Lauren Booth – What if you were Muslims and Did Not Know
AI: Summary ©
Lauren discusses her experiences with drugs and alcohol, including her desire for 80,000 likes on social media and her desire for a better life. She describes her desire for a better place to live, finding a woman with a stone in her hand and a tank. She also describes her experiences living in France, where she found a woman with a stone in her hand and a tank, and traveling to the city of sources where she found a woman with a stone and a tank. She also discusses her struggles with addiction and religion, including her desire to bring attention to the upcoming war in Iraq and her desire to bring attention to the war in Iraq.
AI: Summary ©
As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu.
My name is Lauren Booth, I'm a journalist
and I'm a broadcaster, and I'm an actor
and a writer by the grace of Allah,
and I've been Muslim since 2010.
I wasn't born Muslim, guess what, I was
born in London to parents who had lost
their face.
They were 1960s people in a famous circle
of friends, and so they had lost their
face.
But I always grew up knowing that there
was one God.
In fact, my mum called me a few
months ago and she said, the family have
been discussing why you've become an extremist in
religion.
I said, oh, okay, what did the family
say?
What did you say, mum?
And my mum said, well, you were always
a weird kid.
And I said, how was I weird?
She said, you were always praying.
You know, you just go to your room,
I'm just going to ask God about this
matter.
So I was a pious kid without any
knowledge.
But it's not easy, it's not easy, in
any age, but in this day and age,
to hold on to faith in your teenage
years.
So I became a kind of celebrity in
my late 20s, mostly because my brother-in
-law was the prime minister, but I certainly
made the most of my moments of attention.
And it becomes very, very toxic, very addictive.
Celebrity is addictive.
Once people are looking at you and admiring
you and wanting you to come to give
you things.
Celebrity is a lot about being given stuff.
You get free clothes, you can get a
free car, you can get a free holiday,
and then you get lots of free attention.
So nowadays it's like everybody's a celebrity on
social media.
How many likes?
Only 70 likes.
I want 80, I want 90, I want
100,000 likes.
And it's completely, having been, I know about
drugs, I know about drink, celebrity and social
media is more addictive.
And sugar, actually, in my experience.
So I definitely wouldn't say that in my
20s I was on any spiritual journey.
I was on a complete nasty, nasty celebrity
journey.
And I was content with that.
When I say, actually, content isn't the right
word.
I was okay with that.
I was okay with that.
But I was getting myself into situations which
were ugly, with people who were in a
very low moral state, which, to be honest,
their fame was this high, the moral state
was in the gutter.
Really, really degrading circumstances for the human being
to be in.
But it looks great on the front cover
of a magazine.
So there's this big disparity that I started
to notice.
And may Allah forgive me, I was very
selfish.
I was a selfish human being.
Because I was so involved in my own
drama, the drama of life.
And really, what everybody wants to know from
a convert is, okay, so when did you
wake up?
How did the wake up happen, right?
Yeah, I guess that's what everybody wants to
know.
You know, for women, possibly for men as
well, but definitely for women, the wake up
is having a baby, right?
Your body changes.
You're aware that something inside you needs you.
You have to calm down.
I had three miscarriages because of drinking drugs.
May Allah forgive me, right?
I had to calm down.
And then when the baby is born, and
going through the pain of childbirth, to me
it was like it was ripping a reality.
It was ripping from one place of just
table, chairs, lights, to something else.
I saw through a veil.
And there was beauty there, and there was
creation there, and there was hope there.
And I wanted to go there with my
child.
So that was one of the changes that
I went through.
That was in 2000.
And in the same time as my daughter
was born, I remember watching the news on
TV one night.
My baby was very small.
I was breastfeeding her.
And there was a photograph of a boy.
And you know when you give birth, if
you haven't given birth yet, you need to
know this, that you become very sensitive.
It's like all of the layers of ugliness
and of sarcasm and of self-obsession are
peeled away, and you want the world to
be a better place.
You really want the world to be a
better place.
So I was watching the news this night
with my new baby, and there was a
photo of a boy.
And the boy was small, but he was
15.
It was the news.
And he was standing like this.
And all you could see was his back.
And only a little bit in front of
him, there was a tank.
And the tank was coming towards the boy.
Now, if a tank came towards you and
me in this, you know, situation we are
in right now, you and me, we'd run
the other way, right?
That's the human instinct.
But this boy, this little boy, with a
stone in his hand, was leaning into the
tank.
And I was just thinking, you know, I
was just thinking, run away.
Run away.
You strange Middle Eastern child.
You strange alien child in a place of
dirt and refugee camps.
Just go home.
Just go home.
Your mom's waiting.
And it was very raw.
And the place that he came from was
Gaza, which I didn't really know about.
The place was called Palestine.
But I did know that 10 days later,
Faris Oday was shot dead by an Israeli
sniper.
And he died.
He bled to death on the floor of
a refugee camp, protecting his family with a
stone.
That and the Qadr of Allah is the
only explanation I have for everything that's happened
since.
Five years later, I found myself asking to
go to Palestine.
It was like there was a voice in
my head saying, go to Palestine, go to
Palestine, go to Palestine.
Why do I want to go to Palestine?
By this point, I'm living in France.
I've got two daughters, a nice husband, a
big house, swimming pool.
You know, we're in the most beautiful part,
one of the most beautiful parts of all
of Allah's earth.
And I want to go to Palestine?
What is that?
That is what you call a calling.
And what we recognize in this world is
that all of us have a calling away
from materialism.
So I found myself in 2005, thanks be
to God, in Palestine.
And I thought that I knew the story
there.
I'd gone to find the truth.
This is another word that you might recognize
in your life.
Whoever's watching this, may God bless you.
Wherever you come from or wherever you're going,
God bless you.
Watch out for the signs that you're being
called to truth and go with it.
That's all I can say is go with
it, okay?
So I went to Palestine and I was
scared.
I was scared of Arabs.
Yeah, definitely.
Arabs, Arabs with guns, Arabs with loud voices.
That's how it sounded to my English ears.
I remember I was being shown into my
interview with Mahmoud Abbas from the Palestinian Authority.
First day in the West Bank and there
were two big bodyguards, Palestinian bodyguards either side
of me, right?
They both had big guns.
They both had walkie-talkies.
And they put me into an elevator.
It was like a movie.
And then one of them said, And in
my mind, the subtitle said, we will kill
the white woman later.
And I was shocked.
I was really shocked because I thought, oh
my God.
I'm a racist.
I'm a racist.
I presume that just because these guys are
Palestinian and just because I'm white, they're going
to kill me.
Where did that thought come from?
Here's the amazing thing.
Three days later, I traveled around the West
Bank on my own, right?
They forgot to tell me in the media
where I was working, this is how you
go to Palestine.
You stay in your hotel room.
You make a phone call.
They come to you.
Don't go outside because that's what they tell
journalists.
Don't meet the Muslims.
Muslims are dangerous.
You might get kidnapped, okay?
You might get disappeared.
You'll never come back.
They'll lie to you.
But I didn't do that.
I just went, If somebody drove past and
said, get in my car, I said, okay,
I'll get in your car.
And so, by the grace of Allah, I
went all around the West Bank.
I went to Jenin.
I went to Bethlehem.
I went to Nablus on my own.
And I saw a different reality.
And there were two things that stayed with
me there.
One was that we're being lied to.
That the media are liars about Muslims.
And the second one was that I knew
nothing about Christianity and the Muslims knew more
about Jesus than I did.
And that, and there was three things.
The third thing was I should read the
Quran because the people were so generous and
kind to me as a stranger, kinder than
anybody in my family or any of my
friends had ever been.
And so gentle that I wanted to be
like them.
It was a panel.
But it took a long time because the
thing is you don't just get to walk
into Islam.
You know, Allah is great and he knows
our condition.
And we have to be, we have to
get out of our old habits to some
degree.
You know, and I had to be deprogrammed.
I had to have my rough edges cut
off, you know, knocked off me before I
was humble enough to say, which is the
Shahada.
I believe in the oneness of Allah and
I believe the Prophet Muhammad is the last
and final prophet.
I had a very traumatic time in 2009.
My family had a traumatic time.
But as a mother, I had a traumatic
time.
And I'll just encapsulate it like this.
In January 2009, I had a husband and
a house and a job.
In October 2009, I had no husband, no
house, no job.
I'd moved back from France, no money, no
nothing.
And it looked like my children were going
to be taken away.
Allahu Akbar.
That is in nine months.
And I didn't know what to do.
And it got to the stage in October,
around October 2009, when I was in a
rented flat, which I couldn't afford, back in
London with no car, with a court case
trying to take my children away from me,
when I put my head to the ground.
And I said, Allah, just my children.
Because I understand that life is not about
money anymore.
It wasn't about the swimming pool.
It wasn't about the great job.
Just my kids.
And let me learn about life and just
my kids.
And I said, sorry to God.
And a month later in 2010, I went
to Iran.
And I went as a journalist.
Not on a spiritual journey at all.
I just went to look around.
And I ended up in Ramadan in a
mosque.
And I sat down in the mosque.
And it felt as if I was under
a waterfall of peace.
A waterfall of peace.
You can imagine all the tension of that
year.
I was starting to have like feelings of
a heart attack.
You know, that whole year.
You know when you're so under pressure.
They talk about stress.
Thought I was going to die from a
heart attack.
And at that moment, in that mosque, everything
just went.
And I knew, I knew the universe was
peaceful.
And I knew that everything was going to
be okay.
SubhanAllah.
And a week later back in London, I
walked into a mosque.
And I said, there is no God but
Allah, alone and without partners.
And the Prophet Muhammad was the last and
final messenger.
And suddenly, Friday night, I was a Muslim.
Allahu Akbar.
That's interesting.
You know what, people...
So I worked in the mainstream media, right?
I worked for right-wing newspapers as a
left-winger.
I'm a liberal.
I don't even know what that means anymore
as a Muslim.
But anyway, you know, I wasn't right-wing.
I was considered myself a liberal.
And working...
I worked in the mainstream of newspapers.
And was everything...
And so as soon as I came to
Islam, there's only two things that the right
-wing media can write.
If someone who is sane, because I clearly
wasn't mad.
If someone who is from them.
I had a page in their newspaper, in
the mail on Sunday.
I was a regular columnist.
I was on TV, on Sky News regularly.
Suddenly turns up in a hijab.
It's like, okay, two options.
She can't cope with life or she's having
a midlife crisis.
Because if it's not one of those two,
then maybe there's a God.
And maybe that God, the one God calls
himself Allah.
And they can't do that.
So I got treated immediately like a written
about.
You get written about as if there was
something missing.
You were at a loss.
You couldn't cope.
So here's a crutch of a faith that
you don't understand.
There you go.
I mean, this rhetoric really is far-right
rhetoric.
I had a nice life.
I had good parts.
And I had difficult and fun parts.
I wasn't looking for faith.
Faith, by the grace of Allah, came to
me.
But I did want to be kind.
And I did want Palestine to be free.
And only Allah knows.
Was it those things?
No, because it's never anything that we've done.
That would be arrogance.
Only Allah's mercy.
We all get a chance to come to
Islam.
So no, I wouldn't say I was missing
anything.
Crazy thing is that I knew nothing about
Islam when I took my shahada.
Yeah, this is really, really mad.
Many people I know study.
But Allah knows.
See, there's as many roots to Islam as
there are human beings.
So if you're a technical person, you may
go line through line and ask questions of
a sheikh for two, five, ten years.
And go, ah, okay, now I get it.
I'm satisfied.
If you're an academic.
I'm a people person.
I was trained as an actor.
I grew up in a literature environment.
So for me, it was always going to
be, how does this faith affect the people?
If I can see in the people something
better than me, then that's interesting to me.
So amazingly, it might seem to Muslims, because
we're always very down on ourselves, you know,
stuff for Allah.
We need to stop that post-colonial nonsense.
My route to Islam was really through the
people of Palestine and the Muslims that I
met in the UK.
And the first time, I read a section
of the Quran in 2007.
I read Surah Fatihah.
It's the opening.
And if you're not Muslim, you'd recognize the
opening of the Quran as sounding a bit
like the Lord's Prayer.
If you read Surah Baqarah, and you're in
a sinful, disbelieving state, it's going to hit
you like a brick.
It hit me like a brick.
There's an ayat in there that says, it's
to do with they pretend to be believers
when they're with believers, but when they're on
their own with their shaitan, complete hypocrites.
And I realized I was a hypocrite.
I told people I believed in God, but
I didn't pray.
I said to myself, oh, all my children,
let's believe in God, but I didn't act
like a believer.
I acted like a non-believer.
And this book told me I was a
liar, and I was going to *, and
it scared me.
So without picking up the Quran again, I
took my shahada, and then I had to
go back to the Quran.
Subhanallah.
But when I picked it up, Surah Baqarah
said, welcome, be at peace.
Everything is going to be okay.
Allah will give you Jannah, all you have
to do is draw closer to Him.
It was an opening, Alhamdulillah.
When I was young, I didn't know anything
about Islam.
In the 80s, early 90s, I just knew
there were Asian people who did weird stuff,
and they had their exotic gods, and it
was probably very colorful, and there were probably,
Muslims probably prayed to about 12 gods.
And I completely confused it with Hinduism, I
didn't care.
And then after 9-11, I felt sorry
for Muslims, because I thought, wow, it's really
unfair that the poorest people on the planet
are being bombed by the richest people on
the planet.
It doesn't make sense.
Afghanistan, Iraq, what was that?
I didn't like what I was seeing.
So I began protesting against the war in
Iraq.
Then I found out about Palestine, and I
took steps by the grace of Allah to
try and do what I could to bring
attention to Palestine.
Actually, because I was 43 when I came
to Islam, and because I'd been to Palestine
by ship and by, I don't know, all
different ways, my family kind of thought I
was crazy anyway by this point.
So like, oh, now it's Islam.
Oh, right, okay.
So, but, it started to bite after a
while.
Oh, you're really going to keep the scarf
on, are you?
It's not just a fad, no.
It's something that I need to do for
my faith.
It's something I believe in.
And then you start praying in your mum's
house.
She's like, ugh.
But she was okay, to be fair.
She never stopped me praying.
But there were a couple of times when,
even recently actually, you know, I had to
speak to my family because they were serving
alcohol at the table, and I said, you
know what?
I can't do this.
I can't.
It just is not right for me to
sit here.
I know it's your house.
But do you mind, you know?
I'm not going to ask you not to
drink, but I'll just go and sit at
another table.
You said, what about your mum?
I said, my mum's 80 years old.
She can do what she wants.
But you're younger, and you know I'm a
Muslim.
If you choose to drink now, it's your
house.
I'll go and sit somewhere else.
But for me, I'd rather not.
So there's all these kind of little sticking
points.
But honestly, they've been really, really good.
That hasn't been a problem for me, alhamdulilah,
shukr Allah.
Ah, the media was horrendous.
The media was horrendous.
I went from being a part of the
media to being, like, seen as a criminal.
I walked into Sky News after a month,
and I finally had the nerve to put
on my hijab, because before that, I'd be
going to Sky News and taking it off
in the car.
And then I read an ayat in the
Quran about the hypocrites who do one thing
and then don't do it, and I'm like,
oh my God, I'm a hypocrite.
I'm pretending to the TV.
I'm not Muslim.
I'm just, so I went in with hijab,
and everybody went, hi, Laurie.
I'll never forget it.
And then I remember going into where they
do the makeup, and she was like, shall
I do your hair?
Oh, I'll just do a little bit of,
yeah, I'm like, just, it's fine.
I did exactly the same job as I'd
ever done for 10 years.
Same job, talking about the newspaper, same kind
of opinions.
And they said, thank you very much, but
there was one difference.
On the Monday, next Monday morning, I got
a phone call.
Laura, we're changing things around.
We won't be using you anymore.
Thanks very much.
Take care.
Now, I can't prove that that was to
do with me converting, and you will notice
there are now, hamdulillah, lots of women on
the mainstream news.
Not lots, but there's a number who have
hijab, but are they converts?
Are they converts?
The world is not ready for converts to
be seen.
The Western world is not ready for converts
to be seen as rational human beings, because
how can you be rational when you've been
believing Allah and all that stuff from the
Middle East, and they have all these confused
ideas.
So that was difficult.
It was only difficult in that it impacted
me financially, because I literally didn't care.
I didn't care.
Call me a terrorist sympathizer.
I don't care.
I've got my Quran.
I've got my Allah.
I've got my kids.
I don't care.
And hate and hate and hate for years,
four or five years, hatred.
And it didn't matter at all, because everything
is with Allah, and Allah will choose the
path, as long as we stay the course,
steadfast, steadfast, steadfast.
So I'd say this to anybody who has
a feeling in their heart, maybe Islam is
the right way.
You might come from Russia or Texas or
France or South America or parts of Africa
from a Christian family.
Don't be afraid.
Never fear.
When you take the path to Allah, everything
is lifted up.
Everything is lifted, because you know what?
Our sins are gone.
And nothing, nothing you've experienced so far can
replace that feeling.
And don't be afraid as well, because everything
will make sense.
You know the feeling of, I don't know
why I'm getting up in the morning.
The feeling you might be having of, this
world is so crazy, I don't know why
I'm here.
When you study Islam, when you live a
Muslim life, when you speak to Allah every
day, everything makes sense.
You will know why you're here, where you
go to next, and how to make things
better, inshallah.