who i am..

I am a Muslim.

I grew up in a small town in east Texas, where Islam is a taboo word. A town that has more churches then business and schools combined, in fact the common slang for the area I reside in is the "bible belt". This is where I spent my childhood and teen years, fishing and doing the typical Texan thing. Waking up every morning to the smells and sounds of a farm.

My family is a devout Christian family. Most have thick Texan accents, wear wrangler jeans, and of course can’t forget those cowboy hats they love to wear. My parents are both from large families, according to American standards that is, and opinions are just as large as the families and their unique personalities.

An ironic story that my parents once proudly told to anyone who they met, that would listen, was a story of my early childhood. When most children wanted to be fire men or police officers, I wanted to be a preacher. So much in fact, I would gather my cousins at family events, and church would be in session, there I would be, speaking on the balance of life, about how merciful and powerful god is. My cousins, fifteen of them at least gathered by me listening intently to my sermons. Sermons that flowed from a child’s heart. Sermons that spoke about god. In retrospect, I was Muslim then. Never connecting the Christian doctrine of the three parts of god, god was singular.

As I grew older, I studied, examining the bible, comparing these words to science and to historical evidence. If I found a documentary on religion, there I would be flat on the floor watching and learning. I loved to go to church; I loved to learn more and more. I figured, the more I learn, the easier this doctrine would to understand. I read my bible every night, went to Sunday worship and a Wednesday class. Then came the day where I gave up.

I couldn’t make it make sense to me, I believe in god, but this didn’t make sense. I at an early age in my life came to a startling conclusion. The bible, the "word of god", was corrupted by man. However, in and act of desperation I was baptized into Christianity. I remember that night well, it wasn’t a normal night that anyone would be at the church. But after studying long and hard, I walked up to my mother and uttered the words, I need to be baptized. She wept of joy. This is a big deal in Christian beliefs, it marks that no matter what you shall do you are going to heaven. In my mind, the water, give me the gift of wisdom. Maybe this is what I am missing, maybe when I come out of the water, I will have an understanding, and I will be enlightened. There will be a revolutionary understanding, the heavens will part and I will be blessed with the ability to blindly follow what my father and his father before followed.

They called several people to whiteness the baptism; the preacher brought me to a cold pool of water where we both walked in. Both of us freezing from the cold water, he took me and gently dunked me under the ice cold water, pronouncing it in the name of the father the son and the Holy Spirit. Under the water, it felt like forever. Then I cam out of the water, right then, I was enlightened. I heard singing and rejoicing, But I only felt, hurt and ashamed. I stood in front of a group of onlookers who were rejoicing my acceptance to heaven and I was weeping. Weeping because of their ignorance and more because I know what I had been taught was officially wrong.

I was 15 when I was baptized, and immediately I would stop going to church and practicing. I would never stop studying, my studying just grew to encompass more then what I was told was OK to study. My next few years, I would spend in high school, most of my time dedicated to performing in award winning plays, and winning debate rounds. I would become a well respected person in the community, the small community of van Texas, which would grow to have high expectation of me, for me to become a lawyer, an actor, someone successful in life. This is evidence, in my being voted home coming king my senior year, student council president and most likely to succeed by my classmates. I only say this, because it is ironic of how things end up and how ashamed of me many are today. Going from that, to being told by my own father that he Is ashamed as me as a son. But none the less, I graduated high school, went off to college to study theatre. I spent one semester on a full ride scholarship at a university. Only one, something was missing in my life still and I knew it.

So where did I end up? In of all places in the United States navy, serving in Washington dc this is where I will leave you today, because this is ironically where I found what was missing in my life. This is where I found Islam.