Tom Facchine – Advice for New Young Muslims

			A lot of people accept Islam in their teenage years or their early adulthood, because that's the
time in your life where you're, you're ready to support a cause you're ready to challenge
everything, you're ready to think about things differently. And you're ready to strike out on your
own and make an identity for yourself that maybe is different from the identity that you were
inherited, or that you were gifted through lineage or your culture or whatever. And so a lot of
people then they feel hesitant or not sure, how am I supposed to tell my parents how much was to
tell my relatives or my community, and that's a case by case basis, you know, sometimes some people
		

			are certain situations where it makes a lot of sense to wait, you know, you don't have to be in a
rush to tell anybody, especially if you might be in a situation, a lot of times people get kicked
out of the home. And then that has really, really horrible sort of consequences. I know brothers
personally, that have lived in mess cheats, you know, I know a brother personally. And he was a
student in Medina with me that accepted Islam as a teenager, and his aunt kicked him out of the
home. And so he went and lived in the basement of his local machine, and he used to cook for his
meals, he would cook pasta by putting it in a pitcher of water and put it in the window in a sunny
		

			window. That was how he ate. So you don't want to get in that situation. If you can avoid it, you
know, if you need to kind of conceal, go pray in secret, pray in your room, like whatever. The
important thing is that you're on a trend, you have a plan, right? Which way are you trend, you're
getting better day by day? Are you getting to a point because you also don't want to be a poor
representative of SNAP, if you don't necessarily know what you're talking about. And some people are
gonna start peppering you with questions, right? It might be a kind of uncomfortable thing, as
opposed to if you take a little bit of time, and you take a little bit of time and you're able to
		

			get settled, get settled in your identity come to know a few things and be able to sort of respond
to common doubts or common sort of misunderstandings, right, like my aunt, I have an aunt that has
like a she's not an aunt, she's like a, you know, a family friend who is of Jewish heritage. And
when I accepted Islam, she was like, Well, what does this mean for us and our relationship? You
know, because in her mind, she's a she's a Jew, or historic, ethnically a Jew. And now I'm a Muslim,
and we're supposed to be enemies or something. And I told her now, we've been kicking it for years,
for hundreds of years, it was only very recently that any problem started, you go back to Muslim
		

			Spain, and you know, there was no problems. So people need to be educated. Okay. So sometimes it
makes sense to take your time there are other situations though, where you know, you can get you can
get away with or actually, it might benefit you to come out with it right away. Like some people
have parents, you know, that are very, very supportive, even if they're not ready to accept it
themselves. They're kind of like, I will tell them like they're ready to support somebody else's.
Like you know what that makes sense for you. And if you need me to drive to the masjid, I'll take
you and whatever, there's people out there like that. And so if that's your situation, then you
		

			know, go ahead, go ahead, because then you've got maybe even more support and access and resources
from people around you that can see that you're trying to help yourself and will at least support
you in helping yourself even if they don't necessarily, they're not necessarily ready to take it on
or think about it for themselves.