Why did I convert to Islam

Laura M. Poyneer

I grew up and live near Seattle, in the United States.  My parents have never been particularly religiously observant, but my mother was raised a Roman Catholic and when I was a child she sent me to Sunday School regularly so I could decide for myself whether to become a Catholic. However, I could never understand the Trinity or other aspects of Christianity.

After I graduated from college, I had entered graduate school but I soon discovered that it was not the place for me. This left me at loose ends for a while, because I had not considered any other path than what I had been taking. It was during this period, when I was trying to decide what
direction to take next, that I began studying various religions. I looked into Christianity somewhat, but I still did not understand it. I also briefly read about Buddhism, but this did not reach me either. Therefore, my study came to focus on Judaism and Islam.

In Christianity, there is often a great deal of emphasis on believing the right details of theology as the key to salvation, whereas both Judaism and Islam have a simple theology (God is One) and instead stress living according to the right way. I had not been familiar with this before but as
I read further it came to be appealing to me. In the West, people tend to think of Judaism as being "Christianity without Jesus", but in fact it is not very much like Christianity when practiced in the traditional ways, and is more similar to Islam. However, I did not seriously consider converting
to Judaism because I did not agree, nor wanted to, with the idea that God had only sent His Scripture and His guidance to the Children of Israel. So after a few months, my study turned to Islam.

I continued to study Islam for two more years and I always found that I understood and agreed with how Muslims think about God and about how He wants us to live. In fact, I do not have any dramatic "conversion story", it was just that the feeling gradually began to grow on me that if I thought this was the true religion, I ought to do something about it. Finally, in August 1999, I took Shahada. At first, all I knew how to do was the salat, so my learning has not stopped. In fact, I think it only truly began at that time and will be a lifelong process!

A while after I had begun to wear hijab, I lost my job and it took over a year to find another one, despite being on literally dozens of interviews. This has been the most difficult period of my life because it has so often tested my faith in God. He has truly blessed me in my family, who has
supported me from the beginning in my "foreign" religion, and throughout this period. Also, the way that I approached Islam was very "intellectual", and God has blessed me in showing me how much more there is to faith than that.

I hope that my story may, God willing, be helpful to somebody else. It is often very difficult for Westerners to approach Islam, because it is so little known here except for news reports of "Islamic fundamentalism" and terrorism. It hardly seems from that, that there is anything about Islam that could appeal to an educated and skeptical American, especially a woman (often, people that I meet assume that I converted because I wanted to marry a Muslim man, not because I came to it by my own choice and of my own free will.) More generally, I recommend anyone who is considering embarking on a study of religions to take the following advice:

1. Read books about Islam (or any other non-Christian religion) written by Muslims (or the adherent of that religion), not by Western scholars or journalists. Trust the people who actually live it.

2. Learn to distinguish between the religion as it is taught by its sources (in the case of Islam, the Quran and hadiths) and the religion as it is practiced. This is a distinction that very few Western observers seem to be able to make when it comes to Islam.

3. Because Muslim countries are mostly all developing countries, it is important to broaden your perspective by learning about social and economic circumstances in non-Muslim developing countries, especially in predominately Christian ones like in South America. You will quickly see that Islam is not the cause of the problems in Muslim countries, poverty and oppression are.

4. Islam also has a rich theological and intellectual tradition, and a way of looking at things (I have seen it aptly described as the "tawheedian worldview") that is very different from modernism, secularism, or even Christianity. Even non-religious Westerners often have conceptions about God that are based on Christian teachings, and we don't realize that there are other ways to think than this. You may discover as I did that you are actually religious after all, it was just that you didn't believe in the Christian concept of god!

May God guide us all on the path to Him.