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❝ I Didn’t Love My Life Until I Became a Muslim ❝ American Girl Finds the Meaning of her Life in Islam I didn’t come from a very religious family. I mean they say they are religious but they are not really what you would call a religious family. They are Christian Baptists, but we were the type of family that don’t go to church regularly. My parents were divorced when I was 10. So we lived with my dad after that until I was 17. My father was very very abusive to me and my younger brother. He wasn’t so much abusive to my little sister, but he was really abusive to me so much I think because I reminded him a lot of my mother. When I was 16 actually I moved in with my grandparents. I led a pretty self-destructive lifestyle. I hated myself and everything around me. It was just like I wanted to do anything I could do to hurt myself. I just did this like it was fun, and as something I wanted to do. I’ve tried drugs, alcohol and sex and nothing ever really fulfilled me emotionally. I went back to live with my mother when I was 17, and I thought maybe it was like a different thing; a new beginning. But still I led the same pattern, and maybe it even got worse. I met my daughter’s father when I was in my senior high school. He was really funny and sweat, so I thought that was a good path for me. And we dated for a couple of years, and I ended up getting pregnant. At first, it wasn’t as bad. I wasn’t fulfilled and we didn’t have the best of things but it wasn’t bad. We had somebody for each other at least, and I was just satisfied with what I had. I didn’t ask for too much. I didn’t expect too much, as I was certainly better than what I had before. After my daughter was born, that’s when my friend, her father, got really heavy into drugs. It was not just drugs like Marijuana but I’m talking about hard stuff like Cocaine. I can’t say I didn’t do it, I thought it’s OK, I’ll do it too. After like three months, we came to the point where we lost everything. So I quit that and thought he had to quit too but he didn’t. I left him a few times trying to give him a chance after a chance because I loved him and I cared for him, and when you love and care for someone you forgive him, and a lot of people make mistakes and they are forgiven. I thought maybe he could change. Maybe I could change. I did everything. My daughter was actually diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome. It’s a syndrome that starts at your feet, and moves up your body and makes sure muscles are really weak, where your immune system attacks your central nervous system, and it causes your muscles to get really weak and moves up to different parts of your body. It happens to kids or adults. It can happen to anybody. My daughter can move her arms, but some kids get damaged layers, but thank God she didn’t get that bad. She is getting better. I met Hayat and some Muslims at the hospital, and started to ask them a lot of questions about religion and things like that. First, I think a lot of people are misinformed about Islam. I think a lot of people think that it’s like the Hindu religion because this is what I thought. I thought it’s just something predominantly like the Middle East type of things. I didn’t really know about Islam. When they started to tell me that a lot of Islam had to deal with the same background, because I’ve always known that there’s one God I’ve never questioned that, but I was brought up as Jesus died on a cross and that he was the son of God. But it was then like the question was why did Jesus have to die on a cross for our sins, why can't God could forgive us anyway? I mean why does that have to happen? Because God is all powerful and He could do anything, why did He have to get somebody die on a cross for our sins. Then there was the fact that the bible has been translated so many times and there were so many different versions of the bible. I can’t even count how many different churches I’ve been to. They were basically Christian churches but they all have something different and everybody can give you a different answer. I mean you can ask anybody, and they can say my bible says this or this but if it’s a different bible, so which one is the right kind and that was always confusing for me. But then when I looked at Islam, I found that there’s one Quran. Everybody knows what it says. It’s translated in the English but you can read the Arabic. It’s not something that you can’t learn or you can’t read yourself. It’s not very difficult to understand. It’s fairly easy to understand. It’s not like five different things that can come out of it. It’s pretty self-explained and that’s what attracted me. Interviewer: I want to know what really hit you and made you say “This is the right time to take Islam as my religion”. How did that happen with you? Sister Alicia: First, I knew in what direction I was heading, but I was really scared because when you grow up your whole life being told that it’s blasphemous to say that Jesus is not the son of God; that’s blasphemy. And in the religion I grew up in, that’s the unforgivable sin. And if you commit that unforgivable sin then you will go to Hell. What made me get over that fear and pass that to where I could allow myself to embrace Islam, was when I was talking to Hana, Hayat’s mother, and she showed me a lot of passages and I had prayed every night before I go to bed: “Oh God please give me a sign, some kind of a clear sign to know that’s the way I’m supposed to go.” And she read a passage of Quran to me and I can’t read Arabic, so I read the English part and the last words, I don’t remember which chapter it was, but it was about Jesus saying I’m not God and never said I was, and then in the last sentence it said “To all who are looking for a sign, this is a sign within itself”. This is a sign for you. If this is what you are looking for, this is your sign. To me that was like an overwhelming feeling came over me and I just started to cry because I just felt like this is my sign. This is exactly what I was looking for, and God gave this to me. And I actually embraced this because this is something special, because you don’t get a sign from God everyday. That made me really happy and then felt love and support because nobody before was so happy for me, and I never had that before. I feel really good. I feel like a big weight has been lifted off of me. I feel like I can breathe easier than ever before. I don’t have to worry about anything anymore. I’m re-born and I’m free of everything. All the sins that I have committed and all the things that happened in my life don’t matter any more. |
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