Lauren Booth – The Child Who Knew Allah DESPITE their family
AI: Summary ©
A woman describes her experiences of praying every night and how her grandmother made her pray. She talks about her teenage years and how her sister's actions led to her becoming a danger zone. She talks about her father's actions and how they led her to pray harder and harder.
AI: Summary ©
My parents, in the 1960s, were both in
the entertainment industry.
My mother was a model and my father
was a well-known actor.
They were two of what you could call
the beautiful people.
But behind that beautiful exterior was a rather
shoddy backstory that involved a lot of alcohol
and a lot of drugs.
Now, as a little girl of five, I
remember praying every night.
In fact, my mum said to me just
a few days ago, I was speaking with
the family and we were wondering why you're
such an extremist now.
I said, oh, that's nice.
What was the conclusion?
Well, I brought it back to you always
being a strange little girl who used to
pray.
She's partly right.
I'm not an extremist, inshallah.
But I did used to pray.
And I remember being five years old and
my grandmother taught me the Lord's Prayer.
Now, the Lord's Prayer is a Christian prayer.
It's actually made by Isa, as he submitted
to the will of Allah before his disciples.
So I used to make that prayer and
then follow it with an appeal to the
one God who ruled over everything.
Because in a child's mind, faith is very
simple.
There's no buy one, get one free God.
There's no buy one, get three free God.
There's just a had, just one.
So I knew that in my life, my
mother made a lot of decisions.
My dad made a few.
My grandfather made a few decisions.
My grandmother made the most decisions.
We were a matriarchal family.
But above them all, who was running the
outside world?
Who was making the leaves grow on the
trees?
That wasn't my grandmother.
Who was making the stars shine at night?
Who was making the sun rise in the
morning?
That was the one God.
And I used to pray so hard that
I even remember one of my prayers.
And it was this.
Dear God, please take my younger sister away.
She's really horrible.
But Allah is merciful.
And she's with us today, Alhamdulillah.
But I knew who to appeal to.
And that carried me through my whole childhood.
That absolute knowledge, that certainty that God was
out there.
And then come the teenage years.
And they are a danger zone.
In every community, in every time.
So my teenage years came.
And with it, two things happened.
First, the ego comes in.
You become one of those youngsters who knows
everything about everything.
Who's got teenage children here?
Right.
Have you ever heard this phrase?
What do you know about anything?
My grandfather fought in the Second World War.
Five.
In five of the invasions of the Second
World War.
And I used to stand toe to toe
to him when I was 15 going, What
do you know about life?
I think he knew quite a bit in
hindsight.
So the nafs come in, the ego comes
in.
And with that comes another catastrophe.
Potentially the hormones come in.
What a mess we get ourselves into.
But if you add into my teenage years,
the fact that my friend's mom was giving
us drugs.
Got kind of a toxic mix.
I tried, I tried to hold on to
my prayer.
I did.
But one night a friend from school, she
came over to stay at my house.
And as we were going to sleep, I
put my hands together and started to pray.
Dear God, please bless mommy and daddy.
Dear God.
My friend started to snigger.
That sound that only teenage girls make.
What are you doing?
She said.
I said, I'm praying.
She said, who are you praying to?
The big man on the cloud with a
beard.
Santa Claus.
Children are very practical.
I tried to have an image of my
head of what God looked like.
If he was a man like my dad,
my dad made mistakes.
Did that mean God, the father, could make
mistakes?
And actually, if God was on a cloud,
why couldn't I see him on a rainy
day?
My faith began to melt away.
How hard it is to hold on to
that rope of iman.
The rope that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
tells us ties us.
That belief ties us to him and to
safety.
My hands started to slide off.