Chaotic-Cheats.com - What is the lesson of this story?

What is the lesson of this story?

David Pradarelli Assalam-aleikum wa rahmatullah! I came to Islam pretty much on my own. I was born and raised Roman Catholic, but I always had a deep fascination with the spiritualities of other cultures. My Journey started when I desired to have a relationship with my creator. I wanted to find my spirituality, and not the one I was born with. I spent some time in the Catholic religious order known as the Franciscans. I had many friends and I enjoyed prayer times, but it just seemed to relaxed in its faith, and there was, in my opinion, too much arrogance and hypocrisy. When I had returned back from the order into secular living again, I once again was searching for my way to reach God (Allah). One night I was watching the news on television, and of course they were continuing their one-sided half-truth reports on Muslims (always in a negative light instead of balancing it by showing the positive side as well) with images of violence and terrorism. I decided long ago that the news media has no morals whatsoever and will trash anyone for that "juicy story", and I pretty much refused to believe anything they said. I decided to research Islam for myself and draw my own conclusions. What I found paled all the negative images that the satanic media spewed forth. I found a religion deep in love and spiritual truth, and constant God-mindfullness. What may be fanatacism to one person may be devotion to another. I picked up a small paperback Qur'an and began devouring everything I could. It opened my eyes to the wonder and mercy of ALLAH, and I found the fascination growing every day...it was all I could think about. No other religion including Catholicism impacted me in such a powerful way...I actually found myself in God-awareness 24 hours a day 7 days a week...each time I went to my five daily prayers, I went with anticipation...finally! What I have been searching for all of my life. I finally got enough courage to go to a mosque and profess the Shahadah before my Muslm brothers and sisters. I now am a practicing Muslim and I thank ALLAH for leading me to this place: Ashhahdu anna la ilaha ilallah wa Muhammadur rasul ALLAH! This means: "I believe in the oneness and totalness of ALLAH and that Muhammad(peace and blessings be upon him)is the chosen prophet of ALLAH." I now also accept Jesus as no longer equal with ALLAH, but sent as Muhammad was sent ...to bring all of mankind to submission to the will of ALLAH! May all of mankind find the light and truth of ALLAH. Ibrahim Karlsson I was born in an ordinary , non-religious Swedish home, but with a very loving relationship to each other. I had lived my life 25 years without really thinking about the existence of God or anything spiritual what-so-ever; I was the role model of the materialistic man. Or was I? I recall a short story I wrote in 7th grade, something about my future life, where I portray myself as a successful games programmer (I hadn't yet even touched a computer) and living with a Muslim wife!! OK, at that time Muslim to me meant dressing in long clothes and wearing a scarf, but I have no idea where those thoughts came from. Later, in high school, I remember spending much time in the school-library (being a bookworm) and at one time I picked up a translated Qur'an and read some passages from it. I don't remember exactly what I read, but I do remember finding that what it said made sense and was logical to me. Still, I was not at all religious, I couldn't fit God in my universe, and I had no need of any god. I mean, we have Newton to explain how the universe works, right? Time passed, I graduated and started working. Earned some money and moved to my own apartment, and found a wonderful tool in the PC. I became a passionate amateur photographer, and enrolled in activities around that. At one time I was documenting a marketplace, taking snapshots from a distance with my telelens when an angry looking immigrant came over and explained that he would make sure I wasn't going to take any more pictures of his mum and sisters. Strange people those Muslims... More things related to Islam happened that I can't explain why I did what I did. I can't recall the reason I called the "Islamic information organisation" in Sweden, ordering a subscription to their newsletter, buying Yosuf Ali's Qur'an and a very good book on Islam called Islam - our faith. I just did! I read almost all of the Qur'an, and found it to be both beautiful and logical, but still, God had no place in my heart. One year later, whilst out on a patch of land called "pretty island" (it really is) taking autumn-color pictures, I was overwhelmed by a fantastic feeling. I felt as if I were a tiny piece of something greater, a tooth on a gear in God's great gearbox called the universe. It was wonderful! I had never ever felt like this before, totally relaxed, yet bursting with energy, and above all, total awareness of god wherever I turned my eyes. I don't know how long I stayed in this ecstatic state, but eventually it ended and I drove home, seemingly unaffected, but what I had experienced left uneraseable marks in my mind. At this time Microsoft brought Windows-95 to the market with the biggest marketing blitz known to the computer industry. Part of the package was the on-line service The Microsoft Network. And keen to know what is was I got myself an account on the MSN. I soon found that the Islam BBS were the most interesting part of the MSN, and that's where I found Shahida. Shahida is a American woman, who like me has converted to Islam. Our chemistry worked right away, and she became the best pen-friend I have ever had. Our e-mail correspondence will go down in history: the fact that my mailbox grew to something like 3 megabytes over the first 6 months tells its own tale. She and I discussed a lot about Islam and faith in god in general, and what she wrote made sense to me. Shahida had an angels patience with my slow thinking and my silly questions, but she never gave up the hope in me. Just listen to your heart and you'll find the truth she said. And I found the truth in myself sooner than I'd expected. On the way home from work, in the bus with most of the people around me asleep, and myself adoring the sunset, painting the beautifully dispersed clouds with pink and orange colours, all the parts came together, how God can rule our life, yet we're not robots. How I could depend on physics and chemistry and still believe and see Gods work. It was wonderful, a few minutes of total understanding and peace. I so long for a moment like this to happen again! And it did, one morning I woke up, clear as a bell, and the first thought that ran through my brain was how grateful to God I were that he made me wake up to another day full of opportunities. It was so natural, like I had been doing every day of my life! After these experiences I couldn't no longer deny God's existence. But after 25 years of denying God it was no easy task to admit his existence and accept faith. But good things kept happening to me, I spent some time in the US, and at this time I started praying, testing and feeling, learning to focus on God and to listen to what my heart said. It all ended in a nice weekend in New York, of which I had worried a lot, but it turned out to be a success, most of all, I finally got to meet Shahida! At this point there was no return, I just didn't know it yet. But God kept leading me, I read some more, and finally got the courage to call the nearest Mosque and ask for a meeting with some Muslims. With trembling legs I drove to the mosque, which I had passed many times before, but never dared to stop and visit. I met the nicest people there, and I was given some more reading material, and made plans to come and visit the brothers in their home. What they said, and the answers they gave all made sense. Islam became a major part of my life, I started praying regularly, and I went to my first Jumma prayer. It was wonderful, I sneaked in, and sat in the back, not understanding a word the imam was saying, but still enjoying the service. After the khutba we all came together forming lines, and made the two 'rakaas'. It was yet one of the wonderful experiences I have had on my journey to Islam. The sincerity of 200 men fully devoted to just one thing, to praise God, felt great! Slowly my mind started to agree with my heart, I started to picture myself as a Muslim, but could I really convert to Islam? I had left the Swedish state-church earlier, just in case, but to pray 5 times a day? to stop eating pork? Could I really do that? And what about my family and friends? I recalled what Br. Omar told me, how his family tried to get him admitted to an asylum when he converted. Could I really do this? By this time the Internet wave had swept my country, and I too had hooked up with the infobahn. And "out there" were tons of information about Islam. I think I collected just about every web page with the word Islam anywhere in the text, and learned a lot. But what really made a change was a text I found in Great Britain, a story of a newly converted woman with feelings exactly like mine. 12 hours is the name of the text. When I had read that story, and wept the tears out of my eyes I realized that there were no turning back anymore, I couldn't resist Islam any longer. Summer vacation started, and I had made my mind up. I had to become a Muslim! But after all, the start of the summer had been very cold, and if my first week without work was different, I wouldn't lose a day of sunshine by not being on the beach. On the TV the weatherman painted a big sun right on top of my part of the country. OK then, some other day... The next morning; a steel grey sky, with ice-cold gusts of wind outside my bedroom window. It was like God had decided my time was up, I could wait no longer. I had the required bath, and dressed in clean clothes, jumped in my car and drove the 1 hour drive to the mosque. In the Mosque I approached the brothers with my wish, and after dhuhr prayer the Imam and some brothers witnessed me say the Shahada. Alhamdulillah! And to my great relief all my family and friends have taken my conversion very well, they have all accepted it, I won't say they were thrilled, but absolutely no hard feelings. They can't understand all the things I do. Like praying 5 times a day on specific times, or not eating pork meat. They think this is strange foreign customs that will die out with time, but I'll prove them wrong. InshaAllah! Abd al-Hayy Moore I became a Muslim when it seemed I had already accepted Islam in my bones, as if beyond choice, and I only had to make a leap to embrace it formally. Outwardly I was content; inwardly I was coasting. My three-year-old theatre company was disbanded after a hilariously chaotic production for a Tim Leary Benefit at the Family Dog in San Francisco, circa '68 -- naturally the orange juice everyone had passed around was spiked, so that chorus members were doing the final scene in the first ten minutes -- and for six months I had been methodically typing out poetry manuscripts in my attic in Berkeley preparatory to a big publishing peak. I considered myself a Zen Buddhist. But I was other things as well. My normal routine was to get up, sit zazen, smoke a joint, do half an hour of yoga, then read the "Mathnawi" of Rumi, the long mystical poem of that great Persian Sufi of the thirteenth century. Then I met the man who was to be my guide to our teacher in Morocco, Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, may Allah be pleased with him. At first the meeting was simply remarkable, and my guide simply a remarkable man. But soon our encounter was to become extraordinary, leading to a revolution in my life from which I have never recovered and never hope to. The man looked like an eccentric Englishman. He too had only recently come out of the English version of the Hippie Wave. He was older, refined in his manners, spectacularly witty and intellectual, but of that kind prevalent then who had hobnobbed with the Beatles and knew the Tantric Art collection of Brian Jones firsthand. He had been on all the classic drug quests -- peyote in the Yucatan, mescaline with Laura Huxley -- but with the kif quest in Morocco he had stumbled on Islam and then the Sufis, and the game was up. A profound change had taken place in his life that went far beyond the psychedelic experience. For the three days following our meeting, two other Americans and I listened in awe as this magnificent storyteller unfolded the picture of Islam, of the perfection of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, of the Sufis of Morocco, and of the 100-year-old plus Shaykh, sitting under a great fig tree in a garden with his disciples singing praises of Allah. It was everything I'd always dreamed of. It was poetry come alive. It was the visionary experience made part of daily life, with the Prophet a perfectly balanced master of wisdom and simplicity, an historically accessible Buddha, with a mixture of the earthiness of Moses, the otherworldliness of Jesus, and a light all his own. The prophetic knowledge our guide talked about was a kind of spiritual existentialism. It was a matter of how you enter a room, which foot you entered with, that you sipped water but gulped milk, that you said, "Bismillah" (In the Name of Allah) before eating or drinking, and "Al-hamdulillah" (Praise be to Allah) afterwards, and so on. But rather than seeing this as a burden of hundreds of "how-to's," it was more like what the LSD experience taught us, that there is a "right" way to do things that has, if you will, a cosmic resonance. It is a constant awareness of courtesy to the Creator and His creation that itself ensures and almost visionary intensity. It is hard to put forward any kind of explanation of Islam, to try to suggest the beauty of its totality, through the medium of words. The light of Islam, since it is transformational and alchemical in nature, almost always comes via a human messenger who is a transmitter of the picture by his very being. Face to face with our guide, what struck us most was his impeccable, noble behavior. He seemed to be living what he was saying. Finally the moment came, as a surprise, when he confronted me with my life. "Well," he said one morning after three full days of rapturous agreement that what he was bringing to us was the best thing we'd ever heard, "What do you think? Do you want to become a Muslim?" I hedged. "It's the most beautiful thing I've heard about so far. After all my Zen Buddhism, all my yoga, Tibetan Buddhism and Hindu gurus, this is certainly it! But I think I would like to travel a little, see the world, go to Afghanistan (then unoccupied), maybe meet my Shaykh in a mountain village far off somewhere." "That's not good enough. You have to decide now. Yes or no. If it's yes, then we start on a great adventure. If it's no, then no blame, I've done my duty. I'll just say goodbye and go on my way. But you have to decide now. I'll go downstairs and read a magazine and wait. Take your time." When he had left th

Public Comments

That no one will read your story for 2 reasons: 1-It is incomplete 2-Long stories suck
No way am I reading all of this.
The lesson: your posts are too long for Yahoo! Answers.
Its way to long & I am not sure .. You may need help writing your next one.
Spam??? Abuse??? Mmmm, decisions decisions....
Walaikum as asalam wa rehmatullah that more and more people r realizing that islam is THE true relegion,subhanAllah i myself was born a muslim but didnt know exactly wat it meant until a couple of years ago when i too realized how great Gods mercy and bounty is,before that it semed more like a tedious responsibilty.iv only met a couple of converts...im waiting ot meet someone who wants to convert...its so exciting :D
I did not finish reading your story, but I did read enough, to let me know That you said your eyes were opened, Many religions today has their eyes open & are blind as a bat. When you came out of the Catholic church that was good, but when you went deeper into a false God, Then you were blinded. You are wondering out there in a religion that soon God himself will destroy. You don't believe me read Zephaniah 2:11 God will famish all the gods of this world. Many religions today & even muslims think that they will have a State, NO way, Read Amos 9:11-12. God is speaking in that day he will rasied up again the tabernacle of David, & he will build it as in the days of old. Sorry,you went to the wrong teachings, I rather be on God's side & not mans.
HAY GUY, DO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK WE NOT DOING IT FOR YOU :-)