Cover design of The Quran
Originally uploaded by *Muhammad*.
When I was 15 I was listening to a Cat Stevens album and I noticed that on the back of the jacket he had a letter to fans explaining why he had converted to Islam. My religious quest began its circle toward home.
I looked in the phone book and called the local mosque to ask where I could get a copy of the Koran.
“I will give you one” the man said.
“Great,” I said.
“When will you come?” he demanded.
“I’ll come now,” I said, and I jumped on a bus.
(You can now check authority figures off on the Islam List of Things SnakeLady Heads Toward)
When I arrived at Ann Arbor’s Islamic Center I could feel God there. I could feel God in the entryway. I could feel the intensity of the place and there was almost no one there. It felt good and it felt real. I knew I wanted to go back again.
The man I’d spoken to on the phone handed me a copy of the Koran that I still have. Islam is lived in an intensly social way and I was later to become friends with his wife and daughter. He also asked for my phone number to give to an American Muslim woman who could answer my questions. A day or so later she called and asked if I’d like to go out for pizza with her and her family. I said yes. Khadijah was a wonderful support to me both in my religious life and in my teenage years, serious in her religion, knowledgable, and very kind. She was about 27 at the time.
Islam was easy for me to accept. The tenets seemed natural and obvious. The requirements were welcome and did not feel restrictive. I took the religious name Maryam. And in those early years I felt closer to God than at any other point in my life. I miss those years terribly and I hope someday that feeling will come back.
The biggest sticking point with my family was wearing hijab – the head covering. But I gave that up after a few years and they felt comfortable going out in public with me again and all was well.
Sometimes someone will challenge my faith. They’ll tell me an off-color story about the Prophet Muhammad, or quote the Koran in an odd context. My usual reply is just to shrug. Maybe it’s so, maybe it isn’t, but I accept my faith, and the people in it. Fighting over religious doctrine isn’t important to me, what I value is having a religion I can call home. A place and a faith and a practice that are whole and real to me – an access point to God and a place to turn.
Do I pray 5 times a day? No, I pray in the traditional Islamic way only rarely now. Do I fast during Ramadan? I try. Do I believe that there is only one God and the Prophet Muhammad is His messenger? Yes, I do. And I try to read the Koran and some other traditional Islamic texts with some regularity but I am surely no scholar.
Islam is mostly defined by works rather than by beliefs and by that standard I am a poor Muslim indeed. But I am what I am, I am who I am. And when I need my religion I know it will be there, with plenty of rules to follow to let me know I’m really doing something.
Over the years I’ve considered finding a more “practical” religion for living in America, but I simply believe in Islam. I’ve been a Muslim for 16 years, however lapsed most of the time. I couldn’t pretend to believe something else for the sake of social convenience or ease.
And in any event, the God I pray to now is the same one I was praying to in the church bus at Spotswood Elementary, at the Catholic church in my home town, at the Methodist church in Ann Arbor, in the Rastafari years, in the heady years of my early conversion to Islam, and now. He knows me pretty good, what I’m capable of good, bad, and out of sheer laziness. I couldn’t fool him by another conversion to something less demanding.
P.S. I wrote Cat Stevens to thank him for pointing me to Islam. He wrote back and said You’re Welcome.
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