Her story - Patricia Dunn

obmar · Her story - Patricia Dunn

Fifteen years ago, I converted from Catholicism to
Islam. My mother still doesn't understand my choice,
but there's not a day that I regret it.

By Patricia Dunn

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/...onverting_islam/?source=whitelist

Dec. 18, 2006 | I'm not the same woman I was at 27
when I told my mother, "Ma, I can't eat the pasta
fagioli." (She'd made it with bacon.) I'm not the same
woman who lied when she said, "I didn't become Muslim
because of Ahmed."

My mother believes that for women, most problems and
solutions begin and end with the man in her life. But
back then there was no way this feminist would admit
to anyone -- including herself and especially not her
mother -- that she had converted because of a man.

But today, at 42, and secure in my faith, I can admit
that if it weren't for Ahmed -- though he is now my
ex-husband -- the word "Islam" would probably still
conjure up images of black-cloaked women and
melodramatic Sally Field movies in my head. After all,
I am my mother's daughter.

The day I left my Italian-Bronx neighborhood to go to
college, I knew my communion and confession days were
over. I was never going to let Jesus stick to the roof
of my mouth again. There were too many contradictions
for me in Catholicism. Why was my
never-miss-Sunday-mass father excommunicated after he
and my mother divorced -- especially when she was the
one having the affair? How could the pope have an
Olympic-size swimming pool while millions of his
people were starving? And how could I tolerate the
church's position on abortion and women's rights?

By the time I transferred from Barnard to UCLA, I was
a lapsed Catholic who wanted nothing to do with
organized religion. But I needed to believe in
something.

During my years at UCLA I spent more hours making
fliers, organizing demonstrations and making phone
calls -- and once or twice bail -- than I spent
studying. I defended clinics under attack by
anti-abortionists; I worked for funding for the
homeless and against nuclear testing; I traveled to
Nicaragua to build houses and to Arizona to herd sheep
for Navajos fighting to keep their land.

I tried to change the world one cause at a time.

In the summer of 1988, I interned at the Nation
magazine's Washington office. While researching a
story about Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian-American
psychologist and founder of the Palestinian Center for
Non-Violence, the president of the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee invited me to go on a
student delegation to the Occupied Territories. Two
weeks after returning to UCLA from the West Bank and
Gaza I gave a talk to 50 students about my experience.
I explained how the intifada had propelled women into
major leadership roles. How women-run factories and
businesses were building an infrastructure for a
future state.

At the back of the room stood a man, 6 feet tall with
bright red hair. He held his hand to his chin, and his
focus on me helped me focus. When I finished, he
applauded louder than anyone else. I was relieved the
talk had been a success -- at least no one from the
audience had shouted out, "Arab-loving whore!”

The man waited until I gathered my notes and walked
off the stage before approaching me. "Brilliant
speech," he said. I thanked him, trying not to blush.
Extending his hand, he said, "My name is Ahmed." But I
already knew who he was. He was president of the
Muslim Students Association and, like me, he wrote a
column for the school paper, where we were both
slotted "on the left." I was a fan.

This was a guy who knocked on every door in Islam
Vista, in Santa Barbara, Calif., to campaign for Jesse
Jackson. But that day, when he smiled a win-me-over
smile, I thought the same thing I'd wondered whenever
I read his column, "How could a smart, socially
conscientious guy be a Muslim? Be a part of any
organized religion?" He was a feminist. A feminist
Muslim -- wasn't that an oxymoron?

As Ahmed and I spent the next several years deepening
our friendship -- and eventually marrying -- I
returned again and again to those questions. He mostly
stood out of my way. It didn't matter to him if I was
Catholic or Muslim or Jewish or Marxist (though he
thought Marx grossly underestimated the seduction of
capitalism). Ahmed wanted me to come to my own
conclusions about Islam. After all, it was what he'd
had to do. He'd been born into a Muslim family, but
after they immigrated from Cairo to Los Angeles, Islam
played little visible role in their lives. It wasn't
until Ahmed read the Quran for the first time in
college that he helped his parents reconnect with
their faith.

I studied Islam in order to debate Ahmed and his
belief system, but the more I learned, the more I
found how greatly I had underestimated my own
ignorance. Mine wasn't a hit-you-over-the-head
epiphany, but rather a slow and steady stream of
aha's.

The feminist in me aha'd when she realized that in the
Quran God is neither male nor female. The scholar in
me aha'd at the various interpretations and schools of
thought within Islam, most of which depict the
religion as a social and constantly changing belief
system, rather than the fixed, dogmatic one the
government of Saudi Arabia would have the world
believe.

The Christian still left in me aha'd when she read in
the Quran how those who do good deeds are in God's
grace. And the scared Bronx girl in me aha'd at the
Quran's refrain that God is "merciful and
compassionate" -- until, eventually, the scared Bronx
girl was no more.

But it was the social activist in me who aha'd the
loudest when she got a deeper understanding of "jihad"
(a term that has been grossly misinterpreted in the
media). "Jihad" is a word with many meanings, but
foremost it describes one's personal and inner
struggle to live a just life, a life in which one is
obligated to defend those who cannot defend
themselves. Wasn't that what I had always tried to
commit my life to -- fighting, or, more accurately,
struggling, for justice?

Who knows? Maybe I would have remained a Catholic if I
had discovered the Catholic Worker movement or
Catholics for a Free Choice earlier in life --
organizations whose missions emphasize economic and
social justice. Maybe I would have remained a Catholic
if the one priest who talked and listened to me when I
was 13 had done so face to face and not in some dark
box (and if he had, along with hearing me confess and
granting me absolution, counseled me about surviving
adolescence). Then there was the question of Jesus. It
had always been hard for me to believe God took human
form. But it was as a Muslim that I learned what an
incredible prophet he was -- the epitome of the social
activist.

After years of questioning Ahmed about everything, I
found my answers in Islam. But as a convert I had to
work for everything I believed. I was constantly
translating, not only the language of the Quran, but
the rituals too. It was hard to trust that one could
have a one-to-one relationship with God, and I still
believed I needed an intermediary, some authority,
someone more worthy to intervene on my behalf. So I
turned to the "real" Muslim, the one born into faith,
for all my answers. I made Ahmed my teacher, my
priest.

While equality was the rule in every other aspect of
our lives, when it came to matters of faith, I wanted
Ahmed to call the shots. When we prayed, though he
encouraged, often insisted, that I lead the prayer, I
refused. Ahmed was the authority. Besides, he sounded
so beautiful when he recited the Quran in Arabic. I
wanted him to give me all the answers, and when he
refused, my questions turned into childish badgering:
"Are you sure if you swallow accidentally while you
brush your teeth that doesn't break my fast?"

It wasn't until my son was born that I truly grew up
into Islam. Ali was seven weeks premature, and small
enough to fit in the palms of his father's hands. The
doctors told us Ali couldn't go home until he was able
to regulate his own body temperature. I could hardly
swallow as I watched my son in his plastic incubator,
trailing tubes and wires to help him breathe. It had
taken years of trying and fertility testing for Ahmed
and me to get pregnant: I couldn't believe God would
take our son from us now. I felt like a kid again --
swept back in time to age 12, when I'd been convinced
God had killed my friend Barbara by giving her
leukemia for no reason at all.

Desperate for hope, I saw breast-feeding as the one
way I could help Ali heal -- but he was too weak to
latch on. So on the first day of his life, instead of
a newborn suckling at my breast, I nursed an electric
pump (on loan from the hospital) to increase my milk
supply. Then -- somehow -- the loud methodical
chugging of the pump's motor helped to drown out my
fear. "In the name of God, the Benevolent, the
merciful..." I began reciting the first Sura in the
Quran. "...It is You we serve, to You we turn for
help..." There, alone in the hospital, I spoke to God
for the first time, one to one, with no intermediary.
And I understood that the God I was talking to was
compassionate and merciful.

Two weeks later, Ali began to nurse. The day I took
him home in his oversize blue-striped onesie, I knew
God had heard me.

Though I still love my son's father, Ahmed and I have
been legally separated for a year now. There were, in
the end, some questions that Islam could not answer.
But because of our faith, a lot of prayer -- and yes,
some therapy -- we have remained friends and continue
to raise our son together.

I'm not the same Muslim I was 15 years ago, but I am
still a Muslim. And last week, after all these years,
when I told my mother that Ali couldn't eat her baked
beans because they were made with pork, her response
was the same as ever. "That's ridiculous," she said.
Then she mumbled, "Well, let's see what you believe
when the next guy comes around."

I didn't respond. My conversion may have started with
a man, but it continues with me, and it's
never-ending.

About the writer

Patricia Dunn is freelance writer and editor for
Muslimwakeup.com. She teaches writing at Sarah
Lawrence College.
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obmar

Thank You Pat,
tears flow when I read that you started feeding Ali with HIS NAME, the Benevolent, the merciful...

May God bless you

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