The Story of My Conversion and my Near Baptism The story of my conversion is not the most fascinating. However, one aspect is of interest: the affect that the Quran had on me. My family moved to California from Spain. Thus, we were nominally Catholic. I had very little exposure to any religion until a friend of mine in school invited me to their church. I started attending and this was the first time that I began to read the Bible. I was definitely taking everything very seriously. There then came the time to be baptized. I had no problem with it except that I decided that, since this was the first religion I was exposed to, I should just look around at other religions to make sure that I was certain about what I was doing. I did not think this would actually affect my final decision while, in reality, that near baptism led me to becoming a Muslim. I started studying about all religions I could find. This, obviously, is what led me to the Quran.
My First Parameter: If it is God’s Religion I am Looking for, the Sacred Scripture Must be From God In my study of other religions, one of my goals was to read each religion’s sacred scriptures directly, in order to understand directly from the source what the religion was all about. This is obviously what piqued my curiosity in the Quran. I already had a strong belief in God and was convinced of the existence of a Supreme Being. In fact, for a while, I was sometimes a Christian and sometimes simply a deist, following in the footsteps of Voltaire and many of the “founding fathers” of the United States. Already believing in God, therefore, my first parameter for a true religion was that the religion must have God as its original source. No one can know the details about God except God. He is above and beyond the realm of human experience. More importantly, no one knows how He should be worshipped except Him. No one knows what way of life is pleasing to Him except Him. Although humans are able to come to many sound conclusions about God, no human could logically claim that he has somehow—independent of revelation from God—discovered the way in which God should be worshipped and the way that is pleasing to God. Thus, if the ultimate goal in one’s heart is to truly please and worship God as He should be worshipped, then one has no alternative but to turn to Him for guidance and direction. Based on this first premise, any man-made religion is not a logical alternative. No matter how hard humans may try, they cannot authoritatively speak about how God is supposed to be worshipped. It is important to note that this parameter does not mean that one time God played a role in the formation of a specific religion. No, this parameter means that the entire scope of the teachings come from God. There are some religions that may have originated from God but, afterwards, their adherents felt free to rely upon human reasoning to adjust, modify or alter the religion. In the process, they actually created a new religion, different from that which God had revealed. This, once again, completely defeats the purpose. What God revealed does not need any improvement or change from humankind. Any such change or alteration means a deviation away from what God revealed. Thus, any change or alteration will only take humankind away from the true and proper way of worshipping God. Furthermore, God is more than capable of revealing a perfect revelation for any time or circumstance. If there were any need to alter or change any of God’s laws, the authority for that also rests only with God. In other words, God is free to change some of His laws due to His wisdom and knowledge, for example, out of mercy or as a form of punishment upon His servants. He may do this by sending a new revelation or even by sending a new prophet. With that, there is no logical problem. But there is a grave problem when humans take it upon themselves to “fix” God’s revelation. Thus, the first parameter states that the religion originates with God. However, this is not sufficient. The second parameter is that the teachings from God must be preserved in their original form. The logic behind this point should be obvious. If the original revelation came from God but was then later tampered and distorted by humans, one now has a mixture of God’s religion and human interpolation. This is no longer God’s pure religion. Although this may seem like an obvious premise, it is amazing to see many people who have not even considered this point, blindly following scriptures or teachings that cannot be historically authenticated.
The First Miraculous Aspect of the Quran: Its Detailed Preservation In fact, this is one of the first things that impressed me concerning the Quran. Even those who were clearly anti-Islam in their writings, such as Sir William Muir, would admit that the Quran that we have today was preserved since the time of the Prophet, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him.[1] In fact, even those who tried to be most critical and cast doubt upon the complete authenticity of the Quran, such as Jeffery, impressed me even further as to the amount of information that we have concerning the history of this text. To fully appreciate this point, one must put it into the context of my Christian background. Incidentally, this paper is in no way meant to be a critique of Christianity. However, it is the background from which I came and it was the litmus test by which I examined other religions. Therefore, I did a lot of cross comparisons between Christianity and other religions, including Islam. Hence, I have no choice but to refer to Christianity during the course of this paper as this is a paper about my experience.
“And We have indeed made the Quran easy to understand and remember…” (Quran 54:17) To this day, millions of Muslims have the Quran memorized. If Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 were to be a reality today and all the books were to be burned to ashes, the Quran would still survive. Muslims would be able to rewrite the entire Quran from memory. Soon after the death of the Prophet, the Quran was all compiled together and shortly afterwards official copies were sent to the distant lands to ensure that the text was pure. To this day, one can travel to any part of the world and pick up a copy Quran and find that it is the same throughout the world.[3] Even the language of the Quran, which is essential to keeping a true understanding of the text, has been preserved.[4] Such cannot be said for earlier prophets such as Moses and Jesus, whose Hebrew and Aramaic no longer exist. As noted earlier, the greatest care was taken to make sure that anything that did not belong to the revelation directly from God—even the Prophet’s own statements—were kept completely out of the Quran. The Quran was nothing but the words that the Prophet received as revelation and informed his followers that they formed part of the Quran. Hence, the Quran is completely different from the Bible, which includes stories about the prophets, comments on their lives and teachings, letters and writings by non-prophets and so forth. No such human interpolations and additions can be found in the Quran whatsoever. Thus, the Quran originally impressed me in two ways: First, it clearly proclaimed itself to be the word of God and was not interlaced with words from humans. Second, it was minutely preserved from the time of its revelation. These two points meant that the Quran met my logical parameters for religion and revelation. I was therefore ready to move on to further study and analyze its teachings. By the way, someone may rightfully ask as to why it is that God allowed his earlier revelations to be distorted and not preserved. One can actually think of a lot of important reasons behind this. First, as is clear in their own scriptures, the earlier prophets, such as Moses and Jesus, were not sent for all of mankind. Their messages were clearly for the Tribe of Israel and for their particular times. Actually, God teaches us that all peoples had messengers who were sent to them and whose purposes were limited. The Prophet Muhammad, and therefore his revelation, is meant for all of humankind from his time until the Day of Judgment. Secondly, if their revelations were preserved, their followers could use that as a reason for continuing to follow their prophets and refusing to follow the Prophet Muhammad. Since it is very clear via many means, such as historical evidence, contradictory statements within the text and so on, that their scriptures have not been preserved in detail and that they cannot claim to be following what is purely God’s religion—not mixed with human interpolation—they have no valid excuse not to abandon their non-preserved revelation for the true, complete and exact revelation from God found in the Quran.
No Leap of Faith Coming from a Christian background, I experienced what many experienced concerning matters of belief and how to understand them. It was virtually impossible to get straight answers concerning the very basics of Christian beliefs from the pastors and priests. The reality is that the concepts of belief were meant to be a “mystery” and belief in what one cannot truly understand is what proved a person’s faith. That approach simply did not sit well with me and I found it, and still find it, illogical. It does not seem that the truth as revealed by the Merciful and Wise God, who has given so many marvelous signs in the creation, should lead one to have to say, as the 2nd-century North African Church Father Tertullian is well known for saying: credo quia absurdum est, “I believe because it is absurd.” Religion should not be simply “faith-based”—a leap of faith, as such. Actually, it should be first as well “knowledge-based,” so that both the heart and the mind find solace in it and submit to it with a firm resolution. And this is what I found in Islam. You should recall that the Prophet Muhammad, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him, first encountered a people who were indulged in idol worship. Furthermore, they, in general, did not believe in the Hereafter. Some of them, it seems, did not have a clear perception of the Supreme Being. It was in this environment that the Quran was revealed. The Quran did not simply give them a command to believe. No, indeed! The Quran gave them proof after proof, lesson after lesson, sign after sign that should make anyone believe that there is a Creator and that the Creator created humans and all of this wonderful working of the Universe with a purpose, as He is not a foolish or ignorant Creator. Hence, the Quran is filled with passages demanding that humans think. In essence the message was this: Allah knows that if humans do use their mental capabilities properly, they will come to recognize the truth of what Allah is saying in the Quran. In fact, Islam teaches that the recognition of such facts is innate within the souls of humans. The fact is that one’s belief in Allah, the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad is not based on mere emotion or a blind leap of faith. It is based on real reasons and evidence. Coming from my background, this boldness in propagating the belief and challenging humans to think and ponder was nothing short of miraculous.
Stealing from the Christians and Jews One concept that many of the non-Muslim writers were claiming was that the Prophet Muhammad simply stole most of his teachings from the Jews and Christians. Take, for example, the title of Bell’s book, The Origin of Islam in its Christian Environment—which, by the way, if you tell any Arab that Islam developed in a Christian environment, it would be a real shock to them! I recognized that there were two possibilities: (1) the Prophet Muhammad did steal his material or (2) the revelation he received was from the same God who sent Moses, Jesus and the earlier prophets, as the Prophet Muhammad himself claimed. If it were the latter, it would explain why there would be much overlap in the teachings and message. The same God sent the earlier prophets and is simply recounting their stories again in the new revelation. However, I immediately started to notice some glaring differences between the Quran and the Bible, even with respect to the teachings about God. If the Prophet Muhammad was “editing” what he was hearing from the Bible—and by the way, at that time, there was no Bible available in Arabic—then he was doing an excellent job. I found that the strange teachings about God that one finds throughout the Bible are completely and unequivocally missing from the Quran. For the sake of brevity, only a few examples illustrating this point shall be given. The New International Version of Genesis 3:8-11, reads, 8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?” 10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” 11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” Here, God is pictured as walking in the garden in the cool of the day. What is even more astonishing is that Adam and Eve were able to hide from God and he had to ask, “Where are you?” If a human is able to hide from Him in the garden, how is it that this Lord is going to have knowledge of the sins that people commit? It would be difficult for any human to gender in his heart the kind of love and fear of God that he should have when he believes that his God is so faulty and weak that an event like this could occur to him. In Genesis 32:24-28,[1] there is the story and literal description of Jacob wrestling with and defeating God. In verse 28, it says, “You [Jacob] have wrestled with God and with men, and you have won.” In other words, the creator of the universe whom mankind is expected to worship and submit to was defeated by a mere mortal in a wrestling match. The Old Testament even pictures God as one who intended to do evil but then repented. Exodus 32:14 states, “And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people” (King James Version). It would not be surprising for anyone to turn away from God and not consider Him worthy of worship if He himself has to repent from His own evil.[2]
My First Parameter: If it is God’s Religion I am Looking for, the Sacred Scripture Must be From God In my study of other religions, one of my goals was to read each religion’s sacred scriptures directly, in order to understand directly from the source what the religion was all about. This is obviously what piqued my curiosity in the Quran. I already had a strong belief in God and was convinced of the existence of a Supreme Being. In fact, for a while, I was sometimes a Christian and sometimes simply a deist, following in the footsteps of Voltaire and many of the “founding fathers” of the United States. Already believing in God, therefore, my first parameter for a true religion was that the religion must have God as its original source. No one can know the details about God except God. He is above and beyond the realm of human experience. More importantly, no one knows how He should be worshipped except Him. No one knows what way of life is pleasing to Him except Him. Although humans are able to come to many sound conclusions about God, no human could logically claim that he has somehow—independent of revelation from God—discovered the way in which God should be worshipped and the way that is pleasing to God. Thus, if the ultimate goal in one’s heart is to truly please and worship God as He should be worshipped, then one has no alternative but to turn to Him for guidance and direction. Based on this first premise, any man-made religion is not a logical alternative. No matter how hard humans may try, they cannot authoritatively speak about how God is supposed to be worshipped. It is important to note that this parameter does not mean that one time God played a role in the formation of a specific religion. No, this parameter means that the entire scope of the teachings come from God. There are some religions that may have originated from God but, afterwards, their adherents felt free to rely upon human reasoning to adjust, modify or alter the religion. In the process, they actually created a new religion, different from that which God had revealed. This, once again, completely defeats the purpose. What God revealed does not need any improvement or change from humankind. Any such change or alteration means a deviation away from what God revealed. Thus, any change or alteration will only take humankind away from the true and proper way of worshipping God. Furthermore, God is more than capable of revealing a perfect revelation for any time or circumstance. If there were any need to alter or change any of God’s laws, the authority for that also rests only with God. In other words, God is free to change some of His laws due to His wisdom and knowledge, for example, out of mercy or as a form of punishment upon His servants. He may do this by sending a new revelation or even by sending a new prophet. With that, there is no logical problem. But there is a grave problem when humans take it upon themselves to “fix” God’s revelation. Thus, the first parameter states that the religion originates with God. However, this is not sufficient. The second parameter is that the teachings from God must be preserved in their original form. The logic behind this point should be obvious. If the original revelation came from God but was then later tampered and distorted by humans, one now has a mixture of God’s religion and human interpolation. This is no longer God’s pure religion. Although this may seem like an obvious premise, it is amazing to see many people who have not even considered this point, blindly following scriptures or teachings that cannot be historically authenticated.
The First Miraculous Aspect of the Quran: Its Detailed Preservation In fact, this is one of the first things that impressed me concerning the Quran. Even those who were clearly anti-Islam in their writings, such as Sir William Muir, would admit that the Quran that we have today was preserved since the time of the Prophet, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him.[1] In fact, even those who tried to be most critical and cast doubt upon the complete authenticity of the Quran, such as Jeffery, impressed me even further as to the amount of information that we have concerning the history of this text. To fully appreciate this point, one must put it into the context of my Christian background. Incidentally, this paper is in no way meant to be a critique of Christianity. However, it is the background from which I came and it was the litmus test by which I examined other religions. Therefore, I did a lot of cross comparisons between Christianity and other religions, including Islam. Hence, I have no choice but to refer to Christianity during the course of this paper as this is a paper about my experience.
The Quran’s Promise that it Shall be Preserved In any case, it caught my eye that the Quran says about itself: “We have revealed the reminder and We shall preserve it.” (Quran 15:9) This was interesting to me because within the Quran there is a clear reference as to how the previous peoples fail to preserve completely the message that they received.[2] Hence, in the light of what the Quran was saying about previous revelations, this was a very bold statement. And, incidentally, it can be considered one of the prophecies of the Quran- coming from a Judeo-Christian perspective, prophecies were somewhat important to me. If they did not come to pass, they would be very damaging in my eyes while if they did come to pass, I would consider that a very good sign. Once again, the history of Islam presents a different scenario than that of the earlier revelations. The Prophet Muhammad, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him, lived just over 1400 years ago. He is definitely the most “historical” of the various prophets. Thus, the history of the Quran is known and documented. The Quran was preserved with meticulous care. The Quran describes itself as both a “reading” (Quran) and a book (kitaab). In fact, it was via both of these means that the Quran was meticulously preserved. During the life of the Prophet, the Prophet had specific scribes whose job was to record the revelation when the he received it. The Quran was not revealed all at once. It was revealed and recorded over a period of twenty-three years. During that time, revelation could come to the Prophet at any time. When it did, it would be recognized by physical signs on the Prophet (a point that led some to claim that he was simply epileptic). He would then call for his scribes and tell them what had been revealed and exactly where the new passage fits vis-à-vis what had already been revealed by God. The Quran, which is not a large book, was also preserved in memory as well as written form from the time of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Many of the Companions of the Prophet had memorized the entire Quran and, fearing what had happened to earlier religious communities, they took the necessary steps to protect it from any form of adulteration. The Quran continues to be memorized today—another amazing aspect of the Quran. In fact, God says about the Quran:
“And We have indeed made the Quran easy to understand and remember…” (Quran 54:17) To this day, millions of Muslims have the Quran memorized. If Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 were to be a reality today and all the books were to be burned to ashes, the Quran would still survive. Muslims would be able to rewrite the entire Quran from memory. Soon after the death of the Prophet, the Quran was all compiled together and shortly afterwards official copies were sent to the distant lands to ensure that the text was pure. To this day, one can travel to any part of the world and pick up a copy Quran and find that it is the same throughout the world.[3] Even the language of the Quran, which is essential to keeping a true understanding of the text, has been preserved.[4] Such cannot be said for earlier prophets such as Moses and Jesus, whose Hebrew and Aramaic no longer exist. As noted earlier, the greatest care was taken to make sure that anything that did not belong to the revelation directly from God—even the Prophet’s own statements—were kept completely out of the Quran. The Quran was nothing but the words that the Prophet received as revelation and informed his followers that they formed part of the Quran. Hence, the Quran is completely different from the Bible, which includes stories about the prophets, comments on their lives and teachings, letters and writings by non-prophets and so forth. No such human interpolations and additions can be found in the Quran whatsoever. Thus, the Quran originally impressed me in two ways: First, it clearly proclaimed itself to be the word of God and was not interlaced with words from humans. Second, it was minutely preserved from the time of its revelation. These two points meant that the Quran met my logical parameters for religion and revelation. I was therefore ready to move on to further study and analyze its teachings. By the way, someone may rightfully ask as to why it is that God allowed his earlier revelations to be distorted and not preserved. One can actually think of a lot of important reasons behind this. First, as is clear in their own scriptures, the earlier prophets, such as Moses and Jesus, were not sent for all of mankind. Their messages were clearly for the Tribe of Israel and for their particular times. Actually, God teaches us that all peoples had messengers who were sent to them and whose purposes were limited. The Prophet Muhammad, and therefore his revelation, is meant for all of humankind from his time until the Day of Judgment. Secondly, if their revelations were preserved, their followers could use that as a reason for continuing to follow their prophets and refusing to follow the Prophet Muhammad. Since it is very clear via many means, such as historical evidence, contradictory statements within the text and so on, that their scriptures have not been preserved in detail and that they cannot claim to be following what is purely God’s religion—not mixed with human interpolation—they have no valid excuse not to abandon their non-preserved revelation for the true, complete and exact revelation from God found in the Quran.
No Leap of Faith Coming from a Christian background, I experienced what many experienced concerning matters of belief and how to understand them. It was virtually impossible to get straight answers concerning the very basics of Christian beliefs from the pastors and priests. The reality is that the concepts of belief were meant to be a “mystery” and belief in what one cannot truly understand is what proved a person’s faith. That approach simply did not sit well with me and I found it, and still find it, illogical. It does not seem that the truth as revealed by the Merciful and Wise God, who has given so many marvelous signs in the creation, should lead one to have to say, as the 2nd-century North African Church Father Tertullian is well known for saying: credo quia absurdum est, “I believe because it is absurd.” Religion should not be simply “faith-based”—a leap of faith, as such. Actually, it should be first as well “knowledge-based,” so that both the heart and the mind find solace in it and submit to it with a firm resolution. And this is what I found in Islam. You should recall that the Prophet Muhammad, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him, first encountered a people who were indulged in idol worship. Furthermore, they, in general, did not believe in the Hereafter. Some of them, it seems, did not have a clear perception of the Supreme Being. It was in this environment that the Quran was revealed. The Quran did not simply give them a command to believe. No, indeed! The Quran gave them proof after proof, lesson after lesson, sign after sign that should make anyone believe that there is a Creator and that the Creator created humans and all of this wonderful working of the Universe with a purpose, as He is not a foolish or ignorant Creator. Hence, the Quran is filled with passages demanding that humans think. In essence the message was this: Allah knows that if humans do use their mental capabilities properly, they will come to recognize the truth of what Allah is saying in the Quran. In fact, Islam teaches that the recognition of such facts is innate within the souls of humans. The fact is that one’s belief in Allah, the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad is not based on mere emotion or a blind leap of faith. It is based on real reasons and evidence. Coming from my background, this boldness in propagating the belief and challenging humans to think and ponder was nothing short of miraculous.
Stealing from the Christians and Jews One concept that many of the non-Muslim writers were claiming was that the Prophet Muhammad simply stole most of his teachings from the Jews and Christians. Take, for example, the title of Bell’s book, The Origin of Islam in its Christian Environment—which, by the way, if you tell any Arab that Islam developed in a Christian environment, it would be a real shock to them! I recognized that there were two possibilities: (1) the Prophet Muhammad did steal his material or (2) the revelation he received was from the same God who sent Moses, Jesus and the earlier prophets, as the Prophet Muhammad himself claimed. If it were the latter, it would explain why there would be much overlap in the teachings and message. The same God sent the earlier prophets and is simply recounting their stories again in the new revelation. However, I immediately started to notice some glaring differences between the Quran and the Bible, even with respect to the teachings about God. If the Prophet Muhammad was “editing” what he was hearing from the Bible—and by the way, at that time, there was no Bible available in Arabic—then he was doing an excellent job. I found that the strange teachings about God that one finds throughout the Bible are completely and unequivocally missing from the Quran. For the sake of brevity, only a few examples illustrating this point shall be given. The New International Version of Genesis 3:8-11, reads, 8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?” 10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” 11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” Here, God is pictured as walking in the garden in the cool of the day. What is even more astonishing is that Adam and Eve were able to hide from God and he had to ask, “Where are you?” If a human is able to hide from Him in the garden, how is it that this Lord is going to have knowledge of the sins that people commit? It would be difficult for any human to gender in his heart the kind of love and fear of God that he should have when he believes that his God is so faulty and weak that an event like this could occur to him. In Genesis 32:24-28,[1] there is the story and literal description of Jacob wrestling with and defeating God. In verse 28, it says, “You [Jacob] have wrestled with God and with men, and you have won.” In other words, the creator of the universe whom mankind is expected to worship and submit to was defeated by a mere mortal in a wrestling match. The Old Testament even pictures God as one who intended to do evil but then repented. Exodus 32:14 states, “And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people” (King James Version). It would not be surprising for anyone to turn away from God and not consider Him worthy of worship if He himself has to repent from His own evil.[2]
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