I returned to college that fall disappointed that I had not found the answers I was hoping for in Europe, but with a passion for a language I had only just learned about - Arabic. Ironically, I had stared right at the answers I was searching for, on the walls of the Alhambra.
It was amazing to see such a mosque built in Ireland considering that it’s the largest Islamic center in Europe.
Islam was needed to bring "the people of the Book" back to the original doctrine of God and away from the pagan contaminated ideologies of multiple gods in one or multiple-gods period.
I spent six months traveling around the Middle East and it was there that I started to read into Islam. I spoke to many people about Islam while I was traveling and it was so hard to change from my identity as a spiritual human rights person to a Muslim. This was the hardest thing.
One of the reasons why I was able to convert to Islam was because my whole life I’ve been searching for a relationship with God, our creator Allah. I really never found that in Christianity because Christianity is more focused around who Jesus was and rarely do they talk about our creator God.
As the emptiness grew, the parties became dull, I got stuck with a sexy image and the hipster friends did not bring out the best in me, to say the least. I began to hate who I was becoming in those short months and I was back to feeling lost, hopeless and confused about the world.
Not too long ago, I met a brother who came up to me. He wanted to accept Islam and take the Shahadah. It was in Midwest somewhere in Ohio. He told me that he’s a bartender his whole life. I don’t know how he found one of my videos or something in YouTube and he started watching a bunch of them.
In submitting to God through Islam, I am simply saying "I want my whole life to reflect His will. I want to worship Him with my whole being 24 hours a day. I want to show the world, that saying I am worshipping God, isn’t about having a belief that someone else has paid the penalty for my sin...
How else can one explain the increase in conversions with the increase of anti-Islam rhetoric? How else can one explain that more non-Muslim preachers have been converting to Islam than ever before?
I hated Muslims, I thought all Muslims should die, and anyone who even resembled Muslims, in my mind, that they shouldn't exist, they should go back to their countries... the common American idea of what Islam is, but that was my own ignorance and following the media.
If I had to identify one single event as the starting point for my journey to Islam, it would have to be the tragic events of 9/11. After months of seeing very unflattering media coverage about Islam and Muslims, it occurred to me that the negative portrait...
Converting to Islam made me feel different. It made me feel absolutely peaceful. Converting to Islam gave me that peace and security and the balance that I needed in my life...
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