My story in islam

I was born and raised in a typical middle-class Lebanese

Catholic family in Beirut, Lebanon. Two years into the
war I was forced to leave, and completed high school in
England. Then I went to Columbia College in New York.
After my BA I went back to Lebanon and taught at my
old school. Two years later I left Lebanon again, this
time of my own free will, although it was a more
wrenching separation than the first. I left behind my
war-torn country and made for my new land of
opportunities. I was demoralized, and spiritually at a
complete impass. With my uncle's support I went back
to graduate studies at Columbia. This is the brief story
of my conversion to Islam while there.

While in Lebanon I had come to realize that I was a

nominal Christian who did not really live according to
what he knew were the norms of his faith. I decided than
whenever the chance came I would try my best to live
according to my idea of Christian standards for one
year, no matter the cost. I took this challenge while at
Columbia. A graduate student's life is blessed with the
leisure necessary for spiritual and intellectual
exploration. In the process I read and meditated
abundantly, and I prayed earnestly for dear guidance.
My time was shared literally between the church and the
library, and I gradually got rid of all that stood in the
way of my experiment, especially social attachments or
activities that threatened to steal my time and
 concentration. I only left campus to visit my mother
every now and then.

Certain meetings and experiences had set me on the

road of inquiry about Islam. During a scholarship year
spent in Paris I had bought a complete set of tapes of the
holy Qur'an. Back in New York I listened to its
recitation for the first time, as I read simultaneously the
translation, drinking in its awesome beauty. I paid
particular attention to the passages that concerned
Christians. I felt an inviting familiarity to it because
undoubtedly the One I addressed in my prayers was the
same One that spoke this speech, even as I squirmed at
some of the "verses of threat". After some time I knew
that this was my path, since I had become convinced of
the heavenly origin of the Qur'an.

I was reading many books at the same time. Two of them

were Martin Lings' "Life of Muhammad" and
Fariduddin Attar's "Book of Secrets" (Persian "Asrar-
Nama", in French translation). I found extremely
inspiring Lings' account of Shaykh Ahmad `Alawi's life
in his book "A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century." I
did not finish the latter before I became a Muslim; but I
am jumping ahead. At any rate, it now seemed my
previous experience of religion had been like learning
the alphabet in comparison, even my early morning and
late night Bible readings and my past studies in the
original Latin of Saint Augustine, who had once towered
in my life as a spiritual giant.
 I began to long almost physically for a kind of prayer
closer to the Islamic way, which to me held promises of
great spiritual fulfillment, although I had grown
completely dependent on certain spiritual habits --
particularly communion and prayer -- and could hardly
do without them. And yet I had unmistakable signs
pointing me in a further direction. One of them I
considered almost a slap in the face in its frankness:
when I told my local priest about the attraction I felt
towards Islam he responded as he should, but then
closed his talk with the words: allahu akbar. "Allahu
akbar"? An Italian-American priest?!

I went to two New York mosques but the imams there

wanted to talk about the Bible or about the Middle East
conflict, I suppose to make polite conversation with me. I
realized they did not necessarily see what drove me to
them and yet I did not find an avenue where I would
pluck up the courage to declare my intention. Then I
would go home and tell myself: Another day has passed,
and you are still not Muslim. Finally I went to the
Muslim student group at Columbia and announced my
intention, and declared the two shahada: The Arabic
formula that consists in saying "I bear witness that there
is no god but Allah" -- the Arabic name for God -- "and
I bear witness that Muhammad is His Prophet." They
taught me ablution and salat (prayer), and I gained a
dear friend among them. Those days are marked in my
life with letters of light.

Another close friend of mine played a role in this

conversion. This devout American Christian friend had
entered Islam years before me. At the time I felt in my
silly pride that it was wrong for an American to enter
into the religion of the Arabs and for me, an Arab, to
stand like a mule in complete ignorance of it. It had a
great effect on me from both sides: the cultural one and
the spiritual, because he was -- is -- an honest and
upright person whose major move meant a great deal to
me.

I had also come to realize that my early education in

Lebanon had carefully ****tered me from Islam, even
though I lived in a mixed neighborhood in the middle of
Beirut. I went to my father's and grandfather's Jesuit
school. The following incident is proof that there is no
turning away of Allah's gift when He decides to give it.
One year, when I was 12, a strange religious education
teacher gave us as an assignment the task of learning the
Fatiha -- the first chapter of the Qur'an -- by heart. I
went home and did, and it stayed with me all my life.
After parents complained he was fired -- "we do not
send our children to a Christian school in order for them
to learn the religion of Muslims" -- but the seed had
been sown, right there in the staunch Christian
heartland, inside its prize school. Now here I was in the
United States, knocking at the door of the religion of the
Prophet, peace be upon him!

Days after I took shahada I met my teacher and the light

on my path, Shaykh Hisham Kabbani of Tripoli, after
which I met his own teacher, Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani
 of Cyprus. May Allah bless and grant them long life.
Through them, after some years, my mother also took
shahada and I hope and pray every day that my two
brothers and stepfather will soon follow in Allah's
immense generosity. Allah's blessings and peace on the
Prophet, his Family, his Companions, and all Prophets.