Before I start: I'm warning everyone, this is going to be long. Very long. Please bear with me and I sincerely apologize if you get bored.
I want to share my journey with all of you, because I feel like I should tell people about this.
I grew up in a semi-traditional Sunni household. My mom was a convert; my dad was born into a Muslim family. I lived in a melting-pot city with a mix of people from different races, especially Asians. Somehow, everyone automatically knew I was Muslim when they saw me. It wasn't because of my name; I'm certain of that. It probably had something to do with my Syrian or Arabian appearance. Either way, when I was a little kid I was blissfully unaware of all the negative things people had to say about Islam, because they avoided saying those things around me. I didn't know what 9/11 was until I turned 9, and even then I didn't know that radical "Muslims" had initiated it.
Ever since I was a child, I liked asking questions that my parents couldn't answer. Once I asked my mom at the age of five or six, "Can God find a difference between two pictures in which there is no difference?"
"That doesn't make any sense," my mom told me. She went around for the rest of the day looking slightly confused.
My parents were pretty lenient. They liked music, although they admitted that there were hadiths forbidding it. I played piano, sang, and took art classes. This mortified some of my Muslim friends, of which I had a lot. One girl, Samra, would tell me music was haram every time she came to my house and saw the piano in the guestroom. She started wearing hijab at the age of 12, which was a pity because she had the most beautiful reddish hair. She insinuated that I should do the same (wear hijab) unless I wanted to go to hell.
Around this time I stopped going to Sunday school. I didn't like praying because I didn't understand why I should do it, and I would lie to get out of it. I was an academically gifted child (perhaps too gifted) who believed that schoolwork was more important than kindness and charity. My parents decided that something must be done.
They made me take online Quran classes with a sheikh who seemed nice at first. He encouraged me to ask questions, but every time I asked anything, he either pretended not to understand me or else actually didn't understand me. I'd been taught dogmatically that people should only recite the Quran in Arabic and that doing so in English is rather pointless. Even so, I demanded translation classes instead. My dad conceded. I started learning an incredibly misogynistic, violently inclined, insanely inaccurate translation of the Quran, and I was horrified. I was old enough by then to understand that the doctrines being introduced in this translation were just plain wrong. I started doing my own research.
After a long time (like several weeks/months) of doing a little research a day, I came across Joseph's website. My dad had always been a fan of his and I became interested after I realized that this Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam guy was the same one my little sisters listened to in the car. I read a lot of articles, figured out a lot of life-changing stuff, and finally realized that other people needed to know about this.
It was around this time that ISIS started getting on the news, every single day. It drove me berserk. My teacher singled me out, asking how I and the other Muslims in the class felt about these crazy extremists. I said they were lunatics because I couldn't find any other words to describe them. My Honors History teacher demonstrated how lucky we were to live in America by telling us about the horrors of Sharia law. He showed us videos of terrorists on CNN News, holding up guns in one hand and glittery copies of the Quran in the other.
I started feeling kind of hopeless, like no matter what the Obama Administration did or how many drone attacks they launched, the lunatic terrorists would still be out there killing people. I began reading the Quran more, especially Surahs Mary and Imran for some reason. The Quran says Allah grants respite to disbelievers for a while, then He destroys them. (Can't cite exact verse right now.) I'm still wondering when the respite of these disbelievers is going to end, and I'm still wondering what exactly they are--hypocrites, mentally ill wackos, or what?!
Anyway, one of my mom's friends was very scared at this time because her relatives, who live in Iraq, were under ISIS rule and there's a lot of warfare and insanity going on there right now. She called my mom a few times, crying about it, because her family wasn't faring too well from what I could tell. This led me to ask questions about why God would allow such horrible things to happen to people. Joseph had articles for that, too.
What I've taken from this is that the Quran actually has answers for everyone's questions, whether directly or indirectly. One day I was wondering if God would allow women to be astronauts (don't ask; it's another long story), and I came across this verse:
Yusuf Ali: O ye assembly of Jinns and men! If it be ye can pass beyond the zones of the heavens and the earth, pass ye! not without authority shall ye be able to pass! -55.33
It's like the answer to my question was handed to me on a golden platter, wrapped up in fancy Christmas paper with a big red bow on top. Explicit permission for NASA granted.
I'm still concerned about a few things. Even the Quran-centric community is divided into the 19-code-obsessed people and the people who just follow the Quran, alleged miraculous code or not. They differ over ridiculously tiny issues. How are we going to fix this, and how can we enlighten more people?
Also, why doesn't God make the community of His sincere believers bigger? He says He could've made everyone believe if He'd wanted to, but He decided not to for whatever reason. Still, He says His sincere believers will be given dominance. I want to see that happen in my lifetime.
Hugs and apologies for an overly long story
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