Lauren Booth: I'm now a Muslim. Why all the shock and horror?

Lauren Booth . . .'

It is five years since my first visit to Palestine. And when I arrived in the region, to work alongside charities in Gaza and the West Bank, I took with me the swagger of condescension that all white middle-class women (secretly or outwardly) hold towards poor Muslim women, women I presumed would be little more than black-robed blobs, silent in my peripheral vision. As a western woman with all my freedoms, I expected to deal professionally with men alone. After all, that's what the Muslim world is all about, right?

This week's screams of faux horror from fellow columnists on hearing of my conversion to Islam prove that this remains the stereotypical view regarding half a billion women currently practising Islam.

On my first trip to Ramallah, and many subsequent visits to Palestine, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, I did indeed deal with men in power. And, dear reader, one or two of them even had those scary beards we see on news bulletins from far-flung places we've bombed to smithereens.

Surprisingly (for me) I also began to deal with a lot of women of all ages, in all manner of head coverings, who also held positions of power. Believe it or not, Muslim women can be educated, work the same deadly hours we do, and even boss their husbands about in front of his friends until he leaves the room in a huff to go and finish making the dinner.

Is this patronising enough for you? I do hope so, because my conversion to Islam has been an excuse for sarcastic commentators to heap such patronising points of view on to Muslim women everywhere. So much so, that on my way to a meeting on the subject of Islamophobia in the media this week, I seriously considered buying myself a hook and posing as Abu Hamza. After all, judging by the reaction of many women columnists, I am now to women's rights what the hooked one is to knife and fork sales.

 World of Islam in The 21st Century

So let's all just take a deep breath and I'll give you a glimpse into the other world of Islam in the 21st century. Of course, we cannot discount the appalling way women are mistreated by men in many cities and cultures, both with and without an Islamic population. Women who are being abused by male relatives are being abused by men, not God. Much of the practices and laws in "Islamic" countries have deviated from (or are totally unrelated) to the origins of Islam.

 Instead practices are based on cultural or traditional (and yes, male-orientated) customs that have been injected into these societies. For example, in Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to drive by law. This rule is an invention of the Saudi monarchy, our government's close ally in the arms and oil trade. The fight for women's rights must sadly adjust to our own government's needs.

My own path to Islam began with an awakening to the gap between what had been drip-fed to me about all Muslim life – and the reality.

I began to wonder about the calmness exuded by so many of the "sisters" and "brothers". Not all; these are human beings we're talking about. But many. And on my visit to Iran this September, the washing, kneeling, chanting recitations of the prayers at the mosques I visited reminded me of the west's view of an entirely different religion ; one that is known for eschewing violence and embracing peace and love through quiet meditation.

A religion trendy with movie stars such as Richard Gere, and one that would have been much easier to admit to following in public – Buddhism. Indeed, the bending, kneeling and submission of Muslim prayers resound with words of peace and contentment. Each one begins, "Bismillahir rahmaneer Raheem" – "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate" – and ends with the phrase "Assalamu Alaykhum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh" – Peace be upon you all and God's mercy and blessing.

Almost unnoticed to me, when praying for the last year or so, I had been saying "Dear Allah" instead of "Dear God". They both mean the same thing, of course, but for the convert to Islam the very alien nature of the language of the holy prayers and the holy book can be a stumbling block. I had skipped that hurdle without noticing. Then came the pull: a sort of emotional ebb and flow that responds to the company of other Muslims with a heightened feeling of openness and warmth. Well, that's how it was for me, anyway.

How hard and callous non-Muslim friends and colleagues began to seem. Why can't we cry in public, hug one another more, say "I love you" to a new friend, without facing suspicion or ridicule? I would watch emotions being shared in households along with trays of honeyed sweets and wondered, if Allah's law is simply based on fear why did the friends I loved and respected not turn their backs on their practices and start to drink, to have real "fun" as we in the west do? And we do, don't we? Don't we?

Finally, I felt what Muslims feel when they are in true prayer: a bolt of sweet harmony, a shudder of joy in which I was grateful for everything I have (my children) and secure in the certainty that I need nothing more (along with prayer) to be utterly content. I prayed in the Mesumeh shrine in Iran after ritually cleansing my forearms, face, head and feet with water. And nothing could be the same again. It was as simple as that.

Convert to Islam

The sheikh who finally converted me at a mosque in London a few weeks ago told me: "Don't hurry, Lauren. Just take it easy. Allah is waiting for you. Ignore those who tell you: you must do this, wear that, have your hair like this. Follow your instincts, follow the Holy Qur'an- and let Allah guide you."

And so I now live in a reality that is not unlike that of Jim Carey's character in the Truman Show. I have glimpsed the great lie that is the facade of our modern lives; that materialism, consumerism, sex and drugs will give us lasting happiness. But I have also peeked behind the screens and seen an enchanting, enriched existence of love, peace and hope. In the meantime, I carry on with daily life, cooking dinners, making TV programmes about Palestine and yes, praying for around half an hour a day.

Now, my morning starts with dawn prayers at around 6am, I pray again at 1.30pm, then finally at 10.30pm. My steady progress with the Qur'an has been mocked in some quarters (for the record, I'm now around 200 pages in). I've been seeking advice from Ayatollahs, imams and sheikhs, and every one has said that each individual's journey to Islam is their own. Some do commit the entire text to memory before conversion; for me reading the holy book will be done slowly and at my own pace.

In the past my attempts to give up alcohol have come to nothing; since my conversion I can't even imagine drinking again. I have no doubt that this is for life: there is so much in Islam to learn and enjoy and admire; I'm overcome with the wonder of it. In the last few days I've heard from other women converts, and they have told me that this is just the start, that they are still loving it 10 or 20 years on.

On a final note I'd like to offer a quick translation between Muslim culture and media culture that may help take the sting of shock out of my change of life for some of you.

When Muslims on the BBC News are shown shouting "Allahu Akhbar!" at some clear, Middle Eastern sky, we westerners have been trained to hear: "We hate you all in your British sitting rooms, and are on our way to blow ourselves up in Lidl when you are buying your weekly groceries."

In fact, what we Muslims are saying is "God is Great!", and we're taking comfort in our grief after non-Muslim nations have attacked our villages. Normally, this phrase proclaims our wish to live in peace with our neighbours, our God, our fellow humans, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Or, failing that, in the current climate, just to be left to live in peace would be nice.

Alessandro Re - an Italian who convert because had questions about the afterlife

I converted to Islam last year's summer.

I decided to become religious because I had frightening questions about the afterlife…but the problem was, which religion?

It all started thanks (yeah, thanks!) to the so called “critiques of Islam". They would go on and on saying that the Qur'an is evil, Muhammad was a warmonger etc, etc.

Now, I like to consider myself an intellectually honest person so I visited both anti-islamic and Islamic sites. The Islamic sites used very basic knowledge to completely debunk anti-islamic arguments which left me impressed, to say the least.

(I am 100% Italian btw, but I've never really found Christianity appealing. Islam on the other had a natural fashion.)

I bought and read a translated Qur'an, in which there were useful notes with historical context and studies done on certain statements of the Qur'an.

That's how I got to know more about the purest form of islam and it's scientific, historical and mathematical miracles.

That really left me wondering, how could a man from 1400 years ago know such things?! Things like “it's the female bee that makes honey” and much, much more. (I suggest you to look into these things deeper)

I started looking for errors, and I obviously found countless claims by anti-islamic sites (such as wikiislam)… but they didn't really penetrate into my heart and most of the times were lacking of solid arguments ( the rest of the times the Arabic words they used as “proof for errors” had many more meanings that changed between translation and translation, so it didn't really make sense either).

I looked more into the life of the prophet pbuh (to be sure I looked both into reliable Muslim AND non-muslim sources) and found out many heartwarming things, which the islamophobes would call “propaganda” or “taqqiya”, words of which they don't know the real meaning… especially if said by a non-muslim!

I integrated that knowledge with studies done by respectable figures such as Dying to win by Robert Pape (I suggest you to look into that as well)

I decided then to convert.

Wasn't it for “islamophobia” I would have never been a Muslim today.

And I pray God to let me die as a believing and practicing muslim, inshallah.

Julio Altamirandah story - Converting to Islam

 Julio Altamiranda shared his story how he has converted to Islam.

I was 27. I had left a job in finance after reading the Torah and then Gospel of Matthew, chapter 19 verse 29.

My girlfriend was Muslim. I had quit my job on a whim. I read the above verse on a wednesday morning and quit that afternoon. I was raised Catholic but by 13 I had decided Christianity was nonsense. I was not willing to accept that my non-Christian friends, many who were much nicer and generally better human beings than I was, were all going to hell, even my Jewish friends who prayed and went to Synagogue on Saturdays.

I was also not interested in being told that Jesus died for my sins, when not once does Jesus say anything about this in the Bible. Also by the looks of my life and the life of others in the world… we are all suffering all the time.

According to Judaism and Islam and just about all the other religions (EXCEPT CHRISTIANITY) people suffer because they are being punished for sins, or because of Karma (which is really the same thing), or even sometimes because God might be saving them from something worse…

I cannot answer that question, but at the age of 13 I was still 100% sure that believing that someone died for your sins creates a situation where you are likely to continue sinning.

So I stopped going to church and just fucked around for years. Then I took LSD. It became blatantly obvious to me that there was a God, or at least something going on. So I began searching.

I studied Hermeticism, and saw that Christianity was really just a hodge podge of beliefs based on whatever was popular in the Roman empire. As if the President of United States looked on facebook at the most popular religious beliefs and created a new religion based on those. It was not based on any of the things Jesus said to do, because Jesus was not a Christian. It rejected several concepts that had been part of Judaism for thousands of years, and not based on what Jesus said but what Paul says.

So at around 26, I moved to Brooklyn. I would see the Orthodox Jews reading their books on the train and thought, well these people have been doing this every morning, for thousands of years! So I bought a book of Psalms and began reading it with the lunar calendar. I still do this everyday.

I looked into Judaism, my grandmother was Jewish, and the Orthodox community in Brooklyn is very vibrant and interesting but I found the religion very racist, not towards me… or any skin color, but in general there was this belief that God only loved us, and that we did not owe anything to others. For example the Torah says “do not lend on interest to your brother”

The word brother according to Orthodox Rabbis meant other Jews… so it is ok to lend on interest to non-Jews. I could not accept this hypocrisy. Also I was reading the Quran… a Quran I found in a Synagogue!

The Quran simply made more sense, and believe it or not, was much less violent than the Torah. People say the Quran is violent because they have not read the Bible in its entirety, or they argue that Jews do not take the Bible literally and Muslims take the Quran literally.

I think it says multitudes about a group of people and their book if they cannot take their own book seriously.

It became obvious to me that the Torah was not ONE book that Moses wrote after God gave it to him at Sinai. I began to do research and see that it was not until Maimonides that Jews even began to say or believe that the Torah was written by Moses based on what God gave him at Mt. Sinai. This is very interesting because Maimonides lived during the Arab Golden Age, meaning he most likely stole this idea from Muslims.

Prior to Maimonides, Jews thought exactly what most mainstream Jews and Christians believe today about the Bible… that it is made up of different books written by different people at different times who believed different things.

the Quran

I learned that there was only one version of the Quran. There are not disputes among Muslims like there are among Christians and Jews as to whose version is correct. There is no evidence like the Dead Sea Scrolls that basically proves the Torah inside our Synagouges today… IS NOT what Jews had 2000 years ago, and that prior to the first written Masoretic texts… the Torah was not a concrete text, but a fluid one that was always being written differently.

It also was interesting that the earliest Torah we have is from 2300 years ago but Moses lived over 3000 years ago.

The earliest Gospels were all written after Jesus left the earth, and all the canonical Gospels (the 4 in the Bible) were written in Greek. There are no Hebrew/Aramaic versions.

The Quran however… all the same. No alternate versions. When the Torah is uploaded into software designed to analyze text and tell us if there are more than one author (usually used to spot plagiarism in student papers)

The software shows us clearly what any 5th grade student would ask his religion teacher

If Moses wrote the Torah, why is it written from a third person’s perspective?

Why doesn’t Moses call himself “me”

Why does Moses say, “And then Moses went up to the top of the mountain and died and was buried there”

Why do we have to believe in stupid things?

So I sat down with a glass of wine and began to read the Quran in the order of revelation, starting with Surah 96 (AL-ALAQ), 68, 73, 74, 111, 1

I read maybe 40 Surahs that night. I felt almost as if I was Muhammad, alone in a cave wondering if this could really be.

Could God have actually have given humanity a book? in his own hand

And surely enough he had.

I got to a verse

77:46

EAT AND ENJOY YOURSELVES A LITTLE LONGER, FOR YOU ARE INDEED THE EVILDOERS

Well let me tell you. I was an alcoholic. I used to drink everyday for years. I had tried to quit for 2 years. I had gone to AA meetings and always ended up leaving thinking I had it under control. I would stick to just beer and find myself finishing bottles of Whiskey on a Wednesday night.

I knew what the Quran said about alcohol, and thinking about it now I probably was reluctant to accept the truth because I did not want to stop drinking, I did not want to believe that God had said I should stop drinking.

But there I was, 27, DRUNK, reading THAT verse.

I put the book down and it dawned upon me that I was now a Muslim.

In 2 weeks I was sober and I have not touched alcohol since. I didn't need anymore signs.

… But I got more signs!

Mathematical Structure in the Quran

Later I discovered some of the newly found details about mathematical structures in the Quran.

I will just put a link here, as this answer is probably longer than most people would like.

Basically. It became obvious to me that there is no way that Muhammad or any human being wrote this book.

It would be impossible for a man in the 7th century in Arabia of all places… to have written this book with all these details that nobody could have known.

It would be more likely to believe that Muhammad had a time machine, went to the future, studied Cryptography at MIT and then went back to Arabia and wrote the Quran secretly, then slowly revealed verses and kept the entire mathematical structure a secret, and told NO ONE. And nobody figured it out until 1973…

Sounds crazy because it is.

God wrote the Quran.

Quran is the holy grail. No doubt about it.

Becoming a Muslim was the best thing that ever happened to me. I pray that God will let me die a Muslim.

Brittney Citci a American Muslim who recently convert to Islam

My name is Banu, I am a 5th generation American and convert to Islam. I now live in Ankara, Turkey with my husband and cat. I enjoy reading, writing, video games, working out, Islam, and languages. I am a returning student for international relations, before I was a medic, nurse and volunteer firefighter.

I am working on my own website I hope is mostly done by the end of Ramadan. My website is dually in part about my life in Turkey as an expat, and various articles and help for native Muslims with their religious.

brittneycitci.com

My story converting to Islam

I am of this case. I was an atheist, from an atheistic family. The Quran had absolutely no influence on my conversion.

I was raised by a very strict atheistic family whom made sure I was well away from any religious upbringing. My parents had a personal spite with their family trying to Christianize them; so they worked very hard to ensure I never live what they did. Growing up I never knew much about Christianity, which people somehow are surprised seeing that most Americans know the minimal at the least.

I was 21 when I was studying Islam for fun just to disprove it. I hated all religions, except Western Buddhism (it seemed the least problematic). I was a nurse, it was through seeing illness and death that made me first think there is something more…watching life transform to death is something not easy to forget. My own health declined during my Islamic research, it came at a time when my health/life was at its peak. I had a heart condition, and my life fell apart.

Atheism wasn't answering the “Why is this happening to me?” My illness gave me a lot of time to think and I did a lot of self-reflection. I came to the conclusion that I am an overly selfish being, with an egotistical existence that does not benefit society, I was miserable and purposeless and afraid of death. I ran away from my life, and my illness until I accepted the fact that I am ill, and I might be wrong about life and why I exist. After recovery my life was empty, I started to read Hadith (specifically Bukhari).

Sahih Bukhari had a lot of amazing facts that I could not deny. Most of it incredible given the lack of knowledge in those lands, and in those years. I started to change my attitude that this Prophet (pbuh) miraculously knew things that would have been impossible to know. I still hated the idea of Allah swt. Over time I grew to respect this Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and agreed with nearly everything in the hadith. Yet I didn't want to be Muslim.

I tested Allah swt. I tried the “duaa” thing. When I got what I wanted I said it was just chance and circumstance. It took me months to somewhat believe in Allah swt. I converted to Islam 10+ times because I had major tawheed problems. I even made duaa to not be a Muslim. I fought within myself to stay an atheist, but my lifestyle changed. I somehow slowly adapted to an İslamic lifestyle even before I converted because of the hadith. I stopped going to parties, I started to dress more conservatively.

I decided to take an Islamic class on tawheed to clear up my confusion about God. It was then that I fully believed in Allah. It hit me like a lightning strike, I fell into a depression and wouldn't talk to people for months. Converting to Islam was not a happy event, it was terrifying to realize that my egotistical religion (atheism) was wrong, I was wrong. I was defeated, and I would have to rebuild myself from the nothingness. I was very pissed off about my conversion for years, it wasn't until about the 2nd year where I started to enjoy it. Allah swt chose me, before I chose Him.

I am approaching 6 years as a Muslim. They have been the most lonely and difficult in my life, yet they are the most fulfilling and I have not regretted it since.

Conclusion: I converted because I was compelled to be something greater than myself. Islam has a lot of logic I couldn’t deny and the religion answers all the questions I need to keep going as a human. I am no longer lost in the Atheistic debacle of existence.