Johari Abdul-Malik – From Christianity to Islam Dar AlHijrah Outreach Director
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
People have asked many people have asked, how
is it that I I came to Islam?
And probably after
so many years of
being asked this question and having the opportunity
to to think,
somewhat deeply about it.
I think for me, I really never,
in in one sense, I never
became
a Muslim in
the traditional sense.
That is,
I became a Muslim
through,
a series of
of processes,
that that that I think were were very
orchestrated and very organized even though while I
was living it, it didn't it didn't really
seem like that.
And, ultimately,
I never left
what I had,
but that I acquired a acquired a a
fuller vision
of what it is that I already believed
in.
It replaced
some issues of doubt with issues of certainty.
Probably, I could go back
to my earliest
recollections
and
say,
I
grew up in New York City,
born in Brooklyn.
My father is from the Caribbean, Barbados. My
mother is from
Louisiana, the northern part, not the part that's,
Mardi Gras and Cajun or less.
But
they met in New York City
and were married
and went to Howard University,
where my father and my mother studied.
Those variables, I think, for me are important
because it created for me
an international
sense
that I was born,
to this sort
of eclectic
international
kind of family. So I had national American
roots, and I had Caribbean roots.
And then I was
born
right after my parents graduated
from
Howard University. My father went to pharmacy and
my mother
in dental hygiene.
I think really probably somehow,
if it were not for the fact that
they needed to match the times, my mother
probably
should have done dentistry, so.
She was such a a wonderful student.
I heard about that. I didn't know about
that. But when I
when my mother graduated from Howard University,
that was in June. I was born in
August of that year, and they had moved
back to New York City. So I was
born in New York even though I was
conceived
at Howard University.
You might ask the question, why is this
relevant? But, if you stay with us, you'll
you'll see.
I grew up in Brooklyn,
and soon after,
maybe I was 3 or 4 years old,
my mother and father separated.
And so I was raised by my mother.
My mother had a had an interesting,
kind of very outgoing, engaging personality.
We lived in one of those buildings you
call a a brownstone.
It's one of those houses like you see
maybe on the Cosby show,
where
people live on top of one another.
And in the old days,
when families were large,
it used to just be one family lived
in the whole building. Mother,
father, grandparents, grandchildren.
But in the later years, it became,
what they call rooming houses
where people would rent out
the upper levels, and they would live on
on in part of the building.
But my mother, in order to,
supplement her income,
she would
rent out the upper part of the building,
and we closed off access from the top
to bottom for our part of the house.
But, subhanallah,
right around this time, I was born in
August of 19
56,
the 19th August of Harlem.
In the sixties,
I was obviously 5 years old
in
1960,
61, right around the time that John f
Kennedy became president
and during the period of what we call
the Cold War.
The cold war, doctor Suneiman Yang gave me
this insight,
professor at Howard University in African Studies,
former chairman,
said
the United States began to bring Muslims to
America in significant numbers
as what he called the children of the
cold war.
So in order to vibe between
Africa and the Middle East and Asia for
their intelligentsia,
the United States would build a relationship with
governments and say, give us your talented people
and bring them to America, and we will
train them how to become leaders of their
society.
Now the Soviets were doing the same thing,
and we'll get to that later.
So for me,
in the sixties,
civil rights movement is going on. Other things
are going on,
and international
students are renting
space
above where I live from my mother.
And so when I got to be the
age of 7 or 8 years old,
I can remember some of these international students.
They were my first babysitters.
And when they came to America,
they had some folklore that says, you know,
whatever place that you family that you stay
with when you first arrive, this is your
family in America.
And so these men, young men, they would
look to to my mother as their mother
in America,
and therefore,
I was like their baby brother in America.
Well, I can remember one of them, subhanallah.
My mother used to always call him
by his full name,
Sammy Abdul Wahab.
Sammy Abdul Wahab.
He was from,
Liberia.
He was Muslim.
But we never talked about Islam.
I would visit his room,
and I recall that, he didn't have much
furniture. His bed was on the floor, and,
we would eat on the floor.
And he would have a big bowl or
a big pan in front of him, and
he would put some rice and he had
some kind of sauce and meat and he
put it there. And I asked him one
time, I said,
Sammy, what kind of meat is this? Is
this pork?
He said,
no. This is this is lamb.
No.
Americans,
especially regular people, in those days, they didn't
eat lamb.
So it was a chunky kind of meat
and
lighter than beef,
most of the time. That's it. So I
don't know.
And I would eat with them and, and
maybe I would eat with both hands, and
he would say, no. No. No. Eat with
your
right hand.
I didn't know
that I was being influenced by someone
who was teaching me the sunnah of the
prophets of Allah.
But these were men that
I look up to. I'm I'm sure in
my memory now, I can see something that
looked like a prayer rug in his room.
I never saw him pray. We never talked
about the Quran.
Well, I had another,
babysitter,
subhanahu,
from Nigeria.
His nickname,
Mobolaji.
What we didn't know then is that Mobolaji
is in his local language,
the name Mohammed.
SubhanAllah.
Mobolaji
was someone who,
my mother took him in like a son
again.
And so
we had these experience and political discussions about
the world and
this and that. So I came to a
a sense of of
being having been mentored by
men
who had Islamic
backgrounds.
My my mother never asked them, what is
your religion? What's your background?
But from
those early seeds
of Islam,
Not the not people talking about Islam,
but people giving the perspective
that comes from the background of Islam.
Probably,
as a young person, I was, I I
think, failing,
spiritual.
I used to attend,
with my mother, the Anglican church.
Now even though my mother,
grew up in the south, we didn't have
Anglican church in Louisiana.
But
when my mother married my father,
the church of England
is the the
church of the island of Barbados
because of the British connection.
But the Anglican church in America
was formed when
the
United States was formed, breaking away from the
British,
they could no longer have in those areas
where,
the Church of England
had its allegiance to the crown,
and so they had to either decide whether
they leave
the principles of the Anglican church completely
or whether they would form a new church
with the same or similar doctrine, but they
would excise
the the queen
and king as the head of the church,
and so they created the American Episcopal Church.
So I grew up in the Episcopal Church,
Saint Luke and Saint Matthews on Clinton Avenue
and Fulton Street in Brooklyn, New
York. I sang in the choir. I was
regular in church.
And, you know, when you're a kid and
you sing in the choir,
you have to stay awake during the services.
Where maybe other kids, they could sleep because
we sat right behind the priest. We had
to be awake and attentive, and we would
stand and sit to to sing, and we
would process in and out.
So I spent a lot of time in
church.
Not only that,
we had choir rehearsal.
And so I would attend,
choir rehearsal some days during the week,
and they had one rehearsal
for the kids just to teach you how
to sing. And then they had another rehearsal
where you would sing with the whole choir.
So that was a couple of days a
week right there.
So in my life,
the activities in the church, my mother was
head of the youth group. We we were
very active.
When
I would visit my relatives in the deep
south,
they had a different kind of religious experience.
Their religion wasn't the,
2 days a week that you go to
choir rehearsal plus Sunday at 11 o'clock.
They had a kind
of organic faith.
It permeated. If they were saved and sanctified,
they were,
what
people call here a Cogic,
church of god in Christ.
They were
Christian fundamentals.
They believed that the television,
was was haram, that that that it was
people shouldn't watch television. If they did, they
watched it for special things, the news or
the president had something like that. But just
to sit and watch, television,
for them, that that was that was a
sin.
They didn't go to the movies.
They didn't go to,
like, outdoor athletic events because it was beer
and and wine and so on.
And so in the summer,
because my mother was a single parent,
and she had to work during the summer
to have
a a late to to be off all
summer. She had to have something to do
with with me, so she would send me
to visit my relatives,
in the south.
And, you know,
family is a is a tremendous thing.
For a time, my grandparents
watched me when I was my mother and
father were first breaking up. So
the family in the south, they knew me
as this little guy who used to live
with them for,
a few months. And so my grandmother really
thought of me almost like one of her
own children,
not really like a grandchild.
So I would visit them in the south
in the summers,
and I would go to the Cogic church.
And I would
see
that, they were very serious about their religion.
And they kind of looked down on, New
Yorkers like me
who had this sort of, you know, vacation
religion. You know, they just on the weekend,
they would have religion the rest of the
week or maybe just part of the day
on Sunday and the rest of the time,
they drank and they had they partied, whatever.
These people didn't do anything.
We went to church
Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night. I think
Thursday night, they took off.
Friday. So every almost every day, we went
to church.
And they wanted to live the gospel
of Jesus.
It put me in an environment where
those values and principles of worship, of faithfulness,
were exemplified
as a daily way of life.
When I would go back to New York
City, I would go back to,
the other sort of more formal,
very little
everyday
worship activities.
But,
life of service.
And my mother,
was a servant
of her community,
and she was always helping out and always
looking out for the children and the needy
people in the neighborhood.
So if you put those things together, it
it lays a found it creates a foundation
and a culture
that Islam is a fertile ground
to
grow.
When I was about,
I guess, 12 or 13,
they have something in the Episcopal church called
confirmation.
So from Allah, a confirmation,
you have to learn the creed
of the faith,
and you move from baptism
where as an infant, they sprinkle water on
you and
godparents
take
the pledge that,
of the faith for you.
And then when you reach the age of
puberty,
then you assume
that responsibility
for
yourself. And so I had to attend confirmation
class.
It's about a lot. I enjoyed confirmation class.
And I would come in through the back
door and go through the choir room and
come through the area where the altars were,
and I would come to my confirmation
class
with other little kids like myself, I guess.
You know? Not not elementary, but not
upper, grades.
And we mostly we wanted to go out
and play after school. We didn't really wanna
go to confirmation class, but so far, I
used to go to confirmation class.
And I had to learn and I learned.
One of the
things that helped, I think,
as
a a dividing line, a place that
made me think about what I'm doing now,
my faith.
That was that
and I think it was attorney, a really,
a place when I can look back and
see attorney.
Confirmation class, you have to learn the 10
commandments.
The priest, he had us in the room
when I remember, he said,
who knows the first commandment?
I
raised my hand.
So I'm very enthusiastic.
So he said, tell me. I said,
thou shall have no other gods before me.
And another citation,
it says,
all children of Israel, your god is a
jealous god and
refuses to have anyone worship besides
him. Oh, very good. Very good.
I raised my hand again.
The the priest, he asked.
Yes. What is it? He said, I have
a wrong question.
I said, father,
it it says that there's only one god.
Why do we have 3?
Father, son, holy ghost.
He said, oh, oh, no. It's only one
god.
But but it's one god. It's it's it's
one god that's made up of 3.
I said,
I don't understand.
And so it's it's it's 1,
and you say it's 3. I don't understand.
He said, this is a matter of faith.
This is our faith, and you have to
accept
it. How these are manifestation of the others.
Didn't work for me at 12 years old,
13.
I I wasn't buying it, but I did
that.
Next,
who knows the second commandment?
I'm going again.
So I
guess maybe I don't know. He called on
me because I guess maybe nobody else was
nobody else wanted to raise their hand. So
he asked me. I said, okay.
I said, thou shall not make to thyself
any graven image of the likeness of anything
that is in the earth or on the
earth or in the water, under the earth.
Thou shall not bow down to them
nor worship them.
Good
answer. I have a follow-up.
I said, father, I don't understand.
We we say,
we say,
thou shall not make thyself any graven images.
I said, the father,
when I come into the church
and I go
through the the place and from the big
altars and the small altars and everything and
the stained glass windows. There are pictures of
of god
and there's pictures of Jesus who's supposed to
be god too
and there's statues
of Jesus on the cross. And when I
go by the altars,
I have to stop and worship.
Each one of them before I can go
by to stop.
Go next.
He said, oh,
we're not worshiping.
He said, we're using these images to help
us
focus our worship to god.
So
we're not worshiping the images.
I said, okay, father. I said, we may
not be worshiping the images. We're worshiping what
they represent.
So but it says, thou shall not bow
down
nor worship.
Now I may not be worshiping
the thing itself,
but I'm definitely bowing down. I don't understand.
The
priest, he turned red.
That's interesting. It's mostly black community. Most all
the kids in confirmation were black,
far as I can remember.
And the priest is white because we lived
in a community of white flight. So the
sixties, a lot of people moved out from
whites, moved out from inner city. And so
I have a priest
who was saying to me, you know, you
really don't get it, kid,
that
I just told
you that
we're not worshiping it,
I said, well, father, it says, thou shall
not
bow down.
No worship.
And I know definitely
when I pass by the altar that I
am bowing down.
I don't know what he said after that.
I just remember he was very unhappy with
yours truly,
and we moved on to the other commandments.
But for me, after that day, I began
listening
to the sermon and the reading of the
bible
with, I think,
a different
ear
that I could hear
in the Easter
service when
the bible says that Jesus
cried out,
my god, my god, why have thou forsaken
me?
I said, I'm I think I'm on to
something.
I started to think in the way that
when they report that Jesus, peace be upon
him,
would sit with
the learned people and that he would have
a new
and a different interpretation
of
the scriptures than they had.
I began feeling that precocious feeling as a
young person
that god is guiding me
and that interpretation
that I have, I think, is more accurate
to the meaning of the bible
than
the way that
my priest is instructed.
You know, it's funny. A person goes to
seminary and studies,
and he can't convince
a 13 year old
that what he's saying is true and his
interpretation
is true.
And that what that young person is reading
in the book
that they don't understand
it.
I
went for
what does the book say
and
began placing the rest of that information in
that context.
Well, by the time I was a high
school student,
my mother and I had traveled,
to many different countries.
I had seen many different people and did
it many different ways of life.
And we were always hosting,
guests who were coming from other countries and
other cultures.
So my worldview
as a little black boy in the middle
of Brooklyn
It was a very wide worldview.
So when I got to high school, I
started to
study about different world religions, about Buddhism,
about,
Hinduism.
As a musician in high school, I used
to go to the ashram
because some of the the musicians at that
time had started looking into eastern religions. The
Beatles had,
going to the Dalai Lama.
John McLaughlin had become,
I think,
a Hindu.
And so in in that those spirit and
I think
that many of them became
interested in these eastern religions.
John Coltrane
and others, although they had had some
association with Islam. And then let's not forget,
subhanallah,
what I used to ride up to Harlem
with my father,
to his pharmacy,
I would see on the subway
members of the nation of Islam.
And I would ask my father, what kind
of people are these?
He said, oh, these are people that in
the they are part of this group called
nation of Islam.
He said most of them, came out of
prison or from the south and not well
educated.
And, of course, we're a proud Palestinian. He
said, you know, we don't need that.
That kind of religion, we don't need it,
but it's good for them.
So he didn't put it down, but he
said that that we, the kind of people
that we are, we don't need it.
With that foundation, I went to college at
Howard University.
And when I got to university, I met
and studied with and became friends with
people from all around
the world,
from Africa, from Asia, from the Middle East.
And the people became my closest friend.
I, thinking that I'm just following in the
natural way of growing and developing,
became a vegetarian and learned that some of
the foods that we were eating were not
they weren't the foods that the bible was
saying to eat.
The book of Leviticus tells you not to
eat food,
and drugs and alcohol and the consciousness that
comes from, subhanallah,
from
Malcolm X and people like this talking about
how we need to be upright and to
be serving our community, and all of this
fell on the foundation of my family.
Well, as a learned
person studying in university,
I stopped
doing the things that people
around me were doing, and I started doing
the things that the Muslims around me were
doing.
Until ultimately,
one day,
I met 2 drunk men,
on the corner.
When they saw me coming, they put the
the man he put his wine bottle behind
his back. We used to call him wine
on his back. Now they call him alcohol.
Homeless people.
When they saw me coming, the one of
the the
brothers, he said to me, he said, brother,
can I ask you a question, brother? Trying
to trying to educate this guy right here.
He said, brother,
how many gods are there, brother?
Said, brother, there's only there's only one god.
He says, yeah. I'm talking about brother.
Muslim. He said, brother,
you
you you you you believe in Allah. Right?
I said, well, Allah is just the word
for for God in Arabic. He says, tell
my brother. He
said, brother, you believe in Muhammad. Right, brother?
I said, well, of course, my I mean,
any knowledgeable person or Muhammad is a prophet.
He said, dad, tell my
brother. I said, buddy, he said, brother, you
know, he's that poor thing, brother. I said,
no, sir. I don't need pork, brother. He's
an *. He's not good. He said, Muslim.
That's what I'm trying to tell you, brother.
Not Muslim. Right? Then he went down this
whole catechism. It was just like, I was
in confirmation
all over again.
And so
when I finished with him,
I said, well, brother, I'm I'm not a
Muslim.
He said, that's alright, brother.
I said,
And what I had not fully come come
to realize
is that through a
step by step process
that I had become
I didn't
change to become something else.
That from those foundations,
I had become
the product of the understanding that had grown
out of many decades.
I was a graduate student. I've done a
degree in chemistry.
I was working on my master's degree in
genetics.
The evidence of Allah's reality and the truth
was evident
everywhere.
It was just finally me making the commitment
one day of brother Shemsidini. He came to
me and said,
I see you praying
with us Muslims. I see you fasting.
When did you take Shahadah?
And I said, well,
I
never did that.
He said, well, you need to do that
because that's when you make the commitment
to live by these principles.
And so one day at college, it was
a jewel mark.
I went to the Islamic Center in Washington
DC,
and I sat with some of the people
there and I said a shadow in there.
It
was the best decision, SubhanAllah.
I mean, I made all of you.
Now I accepted.