Jeffrey Lang – The Way to Islam in America Pt 03 The Decision 228c
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
I might.
Let me try this. Hello?
In the name of God, the merciful, the
compassionate,
Bismillahir Rahmani Rahim. Can you all hear me
alright?
I know you all must be extremely tired.
I know I am.
Of the 3 lectures, this is
the one that I have dreaded
hate to use that word, dreaded the most,
because it is indeed for me the hardest
one to
give.
Reasons are
essentially 3. 1 is this is the first
time I'm giving it.
The other is that it represents sort of
a collective
experience.
And it's very hard to know that
it's very hard to represent so many different
people's experiences and try to turn them into
1.
And the 3rd
let me see if I can remember the
3rd. The 3rd, frankly, I can't remember.
But in any case,
in any case, so far I I've invited
you all to pretend that you are sort
of hypothetical atheists.
I'd like you to stay with me in
that train of thought,
and let's see where we are now.
So far we have approached the Quran
rationally.
Oh, and by the way, I'm gonna take
us up to the moment of the decision.
If you have questions about what happens after
you make that decision, I think that would
be a good focus of, topic after we're
done, after I'm done with this speech. It's
just a suggestion.
But we have approached the Quran up until
this point rationally.
And it had tremendous rational appeal.
We've come to it with many questions.
And frankly, we found
coherent,
compelling,
rather
simple answers, answers that seem to suit us
and our nature.
But that alone is not gonna lead to
a conversion.
Something else must take place.
And that is why
the Quran, I believe, is not simply a
rational
document.
It's much more than that.
And it approaches the person
on many levels.
Sure,
because we were atheists, maybe what intrigued us
were rational questions.
And the Quran sort of, to use a
word of one of the speeches tomorrow,
lured us
in.
Challenged us. Got us in a little deeper.
Challenged us further. Got us in a little
deeper.
We were intrigued.
We had to know the answer. And so
we got deeper and deeper and deeper.
But in that process,
we've also been exposed
to much more.
In particular,
we've been exposed
to the so many verses of the Quran
that talk about human nature on other levels
than simply the rational.
And when we studied those verses,
we came to find that those type of
verses that talk about human nature,
that talk about the way people think and
feel and react and act,
reveal something about humanity and reveal something about
us. They reveal something of our humanity,
our secrets,
our weaknesses,
our desires.
There are certain verses in the Quran that
expose us
to ourselves.
Pretend like I said that you are atheist.
If you are, then you've had many goals
in life.
And any atheist will tell you that every
time they've achieved those goals,
there's a certain
emptiness that comes with the achievement.
I used to say it was likely when
we outgrow Christmas,
for those of you who came from, American
background.
When you outgrow Christmas, when you become an
adult, every year you set this goal for
yourself that here comes Christmas, and you try
to get yourself all excited about it, and
you try to get yourself all enthusiastic about
it, and to retrieve
those that feeling of anticipation and that joy
and that thrill that when you were a
child,
and Christmas comes and
it's not there.
You've outgrown it.
And so the goals that you pursue, the
things that you try,
the the goals that you reach end up
being empty victories,
one after the other. And you're in a
continual search for meaning in your life. You're
looking for something significant, and no matter what
we seem to find, we come up empty.
And so the following verse in the Quran
is just one and I can only give
a few examples. Just one of the many
type of verses that reveals our struggle, our
search, our tragedy
to ourselves.
We recognize ourself
in such verses. And those who disbelieve,
their deeds are like a mirage in the
desert, which the thirsting deems to be water.
And when he comes to it,
he finds it nothing.
And there indeed, he finds God. And he
pays him his account in full.
We recognize our own desperate search
for happiness, for significance, and meaning in our
lives, and that type of verse. And we
recognize our own frustrations.
Or as it goes on, or this type
of person is like darkness in a deep
sea. There covers him a wave, above which
is a wave, above which is a cloud.
Darkness is one above another. When he holds
out his hand, he's barely able to see
it. And to whom God gives no light,
he has no light.
We start to see that in those verses,
they feel like they're being revealed to us
personally.
Maybe we argue our case with conviction.
Atheists are very good at that.
They always tell you, and genuinely,
that they only have the most noble motives.
They hold their beliefs. They act the way
they do out of genuine sincerity.
They have good intentions,
and they believe it.
And they really are convinced.
And yet they find that when they go
out, and they could and they'll swear by
heaven
that what they are doing and the way
they are living is indeed the right way,
and really they're doing it out of sincere
convictions.
Many of them are devout humanists.
They care about people.
But yet, when they go about and living
their lives,
they find that they keep on hurting people
and hurting themselves and hurting others.
And so when they read a verse like
this,
and some men there are, who sang upon
the present world pleases you. And such one
calls on God to witness what is in
his heart. And he is most adept at
argument.
And when he turns his back, he hastens
about the earth to do corruption there.
And we start to see ourselves in these
verses.
We pursue life. We struggle. We try to
obtain
things that we think will make our life
significant.
Honors,
degrees,
accomplishments,
praise,
worldly goods,
power, wealth.
And nothing seems to make us happy, nothing
seems to satisfy the urge,
Nothing seems to satisfy that infinite void, that
infinite vacuum
that cries out for something that we don't
know what it is.
And so a verse like the following when
we read it strikes home
very easily.
The mutual rivalry
for piling up. Piling up what? Things, honors,
goals, whatever you wanna call it. Your mutual
rivalry for piling up things diverts you. It
distracts you
until you visit the graves.
Of course, as Muslims, we believe that we
come to understand reality to a certain degree
when we die,
we're suddenly enlightened, and then again on the
day of resurrection.
So that the mutual rivalry for piling up
things diverts you until you visit the graves.
But know you shall soon know.
Perhaps it's talking about the day of judgement
or, you know, the day you die. Then
again,
you shall soon know.
Perhaps about the day of judgment.
No.
If you were to know with the eye
of certainty,
you would certainly see the *.
And what *?
To those who have read it for the
first time,
the * you are already in.
Because your life is is in agony.
When the Quran tells us about the coward,
the hypocrite, the arrogant, the tyrant,
and their followers. And most people are either
1 or the other.
The worshipper who tries to be seen but
ignores the needs of others.
We know as we read that that each
of these personalities and their different shades that
were presented in the Quran,
each of these lives to some degree within
ourselves.
And so as we read through the Quran,
these verses are slowly but surely wearing down
our resistance.
How many times have we turned the back
turned our backs on people who are in
desperate need?
And made excuses for ourselves? And rationalized our
behavior?
How many times have people suffered terribly and
we could have done something about it and
we refused?
Take the situation in Bosnia for example.
How do we rationalize what's going on here
as the world looks on,
and and another holocaust is happening before our
eyes? And we come across a verse in
the Quran that says, what ails you that
you will not fight in the cause of
the utterly helpless men, women, and children who
are crying?
Oh, our lord, lead us forth out of
this land whose people are oppressors, and raise
for us out of your grace a protector,
and raise for us out of your mercy,
one who will defend us.
And then we faced how many times we
turned our back on exactly this type of
situation.
In verses like these,
and there's so many of them in the
Quran,
we start to feel that we're starting to
discover something.
What?
We're starting to discover our worst
potentialities.
These verses measure and reveal ourselves.
Measure and reveal us
to ourselves.
We begin to see
ourselves in these verses with all our weaknesses,
all our frailties, all our fears.
But the Quran doesn't stop there. It also
presents the very best that we could be.
It shows us the very best
of human potential.
It shows us prophets like Abraham, Moses, Jesus,
and Mohammed, peace be upon him.
It shows us noble and great women, heroic
women, like Mariah.
Mary, Asiya,
the queen of Sheba, the mother of Moses.
It shows us heroic people,
like the magicians of pharaoh, who when they
realize the truth,
risk their lies,
risk terrible persecution
to defend the truth that they now realize.
We're shown the stranger from the crowd of
the Egyptians who rises out of the crowd
and against his countrymen
defends the message because he knows it's true.
You see the people of the pit
who lose their lives,
lose their lives clinging to a single concept.
That there is no God,
and that they have surrendered to him.
We see young people, like the men of
the cave, and old people, like Jacob and
Surah Surah Yusuf.
We see men and women, parents, children, husbands,
wives,
believers and disbelievers,
all struggling
for that same eternal choice.
Am I going to surrender
to truth,
or am I gonna turn my back on
it?
And we're presented their lives at the point
of crisis. We're thrust into their lives at
the point of crisis, when they're grappling with
that choice.
And their lives slowly but surely begin to
live in ours.
One Western scholar said, his name is Frederick
Denney, not too far from here, from the
University of Colorado.
I think he's in Colorado. Is that in
Boulder, Colorado? Well, whatever. He's in Colorado.
But he mentioned that
when you read the Quran,
it slowly but surely becomes starts becoming a
part of you.
And that at some stage, you start to
realize, even if you're a non Muslim, which
he isn't,
that it's not just you who are reading
the Quran.
It's the Quran who's reading you.
It's almost as if it's anticipating your thoughts
in sequence. It's filling in the lines in
time for you to read them,
almost as if it was re read for
you individually.
And he said, this is a sort of
scary experience.
You feel like you're in the presence of
a tremendous power.
And he says, you don't have to be
a Muslim to feel it.
As we read in the Quran the personality
portraits,
the utter loss of so much of humanity.
As we read the stories of the different
individuals
and their personalities,
slowly but surely a transform transformation begins to
sneak up on us.
From the Quran's images
and verses and surahs,
a picture slowly begins to emerge.
There begins to dawn with increasing clarity,
a sharper
and sharper and more penetrating view.
Of what?
Of ourselves.
And looking deeply inside ourselves,
we come to see our flaws,
our weaknesses,
our pains, our loss, our potentials,
and our failures.
And we very often don't like what we
see.
And looking deeply inside ourselves,
we come to recognize by now
something that we all way always really knew,
that there is no god
but god.
As they say in Arabic, la idaha illallah.
But even when we arrive at this stage,
recognition
is not faith.
There is still a tremendous barrier of fears
and apprehension
separating
us from submission.
There's a huge wall between recognition
and submission.
A huge wall of fears,
A huge wall of apprehensions.
A huge wall about that has to deal
with traditions, and society, and mother and father,
and job, and work, and how am I
going to live.
And when you reach this stage, and I
know I'm taking it through you quickly.
But when you reach that stage
where you are ready to give assent
to the Quran's
picture of life and our purpose in it.
When you've agreed, yes there must be only
one God and there is a God.
There are certain verses that call out to
you, that speak to your soul,
for your soul, as much as it speaks
to your soul.
When you feel alone, and you do feel
alone when you're grappling with this choice, every
person who has gone through it knows.
There's a stage in which you feel isolated
and alone and like you're the only person
in the world that is gonna deal with
this choice. And you feel the weight of
this choice falling on you like the weight
of the world. You need to believe that
god is with you. And so a verse
in the Quran will reach out to you
such as, and if my servants call on
me, tell them I am near. That I
heed the call of every caller so let
them with a will call unto me. And
believe in me so that they may walk
in the right way.
When you think you're beyond hope,
when you think you're beyond repair,
when you think this is you just don't
have it in you to be able to
accomplish this.
The Quran comes to your aid and assures
you and says, oh, my servants who have
sinned against yourselves,
never despair of the mercy of god.
For god forgives all sins.
For he is oft forgiving,
most merciful.
When you're feeling
isolated, when you're feeling that you need comfort,
when you're feeling these fears welling up inside
you, when you feel that you need someone
to comfort you, the Quran comes to your
aid and rushes to you and embraces you
and says,
our lord, we have heard the call of
1 calling to faith. Believe in your lord.
And we have believed.
Our lord, forgive us our sins and blot
out from us our iniquities and take to
yourself our souls in the company of the
righteous. Our lord, grant us what you did
promise us through our apo through your apostles
and save us from shame on the day
of judgement for you never break your promise.
And their lord accepted of them their prayer
and answered them. Never will I suffer to
be lost the work of any of you,
be he male or female.
You are members one of another.
Those who have left their homes or were
driven out there from or suffered harm in
my cause or fought or were slain.
Truly I will blot out from them their
iniquities and I'll admit them into gardens with
rivers flowing underneath. This is a reward from
the presence of god and from his presence
is the best of rewards.
We've talked the other day about the order
of the Quran. As you begin to move
the Quran from move through the Quran from
beginning to end. As you recall it, the
Quran in the beginning seems very rational, very
logical. It is throughout but it seems less
emotive. But the closer and closer you come
to the end, the closer and closer you
come to grappling with that decision, the Quran
now begins to surge in power. It's a
motive faculty takes over. It starts to in
short, choppy Surah, short, brief Surah starts to
pound out a spiritual and emotionally powerful message.
The message you need to hear because now
you're coming down to the deadline. Now you're
coming and you're really grappling with that choice.
You feel walled in. You feel like you're
painting yourself into a corner, and that corner
only has one choice.
And the Quran has to keep pounding it
into you, pounding in its major themes, recalling
its major major message, rising it up inside
you till it's burning inside you. And you're
trying to grapple with it, And you really
just feel you're not You don't know what.
Tensions are pulling you in every single direction.
From the back of your mind, there comes
a voice, and you hear yourself saying,
Come on. Be reasonable.
Do you really think you could pull this
off?
Do you think you could enter this community?
They're not like you.
You're as different as night and day.
Don't you see them?
You're an American.
This is a foreign phenomenon.
How are you going to fit in?
Think about yourself.
You're suddenly gonna become religious.
Religious?
After all these years?
You?
What are you gonna do to really become
mister piety?
Wear your religion on your sleeve?
Become everything you've always despised
in those pious hypocrites?
What about all those vices
you've accumulated over the years?
What do you think they're just gonna go
away?
They're a part of you. They're in their
blood.
No matter what you do, they'll always be
a part of you.
Don't kid yourself.
Look at you.
Do you really think
you could win acceptance through this system in
the eyes of God?
After all you've done,
after all you've been,
After all you are?
Come on now.
Wake up.
This is reality
speaking.
And you do have those sort of thoughts.
And you think about it,
and you know it's true.
And so you close the Quran,
and you walk away.
Leave it at your bed stand,
night stand.
And maybe a week passes or maybe a
month
or 2 months.
And every night you go to bed and
you look at that Quran still in the
same position and you're still in the same
position.
It's almost as if it's frozen there, and
you're frozen.
And finally, you say to yourself, well, at
least you owe it to yourself to finish
it. I mean, you've gotten this far.
At least you owe it to yourself to
finish that last
3% of the Quran that you have neglected.
And so even though you know it's hopeless,
even though that you know there's no hope
for you,
you simply just pick it up just to
finish the past that you began.
And you turn to the 91st Surah, and
you read it. And it's evocative and powerful
and emotive.
And you just think desperately,
it's just too bad that this is not
for you.
And you read the 92nd Sura, and your
feelings are very much the same.
And then you turn to the 93rd Surah.
And as you read it, your eyes are
transfixed on the page. And deep inside you
you start feeling something welling up, welling up
into your chest. And it's agonizing, and it's
painful.
And it's and as much as you try
to fight it back, it starts
coming out and and struggling out in heart
deep, heart stricken sobs. And slowly but surely
your tears start trickling down your face and
then rushing down your face, and now they're
dampening the page beneath you. Because as you
look at these damn filled pages and you
stare at the words before you, it tells
you that in the darkest times and in
the brightest times, god does not forsake you.
You. It says, by the glorious morning light
and the night when it is still in
dark, your guardian lord has not forsaken
you, and nor is he displeased.
And the promise of the hereafter is greater
than the promise of the present. Think about
it. It's telling you. And soon he will
grant you. And you will be well pleased.
Do you think that he would abandon you?
He goes on to say,
did he not find you like an orphan?
In some sense, we all are orphans when
we come into this world. Did I not
Did he not find you like an orphan
and shelter you?
And he found you lost,
and he guided you, and he found you
in need, and he nurtured you.
Do you think he would abandon you?
So come on,
it's telling you. Come on, one step at
a time. The journey of a 1000 miles
begins with the first step.
Begin simply. Begin with this.
And so, treat not the orphan with harshness,
the destitute child,
nor repulse the petitioner,
unser
unheard.
Simple advice. Take one step at a time.
But the bounty of your lord rehearse and
proclaim.
So now you start finishing the Quran. You
start going through it 1 surah at a
time. Again, it's very powerful now. It's very
emotive. It's pounding out its message. And then
you finally come to the last 3 surahs
in short order. And now the Quran is
gonna put before you the very words you're
longing deep down inside to say yourself. And
it's gonna say them for you and with
you. It's gonna say in 3 3 repetitive
Suras with a few lines in between between
say, he is God the 1. God the
eternal source of all. You need protection? Ask
for it. Say I seek protection of the
Lord of the dawn, of the new day's
dawn. Say I seek protection and a sustainer
of mankind.
Say it, it's telling you. Say it, say
it, say it.
You find yourself maybe a few days later,
a week later or so, a month, 2
months,
sitting in a small room somewhere. It might
be a masjid.
It might be a
a prayer room where Muslims meet. It might
be somebody's house. More than likely, the pea
the 3 or 4 people you're talking to
are strangers.
You promised yourself you're just going there to
ask a few questions
about Islam.
And so you begin to ask. The conversation
goes along. It's not really going very well.
It's not going very exciting. It's
moving along smoothly enough. And then suddenly comes
to you a question.
Well,
so would you like to become a Muslim?
And then suddenly, you're seized by terror.
Suddenly, every fear comes back to you.
You start to feel yourself overcome by panic.
What? Become a Muslim? That's not why I
came here.
Why did you even ask it in the
first place? You're thinking to yourself, who does
this person think he is?
What business of it is of his anyway?
What right does he have to do that?
Why didn't he just leave it alone?
I didn't ask him for this.
What? Is he trying to convert me?
Who the heck does he think he is?
Faces from the past, voices that you haven't
heard in years come rushing forward, and you
see yourself stumbling over excuses as you try
to explain to people you never even really
cared about. How could you dare make such
a choice?
Every negative impulse,
every defensive reflex, every excuse,
every weakness,
every
tragic urge comes rushing forward and combines.
It comes rushing forward and screams out into
your mind in one single
blasting, bellowing shout,
No.
And you're seized by panic.
You look to the door. You look to
the window. It's getting hot in here.
You're starting to sweat in the lower part
of your back. Your hands are becoming cool
and clammy.
What? Why doesn't somebody open up a window?
It's getting hard to breathe. It's starting to
feel heavy. You gotta get out.
You look to the window. You look to
the door.
You're starting to feel a little faint. I
gotta get out.
But you know once you go out, you're
never coming back again. You know that this
is as close as you'll ever be. You
know that once you leave that door, that's
it. You've made your final decision. You'll know
that you'll never get this close ever ever
again. You reach down inside yourself
looking for that last penny of courage,
and you just can't find it.
And then suddenly from within inside the depths
of your heart, there rises up
there rises up one last single
desperate,
solitary,
agonizing,
helpless plea. Don't leave me.
Please don't leave me.
Not after having come this far.
And then suddenly the question comes back again.
And this time, it has only 1% of
its original force.
1% of its original confidence.
So would you like to be a Muslim?
This time, there's no voices,
no faces.
You don't think about your job or families.
Right now, your mind is completely blank.
You're exhausted. You're numb.
You're not thinking anything. Your mind is silent.
And then into that silence,
there's slips of recollection,
a verse.
And you remember,
by the glorious morning light,
and the night when it is still in
dark,
your guardian Lord does not forsake you,
and nor is he displeased.
And then,
to the utter surprise
of your witnesses,
you make a statement
that by the expression on their face
seems to surprise them,
shock
them, even confuse them.
Because you look to them and say,
yes,
I think I wanna be a Muslim.
I want to be a Muslim.
And I tried to keep it short
and may the peace and mercy of God
be upon you all.
I do not
claim
to
understand
fully what went through the mind
of
doctor Jeffrey,
and all of those who went down the
same road
with him.
From a far distance
of disbelief
to the
high
stand,
high level
of belief in Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. Because
I was born a Muslim.
I did not go through that experience.
But
when he was talking, he reminded me of
a verse in the Quran that describes
the
state of non Islam
as being
a far,
deep
in this guidance.
And now, he showed me that it is
really far
because he came a long way.