I was shipped on the church bus every Sunday from the time I was four years old until I was fifteen, perhaps to gain a Christian upbringing, but mostly so my mom could sleep in and sleep with her man in our absence.
I recited Bible verses from memory (if not by heart), honed my quiz master skills on Bible lore, attended overnight prayer meetings, participated in youth group activities and picnics, recruited friends and young family members to attend church with me, carried around my hard-won white leather bible with the gilded page edges and Christ’s speech in blood red, led prayers, put in prayer requests for people I knew, acted in pageants, and even wore really cool shirts that espoused Christian beliefs in a pop culture parody way (like the “Eternity: Smoking or Non-Smoking?” one) to school so people could see that I was a Christian.
Albeit it, one who tormented her little sister and got into fistfights at school, but was a perfect angel every Sunday. I even almost believed them when the youth pastor told us that those who refused to eat certain foods such as pork or even meat for their beliefs were really in league with Satan because he was able to point out Bible passages that proved it. I signed a pledge to be a virgin until I was married and to tell my promiscuous friends that “I could be like one of them anytime, but they could never be a virgin like me again.”
Then a certain incident happened that I don’t like to talk about. My mother excused me from going to church again after it came out what was being taught there.
I floated around, never an atheist, but unreligious, and deriding God until I got rejected for an invitation to Homecoming by my friend Luay in the 11th grade. He told me he was flattered being asked out by me, but it was against his religion because he was a Muslim. We started chatting about religion, as he was a youth leader in the mosque and even did the call to prayer with his very beautiful voice (he demonstrated for one of our classes). Instead of being dejected about being turned down, I became interested and with a couple that were also friends with Luay, went to the mosque with him a few times. We all eventually converted to Islam. It just made more sense to me than many of the things I had been taught in my Christian upbringing.
And, scoff as some of you might, I found Muslims to be far more tolerant of other religions than Christians were. Luay’s mother took me in as one of her own daughters. She had one daughter-in-law who converted to Islam despite Raqib, Luay’s older brother, insisting it was unnecessary. I worked with Raqib when he was a security guard at the store where I spent my summers and he went on to become a police officer. Both brothers were absolutely hilarious and fun to be around.
I remember one day Brother Mike, the lead pastor of my former church’s youth group, bumped into me at the store where I worked a few months after my conversion to Islam. He asked me why didn’t I go to Sunday School anymore. I told him that I wasn’t a Christian anymore. “Oh?” he asked. “You can always come back, you know. We miss you. Jesus loves you.”
“I’m a Muslim now,” I informed him.
“Hmph. I’ll pray for your soul that you choose not to burn in hell for eternity,” he said disgustedly and walked away without another word.
I called, “Sala’am alaikum.” but I doubt he would have cared to hear such “pagan” words. I was saddened that he reacted so hatefully.
This was the same man who came to visit me in the hospital when I was diagnosed with cancer and got all of my youth group to sign a huge posterboard-sized “get well” card.
I lasted as a practicing Muslim, even wearing the head scarf to school, for about 4 years. Then I began to realize that I hate rituals and traditions. While I still refer to myself as Muslim in the pure sense of the word “one who submits to God”, I believe myself to be more of a numberian. I never found God inside a church or a mosque, but the more I learned about numbers and abstract math, the more I found perfection in the connections between numbers and nature, music, language, evolutionary trends, physics, and chemistry. I never strayed from believing in God, but I had finally found Him in the fact that everything in the universe is so well-structured that it is impossible for it to have all happened randomly.
Plus I have a weakness for bacon and ham which doesn’t mesh well for being Muslim. I have given up shellfish (and invertebrates in general) pretty much. And if someone asks me my religion, I still more closely associate myself with the four years of being a Muslim than the fifteen-plus years of being raised a Christian. But in my heart of hearts, I simply believe in God without all the pomp and circumstance that religion seems to require to disrupt one’s relationship with God.
