My
journey to Islam began twelve years ago, and about eight months after
the beginning of this beautiful journey I found my true way in life by
entering the blessed religion of Islam, alhamdulillah.
Having lived
the difficulties of a convert and having seen a lot of other new
converts or people who desire to convert to Islam, I thought
about writing down my story, with the purpose of making it somehow
easier for the brothers and sisters in humanity who wish to accept Islam
as their way of life.
My Previous Life
About my
religious upbringing there is not much to say. My parents were average
Italian Catholics, not very religious, who sent me to the religion
lessons in the church every Wednesday afternoon, just because all the
other families did the same. But the thought of God had not much
influence in our home: my parents never told us a word about life after
death, or about the necessity to have faith in God. They just gave me
very good moral values, derived from a secularized contest.
That’s why, when I decided to leave the religion lessons, and later
decided not to go to the church anymore; my parents didn’t have anything
to say. So, since I was fourteen, I lived without thinking of God, even
if I don’t remember having explicitly denied the very existence of a
Creator.
Anyway, even if I could live without faith in God, I
could not live without asking myself what purpose my life had. I was
very concerned with the injustice in the world and I looked for a
possible theory that could help the world to be a better place. When I
studied Marx’s theories in high school I thought that could be the
solution to most of the world’s problems, and I was convinced just for a
while, that all the injustice has been derived from disparity in
wealth, and all the spiritual phenomena were no more than consequences
of the material condition.
But my life as a materialist
couldn’t last long. Towards the end of high school some deep problems
affected me, I felt it was my soul that lacked something, and this
didn’t have anything to do with the material conditions of my life,
which were very good.
Searching for the Meaning of Life
Asking for a sense of life I decided to study philosophy at the
university. It was a big shock for my parents. I finished the scientific
high school with very good results and I could be admitted to every
faculty I wished. So they wanted me to study something that could assure
me a good job for my future, something like medicine or engineering.
But I was tormented by the questions about the meaning of the universe;
human beings, life and death, and I decided that just studying
philosophy I could find some answers.
If I thought I could find
much ‘‘intellectual food’’ at the faculty of philosophy, then I was
wrong. Most of the students there had decided to study philosophy just
because they thought it was the easiest, or one of the easiest, between
the many faculties.
And the students who really tried to answer
“philosophical” questions were soon kept in an atmosphere of false
intellectualism, that was no more than showing off how much knowledge
about literature, music, films, figurative arts, and wearing
“alternative” clothes to be different from the good kids of the middle
class. Since my personality wasn’t very strong at the time, and I didn’t
have the courage to make a “really” alternative choice, I adapted
myself to that atmosphere.
Of course I was not happy and I
didn’t like my life, but sometimes I came to the extent to think that
nobody is really happy, and especially the most intelligent and
sensitive people had to be sad. I can say that during the five years of
my studies I met many people, but just one girl became a real friend
(and she’s the only one with whom I still have contacts). One special
thing in this girl is that she wasn’t afraid or ashamed to tell she was a
believing Christian, and I thought she should have courage, assuming
the prevailing atheistic contest of the faculty of philosophy.
The only thing that made me really happy was traveling, and I traveled
much indeed, despite the little money I had in my pockets. That’s why I
couldn’t miss the possibility to spend a study-year abroad. I worked
very hard because a lot of students wished the same and the number of
places was limited. With the help of God I got a place for 6 months in
Germany. Many “errors” occurred in the selection of the city and
dormitory where I was going to stay: now I know they were no errors, no
tricks of a blind casualty, but just the will of God.
Making the Change
My perspective of life changed with my new condition, especially
because I had the fortune to live in a dormitory where not many European
students lived. Some of them came from poor countries and they had to
work to support their studies, and some had to send some money to their
families abroad. This changed my perspective of life, and I started
thinking that much of my “spiritual” problems derived from the fact that
my life was very easy and I didn’t have many material needs, so I had
to make it difficult somehow with other burdens.
It was during
the first months in Germany that I came nearer to God. As I mentioned, I
never denied His existence, but I thought of Him like an original power
who “created” the universe (anyway without a “will” similar to the
human one) and constantly maintained it, and maybe one day everything
would collapse in Him again. Yes, I knew there is law and order among
all the units that comprises this universe.
Everything is
assigned to a place in a grand scheme, which is working in a magnificent
and superb way. I admired the whole “project”, but of course I couldn’t
pray to this “physical” God, no more than I could pray to gravity
force. He was too great and too abstract in my conception and I found it
stupid to think that He could listen to us, or judge us, or fulfill our
wishes if we pray to Him.
Then I became friends with a girl
who attended the functions in the Catholic Church of the city we were
living. I started going to the church with her with the purpose of
improving my German by learning new words, which actually I could listen
just in the church. Anyway I started liking attending the Mass?
Because it reminded me of my childhood, and because yes, I started
thinking of the meaning of praying and having a close relationship with
God, who maybe wasn’t just an absent power like I figured it to myself.
Anyway I found the Catholic ritual like a sort of big theater, maybe
beautiful to see, but superfluous to a true adoration of God.
If my Creator was so near to me, why did I need so many things to
communicate with Him; like a priest, a statue of Jesus, the ceremony of
the holy bread and wine, the remission of the sins by a human being like
me, who committed sins as well and then the music, the pictures…?
In the same period I came close to a Muslim man who was living in my
same dormitory. I found him very intelligent and I liked discussing with
him; in fact, we could talk for hours and hours without getting tired,
even if German wasn’t our native language. Our discussions were not only
about religion, but it was an important part of it. I must admit that,
although at the university I had learned so much about Christianity and
western philosophy, I had almost no knowledge about Islam.
I
had learned something about Avicenna and Averroes, anyway just as
commentators of Aristotle; I realized my education was very Eurocentric,
and the philosophical theories, which had often their roots in
Christianity, were just a limited possibility of the human thought, even
if they were presented to us as “universal”, or “human” in general.
I learned the basic points of Islam, and the differences between Islam
and Christianity: from the very beginning I realized that the absolute
Oneness of God made more sense to me than the Trinity of God, the pure
human nature of Jesus was more logic that the “double” one and the
absence of priesthood, Church hierarchy and Pope was absolutely in
accordance with my own ideas about religion. Once the absolute Unity of
God without any partner or plurality in his essence is admitted, the
other points can easily be settled.
The Trinitarian branch of
the Christian school had exhausted all the brains of its saints and
philosophers to define the essence and the person of the deity. And what
have they invented? Athanasius, Augustinus and St. Thomas Aquinas,
“fathers of the church”, have stated the unity and trinity of God’s
essence as a dogma, a dogma which cannot be understood by reason and, at
the same time, is like a puzzle and paradox for our understanding.
Anyway, when I spoke with him, I always tried to defend the Christian
dogmas, not because I was really convinced of them, but because I was
used to the dialectical contraposition in dialogue and I couldn’t accept
so easily that he “won” almost always, through his simple, direct,
logical arguments.
Even if I didn’t admit it, it was the
influence of Islam on every action, even the smallest one, that
impressed me most of all. I understood Islam to be a practical religion.
Achievement of purity is through action. Good behavior, avoiding bad
actions, and being strong and assertive in making correct choices is the
practical way to self-development. So easy, so beautiful.
Another important point was the perfect balance between the material and the spiritual side of life.
In my opinion the exaggerated asceticism of some currents of
Christianity was against human nature, but even excessive hedonism or
materialism cannot fulfill the needs of our soul. My Muslim friend
explained to me that, through Islam, we should renounce materialism and
give priority to the afterlife, since the Hereafter is better than the
material world. But, at the same time, we are not asked to withdraw from
life and to make no contribution to the building of a material
civilization. Neither does it mean refusing to enjoy the bounties that
God put on earth for the benefit of humans. It simply means belittling
materialism and having a correct relation to material goods as things to
be used by humans in the fulfillment of their duties to God and not as
masters who control human behavior.
One evening I heard my
neighbor reciting the Quran: a sort of irresistible power drove me to
his door, and I stood there and listened to those words, which I cannot
understand, but had so much power on me. My emotions were very strong,
and I remember having written an e-mail to a close friend of mine to
narrate to her the fact of the previous night as very important to me,
even if I could not understand the real meaning of it.
When I
went back to Italy, I was sad and bored of my “old” life. I started
reading everything that I could find about Islam. The first books that I
could get were all written by non-Muslims and dealt just with the
material history of Islam and Islamic countries. The only book which was
really interesting had been given to me in Germany; its topic was the
relationship between the Old and the New Testament and the Quran. The
author was a very well-educated Christian scholar, who had become a
Muslim after having studied for many years the Bible and the Gospels in
their original language.
This book left me no doubts about the
divine origin of the Quran, and I felt I had just one step more to do,
the most important one: reading it! Actually I should have done it
first, but maybe it was good to read it after having gained some general
knowledge about it. On a hot day in June 2002 I visited a friend in the
beautiful medieval town of Bologna, and during the afternoon we looked
for some refreshment in a bookshop.
There I found an Italian
translation of the Quran, translated by an Italian journalist who had
converted to Islam many years before. I didn’t know there were Italians
who converted to Islam and I was very surprised. I bought the Quran and I
sat on a bench in a park, practically ignoring my friend… it was not
very polite, but I was so captured from those words, that I couldn’t
stop reading. My friend read a couple of pages and was fascinated as
well. Then I read the Surat An-Nur, the Light, and the famous “verse of
the Light”:
(Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth.
The Parable of His Light is as if there were a Niche and within it a
Lamp: the Lamp enclosed in Glass: the glass as it were a brilliant star:
Lit from a blessed Tree, an Olive, neither of the east nor of the west,
whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it: Light
upon Light! Allah doth guide whom He will to His Light: And Allah
speaketh to mankind in allegories: and Allah doth know all things)
(An-Nur 24:35).
Well, I had no doubt that God couldn’t have
described Himself in a more appropriate way than “Light upon Light”, and
the allegory came from God. I can individuate that moment as the one in
which I was really convinced of the truth of Islam.
More than
twelve years after that moment, I cannot say that “my journey to Islam”
has reached an end: indeed, I wish to learn more and more till the end
of my days, inshaAllah. The acceptance of Islam changed many things in
my life, all in a positive way. Of course I have had some difficulties
with my parents, and I still have most of all as I decided to wear
hijab. But I’ll not give it up, because I feel it as a blessing from God
to women, to protect their dignity and their honor, and now I couldn’t
live without it.
My family also has problems with my
husband—the same, wonderful man, who introduced me to Islam. For the
first time; I cannot stop thanking God for having given him to me, and I
hope and pray that one day my parents will accept him and all the
beautiful things of my new way of life.
Sometimes I ask myself
how my condition was before submitting myself to the One God. I think I
was already submitted to Him, like every other part of the universe, I
just needed to recognize it. This universe and all the created beings in
it are in thrall to God, whether by choice or by force. Even though my
mind was alienated from my Lord and failed to worship Him, the atoms of
my body and everything in me were worshipping Him and glorifying Him,
like everything else in the world:
(The seven heavens and the
earth and all that is therein, glorify Him and there is not a thing but
glorifies His Praise. But you understand not their glorification. Truly,
He is Ever Forbearing, Oft Forgiving) (Al-Israa’ 17:44).
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