This article is based on an interview with Janine Cadd, born in Australia to a Christian Lebanese mother and Australian father.

My mother never spoke badly about other religions, and as a family we often attended ceremonies for relatives who followed other religions.

I was taught to be open-minded and never biased. My mother taught me to be spiritual and I followed Christian morals; it was a strict upbringing.

On my father’s side, however, there was the “Australian” touch; I was expected to integrate and “belong.”

The spirituality and religiousness of my mother was even more precious because my father was an alcoholic who gambled, and he was often violent. As a child, I quickly learned how to avoid abuse. I was the youngest, having two brothers and one sister.

I went to church every week and went to confession. I attended a convent primary school that was very strict. I believed in God, the Creator, and could see the wisdom in the Ten Commandments. I had more consciousness of God than of Jesus (peace be upon him). For me, Jesus was more like a prophet.

I had to memorize and learn things, but my real communication with God was when I prayed in my own words; just opening my heart to Him because I knew He understands. I loved the story of Jesus, but in my mind I didn’t equate him with divinity. I loved the stories of the prophets: Noah, Moses, and Jesus; especially the story of the birth of Jesus, whom I put into the category of “prophets.”

I felt safer at school than at home when my dad was drunk. It was difficult for my mother to leave him because she was a migrant. In her culture back in Lebanon, it was not usual to have a husband who drinks and gets drunk, and domestic violence was absolutely unacceptable in the Lebanese society.

However, this was a new country for her and she had only a few friends and weak language skills and she did not know her way around the society. It was usual that on pay day my father would gamble his salary, so my mother had to work and she carried on bringing us up in the best way she knew.

When I was 14, I decided I would not go to church anymore. I felt that I could not identify with the thinking of the people there. The sermons I continually heard were not directing me to morally higher ground.

At that time, my peers were listening to Bob Dylan and other such singers of the time, so it was “in” to be against the status quo, and as such I had outgrown going to church. I felt that the church was out of touch with reality; however, I never lost my faith in God, and I always wished to be good; to be better. I hated bullying, and I was known for sticking up for the downtrodden.

The first I learned about Islam was when I was 15 years old — in year 10 at high school. I met a girl who had just migrated from Lebanon. She was a Muslim. Nadia and I became friends. I could understand Arabic and her English wasn’t very bad, so we communicated well.

The Australian girls mostly ignored Nadia, but I liked her and found her to be nice and decent. I used to visit her house sometimes. Nadia and I spent year 10 together, and during that time she told me what Muslims believe in. At that time, I was just curious about her, and since her religion was part of her, I was interested in that too.

I came to know that Muslims believe in all the prophets. I was interested to learn that Jesus was considered to be a prophet and that made sense to me, and then I came to know that Muhammad (peace be upon him) was the last of the prophets. I had not heard about that before, but it seemed to be valid as far as I was concerned.

This information lay dormant in my mind for some years. I used to read a lot and often read books written by Khalil Gibran and what he wrote about the Prophet.

My Syrian Husband

When I was 20 years old, I met my future husband. I met him through Nadia’s brothers whose family owned a sweet shop. He used to buy pastries from this sweet shop, and I was there often visiting Nadia. He talked to me and noticed that I looked Lebanese.

I remember quoting to him the hadith that I had read in one of Khalil Gibran’s books, and he told me later that when he heard me say those words he had said to himself that he would marry me one day. Six months after that, he proposed to me.

At that time, he wasn’t practicing Islam. So when we got married, he used to drink occasionally. We were both social drinkers. He would sometimes go to the Friday Prayer, and he never missed fasting in Ramadan. He would talk to me about Islam, and it was obvious to me that he wanted to structure his life around Islamic morals.

We both started to shut down relations with people who did not want to segregate, and this was the beginning of us starting to practice Islam. We got married in Syria (where he came from) and stayed there for a few months. At that time, I wasn’t yet Muslim. I believed in the Two Testimonies of Faith and used to copy the actions of prayer in the mosque, but no one taught me anything about Islam.

Most of my husband’s family did not pray, but everyone said “bismillah” before eating, but even Christian Arabs said that. My husband had been brought up to be a “Muslim,” but with a superficial understanding of Islam, and so he became a nominal Muslim and was really lacking in knowledge.

After this trip to Syria, my husband and I moved to Sydney, Australia, to a suburb called Lakemba. There are a lot of Muslims there, especially Lebanese. I worked as a bilingual teacher’s assistant in a center for migrant children. While I was working there, one of the mothers took me under her wing.

She was a practicing Muslim, and I was wearing long sleeves, a long top, and a small scarf. She taught me how to pray and asked me if I was a Muslim. I replied, “I think so.” She was also from Syria. She asked me why my husband did not teach me to pray, but without waiting for the answer, she invited both him and myself to visit her and her husband. 

When I got home that night and told my husband that she would teach me to pray, he started to cry from happiness. He called my friend’s husband immediately. The more I learned about Islam, the more he started to practice it. We never looked back.

We often traveled back to Syria, and every visit I would learn new things, and on one particular trip I taught his sisters how to pray.

(Eight years ago Janine’s husband died and left her with seven children).