C. Huda Dodge

I was born in San Francisco, California, and raised in a Bay Area suburb. My small town (San Anselmo, pop. about 14,000 last I checked) was a mostly white, upper-middle-class, Christian community. It is a beautiful area - just north of San Francisco (across the Golden Gate Bridge), nestled in a valley near the hillsides (Mount Tamalpais) and the Pacific Ocean. I knew all of my neighbors, played baseball in the street, caught frogs in the creeks, rode horses in the hills, and climbed trees in my front yard.

My father is Presbyterian, and my mother is Catholic. My father was never really active in any church, but my mother tried to raise us as Catholics. She took us to church sometimes, but we didn't know what was going on. People stand up, sit down, kneel, sit again, stand up, and recite things after the priest. Each pew had a booklet - a kind of `direction book' -and we had to follow along in order to know what to do next (if we didn't fall asleep first). I was baptized in this church, and received my First Communion at about the age of 8, I have pictures, but I don't remember it much. After that, we only went about once a year.

I lived on a dead-end street of about 15 houses. My grammar school was at the end of the street, next to a small Presbyterian church. When I was about 10, the people of this church invited me to participate in their children's Christmas play. Every Sunday morning from then on, I walked down to church alone (no one else in my family was interested in coming). The whole congregation was only about 30 older people, past their 50's, but they were nice and never made me feel out of place. There were about 3 younger couples with children younger than me. I became a very active member of this church down the street.

When I was in 6th grade, I started baby sitting the younger kids during the service. By 9th grade, I was helping the minister's wife teach Sunday school. In high school, I started a church youth group by recruiting 4 of my friends to join me. It was a small group: me, my friends, and a young couple with kids, but we liked it that way. The big Presbyterian Church in town had about 100 kids in their youth group and took trips to Mexico, etc. But our group was content to get together to study the bible, talk about God, and raise money for charities.

These friends and I would sit together and talk about spiritual issues. We debated about questions in our minds: what happens to the people who lived before Jesus came (go to heaven or hell); why do some very righteous people automatically go to hell just because they don't believe in Jesus, we thought about Gandhi; on the other hand, why do some pretty horrible people like my friend's abusive father, get rewarded with heaven just because they're Christian; why does a loving and merciful God require a blood sacrifice (Jesus) to forgive people's sins; why are we guilty of Adam's original sin; why does the Word of God (Bible) disagree with scientific facts; how can Jesus be God; how can One God be 3 different things; etc. We debated about these things, but never came up with good answers. The church couldn't give us good answers either; they only told us to "have faith."

The people at church told me about a Presbyterian summer camp in Northern California. I went for the first time when I was 10. For the next 7 years, I went every summer. While I was happy with the little church I went to, this is where I really felt in touch with God, without confusion. It was here that I developed my very deep faith in God. We spent much of our time outdoors, playing games, doing crafts, swimming, etc. It was fun, but every day we would also take time out to pray, study the bible, sing spiritual songs, and have `quiet time.' It is this quiet time that really meant a lot to me, and of which I have the best memories.

The rule was that you had to sit alone - anywhere on the camp's 200 beautiful acres. I would often go to a meadow, or sit on a bridge overlooking the creek, and just THINK. I looked around me, at the creek, the trees, the clouds, the bugs - listened to the water, the birds' songs, the crickets' chirps. This place really let me feel at peace, and I admired and thanked God for His beautiful creation. At the end of each summer, when I returned back home, this feeling stayed with me. I loved to spend time outdoors, alone, to just think about God, life, and my place in it. I developed my personal understanding of Jesus' role as a teacher and example, and left all the confusing church teachings behind.
I believed and still do in the teaching "Love your neighbor as yourself," fully giving to others without expecting anything in return, treating others as you would like to be treated. I strived to help everyone I could.

When I was fourteen, I got my first job, at an ice cream store. When I got my paycheck each month (it wasn't much), I sent the first $25 to a program called `Foster Parents Plan' (they've changed the name now). This was a charity that hooked up needy children overseas with American sponsors. During my 4 years of high school, I was a sponsor for a young Egyptian boy named Sherif.

I sent him part of my paycheck each month, and we exchanged letters. His letters were in Arabic, and looking at them now, it appears that he believed he was writing to an adult man, not a girl 5 years older than him. He was 9 years old, his father was dead, and his mother was ill and couldn't work. He had 2 younger brothers and a sister my age. I remember getting a letter from him when I was 16 - he was excited because his sister had gotten engaged. I thought, "She's the same age as me, and she's getting engaged!!!" It seemed so foreign to me. These were the first Muslims I had contact with.

The summer after my junior year of high school, I took a volunteer job in San Francisco (the Tenderloin district), teaching English to refugee women. In my class were Fatimah and Maysoon, 2 Chinese Muslim widows from Vietnam. These were the next Muslims I met, although we couldn't talk much (their English was too minimal). All they did was laugh.

I always felt closest to God when I was in a quiet setting and/or outdoors. I started taking walks around campus (Lewis & Clark College has a beautiful campus!), sitting on benches, looking at the view of Mount Hood, watching the trees change colors. One day I wandered into the campus chapel - a small, round building nestled in the trees. It was beautifully simple. The pews formed a circle around the center of the room, and a huge pipe organ hung from the ceiling in the middle. No altar, no crosses, no statues - nothing. Just some simple wood benches and a pipe organ. During the rest of the year, I spent a lot of time in this building, listening to the organist practice, or just sitting alone in the quiet to think. I felt more comfortable and close to God there than at any church I had ever been to.

During this time, I was also meeting with a group of international students as part of the Conversation Group program. We had 5 people in our group: me, a Japanese man and woman, an Italian man and a Palestinian man. We met twice a week over lunch, to practice English conversation skills. We talked about our families, our studies, our childhoods, cultural differences, etc. As I listened to the Palestinian man (Faris) talk about his life, his family, his faith, etc., it struck a nerve in me. I remembered Sherif, Fatima and Maysoon, the only other Muslims I had ever known. Previously, I had seen their beliefs and way of life as foreign, something that was alien to my culture. I never bothered to learn about their faith because of this cultural barrier. But the more I learned about Islam, the more I became interested in it as a possibility for my own life.

During my second term of school, the conversation group disbanded and the international students transferred to other schools. The discussions we had, however, stayed at the front of my thoughts. The following term, I registered for a class in the religious studies department: Introduction to Islam. This class brought back all of the concerns that I had about Christianity. As I learned about Islam, all of my questions were answered. All of us are not punished for Adam's original sin. Adam asked God for forgiveness and our Merciful and Loving God forgave him. God doesn't require a blood sacrifice in payment for sin. We must sincerely ask for forgiveness and amend our ways. Jesus wasn't God, he was a prophet, like all of the other prophets, who all taught the same message: Believe in the One true God; worship and submit to Him alone; and live a righteous life according to the guidance He has sent. This answered all of my questions about the trinity and the nature of Jesus (all God, all human, or a combination). God is a Perfect and Fair Judge, who will reward or punish us based on our faith and righteousness. I found a teaching that put everything in its proper perspective, and appealed to my heart and my intellect. It seemed natural. It wasn't confusing. I had been searching, and I had found a place to rest my faith.

That summer, I returned home to the Bay Area and continued my studies of Islam. I checked books out of the library and talked with my friends. They were as deeply spiritual as I was, and had also been searching, most of them were looking into eastern religions, Buddhism in particular. They understood my search, and were happy I could find something to believe in. They raised questions, though, about how Islam would affect my life: as a woman, as a liberal Californian, with my family, etc.

I continued to study, pray and soul-search to see how comfortable I really was with it. I sought out Islamic centers in my area, but the closest one was in San Francisco, and I never got there to visit, no car, and bus schedules didn't fit with my work schedule. So I continued to search on my own. When it came up in conversation, I talked to my family about it. I remember one time in particular, when we were all watching a public television program about the Eskimos. They said that the Eskimos have over 200 words for `snow,' because snow is such a big part of their life. Later that night, we were talking about how different languages have many words for things that are important to them. My father commented about all the different words Americans use for `money', money, dough, bread, etc.. I commented, "You know, the Muslims have 99 names for God - I guess that's what is important to them."

At the end of the summer, I returned to Lewis & Clark. The first thing I did was contact the mosque in southwest Portland. I asked for the name of a woman I could talk to, and they gave me the number of a Muslim American sister. That week, I visited her at home. After talking for a while, she realized that I was already a believer. I told her I was just looking for some women who could help guide me in the practicalities of what it meant to be a Muslim. For example, how to pray. I had read it in books, but I couldn't figure out how to do it just from books. I made attempts, and prayed in English, but I knew I wasn't doing it right. The sister invited me that night to a dinner after the birth of a new baby. She picked me up that night and we went. I felt so comfortable with the Muslim sisters there, and they were very friendly to me that night. I said my shahaada, witnessed by a few sisters. They taught me how to pray. They talked to me about their own faith (many of them were also American). I left that night feeling like I had just started a new life.

I was still living in a campus dorm, and was pretty isolated from the Muslim community. I had to take 2 buses to get to the area where the mosque was and where most of the women lived. I quickly lost touch with the women I met, and was left to pursue my faith on my own at school. I made a few attempts to go to the mosque, but was confused by the meeting times.

Sometimes I'd show up to borrow some books from the library, and the whole building would be full of men. Another time I decided to go to my first Friday  prayer, and I couldn't go in for the same reason. Later, I was told that women only meet at a certain time - Saturday afternoon, and that I couldn't go at other times. I was discouraged and confused, but I continued to have faith and learn on my own.

Six months after my shahaada, I observed my first Ramadan. I had been contemplating the issue of Hijab, but was too scared to take that step before. I had already begun to dress more modestly, and usually wore a scarf over my shoulders. When I visited the sister, she told me "all you have to do is move that scarf from your shoulders to your head, and you'll be Islamically dressed".

At first I didn't feel ready to wear Hijab, because I didn't feel strong enough in my faith. I understood the reason for it, agreed with it, and admired the women who did wear it. They looked so pious and noble. But I knew that if I wore it, people would ask me a lot of questions, and I didn't feel ready or strong enough to deal with that. This changed as Ramadan approached, and on the first day of Ramadan, I woke up and went to class in Hijab. Alhamdillah, I haven't taken it off since. Something about Ramadan helped me to feel strong, and proud to be a Muslim. I felt ready to answer anybody's questions.

However, I also felt isolated and lonely during that first Ramadan. No one from the Muslim community even called me. I was on a meal plan at school, so I had to arrange to get special meals, the dining hall wasn't open during the hours I could eat. The school agreed to give me my meals in bag lunches. So every night as sundown approached, I'd walk across the street to the kitchen, go in the back to the huge refrigerators, and take my 2 bag lunches, one for fotoor, one for suhoor. I'd bring the bags back to my dorm room and eat alone. They always had the same thing: yoghurt, a piece of fruit, cookies, and either a tuna or egg salad sandwich. The same thing, for both meals, for the whole month. I was lonely, but at the same time I had never felt more at peace with myself.

When I embraced Islam, I told my family. They were not surprised. They kind of saw it coming, from my actions and what I said when I was home that summer. They accepted my decision, and knew that I was sincere. Even before, my family always accepted my activities and my deep faith, even if they didn't share it. They were not as open-minded, however, when I started to wear Hijab. They worried that I was cutting myself off from society that I would be discriminated against, that it would discourage me from reaching my goals, and they were embarrassed to be seen with me. They thought it was too radical. They didn't mind if I had a different faith, but they didn't like it to affect my life in an outward way. They were more upset when I decided to get married.

During this time, I had gotten back in touch with Faris, the Muslim Palestinian brother of my conversation group, the one who first prompted my interest in Islam. He was still in the Portland area, attending the community college. We started meeting again, over lunch, in the library, at his brother's house, etc. We were married the following summer after my sophomore year, a year after my shahaada. My family freaked out. They weren't quite yet over my Hijab, and they felt like I had thrown something else at them. They argued that I was too young, and worried that I would abandon my goals, drop out of school, become a young mother, and destroy my life. They liked my husband, but didn't trust him at first, they were thinking `green card scam'. My family and I fought over this for several months, and I feared that our relationship would never be repaired.

That was 3 years ago, and a lot has changed. Faris and I moved to Corvallis, Oregon, home of Oregon State University. We live in a very strong and close-knit Muslim community. I graduated magna cum laude last year, with a degree in child development. I have had several jobs, from secretary to preschool teacher, with no problems about my Hijab. I'm active in the community, and still do volunteer work. My husband, insha Allah, will finish his Electrical Engineering degree this year.

We visit my family a couple of times a year. I met Faris' parents for the first time this summer, and we get along great. I'm slowly but surely adding Arabic to the list of languages I speak. My family has seen all of this, and has recognized that I didn't destroy my life. They see that Islam has brought me happiness, not pain and sorrow. They are proud of my accomplishments, and can see that I am truly happy and at peace.

Our relationship is back to normal, and they are looking forward to our visit next month, insha'Allah.

Looking back on all of this, I feel truly grateful that Allah has guided me to where I am today. I truly feel blessed. It seems that all of the pieces of my life fit together in a pattern - a path to Islam. "Say: Allah's guidance is the only guidance, and we have been directed to submit ourselves to the Lord of the Worlds.." (Quran 6:71)

Afrah Alshaibani

May 2, 1996. Ever since I can remember, my family attended a non-denominational conservative Christian church (Church of Christ). I grew up in the church, taught bible school and sang in the choir. As a young teenager I began asking questions (as I think everyone does at one point in their lives):

Why was I a member of the Church of Christ and not say Lutheran, Catholic or Methodist? If various churches are teaching conflicting doctrine, how do we know which one is right? Are they all right? Do ‘all paths lead to God' as I had heard some say? Others say that as long as you are a good person it doesn't matter what you believe - is that true?

After some soul searching I decided that I did believe that there was an ultimate truth and in an attempt to find that truth I began a comparison study of various churches. I decided that I believed in the Bible and would join the church that best followed the Bible. After a lengthy study, I decided to stay with the Church of Christ, satisfied that its doctrines were biblically sound (unaware at this stage that there could be various interpretations of the Bible).

I spent a year at Michigan Christian College; a small college affiliated with the Churches of Christ, but was not challenged academically and so transferred to Western Michigan University. Having applied late for student housing, I was placed in the international dorm.

Although my roommate was American, I felt surrounded by strange people from strange places. It was in fact my first real experience with cultural diversity and it scared me (having Stories of New Muslims been raised in a white, middle class, Christian community). I wanted to change dorms but there wasn't anything available. I did really like my roommate and decided to stick out the semester.

My roommate became very involved in the dorm activities and got to know most everyone in the dorm. I however performed with the marching band and spent most of my time with band people. Marching season soon ended and finding myself with time on my hands, I joined my roommate on her adventures around the dorm. It turned out to be a wonderful, fascinating experience! There were a large number of Arab men living in the dorm. They were charming, handsome, and a lot of fun to be around.

My roommate started dating one of them and we ended up spending most of our time with the Arabs. I guess I knew they were Muslims (although very few of them were practicing). We never really discussed religion, we were just having fun.

The year passed and I had started seeing one of the Arabs. Again, we were just enjoying each other's company and never discussed our religious differences. Neither of us were practicing at this time so it never really became an issue for us. I did, deep down, feel guilty for not attending church, but I pushed it in the back of my mind. I was having too much fun.

Another year passed and I was home for summer vacation when my roommate called me with some very distressing news: she'd become a Muslim!! I was horrified.

She didn't tell me why she converted, just that she had spent a lot of time talking with her boyfriend's brother and it all made sense to her. After we hung up, I immediately wrote her a long letter explaining that she was ruining her life and to just give Christianity one more chance. That same summer my boyfriend transferred to Azusa Pacific University in California. We decided to get married and move to California together. Again, since neither one were practising, religion was not discussed.

Secretly I started reading books on Islam. However I read books that were written by non-Muslims. One of the books I read was Islam Revealed by Anis Sorosh. I felt guilty about my friend's conversion. I felt that if I had been a better Christian, she would have turned to the church rather than Islam.

Islam was a man-made religion, I believed, and filled with contradictions. After reading Sorosh's book, I thought I could convert my friend and my husband to Christianity.

At APU, my husband was required to take a few religion courses. One day he came home from class and said: "The more I learn about Christianity, the stronger my belief in Islam becomes." At about this same time he started showing signs of wanting to practice his religion again. Our problems began.

We started talking about religion and arguing about our different beliefs. He told me I should learn about Islam and I told him I already knew everything I needed to know. I got out Sorosh's book and told him I could never believe in Islam.

My husband is not a scholar by any stretch of the imagination, yet he had an answer for everything I showed him in Sorosh's book. I was impressed by his knowledge. He told me that if I really wanted to learn about Islam it must be through Islamic sources. He bought a few books for me from an Islamic bookstore and I started taking classes at a local mosque. What a difference the Islam I learned about from Muslim sources was compared with the Islam I learned about from non-Muslims!

It was so difficult though when I actually decided to convert. My pride stood in the way for a while. How could I admit to my husband and my friend that they were right all along? I felt humiliated, embarrassed. Soon though, I could deny the truth no longer, swallowed my pride, and alhamdulilah, embraced Islam - the best decision I ever made.

A few things I want to say to the non-Muslim reader: When I originally began my search for the truth all those years ago, I made a few wrong assumptions. First, I assumed that the truth is with Christianity only. It never occurred to me at that time to look outside Christianity. Second, I assumed that the Bible was the true Word of God. These were bad assumptions because they prohibited me from looking at things objectively.

When I began my earnest study of Islam, I had to start at the very beginning, with no preconceived ideas. I was not a Christian looking at Islam; I looked at both Islam and Christianity (and many other religions) from the point of view of an outsider. My advice to you is to be a critical thinker and a critical reader.

Another mistake that many people make when talking about Islam is that they pick out a certain teaching and judge the whole of Islam on that one point. For example, many people say that Islam is prejudiced towards women because Islamic laws of inheritance award the male twice as much as the female. What they fail to learn, however, is that males have financial responsibilities in Islam that females do not have.

It is like putting a puzzle together: until you have all the pieces in the right places, you cannot make a statement about the picture, you cannot look at one little piece of the puzzle and judge the whole picture.

Many people said that the only reason I converted was because of my husband. It is true that I studied Islam because he asked me to - but I accepted Islam because it is the truth. My husband and I are currently separated and plan to divorce in June, insha Allah.

My faith in Islam has never been stronger than it is now. I look forward to finding a practicing Muslim husband, insha'Allah, and growing in my faith and practice. Being a good Muslim is my number one priority. May Allah lead all of us closer to the truth.

From Drury Lane to Mecca

History has not recorded the name of the first British Muslim to carry out the rites of Hajj. Rumours abound of converted Crusaders who made the trip in medieval times, and of British Muslims in Ottoman naval service who visited the hallowed precincts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the first detailed account of the Hajj by an English Muslim had to wait until the Edwardian era, when the artist Hedley Churchward became the first recorded British ‘Guest of God.’

Like many Anglo-Muslims of his day, Churchward was the conservative, gentlemanly scion of an ancient family; indeed, his ancestors possessed the second oldest house in Britain. His father ran a successful business in Aldershot, and was well-received in regimental circles, enabling the young Churchward to meet Queen Victoria and the philanthropist Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Showing an early artistic talent, Churchward studied art and became a recognised painter, specialising in the then highly prestigious field of theatrical scene painting. A familiar figure in London’s West End in the 1880s, he worked closely with celebrities as varied as Tennyson, Millais, Lord Leighton, and the most famous of all Victorian ‘super models’, Lily Langtry.

A leisurely trip through Spain opened the young scene-painter’s eyes to the glories of Moorish architecture, and he was tempted to venture across the Straits to Morocco. Here, in a world still untouched by Western influence, he quickly fell in love with the gentle and beautiful lifestyle of Islam. After several visits, he gravely announced to his startled family that he had become a Muslim.

Churchward travelled on to Cairo, where he studied for several years at Al-Azhar, the Muslim world’s highest seat of learning. His scholarship developed apace, enabling him to preach Friday sermons at a small mosque, and even landing him an appointment to the prestigious post of lecturer in Sira (the Prophet’s biography) at the Qadis’ Academy - no small achievement for a convert.

In need of more lucrative work, Churchward then sailed for South Africa, where his art and his elegant drawing-room manner soon won him the favour of Cecil Rhodes, who made him the gift of a rare pink diamond. Moving effortlessly between the Muslim community and the Transvaal’s white elite, it was thanks to Churchward’s earnest intercession that President Paul Kruger granted permission for the erection of the first mosque in the Witwatersrand goldfields.

On his return to Cairo, Mahmoud Churchward married the daughter of a prominent Shafi‘i jurist of Al-Azhar, and continued his Arabic lecturing. But both his head and his heart told him that his Islam was not yet complete: the magnetic pull of the Fifth Pillar was becoming impossible to resist. As he later recorded: ‘One evening, as I strode along the looming Pyramid in the sunset, and saw the jagged skyline of Cairo behind the dreamy African dusk, I decided to carry through what I had intended to do ever since I turned a Moslem - I would go to the Kaaba at Mecca.’

As an Englishman he realised that this ambition might prove hard to fulfil: there was a danger that the Caliphal authorities at Jeddah might distrust the sincerity of his claims to be a Muslim, and unceremoniously turn him away. He therefore petitioned the senior Ulema for a letter of recommendation. In the awe-inspiring presence of the Chief Qadi of Egypt, together with Shaykh al-Islam Mehmet Jemaluddin Efendi (the Ottoman Empire’s highest religious authority, who happened to be on a visit to Cairo), he submitted to a three-hour examination on difficult points of faith. Passing with flying colours, he received a beautifully calligraphed testimonial signed by the scholars present. This religious passport was to serve him well in overcoming the bureaucratic obstacles which lay ahead.

In 1910, after a further year in South Africa, the would-be Hajji packed his trunks and set out from Johannesburg for Arabia. Steamers in those days were slow, and Churchward faced the added impediment of having to travel via Bombay, where he spent weeks in frustrating negotiations with shipping-clerks, officials, and an urbane Lebanese Christian who was the Ottoman consul. At last he found an elderly pilgrim ship, the SS Islamic, and this vessel, captained by an irascible Scotsman and armed with cannon against the threat of pirates, chugged slowly across the shimmering heat of the Indian Ocean, visiting the poverty-stricken Arabian Gulf before wending its leisurely way up the Red Sea.

The days passed slowly, and the time for Hajj was fast approaching. Steaming at six knots, halting at small ports to deliver sacks of mail, which had to be handed over with six-foot tongs because of the fear of plague, there was little to do except watch the dolphins, eat curry, and pray on deck with the Indian pilgrims.

Landing briefly at the Sudanese port of Suakin, Churchward dropped in on the British Consul, who airily told him that his plans to visit Mecca were doomed. ‘My dear chap,’ he told him, sipping an iced drink on the Consular veranda, ‘to begin with you will not be allowed to land at Jeddah.’
But two days later, the Islamic steamed into the roadstead of the Arabian port. ‘On the Indian deck,’ he recorded, ‘there started a great packing of pots, portable stoves, babies and sacks of rice.’ It proved necessary to row ashore in a small dinghy, plunging through the hot spray past a Turkish battleship that had been moored for so long that the coral had grown up around it, immobilising it forever.

Once his little boat was beached on the sands, a short conversation with the Ottoman officials established that all was well, and Churchward went into the town to make contact with the local representative (wakil) of Sharifa Zain Wali, a rich businesswoman of Mecca who ran a large organisation of ‘mutawwifs’ - pilgrim guides. Naturally, she could not attend him here in person - as Churchward later observed:

‘Owing to the immense numbers of pilgrims, hundreds of thousands, who reach Jeddah each year, it is as impossible for these much-respected dignitaries to escort their customers personally as it would be for Mr. Thomas Cook to chaperone every Cockney globe-trotter through Europe. Like all her colleagues, she employed a considerable staff, who saw that the Hajis carried through the ritual prescribed by the Prophet.’

The Wakil took Churchward to his beautiful Arab house, and explained how to don his Ihram clothing before letting him settle down for the night. ‘Finding a level place on the irregular stones I lay down anew’, he wrote. ‘This time a thousand million mosquitoes hovered over me.’ The following day, he telegraphed most of his money through to Mecca, and entrusted, as was the custom, the remainder of his funds to the Mutawwif. That evening, ‘while the lamps of Jeddah glowed in a tropic sunset, two donkeys arrived.’ The road beyond Jeddah was little more than a camel track, but the Wakil confidently led the small party towards the nocturnal east, with Halley’s Comet hanging splendidly among the stars above. ‘Against the stars I saw rock faces; we seemed to be trotting through a kind of canyon. Saving the fall of our donkeys’ feet there was nothing to be heard, not even a jackal. ... Bang! Explosions suddenly rang from some place high in the dark hills. No mistake, those were rifle shots ... The growing brightness showed a very picturesque old building, a kind of tower several hundred feet above the road. From the steep path serving the structure some fez-adorned figures ran down. They wore uniforms and held guns in their hands.’

An Ottoman officer came up, and politely explained that his men had successfully chased off a band of robbers. In those days, attacks by desert Arabs on pilgrims were distressingly common; but Churchward and his party rode on, trusting in God. In the oven-like heat of the early afternoon, after several stops at roadside coffee-houses, they passed the stone pillars which indicated the beginning of the sacred territory into which no non-Muslim may intrude.

‘On entering here my guide signed to me that we should say the proper prayer. Touching his heart and forehead he muttered the Fatiha and held his hands together as if to receive Heaven’s blessing. Then he said, Hena al-Haram (Here is the Holy Ground).’

‘Some pigeons, wild doves and other birds were the first specimens of desert fauna I came on. They appeared perfectly tame, and fluttered a few inches from our faces. Some sat on the hard stones and allowed the donkeys to go right upon them. Very carefully the Wakeel led his beast around the little creatures, for no man will dare to kill a living thing here.’

In the Holy City at last, after almost two days on the road, Churchward and his companions entered the tall mansion-cum-hotel of the Sharifa. This pious and aristocratic lady, a direct descendent of the Holy Prophet, had family connections in Cape Town, where her company of pilgrim guides had been recommended to Churchward. Unpacking his goods, he sent her a gift of a Gouda cheese, which was borne up to her unseen presence by excited servants. The Sharifa herself shortly called to him from behind a wooden mashrabiya screen: ‘Mubarak! Welcome to my house.’ ‘I replied that I felt proud to live in her house, whereat she answered that she was proud of me. ‘The Kafirs make good cheese,’ declared the lady, ‘they must have many cows.’’

The English pilgrim struggled up seven flights of stairs, bathed, and slept on the roof. He was awoken before dawn by the strange lilting sound of Ottoman bugles, and after prayers and a breakfast of melons he set off behind the Mutawwif towards the Sacred Mosque. Taking care to scuff their feet disdainfully on some well-worn flagstones, which the Mutawwif declared were some former idols of Quraish which had been cast down there by the Prophet to be humiliated, Churchward and his companion finally entered the House of God. The first stage of a five-month journey had finally come to an end.

Frithjof Schuon

Frithjof Schuon is best known as the foremost spokesman of the "perennialist" perspective and a sage and philosopher in the metaphysical current of Shankara and Plato. Over the past 50 years, he has written more than 20 books on metaphysical, spiritual and ethnic themes as well as having been a regular contributor to journals on comparative religion in both Europe and America.

Schuon's writings have been consistently featured and reviewed in a wide range of scholarly and philosophical publications around the world, respected by both scholars and spiritual authorities. Of his first book, The Transcendent Unity of Religions (London, Faber & Faber) T.S. Eliot wrote: "I have met with no more impressive work in the comparative study of Oriental and Occidental religion."

Frithjof Schuon was born in Basle, Switzerland, on June 18, 1907. His father was a native of southern Germany, while his mother came from an Alsatian family. Schuon's father was a concert violinist, and the household was one in which not only music but literary and spiritual culture were present. Schuon lived in Basle and attended school there until the untimely death of his father, after which his mother returned with her two young sons to her family in Mulhouse, France, where Schuon was obliged to become a French citizen.

Having received his earliest training in German, he received his later education in French and thus mastered both languages early in life.
While still living in Mulhouse, he discovered the works of the French philosopher and orientalist Rene Guenon, which served to confirm his intellectual intuitions and which provided support for the metaphysical principles he had begun to discover.

Schuon journeyed to Paris after serving for a year and a half in the French army. In Paris, he worked as a textile designer and at the same time began to study Arabic in the school of the mosque. Living in Paris also brought the opportunity to be exposed to a much greater degree than before to various forms of traditional art, especially those of Asia, with which he had had a deep affinity since his youth. This period of a growing intellectual and artistic familiarity with the traditional worlds was followed by Schuon's first visit to Algeria in 1932.

It was then that he met the celebrated Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi. On a second trip to North Africa, in 1935, he visited Algeria and Morocco; and during 1938 and 1939, he traveled to Egypt, where he met Guenon, with whom he had been in correspondence for 20 years. In 1939, shortly after his arrival in India, the Second World War broke out, forcing him to return to Europe. After having served in the French army, and after having been made prisoner by the Germans, he sought asylum in Switzerland, which gave him nationality and was to be his home for forty years.

Schuon was born in 1907 in Basle, Switzerland, of German parents. As a youth, he went to Paris, where he studied for a few years before undertaking a number of trips to North Africa, the Near East and India in order to contact spiritual authorities and witness traditional cultures. Following World War II, he accepted an invitation to travel to the American West, where he lived for several months among the Plains Indians, in whom he has always had a deep interest. Having received his education in France, Schuon has written all his major works in French, which began to appear in English translation in 1953.
In 1980, Schuon and his wife emigrated to the United States, where he continued to write until his death in 1998.

Erin Fannoun

April 12, 1998. Bismillah Arahman Araheem. My intention in writing my story is that for Allah's sake, I may help someone who is searching for the Truth, to realize that they have found it in Islam. I began writing this on Easter Sunday, kind of appropriate, I think. I have been Muslim now for seven years, all praise is for Allah. I first learned of Islam while attending University, from a Muslim friend of mine. I had managed to get out of a very good, college-prep high school believing that the Quran was a Jewish book, and that Muslims were idol worshipping pagans.

I was not interested in learning about a new religion. I held the ethnocentric view that if since the US was ‘#1’, we must have the best of everything, including religion. I knew that Christianity wasn't perfect, but believed that it was the best that there was. I had long held the opinion that although the Bible contained the word of God, it also contained the word of the common man, who wrote it down.

As Allah would have it, every time I had picked up the Bible in my life, I had come across some really strange and actually dirty passages. I could not understand why the Prophets of God would do such abominable things when there are plenty of average people who live their whole lives without thinking of doing such disgusting and immoral things, such as those attributed to Prophets David, Solomon, and Lot, just to name a few. I remember hearing in Church that since these Prophets commit such sins, how could the common people be any better than them?

And so, it was said, Jesus had to be sacrificed for our sins, because we just couldn't help ourselves, as the "flesh is weak".

So, I wrestled with the notion of the trinity, trying to understand how my God was not one, but three. One who created the earth, one whose blood was spilled for our sins, and then there was the question of the Holy Ghost, yet all one and the same!? When I would pray to God, I had a certain image in my mind of a wise old man in flowing robe, up in the clouds.

When I would pray to Jesus, I pictured a young white man with long golden hair, beard and blue eyes. As for the Holy Spirit, well, I could only conjure up a misty creature whose purpose I wasn't sure of. It really didn't feel as though I was praying to one God. I found though that when I was really in a tight spot, I would automatically call directly on God. I knew inherently, that going straight to God, was the best bet.

When I began to research and study Islam, I didn't have a problem with praying to God directly, it seemed the natural thing to do. However, I feared forsaking Jesus, and spent a lot of time contemplating the subject. I began to study the Christian history, searching for the truth. The more I looked into it, the more I saw the parallel between the deification and sacrifice of Jesus, and the stories of Greek mythology that I had learned in junior high, where a god and a human woman would produce a child which would be a demigod, possessing some attributes of a god.

I learned of how important it had been to "St. Paul", to have this religion accepted by the Greeks to whom he preached, and how some of the disciples had disagreed with his methods. It seemed very probable that this could have been a more appealing form of worship to the Greeks than the strict monotheism of the Old Testament. And only Allah knows.

I began to have certain difficulties with Christian thought while still in high school. Two things bothered me very much. The first was the direct contradiction between material in the Old and New Testaments.

I had always thought of the Ten Commandments as very straight forward, simple rules that God obviously wanted us to follow. Yet, worshipping Christ, was breaking the first commandment completely and totally, by associating a partner with God. I could not understand why an omniscient God would change His mind, so to speak.

Then there is the question of repentance. In the Old Testament, people are told to repent for their sins; but in the New Testament, it is no longer necessary, as Christ was sacrificed for the sins of the people. "Paul did not call upon his hearers to repent of particular sins, but rather announced God's victory over all sin in the cross of Christ. The radical nature of God's power is affirmed in Paul's insistence that in the death of Christ God has rectified the ungodly (see Romans 4:5).

Human beings are not called upon to do good works in order that God may rectify them." So what incentive did we even have to be good, when being bad could be a lot of fun? Society has answered by redefining good and bad. Any childcare expert will tell you that children must learn that their actions have consequences, and they encourage parents to allow them to experience the natural consequences of their actions.

Yet in Christianity, there are no consequences, so people have begun to act like spoiled children. Demanding the right to do as they please, demanding God's and peoples' unconditional love and acceptance of even vile behavior.

It is no wonder that our prisons are over-flowing, and that parents are at a loss to control their children. That is not to say that in Islam we believe that we get to heaven based on our deeds, on the contrary, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) told us that we will only enter paradise through God's Mercy, the Prophet said, "Do good deeds properly, sincerely and moderately, and receive good news because one's good deeds will not make him enter Paradise." They asked, "Even you, O Allah's Apostle?" He said, "Even I, unless and until Allah bestows His pardon and Mercy on me."

So in actuality, I did not even know who God was. If Jesus was not a separate god, but really part of God, then who was he sacrificed to? And who was he praying to in the Garden of Gethsemane? If he was separate in nature from God, then you have left the realm of monotheism, which is also in direct contradiction to the teachings of the Old Testament. It was so confusing, that I preferred not to think of it, and had begun to thoroughly resent the fact that I could not understand my own religion.

That point was brought home when I began to discuss religion with my future husband at college. He asked me to explain the Trinity to him. After several failed attempts at getting him to understand it, I threw my hands up in frustration, and claimed that I couldn't explain it well because, "I am not a scholar!" To which he calmly replied, "Do you have to be a scholar to understand the basis of your religion?"

Ouch!, that really hurt; but the truth hurts sometimes. By that point, I had tired of the mental acrobatics required to contemplate who I was actually worshipping. I grudgingly listened while he told me of the Oneness of God, and that He had not changed his mind, but completed his message to mankind through the Prophet Muhammad, Allah's peace and blessings be upon him. I had to admit, it made sense. God had sent prophets in succession to mankind for centuries, because they obviously kept going astray, and needed guidance.

Even at that point, I told him that he could tell me about his religion, just for my general information. "But don't try to convert me", I told him, "because you'll never do it!" "No", he said, "I just want you to understand where I'm coming from and it is my duty as a Muslim to tell you." And of course, he didn't convert me; but rather, Allah guided me to His Truth. Alhamdu Lillah.

At about the same time, a friend of mine gave me a "translation" of the Quran in English that she found at a book store. She had no way of knowing that this book was actually written by an Iraqi Jew for the purpose of driving people away from Islam, not for helping them to understand it. It was very confusing. I circled and marked all the passages that I wanted to ask my Muslim friend about and when he returned from his trip abroad, I accosted him with my questions, book in hand.

He could not tell from the translation that it was supposed to be the Quran, and patiently informed me of the true meaning of the verses and the conditions under which they were revealed. He found a good translation of the meaning of the Quran for me to read, which I did. I still remember sitting alone, reading it, looking for errors, and questioning.

The more I read, the more I became convinced that this book could only have one source, God.

I was reading about God's mercy and His willingness to forgive any sin, except the sin of associating partners with Him; and I began to weep. I cried from the depth of my soul. I cried for my past ignorance and in joy of finally finding the truth. I knew that I was forever changed. I was amazed at the scientific knowledge in the Quran, which is not taken from the Bible as some would have you believe. I was getting my degree in microbiology at that time, and was particularly impressed with the description of the embryological process, and so much more. Once I was sure that this book was truly from God, I decided that I had to accept Islam as my religion. I knew it wouldn't be easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is.

I learned that the first and most important step of becoming Muslim is to believe in that there is no god worthy of worship except Allah, and that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. After I understood that Jesus was sent as a prophet, to show the Jews that they were going astray, and bring them back to the path of God, I had no trouble with the concept of worshipping God alone. But I did not know who Muhammad was, and didn't understand what it really meant to follow him.

May Allah bless all those people who have helped me to understand and appreciate the life of the Prophet Muhammad, (peace be upon him), throughout these last seven years. I learned that Allah sent him as an example to mankind. An example to be followed and imitated by all of us in our daily lives. He was in his behaviors, the Quran exemplified. May Allah guide us all to live as he taught us.

Colonel Donald S. Rockwell

The simplicity of Islam, the powerful appeal and the compelling atmosphere of its mosques, the earnestness of its faithful adherents, the confidence inspiring realization of the millions throughout the world who answer the five daily calls to prayer - these factors attracted me from the first.  But after I had determined to become a follower of Islam, I found many deeper reasons for confirming my decision. 

The mellow concept of life - the fruit of the Prophet’s combined course of action and contemplation - the wise counsel, the admonitions to charity and mercy, the broad humanitarianism, the pioneer declaration of woman’s property rights - these and other factors of the teachings of the man of Mecca were to me among the most obvious evidence of a practical religion so tersely and so aptly epitomized in the cryptic words of Muhammad, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him, “Trust in God and tie your camel.” 

He gave us a religious system of normal action, not blind faith in the protection of an unseen force in spite of our own neglect, but confidence that if we do all things rightly and to the best of our ability, we may trust in what comes as the Will of God.

The broad minded tolerance of Islam for other religions recommends it to all lovers of liberty.  Muhammad admonished his followers to treat well the believers in the Old and New Testaments; Abraham, Moses and Jesus are acknowledged as co-prophets of the One God.  Surely this is generous and far in advance of the attitude of other religions.

The total freedom from idolatry ... is a sign of the salubrious strength and purity of the Muslim faith.

The original teachings of the Prophet of God have not been engulfed in the maze of changes and additions of doctrinarians.  The Quran remains as it came to the corrupt polytheistic people of Muhammad’s time, changeless as the holy heart of Islam itself.

Moderation and temperance in all things, the keynotes of Islam, won my unqualified approbation.  The health of his people was cherished by the Prophet, who enjoined them to observe strict cleanliness and specified fasts and to subordinate carnal appetites ...

When I stood in the inspiring mosques of Istanbul, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, Algiers, Tangier, Fez and other cities, I was conscious of a powerful reaction to the potent uplift of Islam’s simple appeal to the sense of higher things, unaided by elaborate trappings, ornamentations, figures, pictures, music and ceremonial ritual.  The mosque is a place of quiet contemplation and self-effacement in the greater reality of the One God.

The democracy of Islam has always appealed to me.  Potentate and pauper have the same rights on the floor of the mosque, on their (foreheads) in humble worship.  There are no rented pews nor special reserved seats.

The Muslim accepts no man as a mediator between himself and his God.  He goes direct to the invisible source of creation and life, God, without reliance on saving formula of repentance of sins and belief in the power of a teacher to afford him salvation.

The universal brotherhood of Islam, regardless of race, politics, color or country, has been brought home to me most keenly many times in my life and this is another feature which drew me towards the Faith.

Colonel Donald S. Rockwell

Poet and critic, USA

The simplicity of Islam, the powerful appeal and the compelling atmosphere of its mosques, the earnestness of its faithful adherents, the confidence inspiring realization of the millions throughout the world who answer the five daily calls to prayer - these factors attracted me from the first.  But after I had determined to become a follower of Islam, I found many deeper reasons for confirming my decision. 

The mellow concept of life - the fruit of the Prophet’s combined course of action and contemplation - the wise counsel, the admonitions to charity and mercy, the broad humanitarianism, the pioneer declaration of woman’s property rights - these and other factors of the teachings of the man of Mecca were to me among the most obvious evidence of a practical religion so tersely and so aptly epitomized in the cryptic words of Muhammad, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him, “Trust in God and tie your camel.” 

He gave us a religious system of normal action, not blind faith in the protection of an unseen force in spite of our own neglect, but confidence that if we do all things rightly and to the best of our ability, we may trust in what comes as the Will of God.

The broad minded tolerance of Islam for other religions recommends it to all lovers of liberty.  Muhammad admonished his followers to treat well the believers in the Old and New Testaments; Abraham, Moses and Jesus are acknowledged as co-prophets of the One God.  Surely this is generous and far in advance of the attitude of other religions.

The total freedom from idolatry ... is a sign of the salubrious strength and purity of the Muslim faith.

The original teachings of the Prophet of God have not been engulfed in the maze of changes and additions of doctrinarians.  The Quran remains as it came to the corrupt polytheistic people of Muhammad’s time, changeless as the holy heart of Islam itself.

Moderation and temperance in all things, the keynotes of Islam, won my unqualified approbation.  The health of his people was cherished by the Prophet, who enjoined them to observe strict cleanliness and specified fasts and to subordinate carnal appetites ...

When I stood in the inspiring mosques of Istanbul, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, Algiers, Tangier, Fez and other cities, I was conscious of a powerful reaction to the potent uplift of Islam’s simple appeal to the sense of higher things, unaided by elaborate trappings, ornamentations, figures, pictures, music and ceremonial ritual.  The mosque is a place of quiet contemplation and self-effacement in the greater reality of the One God.

The democracy of Islam has always appealed to me.  Potentate and pauper have the same rights on the floor of the mosque, on their (foreheads) in humble worship.  There are no rented pews nor special reserved seats.

The Muslim accepts no man as a mediator between himself and his God.  He goes direct to the invisible source of creation and life, God, without reliance on saving formula of repentance of sins and belief in the power of a teacher to afford him salvation.

The universal brotherhood of Islam, regardless of race, politics, color or country, has been brought home to me most keenly many times in my life and this is another feature which drew me towards the Faith.

Charles Le Gai Eaton

I was born in Switzerland of British parents, a child of war.  At the time of my birth, the final peace treaty ending the first world war, the treaty with Turkey, was being signed close by in Lausanne.  The greatest tempest which had changed the face of the world had temporarily exhausted itself, but its effects were everywhere apparent.  Old certainties and the morality based upon them had been dealt a mortal blow.  But my family background was stained with the blood of conflict.  My father already 67 when I was born, had been born during the wars against Napoleon Bonaparte.  Both had been soldiers ...

Even so, I might at least have had a homeland.  I had none.  Although born in Switzerland, I was not Swiss.  My mother had grown up in France and loved the French above all others, but I was not French.  Was I English? I never felt so.  My mother never tired of reminding me that the English were cold, stupid, and sexless without intellect and without culture.  I did not want to be like them.  So where-if anywhere-did I belong? It seems to me in retrospect, that this strange childhood was a good preparation for adherence to Islam.

Wherever he may have been born and whatever his race, the Muslim’s homeland is the Dar-ul-Islam, the House of Islam.  His passport, here and in the Hereafter, is the simple confession of Faith, La ilaha ill-Allah.  He does not expect - or should not expect - security or stability in this world and must always keep in mind the fact that death may take him tomorrow.  He has no firm roots here in this fragile earth.  His roots are above in that which alone endures.

But what of Christianity? If my father had any religious convictions he never expressed them, although - on his death bed, approaching 90 - he asked: ‘Is there a happy place?’ My upbringing was left entirely to my mother.  By temperament, she was not, I think, irreligious, but she had grown up within a religious framework, and she was hostile to what is commonly called organized religion.  Of one thing she was certain; her son must be left free to think for himself and never be forced to accept second-hand opinions.  She was determined to protect me from having religion ‘crammed down my throat’.

She warned a succession of nursemaids who came and went in the house and accompanied us to France during the holidays that, if they ever mentioned religion to me, they would at once be dismissed.  When I was five or six, however, her orders flouted by a young woman whose ambition it was to become a missionary in Arabia, saving the souls of those benighted people who were - she told me - lost in a pagan creed called ‘moslemism’.  This was the first I had heard of Arabia, and she drew me a map of that mysterious land.

One day she took me for a walk past Wandsworth Prison (we were living in Wandsworth Common at the time).  I must have misbehaved some way, for she gripped me roughly by the arm, pointed to the prison gates and said:

‘There’s a red haired man in the sky who will shut you in there if you’re naughty!’ This was the first I had heard of ‘God’, and I did not like what I heard.  For some reason I was afraid of men with red hair (as she must have known), and this particular one living above the clouds and dedicated to punishing naughty boys sounded very frightening.  I asked my mother about him as soon as we got home.  I do not remember what she said to comfort me, but the girl was promptly dismissed.

Eventually, much later than most children, I was sent to school or rather to a series of schools in England and in Switzerland before arriving, aged 14, at Charterhouse.  Surely, with services in the school chapel and classes in ‘Scripture’, Christianity should have made some impact upon me? It made no impact at all, either upon me or upon my school friends.  This does not seem to me surprising.  Religion cannot survive, whole and effective when it is confined to one single compartment of life and education.  Religion is either all or it is nothing; either it dwarfs all profane studies or it is dwarfed by them. 

Once or twice a week we were taught about the Bible just as we were instructed in other subjects in other classes.  Religion, it was assumed had nothing to do with the more important studies which formed the backbone of our education.  God did not interfere in historical events, He did not determine the phenomena we studied in science classes, He played no part in current events, and the world, governed entirely by chance, and by material forces, was to be understood without reference to anything that might -or might not -exist beyond its horizons.  God was surplus to requirements....

And yet I needed to know the meaning of my own existence.  Only those who, at some time in their lives, have been possessed by such a need can guess at its intensity, comparable to that of physical hunger or sexual desire.  I did not see how I could put one foot in front of the other unless I understood where I was going and why.  I could do nothing unless I understood what part my action played in the scheme of things.  All I knew I knew was that I knew nothing - nothing, that is to say, of the slightest importance - and I was paralyzed by my ignorance as though immobilized in a dense fog.

Where should I seek for knowledge? By the time I was 15, I had discovered that there was something called ‘philosophy’ and that the word meant ‘love of wisdom’.  Wisdom was what I sought, so the satisfaction of my need must lie hidden in these heavy books written by wise men.  With a feeling of intense excitement, like an explorer already in sight of the undiscovered land, I ploughed through Descartes, Kant, Hume, Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Bertrand Russell, or else read works which explained their teachings.  It was not long before I realized that something was wrong.  I might as well have been eating sand as seeking nourishment from this quarter.  These men knew nothing.  They were only speculating, spinning ideas out of their own poor heads, and anyone can speculate (including a school boy). 

How could a 15 or 16-year-old have had the impudence to dismiss the whole of Western secular philosophy as worthless? One does not have to be mature to distinguish between what the Quran calls dhann (‘opinion’) and true Knowledge.  At the same time my mother’s constant insistence that I should take no notice of what others thought or said obliged me to trust my own judgment.  Western culture treated these ‘philosophers’ as great men, and students in universities studied their works with respect.  But what was that to me?

Some time later, when I was in the sixth-form, a master who took a particular interest in me made a strange remark which I did not at understand.  ‘You are’, he said, ‘the only truly universal skeptic I have known’.  He was not referring specifically to religion.  He meant that I seemed to doubt everything that was taken for granted by everyone else.  I wanted to know why it should be assumed that our rational powers, so well adapted to finding food, shelter and a mate, had an application beyond the mundane realm. 

I was puzzled by the notion that the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ was supposed to be binding on those who were neither Jews nor Christians, and I was no less baffled as to why in a world full of beautiful women, the rule of monogamy should be thought to have a universal application.  I even doubted my own existence.  Long afterwards I came across the story of the Chinese sage, Chuangtzu, who, having dreamed one night that he was a butterfly, awoke to question whether he was in fact the man Chuangtzu, who had dreamed that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that it was Chuangtzu.  I understood his dilemma.

Yet, when my teacher made this remark, I had already discovered a key to what might be a more certain knowledge.  By chance - although there is no such thing as ‘chance’ – I had come across a book called ‘The Primordial Ocean’ by a certain Professor Perry, an Egyptologist.  The professor had a fixed idea that the ancient Egyptians had traveled to part of the world in their papyrus boats spreading their religion, mythology, far and wide.  To prove his case, he had spent many years researching ancient mythologies, and also the myths and symbols of ‘primitive’ peoples in our own time.  What he revealed was an astonishing unanimity of belief, however different the images in which that belief was expressed. 

He had not proved his theory about the papyrus boats; he had, I thought, proved something quite different.  It seemed that, behind the tapestry of forms and images, there were certain universal truths regarding the nature of reality, the creation of the world and of mankind, and the meaning of the human experience; truths which were as much a part as our blood and our bones.

One of the principal causes of unbelief in the modern world is the plurality of religions which appear mutually contradictory.  So long as the Europeans were convinced of their own racial superiority, they had no reason to doubt that Christianity was the only true Faith.  The notion that they were the crown of the ‘evolutionary process’ made it easy to assume that all other religions were no more than naive attempts to answer perennial questions.  It was when this racial self-confidence declined that doubts crept in.  How was it possible for a good God to allow the majority of human beings to live and die in the service of false religions?

Was it any longer possible for the Christian to believe that he alone was saved? Others made the same claim - Muslims, for example - so how could anyone be sure who was right and who was wrong? For many people, including myself until I came to Perry’s book, the obvious conclusion was that, since everyone could not be right, everyone must be wrong.  Religion was an illusion, the product of wishful thinking. 

Others might have found it possible to substitute ‘scientific truth’ for religious ‘myths’.  I could not, since science was founded upon assumptions regarding the infallibility of reason and the reality of sense experience which could never be proved.

When I read Perry’s book I knew nothing of the Quran.  That came much later, and what little I had heard of Islam was distorted by prejudices accumulated during a thousand years of confrontation.  And yet, had I but known it, I had already taken a step in the direction of Christianity’s great rival.  The Quran assures us that no people on earth was ever left without divine guidance and a doctrine of truth, conveyed through a messenger of God who always spoke to the people in their own ‘language’, therefore in terms of their particular circumstances and according to their needs. 

The fact that such messages become distorted in the course of time goes without saying, and no one should be surprised if truth is distorted as it passes from generation to generation, but it would be astonishing if no vestiges remained after the passage of the centuries.  It now seems to me entirely in accordance with Islam to believe that these vestiges, clothed in myth and symbol (the ‘language’ of the people of earlier times), are directly descended from revealed Truth and confirm the final Message.

From Charterhouse I went on to Cambridge, where I neglected my official studies, which seemed trivial and boring, in favor of the only study that mattered.  The year was 1939.  War had broken out just before I had gone up to the University and, in two years time, I would be in the army.  It seemed likely, after all, that the Germans would succeed in killing me as I had always thought they would.  I had only a little time in which to find answers to the questions which still obsessed me, but this did not draw me to any organized religion. 

Like most of my friends, I was contemptuous of the Churches and of all who paid lip-service to a God they did not know; but I was soon obliged to moderate this hostility.  I remember the scene clearly after more than half-a-century.  A few of us lingered on, drinking coffee, after the evening meal in the Hall of King’s College.  The conversation turned to religion.  At the head of the table sat an undergraduate who was universally admired for his brilliance, his wit and his sophistication.  Hoping to impress him and taking advantage of a brief silence, I said:

‘No intelligent person nowadays believes in the God of religion!’ He looked at me rather sadly before answering: ‘On the contrary, nowadays intelligent people are the only ones who do believe in God,’ I would willingly have sunk out of sight under the table.

I had, however, a wise friend, a man forty years my senior, whom I found totally convincing.  This was the writer L. H.  Myers, described at that time as ‘the only philosophical novelist England has produced’.  Not only did his major work, ‘The Root and the Flower’, answer many of these questions that gnawed at me, but they conveyed a marvelous sense of serenity united with compassion. 

It seemed to me that serenity was the greatest treasure that one could possess in this life and that compassion was the greatest virtue.  Here, surely, was a man whom no tempest shake and who surveyed the turmoil of human existence with the eye of wisdom.  I wrote to him, and he replied promptly.  For the next three years we wrote to each other at least twice every month.  I poured my heart out to him, while he, convinced that he had at last found in this young admirer someone who truly understood him, replied in the same vein.  Eventually we met, and this cemented our friendship.

Yet everything was not as it seemed.  I began to detect in his letters a note of inner torment, sadness and disillusionment.  When I asked him if he put all his serenity into his books, leaving nothing for himself, he replied:

‘I think your comment was shrewd and probably true’.  He had given his whole life to the pursuit of pleasure and of ‘experiences’ (both sublime and sordid, so he said).  Few women, in high society or low, had been able to resist his astonishing combination of wealth, charm and good look, He, for his part, had no reason to resist their seductions.  Fascinated by spirituality and mysticism, he adhered to no religion and obeyed no conventional moral law.  Now he felt that he was growing old, and he could not face the prospect.  He had tried to change himself and even repent his past, but it was too late.  Little more than three years after our correspondence had begun, he committed suicide.

My affection for him endured and, in due course, I named my eldest son after him, but Leo Myers’ death taught me more than I could ever learned from his books, although it required some years for me to understand its full significance.  His wisdom had been only in his head.  It had never penetrated his human substance. 

A man might spend a life reading spiritual books and studying the writings of the great mystics.  He might feel that he had penetrated the secrets of the heavens and the earth, but unless this knowledge was incorporated into his very nature and transformed him, it was sterile.  I began to suspect that a simple man of faith, praying to God with little understanding but with a full heart, might be worth more than the most learned student of the spiritual sciences.

Myers had been profoundly influenced by a study of Hindu Vedanta, the metaphysical doctrine at the core of Hinduism.  My mother’s interest Raja Yoga had already pointed me in this direction.  Vedanta now became my principal interest and, ultimately, the path that led me to Islam.  This would seem shocking to most Muslims and astonishing to anyone who is aware that the very basis of Islam is an uncompromising condemnation of idolatry, and yet my case is by no means unique. 

Whatever may be the beliefs of the Hindu masses, Vedanta is a doctrine of pure unity, of the unique Reality, and therefore of what, in Islam, is called Tawheed.  Muslims more than others, should have little difficulty in understanding that a doctrine of Unity underlies all the religions which have nourished mankind since the beginning, whatever idolatrous illusions may have overlaid ‘the jewel in the lotus’ just as, in the individual, personal idolatry overlays the heart’s core.  How could it be otherwise, since Tawheed is Truth and, in the words of a great Christian mystic, ‘Truth is native to man’?

All too soon my time at Cambridge was ended and I was sent to The Royal Military College, Sandhurst, emerging after five months as a young officer supposedly ready to kill or be killed.  To learn more about the arts of war I was then dispatched on what was called ‘attachment’ to a regiment in the north of Scotland.  Here I was left to my own devices and occupied my time either reading or walking on the granite cliffs above the raging northern sea. 

This was a stormy place, but I felt at peace as I had never done before.  The more I read of Vedanta and also of the ancient Chinese doctrine of Taoism, the more certain I was that I at last had some understanding of the nature of things and had glimpsed, if only in thought and imagination, the ultimate Reality beside which all else was little more than a dream.  As yet I was not prepared to call this Reality ‘God’, let alone Allah.

When I left the army I began to write, needing to express my thoughts as a way of putting them in order.  I wrote about Vedanta, Taoism and Zen Buddhism, but also about certain Western writers (including Leo Myers) who had been influenced by these doctrines.  Through a chance meeting with the poet T. S. Eliot, who was at that time head of a publishing firm, these essays were published under the title ‘The Richest Vein’, a quotation taken from Thoreau:

‘My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snouts or forepaws, and with it I would burrow my way through these hills.  I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabout…’ But by now I had a new guide through the hills.  I had discovered Rene Guenon, a Frenchman who had lived the greater part of his life in Cairo as the Sheikh Abdul Wahed.

Guenon undermined and then; with uncompromising intellectual rigor, demolished all the assumptions taken for granted by modern man, that is to say Western or westernized man.  Many others had been critical of the direction taken by European civilization since the so-called ‘Renaissance’, but none had dared to be as radical as he was or to re-assert with such force the principles and values which Western culture had consigned to the rubbish tip of history.  His theme was the ‘primordial tradition’ or Sofia perennis, expressed-so he maintained-both in ancient mythologies and in the metaphysical doctrine at the root of the great religions. 

The language of this Tradition was the language of symbolism, and he had no equal in his interpretation of this symbolism.  Moreover he turned the idea of human progress upside down, replacing it with the belief almost universal before the modern age, that humanity declines in spiritual excellence with the passage of time and that we are now in the Dark Age which precedes the End, an age in which all the possibilities rejected by earlier cultures have been spewed out into the world, quantity replaces quality and decadence approaches its final limit.  No one who read him and understood him could ever be quite the same again.

Like others whose outlook had been transformed by reading Guenon, I was now a stranger in the world of the twentieth century.  He had been led by the logic of his convictions to accept Islam, the final Revelation and, as it were, the summing up of all that came before.  I was not yet ready for this, but I soon learned to conceal my opinions or at least to veil them. 

No one can live happily in constant disagreement with his fellow men and women, nor can he engage in argument with them since he does not share their basic, unspoken assumptions.  Argument and discussion pre-supposes some common ground shared by those involved.  When no common ground exists, confusion and misunderstanding are unavoidable, if not anger.  The beliefs which are the very basis of contemporary culture are held no less passionately than unquestioning religious faith, as was illustrated during the conflict over Salman Rushdie’s novel, ‘The Satanic Verses’.

Occasionally I forgot my resolve not to become involved in fruitless argument.  Some years ago I was a guest at a diplomatic dinner party in Trinidad.  The young woman beside me was talking with a Christian Minister, an Englishman, seated opposite.  I was only half attending to their conversation when I heard her say that she was not sure she believed in human progress.  The Minister answered her so rudely and with such contempt that I could not resist the temptation to say:

‘She’s quite right - there’s no such thing as progress!’ He turned on me, his face contorted with fury, and said: ‘If I thought that I would commit suicide this very night!’ Since suicide is as great a sin for Christians as it is for Muslims, I understood for the first time the extent to which faith in progress, in a ‘better future’ and, by implication, in the possibility of a paradise on earth has replaced faith in God and in the hereafter.  In the writings of the renegade priest Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity itself was reduced to a religion of progress.  Deprive the modern Westerner of this faith and he is lost in a wilderness without signposts.

By the time ‘The Richest Vein’ was published, I had left England for Jamaica where I had a school friend who would, I knew, find me work of some kind.  I had been described on the book’s cover as ‘a mature thinker’.  The adjective ‘mature’ was singularly inappropriate: as a man, as a personality, I had barely emerged from adolescence, and Jamaica was an ideal place to work out adolescent fantasies.  Only those with some experience of West Indian life in the immediate post war years could understand the delights and temptations which it offered to those seeking ‘experience’ and sexual adventure.  Like Myers, I had no moral print such as might have restrained me. 

I was embarrassed when I began to receive letters from people who had read my book and imagined that I was an old man –‘with a long white beard’, as one of them wrote - full of wisdom and compassion.  I wished I could disillusion them as quickly as possible and be rid of the responsibility they were putting upon me.  One day a Catholic priest arrived in the Island to stay with friends; he had, he told them, just been reading a ‘fascinating book’ by someone called Gai Eaton.  He was astonished to hear that the author was actually in Jamaica and asked how he could meet me.  His friends took him to a party at which they were told I might be found.  He was introduced and, seeing before him such a foolish young man, gave me a long hard look.  Then he shook his head in amazement and said quietly: ‘You couldn’t have written that book!’

He was right, and I faced, as I had done in Leo Myers’ case and have done on many occasions since then, the extraordinary contradictions in human nature and, above all, the gulf that often separates the writer setting down his ideas on paper from the same man in his personal life.  Whereas the aim in Islam is to achieve a perfect balance between different elements in the personality so that they work harmoniously together, point in the same direction and follow the same straight path, it is common enough in the West to find people who are completely unbalanced, having developed one side of themselves at the expense of all the others.  I have sometimes wondered whether writing or speaking about wisdom may not be a substitute for achieving it. 

This is not exactly a case of hypocrisy (although the saying, ‘Physician, heal thyself!’ applies) since such people are entirely sincere in what they write or say, indeed this may express what is best in them; but they cannot live up to it.

After two and a half years I returned to England for family reasons.  Among those who had written to me after reading my book were two men deeply versed in Guenon’s writings who had followed him into Islam...  I met them. 

They told me that I might find what I was obviously seeking, not in India or China but closer to home and within the Abrahamic tradition...  They asked when I intended to start practicing what I preached and seek a ‘spiritual path’. 

It was time, they suggested gently but firmly, for me to think about incorporating into my own life what I already knew theoretically.  I answered politely but evasively, having no intention of following their advice until I was much older and had exhausted the possibilities of worldly adventure.  I did however begin to read about Islam with growing interest.

This interest aroused the disapproval of my closest friend who had been working in the Middle East and had developed a strong prejudice against Islam.  The notion that this harsh religion had a spiritual dimension seemed to him absurd.  It was, he assured me, nothing more than outward formalism, blind obedience to irrational prohibitions, repetitive prayers, narrow bigotry and hypocrisy.  He told me stories of Muslim practices which, he thought, would convince me. 

I remember in particular the case he mentioned of a young woman dying painfully in hospital who had summoned the strength to get to her feet and move her iron bedstead so that she could die facing Mecca.  My friend was sickened by the thought that she had added to her own suffering for the sake of a ‘stupid superstition’.  To me, on the contrary, this seemed a wonderful story.  I marveled at this young woman’s faith, distant as it was from any state of mind that I could imagine.

Meanwhile, I could not find work and was living in poverty.  I applied for almost every job that I saw advertised, including the post of Assistant Lecturer in English Literature at Cairo University.  This was foolish or so I thought.  I had taken my degree at Cambridge in History and knew nothing of literature before the nineteenth century.  How could they consider employing someone so unqualified? But they did consider it and then employed me.  In October of 1950, at the age of 29, I set off for Cairo the very moment when my interest in Islam was taking root.

Among my colleagues was an English Muslim, Martin Lings, who made his home in Egypt.  He was a friend of Guenon, a friend also of the two men with whom I had talked in London, and he was unlike any I had ever met before.  He was the living embodiment of what, until then, had been no more than theories in my mind, and I knew that I had finally met someone who was all of a piece, whole and consistent.  He lived in a traditional home just outside the city and to visit him and his wife, as I did almost every week, was to step out of the noisy bustle of modern Cairo and enter a timeless refuge in which the inward and the outward were undivided and in which the supposed realities of the world to which I was accustomed had but a shadowy existence.

I needed a refuge.  I had fallen in love with Jamaica, if it is possible to fall in love with a place, and I hated Egypt simply because it was not Jamaica.  Where were my Blue Mountains, my tropical sea, my beautiful West Indian girls? How could I ever have left the only place that had ever felt like home to me? But that was not all, far from it; I had left not only a place also a person, a young woman without whom life now seemed empty and hardly worth living.  I learned then what the word ‘obsession’ really means; a painful lesson but a useful one for those who try to understand themselves and others. 

Nothing in my previous life had any value; the reality was my need for the one person who occupied my thoughts morning to night and stepped into my dreams.  When, in the course of my duties, I read love poetry aloud to my students, tears ran down my cheeks and they told each other: ‘Here is an Englishman with a heart.  We thought all Englishmen were cold as ice!’

These students, particularly a small senior group of five or six, were also a refuge.  I might hate Egypt for being 8,000 miles from where I wanted to be, but I loved these young Egyptians.  I rejoiced in their warmth, openness and the trust they placed in me to teach them what they needed to know; and soon I began to love their faith, for these young people were good Muslims.  I had no more doubts.  If I ever found it possible to commit myself to a religion - to imprison myself in a religion - this could only be Islam.  But not yet! I thought of St. Augustine’s prayer:

‘Lord, make me chaste, but not yet’, knowing that throughout the ages other young men, thinking that they had an ocean of time before them, had prayed for chastity or piety or a better way of life, but with the same reservation; and many had been taken by death in this same state.

All things being equal, I might never have overcome my hesitations.  Intending eventually to accept Islam, I might have postponed the decisive act year after year and still been saying ‘Not yet!’ when age crept up me. 

But all things were not equal.  The longing for Jamaica and for that person grew instead of diminishing as the months passed, as though feeding upon itself.  I awoke one morning to the realization that only lack of money prevented me from returning to the Island.  I made enquiries and found that, if I traveled on the deck of a steamer, I could make the journey for £70.  I was sure I could save this sum by the end of the university term, and my life was at once transformed. 

Knowing that escape was close, I could even begin to enjoy Cairo.  But one question now demanded a firm answer, and the answer could no longer be postponed.  The opportunity to enter Islam might never come again.  Before me was an open door.  I thought that, if I did not walk through it, that door might close forever.  Yet I knew what kind of life I would be living in Jamaica and doubted whether I would have the strength of character to live as a Muslim in that environment.

I made a decision that must, with good reason, seem shocking to most people, and not only to my fellow Muslims.  I decided-as I put it to myself -to ‘sow a seed’ in my heart, to accept Islam at once in the hope that the seed would one day germinate and grow into a healthy plant.  I will offer no excuses for this, and I would blame no one for accusing me of insincerity and a false intention. 

But it is possible that they may be underestimating God’s readiness to forgive human weakness and His power to bring forth plant and fruit from a seed sown in barren ground.  In any case, I was under a kind of compulsion and knew what I had to do.  I went to Martin Lings, poured out my story and asked him to give me the Shahadah, in other words to accept my Testimony of Faith.  Although hesitant at first, he did so.  Full of fear and yet joyful, I prayed for the first time in my life. 

Next day, for this was Ramadan, I fasted, something that I could never have imagined myself doing.  Soon afterwards I told my senior students the news and their delight was like a warm embrace.  I had thought previously that I was close to them, but now I understood that there had always been a barrier between us.  Now the barrier was down, and I was accepted as their brother. 

In the six weeks that remained before my secret departure (I had not told my Head of Department that I was leaving) one of them came every day to teach me Quran.  I looked at my reflection in the mirror.  The face was the same, but it masked a different person.  I was a Muslim! Still in a state of amazement I boarded ship in Alexandria and sailed away to an uncertain future