I want to be smart, I said to myself, and I also want to believe. Sohow is it that one can be too smart to believe?

The answer, I found, ten thousand questions and answers later, was:you cannot. This January, Iembraced Islam, a decision that was informed in equal measure by my mind and my personalreligious sensibilities. It was the culmination of a great emotional and intellectual battle to secure

not just my faith in God but also my integrity as a thinking person, beleaguered as I was by thefalse fear that true faith may come only at the expense of intellect.

At Rhodes, the inimitably Southern Liberal Arts College which has become my second home, Ihad the opportunity to meet Shaykh Yasir Qadhi, who took up a position there in the ReligiousStudies Department in the fall of 2010. In the spring he offered a course that focused on modernIslamic political movements in which I was eager to enroll. Although the course did not covergeneral Islamic knowledge, such as history and theology, from the course I learned one of the


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most important lessons I have acquired in a classroom: the great need for Muslims to speakconvincingly to non-Muslim westerners who can only see the worst of the Islamic world.Ninety percent, Sh. Qadhi said once in class, of the facts you learn in classrooms you willforget. What will be important is that you learned how to think. Any informed Muslim inAmerica knows to stay away from mainstream network news sources such as Fox or CNN,

which, prioritizing ratings and revenue over the truth, often pander to their audiences with half-factual stories reported in a loud and emotionally appealing style. But how do you talk tosomeone whose facts all come from sources that present an insipid and uncritical view of theMuslim world? Who has been taught all their life that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is amysterious, complicated struggle as old and time, to which no one remembers the cause perhaps something vague about an incompatibility of values and to which there never hasbeen a solution? Who views the world in terms of an ultimate clash of civilizations, withChristianity on one side of the line and Islam on the other?

I agree strongly with Sh. Qadhis statement, quoted in a recent New York Times article, that, asan American Muslim, you feel your faith. As a religious minority, you are forced to make

choices that Muslims dont frequently have to make in Muslim-majority countries. You areforced to choose on a daily basis what are to be your priorities. In post-9/11 America, you mustbe more informed, poised, and persuasive on key issues than the majority you must know all oftheir sources better than they do as well as all of your own. Your identity is a struggle for you; astruggle that channels your strengths, keeps you diligent and prevents you from hypocrisy.

A few weeks ago, Sh. Qadhi asked me over lunch what made me decide to come to Islam. Afterall, bowing ones head to the ground, fasting, and studying Arabic are all activities that themajority of Americans do not engage in on a regular basis. From the perspective of themainstream, European and American mentality, many of the practices of our religion seemforeign, indelibly Eastern. My tongue was held by the immediacy of Sh. Qadhis question

and by the force and number of possible replies that raced through my mind; in this deadlock Iproduce only a few half-considered thoughts. But had I had more time to think about my answer,I would have replied as follows.

Islam became normal for me because it is normal. It is a religion of honesty, human dignity, andgood old common sense. Its doctrines are easily intelligible, correspond with the universalinclinations of human thought, and can be expressed through clear, unequivocal use of humanlanguage. Islam requires no suppression of the intellect nor blinding of the senses to believe in;there is no conflict between reason and faith in Islam. Islam is not a foreign culture it is equallyat home in Yemen as in Yakutsk. Islam is a system adaptable to all times and places; the timelessand inextinguishable precepts which form its message, delivered countless times across the spanof time have stirred the hearts of the greatest men to perform the most significant actions inhistory. World history, I told Sh. Qadhi, did not make sense to me until I began to understandIslam.

But how did I come to see all of this? Perhaps I should attribute it to the quality of my sources. Itis not hard to accept the truth of Islam what is hard is abandoning all the problems you hadbefore Islam.


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Islam stands on its own merits. Chief among these is its simplicity. All of the precepts of ourreligion extend from one premise: the premise that Allah (subhanahu wa taala), to the extentthat we are capable of understanding Him, exists. From the fact that Allah (subhanahu wataala), the Ever-Merciful, is, it proceeds that He would furnish some means whereby those ofHis creations which are endowed with free will, human beings, might be brought into the fold of

that mercy through which they would be instructed in the correct way to believe and the correctway to live. Thus proceeding from His mercy, Allah sent prophets to mankind to warn them. It isnatural that such a God would also furnish signs through his creation so that man would come tohave understanding of these truths by observing and investigating the world around him. If oneaccepts belief in the One, All-Powerful and Ever Merciful God, this entails belief in Hisrevelations. If one believes in His revelations, it is natural that one should choose to follow thatwhich they teach i.e., to be a Muslim, one who submits to the will of God.

Belief in this All-Powerful, All-Merciful God has always been absolutely central to my identity;it was only just before I came to college, at the age of 18 years, that I began to seriously questionwhether or not Christianity was the true religion of God. Now I re-examine philosophies and

religions, They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious cloudsand along the landscape and flowing currents, writes American poet Walt Whitman. Naturally,any educated person professing Christianity has to come to terms with the Pauline doctrine thatthe same God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Sublime author of all that exists, was also ahuman being who lived on this earth, ate, slept, and prayed to God. The more I studied the Bible,the more I came to see that this doctrine was only indifferently supported by scripture andsometimes contradicted by it outright. In the Gospel of Mark 12:28-32, one of the Jewish scribesasks Jesus which is the most important of all the commandments:

And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord ourGod is one Lord

And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy

mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none othercommandment greater than these.

And the scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth: for there is one God; and

there is none other but He:

And to love Him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and

with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt offeringsand sacrifices.

And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, Thou art not far from the

kingdom of God. And no man after that durst ask him any question. (KJV)

The first commandment mentioned by Jesus in the above passage is taken from Deuteronomy6:4:


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Hear, O Israel! The LORD our god, the LORD is one.

The word for one in the Hebrew scriptures (Hb. ehad) is cognate with the Arabic wordfor the number one, , as in the first ayah ofSuratl-Ikhlas (112:1):

Say: He is Allah, the One! (Pickthal)

Any Christian would nominally agree with the first half of ourshahadah that there is no god butGod. Yet the Hebrew Scriptures, like our own Quran, take this oneness a step further to affirmthe essential unity of our Creator. God is the One, and the only entity worthy of worship. How,then, can He be three?

Early Christian communities which had accepted the doctrine of the trinity struggled to reconcilethe obvious difficulties in their theology, which necessitated that three be somehow equivalent to

one. The only solution was to split the definition of God into two parts: person or substantivereality (Gk., hypostasis) on the one hand; essence or being (Gk. ,ousia) on the other. Without diving into a too-detailed discussion of Greek philosophicalterminology, suffice the following example to clarify the meaning of both terms. Among a groupof boxes of different sizes and colors, each would be identified by what makes it distinct fromthe other objects in the group its color and size. These characteristics would make up theunique hypostasis of each box. Its ousia would consist of its box-ness, a nature which all threeobjects share in. In the trinitarian formulation, it is a divine nature that binds its tripartiteconception of God. Succinct yet no less convoluted, the formula of three persons, one beingbecame the cornerstone of the theology of Christian Orthodoxy. Yet no matter how you divide it,trinitarianism mirrors polytheism in all but terminology; when they say one, they still mean

three. Around the world, you will find Christians who pray sometimes to Jesus, sometimes toGod the Father, and sometimes to the Holy Spirit, often for equivalent purposes and with littlealternation in liturgy.

Early Christianity, before the ascendance of Orthodoxy, was not, however, without difference ofopinion. A controversial passage in the Gospel of Luke demonstrates the diversity of opinionsone might have encountered had one lived in the eastern Roman provinces during the early yearsof Christianity. In chapter 2 verse 33, the oldest and most authoritative Greek manuscripts readAnd his father and mother were amazed at the things said about him (Jesus) (Sinaiticus,Vaticanus, W 032, and others in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic; my translation). At some timeduring the history of copying and recopying which the biblical text has experienced, this

particular verse was subject to harmonization, in this case referring to alteration of the text bya scribe with the goal of making the text better conform to the prevailing theology of the day. Anunscrupulous Orthodox scribe who took issue with the fact that Joseph is referred to as thefather of Jesus changed the text to suit the view of Jesus as Gods literally begotten son. Thischange was widely accepted and perpetuated so that the few manuscripts which the Anglicanchurch used to make its Authorized Version in 1611, undoubtedly the most influential translationof the Bible ever written, give the less controversial yet altered reading And Joseph and hismother marvelled at those things which were spoken of him. This is just one example among


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many of how the text of the New Testament has undergone considerable change at the hands ofthose trying to advance a particular theological angle. There are more errors in the 6000transcripts of the New Testament as there are words in the New Testament, as biblical scholarBart Ehrman said in a talk at Stanford University summarizing the points in his book titledMisquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.

The notion of disagreement within a religious text is itself problematic. How can somethingwritten by the hands of hundreds (including the scribes who intentionally or unintentionallyadded to or subtracted from the text, thousands) of different human beings living in differenttimes and places be the word of God? The reason why the Bible disagrees with itself on so manyfundamental points is that human beings disagree, because we have imperfect knowledge.

Islam has its healthy share of disagreements among different scholars and thinkers, but that,again, is due to the imperfect knowledge of human beings. On the other hand, the source materialwe have, the Quran, is perfect and without disagreement or variation, nor has it ever changed.There are thousands of different manuscripts of the Hebrew bible, whether complete or partial,

and they all have variant readings. The Septuagint, the early Greek translation of the HB, oftendisagrees considerably with the Hebrew Masoretic text that comes down to us, indicating that itis itself part of an entirely different textual tradition (with its own numerous internal variations) and so on and so forth with the Coptic, Syriac, and Latin traditions. To really understand all thatthe Bible is, in an inclusive sense with its many traditions and variations, one must be fluent inat least six languages! The Quran, on the other hand, is only one text in one language and itsdual preservation as a text both oral and written is a check against any who wouldunscrupulously try to add to it or subtract from it.

The more I studied the Bible, the more it came to represent something foreign, in some caseswell nigh unapproachable. Theres so much language and cultural baggage in the Bible that is

lost on even the most well-trained scholars. The text, despite its wide readership, cannot even beapproached by the layperson without a massive explanatory apparatus attached to the text (thusthese days there are Bibles aimed at particular demographics theres a Catholic Bible, anEpiscopalian Bible, a Baptist Bible, a Bible for women, a Bible for children, Bibles forconservatives, for liberals, etc.) Some books and chapters (all of the books in the deuteronomichistory are plagued with this) seem to exalt systems of values and ethics that would beabhorrent to any conscious, humane moderner: For example, the biblical commandment that theIsraelites should kill all the men, women, children, and beasts of the field everything thatbreathes and possess the land of Canaan (Deuteronomy 20:16). Even if such passages wereamenable to allegorical interpretation, what exactly would they say?

The Qurans teachings are humane, consistent, and of singular, divine authorship. Its languageis unrivaled by any other work in Arabic or any other language. The greatest truths in ouruniverse are evident to anyone who stops and thinks; the beauty around us is but a reflection ofthe beauty of the Creator.

I am not a believer in the notion that the truth is esoteric, that it must be sought out throughsecret or obscure means, nor that it is the reserve of a select few. As I was questioning my beliefswhile studying religions other than Christianity, I was guided by the awareness that the truth


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must be clear and easily accessible.It is a sign of the true Gods Mercy that He sends proofs thatare clear. If mankind at large is truly to be held accountable for recognizing and following truthand leaving behind error, the truth must be right in front of our faces. And so it was. For better orworse, never before have people in the West been more preoccupied with the Islamic question.And the religion yet remains so poorly understood by the masses. If the religious conservatives

in our own country were not so misdirected by prejudiced politics, they too would see how closeIslam is to their own feelings of antipathy in this time and place which seems so immersed in themyths of secularism and so distant from the eternal principles which all of Gods prophets haveestablished on earth in their times and places.

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What Drew Me to Islam