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A CHRISTIAN MINISTER’S CONVERSION TO ISLAM © 2002 (Abu
Yahya) Jerald F. Dirks, M.Div., Psy.D. One of my earliest childhood memories is of
hearing the church bell toll for Sunday morning worship in the small, rural
town in which I was raised. The In that rural setting from the1950 s, the three
churches in the town of about 500 were the center of community life.
The local By my junior high school days, the local By age17 , when I began my freshman year at That spring, Harvard named me a Hollis Scholar,
signifying that I was one of the top pre-theology students in the
college. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Harvard,
I worked as a youth minister at a fairly large
Seen from the
outside, I was a very promising young minister, who had received an excellent
education, drew large crowds to the Sunday morning worship service, and had
been successful at every stop along the ministerial path. However, seen
from the inside, I was fighting a constant war to maintain my personal
integrity in the face of my ministerial responsibilities. This war was
far removed from the ones presumably fought by some later televangelists in
unsuccessfully trying to maintain personal sexual morality. Likewise,
it was a far different war than those fought by the headline-grabbing
pedophilic priests of the current moment. However, my struggle to
maintain personal integrity may be the most common one encountered by the
better-educated members of the ministry.
There is some
irony in the fact that the supposedly best, brightest, and most idealistic of
ministers-to-be are selected for the very best of seminary education, e.g.
that offered at that time at the
As such, it
is no real wonder that almost a majority of such seminary graduates leave
seminary, not to “fill pulpits”, where they would be asked to preach that
which they know is not true, but to enter the various counseling
professions. Such was also the case for me, as I went on to earn a
master’s and doctorate in clinical psychology. I continued to call
myself a Christian, because that was a needed bit of self-identity, and
because I was, after all, an ordained minister, even though my full time job
was as a mental health professional. However, my seminary education had
taken care of any belief I might have had regarding a triune godhead or the
divinity of Jesus, peace be upon him. (Polls regularly reveal that
ministers are less likely to believe these and other dogmas of the church
than are the laity they serve, with ministers more likely to understand such
terms as “son of God” metaphorically, while their parishioners understand it
literally.) I thus became a “Christmas and Easter Christian”, attending
church very sporadically, and then gritting my teeth and biting my tongue as
I listened to sermons espousing that which I knew was not the case.
None of the
above should be taken to imply that I was any less religious or spiritually
oriented than I had once been. I prayed regularly, my belief in a
supreme deity remained solid and secure, and I conducted my personal life in
line with the ethics I had once been taught in church and Sunday
school. I simply knew better than to buy into the man-made dogmas and
articles of faith of the organized church, which were so heavily laden with
the pagan influences, polytheistic notions, and geo-political considerations
of a bygone era.
As the years
passed by, I became increasingly concerned about the loss of religiousness in
American society at large. Religiousness is a living, breathing
spirituality and morality within individuals, and should not be confused with
religiosity, which is concerned with the rites, rituals, and formalized
creeds of some organized entity, e.g. the church. American culture
increasingly appeared to have lost its moral and religious compass. Two
out of every three marriages ended in divorce; violence was becoming an
increasingly inherent part of our schools and our roads; self-responsibility
was on the wane; self-discipline was being submerged by a “if it feels good,
do it” morality; various Christian leaders and institutions were being
swamped by sexual and financial scandals; and emotions justified behavior,
however odious it might be. American culture was becoming a morally
bankrupt institution, and I was feeling quite alone in my personal religious
vigil.
It was at
this juncture that I began to come into contact with the local Muslim
community. For some years before, my wife and I had been actively
involved in doing research on the history of the Arabian horse.
Eventually, in order to secure translations of various Arabic documents, this
research brought us into contact with Arab Americans who happened to be
Muslims. Our first such contact was with Jamal in the summer of1991 .
After an
initial telephone conversation, Jamal visited our home, and offered to do
some translations for us, and to help guide us through the history of the
Arabian horse in the
Over the next 16 months, contact with Jamal slowly increased in
frequency, until it was occurring on a biweekly to weekly basis. During
these visits, Jamal never preached to me about Islam, never questioned me
about my own religious beliefs or convictions, and never verbally suggested
that I become a Muslim. However, I was beginning to learn a lot.
First, there was the constant behavioral example of Jamal observing his scheduled
prayers. Second, there was the behavioral example of how Jamal
conducted his daily life in a highly moral and ethical manner, both in his
business world and in his social world. Third, there was the behavioral
example of how Jamal interacted with his two children. For my wife,
Jamal’s wife provided a similar example. Fourth, always within the
framework of helping me to understand Arabian horse history in the Middle
East, Jamal began to share with me: 1 ) stories from Arab and Islamic
history;2 ) sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him; and3 )
Qur’anic verses and their contextual meaning. In point of fact, our
every visit now included at least a 30 minute conversation centered on some
aspect of Islam, but always presented in terms of helping me intellectually
understand the Islamic context of Arabian horse history. I was never
told “this is the way things are”, I was merely told “this is what Muslims
typically believe”. Since I wasn’t being “preached to”, and since Jamal
never inquired as to my own beliefs, I didn’t need to bother attempting to
justify my own position. It was all handled as an intellectual
exercise, not as proselytizing. Gradually, Jamal began to introduce us to other
Arab families in the local Muslim community. There was Wa’el and his
family, Khalid and his family, and a few others. Consistently, I
observed individuals and families who were living their lives on a much
higher ethical plane than the American society in which we were all
embedded. Maybe there was something to the practice of Islam that I had
missed during my collegiate and seminary days.
By
December,1992 , I was beginning to ask myself some serious questions about
where I was and what I was doing. These questions were prompted by the
following considerations. 1 ) Over the course of the prior16 months, our
social life had become increasingly centered on the Arab component of the
local Muslim community. By December, probably75 % of our social life
was being spent with Arab Muslims. 2 ) By virtue of my seminary training
and education, I knew how badly the Bible had been corrupted (and
often knew exactly when, where, and why), I had no belief in any triune
godhead, and I had no belief in anything more than a metaphorical “sonship”
of Jesus, peace be upon him. In short, while I certainly believed in
God, I was as strict a monotheist as my Muslim friends. 3 ) My personal
values and sense of morality were much more in keeping with my Muslim friends
than with the “Christian” society around me. After all, I had the
non-confrontational examples of Jamal, Khalid, and Wa’el as
illustrations. In short, my nostalgic yearning for the type of
community in which I had been raised was finding gratification in the Muslim
community. American society might be morally bankrupt, but that did not
appear to be the case for that part of the Muslim community with which I had
had contact. Marriages were stable, spouses were committed to each
other, and honesty, integrity, self-responsibility, and family values were emphasized.
My wife and I had attempted to live our lives that same way, but for several
years I had felt that we were doing so in the context of a moral
vacuum. The Muslim community appeared to be different.
The different threads
were being woven together into a single strand. Arabian horses, my
childhood upbringing, my foray into the Christian ministry and my seminary
education, my nostalgic yearnings for a moral society, and my contact with
the Muslim community were becoming intricately intertwined. My self-questioning
came to a head when I finally got around to asking myself exactly what
separated me from the beliefs of my Muslim friends. I suppose that I
could have raised that question with Jamal or with Khalid, but I wasn’t ready
to take that step. I had never discussed my own religious beliefs with
them, and I didn’t think that I wanted to introduce that topic of
conversation into our friendship. As such, I began to pull off the
bookshelf all the books on Islam that I had acquired in my collegiate and
seminary days. However far my own beliefs were from the traditional
position of the church, and however seldom I actually attended church, I
still identified myself as being a Christian, and so I turned to the works of
Western scholars. That month of December, I read half a dozen or so
books on Islam by Western scholars, including one biography of the Prophet
Muhammad, peace be upon him. Further, I began to read two different
English translations of the meaning of the Qur’an. I never spoke
to my Muslim friends about this personal quest of self-discovery. I
never mentioned what types of books I was reading, nor ever spoke about why I
was reading these books. However, occasionally I would run a very
circumscribed question past one of them.
While I never spoke to
my Muslim friends about those books, my wife and I had numerous conversations
about what I was reading. By the last week of December of1992 , I was
forced to admit to myself, that I could find no area of substantial
disagreement between my own religious beliefs and the general tenets of
Islam. While I was ready to acknowledge that Muhammad, peace be upon
him, was a prophet of (one who spoke for or under the inspiration of) God,
and while I had absolutely no difficulty affirming that there was no god
besides God/Allah, glorified and exalted is He, I was still hesitating to
make any decision. I could readily admit to myself that I had far more
in common with Islamic beliefs as I then understood them, than I did with the
traditional Christianity of the organized church. I knew only too well
that I could easily confirm from my seminary training and education most of
what the Qur’an had to say about Christianity, the Bible, and
Jesus, peace be upon him. Nonetheless, I hesitated. Further, I rationalized
my hesitation by maintaining to myself that I really didn’t know the
nitty-gritty details of Islam, and that my areas of agreement were confined
to general concepts. As such, I continued to read, and then to re-read.
One’s sense of
identity, of who one is, is a powerful affirmation of one’s own position in
the cosmos. In my professional practice, I had occasionally been called
upon to treat certain addictive disorders, ranging from smoking, to
alcoholism, to drug abuse. As a clinician, I knew that the basic
physical addiction had to be overcome to create the initial abstinence.
That was the easy part of treatment. As Mark Twain once said:
“Quitting smoking is easy; I’ve done it hundreds of times”. However, I
also knew that the key to maintaining that abstinence over an extended time
period was overcoming the client’s psychological addiction, which was heavily
grounded in the client’s basic sense of identity, i.e. the client identified
to himself that he was “a smoker”, or that he was “a drinker”, etc. The
addictive behavior had become part and parcel of the client’s basic sense of
identity, of the client’s basic sense of self. Changing this sense of
identity was crucial to the maintenance of the psychotherapeutic “cure”.
This was the difficult part of treatment. Changing one’s basic sense of
identity is a most difficult task. One’s psyche tends to cling to the
old and familiar, which seem more psychologically comfortable and secure than
the new and unfamiliar.
On a professional basis,
I had the above knowledge, and used it on a daily basis. However,
ironically enough, I was not yet ready to apply it to myself, and to the
issue of my own hesitation surrounding my religious identity. For 43
years, my religious identity had been neatly labeled as “Christian”, however
many qualifications I might have added to that term over the years.
Giving up that label of personal identity was no easy task. It was part
and parcel of how I defined my very being. Given the benefit of
hindsight, it is clear that my hesitation served the purpose of insuring that
I could keep my familiar religious identity of being a Christian, although a
Christian who believed like a Muslim believed.
It was now the very
end of December, and my wife and I were filling out our application forms for
However, that comfort
was momentarily disrupted when my wife asked me how I had answered the
question on religious identity on the application form. I immediately
replied, “Christian”, and chuckled audibly. Now, one of Freud’s
contributions to the understanding of the human psyche was his realization
that laughter is often a release of psychological tension. However
wrong Freud may have been in many aspects of his theory of psychosexual
development, his insights into laughter were quite on target. I had
laughed! What was this psychological tension that I had need to release
through the medium of laughter?
I then hurriedly went
on to offer my wife a brief affirmation that I was a Christian, not a
Muslim. In response to which, she politely informed me that she was
merely asking whether I had written “Christian”, or “Protestant”, or
“Methodist”. On a professional basis, I knew that a person does not
defend himself against an accusation that hasn’t been made. (If, in the
course of a session of psychotherapy, my client blurted out, “I’m not angry
about that”, and I hadn’t even broached the topic of anger, it was clear that
my client was feeling the need to defend himself against a charge that his
own unconscious was making. In short, he really was angry, but he
wasn’t ready to admit it or to deal with it.) If my wife hadn’t made
the accusation, i.e. “you are a Muslim”, then the accusation had to have come
from my own unconscious, as I was the only other person present. I was
aware of this, but still I hesitated. The religious label that had been
stuck to my sense of identity for 43 years was not going to come off
easily.
About a month had gone
by since my wife’s question to me. It was now late in January of1993
. I had set aside all the books on Islam by the Western scholars, as I
had read them all thoroughly. The two English translations of the
meaning of the Qur’an were back on the bookshelf, and I was busy
reading yet a third English translation of the meaning of the Qur’an.
Maybe in this translation I would find some sudden justification for…
I was taking my lunch
hour from my private practice at a local Arab restaurant that I had started
to frequent. I entered as usual, seated myself at a small table, and
opened my third English translation of the meaning of the Qur’an to
where I had left off in my reading. I figured I might as well get some
reading done over my lunch hour. Moments later, I became aware that
Mahmoud was at my shoulder, and waiting to take my order. He glanced at
what I was reading, but said nothing about it. My order taken, I
returned to the solitude of my reading.
A few minutes later, Mahmoud’s
wife, Iman, an American Muslim, who wore the Hijab (scarf) and modest dress
that I had come to associate with female Muslims, brought me my order.
She commented that I was reading the Qur’an, and politely asked if I
were a Muslim. The word was out of my mouth before it could be modified
by any social etiquette or politeness: “No!” That single word was
said forcefully, and with more than a hint of irritability. With that,
Iman politely retired from my table.
What was happening to
me? I had behaved rudely and somewhat aggressively. What had this
woman done to deserve such behavior from me? This wasn’t like me.
Given my childhood upbringing, I still used “sir” and “ma’am” when addressing
clerks and cashiers who were waiting on me in stores. I could pretend
to ignore my own laughter as a release of tension, but I couldn’t begin to
ignore this sort of unconscionable behavior from myself. My reading was
set aside, and I mentally stewed over this turn of events throughout my
meal. The more I stewed, the guiltier I felt about my behavior. I
knew that when Iman brought me my check at the end of the meal, I was going
to need to make some amends. If for no other reason, simple politeness
demanded it. Furthermore, I was really quite disturbed about how
resistant I had been to her innocuous question. What was going on in me
that I responded with that much force to such a simple and straightforward
question? Why did that one, simple question lead to such atypical
behavior on my part?
Later, when Iman came
with my check, I attempted a round-about apology by saying: “I’m afraid
I was a little abrupt in answering your question before. If you were
asking me whether I believe that there is only one God, then my answer is
yes. If you were asking me whether I believe that Muhammad was one of
the prophets of that one God, then my answer is yes.” She very nicely
and very supportively said: “That’s okay; it takes some people a little
longer than others.”
Perhaps, the readers
of this will be kind enough to note the psychological games I was playing
with myself without chuckling too hard at my mental gymnastics and
behavior. I well knew that in my own way, using my own words, I had
just said the Shahadah, the Islamic testimonial of faith, i.e. “I testify
that there is no god but Allah, and I testify that Muhammad is the messenger
of Allah”. However, having said that, and having recognized what I
said, I could still cling to my old and familiar label of religious
identity. After all, I hadn’t said I was a Muslim. I was simply a
Christian, albeit an atypical Christian, who was willing to say that there
was one God, not a triune godhead, and who was willing to say that Muhammad
was one of the prophets inspired by that one God. If a Muslim wanted to
accept me as being a Muslim that was his or her business, and his or her
label of religious identity. However, it was not mine. I thought
I had found my way out of my crisis of religious identity. I was a
Christian, who would carefully explain that I agreed with, and was willing to
testify to, the Islamic testimonial of faith. Having made my tortured
explanation, and having parsed the English language to within an inch of its
life, others could hang whatever label on me they wished. It was their
label, and not
mine.
It was now March
of1993 , and my wife and I were enjoying a five-week vacation in the
I was a Christian, or
so I said. After all, I had been born into a Christian family, had been
given a Christian upbringing, had attended church and Sunday school every
Sunday as a child, had graduated from a prestigious seminary, and was an
ordained minister in a large Protestant denomination. However, I was
also a Christian: who didn’t believe in a triune godhead or in the
divinity of Jesus, peace be upon him; who knew quite well how the Bible
had been corrupted; who had said the Islamic testimony of faith in my own
carefully parsed words; who had fasted during Ramadan; who was saying Islamic
prayers five times a day; and who was deeply impressed by the behavioral
examples I had witnessed in the Muslim community, both in America and in the
Middle East. (Time and space do not permit me the luxury of documenting
in detail all of the examples of personal morality and ethics I encountered
in the
It was now late in our
Middle Eastern trip. An elderly friend who spoke no English and I were
walking down a winding, little road, somewhere in one of the economically
disadvantaged areas of greater ‘
At that precise moment
in time, I was fully and completely trapped. There were no intellectual
word games to be played, because I could only communicate in English, and
they could only communicate in Arabic. There was no translator present
to bail me out of this situation, and to allow me to hide behind my carefully
prepared English monologue. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t understand the
question, because it was all too obvious that I had. My choices were
suddenly, unpredictably, and inexplicably reduced to just two: I could
say “N’am”, i.e., “yes”; or I could say “La”, i.e., “no”. The choice
was mine, and I had no other. I had to choose, and I had to choose now;
it was just that simple. Praise be to Allah, I answered, “N’am”.
With saying that one
word, all the intellectual word games were now behind me. With the
intellectual word games behind me, the psychological games regarding my
religious identity were also behind me. I wasn’t some strange, atypical
Christian. I was a Muslim. Praise be to Allah, my wife of 33
years also became a Muslim about that same time.
Not too many months
after our return to
My initial reaction
was, “Oh, oh, here it comes”. Nonetheless, it is a Muslim’s duty to be
a good neighbor, and it is a Muslim’s duty to be willing to discuss Islam
with others. As such, I accepted the invitation for the following
evening, and spent most of the waking part of the next 24 hours contemplating
how best to approach this gentleman in his requested topic of
conversation. The appointed time came, and we drove over to our
neighbor’s. After a few moments of small talk, he finally asked why I
had decided to become a Muslim. I had waited for this question, and had
my answer carefully prepared. “As you know with your seminary
education, there were a lot of non-religious considerations which led up to
and shaped the decisions of the Council of Nicaea.” He immediately cut
me off with a simple statement: “You finally couldn’t stomach the
polytheism anymore, could you?” He knew exactly why I was a Muslim, and
he didn’t disagree with my decision! For himself, at his age and at his
place in life, he was electing to be “an atypical Christian”. Allah
willing, he has by now completed his journey from cross to
crescent.
There are sacrifices
to be made in being a Muslim in
For those
contemplating the acceptance of Islam and the surrendering of oneself to
Allah—glorified and exalted is He, there may well be sacrifices along the
way. Many of these sacrifices are easily predicted, while others may be
rather surprising and unexpected. There is no denying the existence of
these sacrifices, and I don’t intend to sugar coat that pill for you.
Nonetheless, don’t be overly troubled by these sacrifices. In the final
analysis, these sacrifices are less important than you presently think.
Allah willing, you will find these sacrifices a very cheap coin to pay for
the “goods” you are purchasing.
Please note: The
ordination certificate above was too large to scan in completely - the top
line of text is missing, which says "Let It Be Known To All Men
That"]
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