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Assalamu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullah,
A few months back (six months to be exact), during a family meeting the subject about religion came up. My father was mentioning how he was disappointed that after all their hard work in trying to raise good Catholic children, I wasn’t going to church as often as before, and that I wasn’t close to God.
My parents went on saying that if one is not close to God; one has no clear purpose in life. With so many things going on in my life at that moment, it never dawned on me the importance of religion, especially now that I’m getting older and the idea of marrying, and having children was just around the corner. What was I to teach my children about religion? I needed to have a clear purpose. From that day, I made a decision to rearrange my priorities.
Of course now, my number one priority was to become closer to God. For me to be able to achieve this, I knew I had to start somewhere. I had to go back to the basics of my religion and study it thoroughly. To be honest I wasn’t so enthusiastic about the whole idea. It brought up the memories of Catechism, which were not so great. During that time when I was in Catechism, I was the type to ask a lot of questions.
It got to the point when they didn’t want me there anymore, because I was inspiring ideas onto other kids. Despite all of my past experiences, I took the initiative to tackle this subject again. It was for my own good. I was one month into my studies, I became frustrated. I felt I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had the same questions all over again, and like before, pretty much no one could give me a clear answer. That’s when I decided to take a “break” for a week or two.
A week or two became six weeks. When I resumed my studying, I made the merit to meet other people with the same faith. I was specifically looking for people with similar backgrounds as mine - Filipino Catholics. I thought maybe, just maybe they could show me a different side of Catholicism. I wasn’t having any luck. Although I am part Filipino, we had too many cultural differences because I was raised in Mexico, and even though we have the same religion, we had different ways of veneration.
This added to my frustration. Out of the blue a random person sends me a message, asking to keep in contact. I was disappointed; this person didn’t fit the profile that I was looking for – at all. This person was male, Arab, and had a totally different religion. I had never met a practicing Muslim before. With time my friendship with this person grew parallel with my studies.
Ironically, while reading some articles in a Catholic website there was this link to another article: “What Catholics should now about Islam” – I was baffled. I somewhat giggled, and said to myself “Are there really things I should know?” Even though it seemed funny at first, I was very curious. As I started reading this article I was completely astonished. I couldn’t believe how ignorant I was about Islam.
This article was like my personal check list of beliefs…belief in one God, check; belief in the prophets, check…and so on. Just about all my questions about God and religion were answered in ten minutes, by an article that I “accidentally” found. After reading this, I started to concentrate in learning more about Islam.
The more I read, the more I wanted to know. I thought everything I was reading was just too good to be true. My values, my ideals, my beliefs… Islam had it. The coming days, and months to follow, I noticed everything in my life was falling into place… I was going thru a change.
A few days latter my friend called me asking what I have been up to the last couple of days. I told him everything except my new interest about Islam. I didn’t want him to know then become pushy about it. Eventually he did bring up the subject of religion. He gave me an overview of Islam. And told me it was up to me to seek the truth and research about it.
“You will see it’s the right way. I just want you to figure that on your own”, he said. I couldn’t believe it, that was it? No trying to overly convince me? To clear my doubts I had about Islam, and to better understand it, I had to formally study it from a trusting source. When I came across the websites I didn’t even had to think twice whether to take classes here. It was about three weeks in when I had the certainty that I wanted to convert.
I was certain, but scared. It never passed my mind that I would one day decide, or even just think about converting to another religion. I really just thought I would be a non-believing Catholic the rest of my life. It wasn’t until one day one of my professors, Sh. Abdul Kareem called me, by the end of that conversation I had already taken Shahada, and had become Muslim. God had planned everything.
