How the Bible Led Me to Islam – 2of2

As the brother introduced me, my name is usually Evans or do some people know me as Joshua and

I was born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina in a very, very strict religious Methodist upbringing. I was raised by my grandparents, who,

as they say old fashioned. We were very thankful that we went to church every Sunday. We went to church, Sunday evenings, and sometimes on Wednesdays, and then Wednesdays became more regular as I got older, that was considered in the south, very religious, you're considered a very good

patient of the church, if you went Sunday, Sunday, Wednesday. And that was not very difficult considering the fact that the church from my home was separated by two houses, you walk out of my house to the right investment house, you pass another house and you walk straight into the wall in church. So it was not very difficult for me to go to church that often. And that was how I was raised. You know, we went to church. Before we ate, we prayed before going to sleep. I pray every time my grandmother had any, you know, any commotion happened to how she prayed. The Bible was always open. We always read the Bible, my grandfather was always teaching me about, you know,

knowing Moses, and you know, the Jesus and you know, all these things. So this was just the environment that was brought up in my father, my mother had stepped out of the picture. My father was working two jobs, which was the reason I was being raised by my grandparents.

And this continued on till about 13 or 14 years of age. At about 13 or 14.

I decided to start attending the youth services on Saturday evenings at my church, Youth Service go Saturday evening were quite different from a normal method is Sunday service. Methodist services are very formal, you don't talk you sit down and listen to the service. You get up, you go outside of the church, and then you talk to each other each other in the home. On Saturday, evenings are quite different. They were held in the gym, and there was music and you know, there was games and play basketball, we played all types of different games.

And then we ate a pizza or we you know, hamburgers, or whatever they did on Saturday evenings, in the in views minister give a lot of 30 minutes sermon on whatever the topic was the he decided to give it to him. And the youth minister was a 19 year old friend of mine. We as I started going to the youth services, we became very good friends. And he was attending a university in a rainbow called Bob Jones University. Anybody familiar with the South and the Bible colleges will ring the bell very much. It's a very, it's considered one of the most conservative Christian colleges in the country. I wanted to attend Bob Jones as well. And he was attending Bob Jones and his major was

textual criticism. If you hear who might be a major religion or anything of that nature might understand what textual criticism is Textual Criticism to try to make a huge field very visible. It's

it's a study that takes all many manuscripts, any type of manuscript when it comes to Christian textual criticism of the Bible. It takes manuscripts of the Bible, which we know just of the old the New Testament, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and 1000s of copies of the New Testament. And none of these copies are exactly the same. Not one single is exactly the same to the letter. So what textual print does is he sourced Rowling's he learns ancient Greek, ancient Hebrew and Aramaic. And he tries to find out the date on these texts. And then which ones are the oldest, and not only ones the oldest, which ones are the most original.

So as I befriended him, I became a layman or textual critic because I, as he was studying, I was studying I was a study partner, I was personally, you know, he shot ideas off of I read his papers, you know, things of this nature. And I always textbooks I would listen, you know, even record some of the lectures, and I've listened to them. So I already wrote about Townsend already decided my major, including sexual criticism.

And since that was the case, me and him together, decided to take up a study of the Bible. we said to ourselves, and he told me that he said that if you know, this is our book, this is what we call the idea. He This is the basic instructions before leaving Earth. Therefore, this is the book, this is the Bible, we need to study we should know, because this is what is going to get us from heaven. So we began studying the Bible. And we started from Genesis one one, and we decided we're going to read through it from beginning to end.

The Bible is a pretty big book, I will give it that it's a pretty, it's a pretty long, and as I read the Bible, this is where I guess you can say the beginning of the end of the beginning.

If that makes any sense.

As I started reading through the Bible, I began I said I'm gonna read this individually

I'm going to read this as a book, I'm going to take away from it, all of my preconceived notions of it, because that's what textual critic has to do. I started reading the Bible. And as I got through the books, the Bible started reading the stories of no one. And I read it. And I knew that I was a puppet and all this and I started reading in the Bible that the Bible says that Noah was a drunkard, as it puts it. And this now is referred to on a number of occasions in the Bible. And immediately something did not sit right with me, because this was a story computed here Sunday school, you heard that, nor Luke er, he saved humanity. He took too in tune with all the animals and all this, but

they didn't take the part about the Bible says that he was a drunkard. He was an alcoholic. So this caught me off guard, I, you know, I said, Where did this come from? You know, so I started reading and then I said, Okay, this what the Bible says, so that I will sit back and say, Okay, how did that sit with me knowing what I know about Christianity, my faith has listened to me. And to be honest, in a nutshell quite well, because I said to myself, and I had a picture in my mind, of the prophets, being the leaders of humanity, the problems of the people chosen to be the leaders of humanity, therefore, I pictured in my mind that therefore they would be the best of humanity. It just seems to

make sense to me.

And alcoholic, alcoholism is a disease. And most alcoholics can barely hold on to a job at McDonald's, much less build an ark.

This never happens. I said, so something didn't fit, right. I said, Okay, maybe it's just, you know, maybe this is something wrong with me. So I need to keep going.

So I kept going, and I got to the story of luck. But then when he talks about what what was

his daughter's getting drunk and stuff.

This is not something I heard in Sunday school. And

so

these things, one after another after another, really started really starting to play with my emotions. And I was trying to read this analytically, just as a book, but I could not separate it with myself as from what I've always learned, and always been taught. So I started taking these things to the scholars at Bob Jones. You know, I told my friend, he said, Okay, let me take you to the people who can answer the vetting. First, I took them to my pastor, the church, and the pastor of my church told me, he said, he put his hand on my shoulder. He said, Brother Joshua, you know, don't let a little bit of knowledge wreck your faith, is exactly what he told me. Don't let a little

bit of knowledge wreck your faith. He said, Because faith is what leads to salvation, not knowledge. He said, faith is what is going to take you to paradise not now that he said, We are justified by faith, and he was quoting Paul, we are justified by faith, not by works. So I said, I said, Okay.

But it didn't it. It was an answer that my mind understood, but my heart would not accept. So I went to the scholars at Bob Jones, and started asking him about these things.

And I started getting the same, it was almost like this, this was a recorded message from you know, from from some of these people, because they would tell me the same thing, you know, brother, Joshua, don't let a little bit of knowledge, wreck your faith, you know, the devil will give you 99% of the truth, to get you to believe the 1% of falsehood. So I said, Okay, and I went back and continued my research of the Bible, I said, I'm not gonna let this

I'm not gonna let this discourage me or ruin me.

So all these things began to came into conflict with me, this set off a whirlwind of conflict with me. So, I was in a frenzy, and I started telling my friend and he realized that I was in a Christian crisis as to say, you know, I was in real crisis. So he took me to,

back to the the scholars at Bob Jones. And he also got me in touch with some some Bible scholars at the moody Institute in Chicago, which is one of the biggest evangelical schools in this in this country, the moody Institute,

which is where I plan to perhaps do my graduate studies after Bob Jones. And they came together and they had you know, an intervention has to say, you know, they tried putting, they began to think because I started to believe that this book cannot be from God.

Not only that, I noticed, changes in the text, but changes in the way the language was spoken, because you can tell in in, in Hebrew, when God is speaking, because it is an extremely eloquent speech, a speech that is not unlike that is not like any type of human speech, you can tell the difference. And then you can see when it automatically changes to almost like slang, it changes to like an educated speech. I ended up talking to one guy, one guy, Bob Jones University, and I don't want to give out his name because he will probably not be very happy with me saying that he is the person who recommended

Christianity,

and he will not be very pleased if I were to give his name and a credit that to him because he's probably still a a professor Bob Jones. But he sat me down, he said, You know what, brother Joshua,

you've seen all these things that are happening, you know, mistakes, things that don't make sense, you know, things don't look right. And he said, you're gonna see it, you're gonna continue to see it, if you continue to read this book. He said, because this book was written by man's hands. And anything that has been touched by man's hands will have fingerprints still left on it, he said, so what happened was, when all these things you see wrong is that somebody probably just made a mistake. He said that the copy of the copy of the copy described will copy this person who person this, this, this, this, this, so on and so forth. Probably one of them made a mistake, and somebody

copies mistake and made his own mistake. And then that person compounded the other person's mistake. And maybe somebody came back and corrected one person mistake and then added his own. He said, so that's probably what happened. And you have the final product of all of that.

And that just had to sit down and actually take that for a second. Because I was fighting inside myself to try to keep this book at the status that it has always been in my home, the inerrant Word of God, this is how to talk in Arabic word of God, Word of God without error, I left Christianity altogether, I decided that

I knew God existed for that was for sure I could look around me until God existed. That was a no brainer. I knew God existed. I knew he had a purpose for my life, I knew that there were prophets, I knew all these people were not remembered so well in history, and they did nothing. So I knew there was something behind all of this, I just wanted to find it. So I started studying every religion, I could find, I knew that God's true religion would be balanced, for sure. Because life is balanced in order for life to exist. in harmony, it must be balanced. And in every one of them, I would see glimpses of the truth, I would see glimpses, and I don't want to discredit Islam, I don't want to

discourage them, because I went to the public library and pull out a book on Islam. And this book, said that the Muslims worship the moon God, and they bow their heads five times a day to a box in the desert. And they and you know, they, they, they can have as many women as they want. And, you know,

they're all Arab, and you know, things of this nature. And what else did they say? Oh, yeah, they can kill non Muslims anytime, anyplace in any way they wish without scrutiny, and that they would get 70 virgins in heaven and all this other stuff. So needless to say, I made it about four chapters in the book, I put the book back, thank you very much. I took a big my big one of the big fat magic markers and raised Islam off and said, You know, I'm moving on, you know, and I said to myself, that if I convert any other religion, Islam will not be the one for sure.

Thank you very much. I'm done with that one. And so, being 17 years old, and having been searching for the truth for about a year and a half, two with us, about a year and a half, they'll give a good credit, about a year and a half, really hard searching, I became very frustrated, I became very angry with it a sense that, you know, I'm looking for you, and you're not doing any effort here. You know, I know, that was my prayer, you know, I'm looking for you. And I don't, I'm not seeing any, any reverse effort on this. And, you know, I felt as though

I was in a room with all the lights off. In every doorway, there was about 50,000 doors in the room, and I knew one of them took me out of here, but the lights were off. And the only way I was gonna know is be able to read the signs on the door, you know, and I was trying to feel my way through this foolishness to find the right door, and I really got frustrated, you know, and I'm asking God, why don't you just turn the light for me, please, you know, just let me out of this, this this foolishness. And I'm a perfectionist at heart. Anything I do, I want to be the best at it. If I was a Christian, I wanted to be the best if I wanted to be a Bible scholar, I was determined to be the

best. So when I decided to get into the street life, for sure, no one was gonna outdo me.

So I became, I went from one way too extremely other way really quick. I was getting into trouble getting kicked out of school, I got expelled, you know, I had to go to night school. I was getting arrested. You know, all these things were happening to me at the age of 17. You know, and my grandmother was, she was

bewildered at all of this. She had no idea what had happened to me.

There was two incidents that changed all that.

The first incident, I got into a car accident, we were on our way back from Clemson from a party.

And it just so happened that night that we were really tired. And I never wore my seatbelt. There was just something I didn't do. And then I just happened to tell my friend You know, we're tired. You know, I'm going to sleep. I don't know if you're going to go to sleep. So let's proceed. But on. You know, if we run off into the ravine, at least we have a seatbelt on. So we did that and we did run off

To the ravine.

Needless to say, we flip the car about six and a half, seven times, they say, you know, like who's counting?

You know, it was slipped quite a bit of times. And at the end,

one half of the car, the back end of the car was on one side of the street and the other half of the of the car broke completely in half.

And I was awoken by the accident. So I got out of the car. And I pulled my friend out. And he had two broken ankles, not really broken English, I had a broken leg and a broken ankle. And I had a piece of glass sticking out of my arm, which I still have a scar to prove it in. It just so happened at that time, there was a police officer traveling the other way he saw the accident, turn around, came back, the officer pulled over and got out of the car. I guess you didn't notice that I was not there was not another car parked on the side of the road. But he got out and he asked me he said, Did you see the accident? You know, he came up, he said, you see the accident? Did you see what

happened? Do you know where the people?

And I looked at him, you know, and I said, I was in the accident? You know, that's that's my friend's car. And when I said that, it was almost you know how they you know, people talk about, you know, seeing the blood red on somebody's face, I saw blood drain. I saw him go from regular color to white.

And he looked at me.

And he said that,

after seeing that wreck, because he saw the whole racket happened in front of him coming towards him and I went across the road in front of him.

He said I've already called the corner just in case. He said these are rakes. When we come to we immediately call the corner just in case. Because these people don't live to that type of rank. You know, we said what do you said, you see this one part of the car. See, I see it I was in. He's in he looked at me. And he must have been a very religious man, because he looked at me. He said, before you are asked, I want you to remember this. He said, I want you to remember that God is real. And that you're here for a reason.

said you're here for a reason. And you better realize what that reason is. He said, I don't know it, but you better figure it out. Because God doesn't keep people around like this unless they have a purpose later on in life. So he said you have a reason you need to figure it out.

needs to say that in that that wasn't the only thing that woke me up because I continued on doing what I was doing. About a month after that I traveled to New York with a friend of mine, and I'm drawing quite closely into my story, I hope.

I traveled to New York with a friend of mine. And I left the hotel room happened to be the same friend and I into the friends I left the hotel room to go to the ATM.

So I went in and I withdrew my little $60. And I was always walking out a guy came in behind me. And apparently

he was so in need of his money. He was so strong out or whatever on drugs and that he was not willing to take the chance of me not giving him that money. Because he pulled the gun pointed in my face and pulled the trigger. He didn't say a word you didn't ask him anything. He didn't say anything.

And then I remember him, his eyes getting big, because nothing happened. Nothing happens. I don't know if there was not a bullet where he was so drugged up that you didn't know the gun was not loaded, or there was a bad bullet. But after that, he started trying to pull the trigger again. And and before I even even had a chance to do that I had because of my martial arts experience. 100 100 Thanks to God. So immediately, I don't rush them in smash them against the glass and why I cracked all the glass that was at the door and shoved them through the door, you know, in in rain, you know, I ran and ran back to the hotel room.

But needless to say, I went back to the hotel room

and started thinking to myself that you know that I gotta get it together. You know, this is this is crazy. I gotta get it together. So I went back home, and I sat down until my grandmother What happened? And she looked at me and you know, she told me, she said the police officer, right when he told you, you know that you have a purpose. And she said

she told me that, um,

this is God's mercy to you, that he's sending these events in your life, to make you realize he loves you.

He says because he didn't love you, he let you die. But he wants you to know him. And he's allowing your life to be extended as a mercy till you know him. So she said go look for him.

So

I went and renewed my search for God, needless to say, and I used to pray every day, many times a day bowing and prostrating on the floor because this is how the Bible taught. This as the Bible taught the prophets prayed. And then one day I was having a debate about religion with a friend of mine.

And

a mutual friend of ours whom we knew through his business

happened to show up at that time, and, you know, told me that he was Muslim at that point, he just decided to reveal

He was Muslim and asked me to come to Juma things didn't. They didn't. From the book I read, I didn't think that that was part of the job description. So, and he was African American and I thought, Muslims were adamant. And he said, You need to come to Juma. He's like, I'm not a good enough Muslim to tell you about this man. You know, because I don't live it, apparently. And he said, What if you come to the mosque, there'll be people there who can help you. You know? So I said, Okay, I said, What is Juma? He said, It's Friday service, just like church on Sunday, there's just no chairs. I said, no problem. So I have myself up to go to this Juma because all I knew about

Muslims was this thing I read in the book. So number one, I was very scared to not see that there were not many windows in the mosque. That was the first thing this gave me. The second thing that scared me was and this might be shocking to you that I lived across the street from this mosque on my life.

When they told me what the mosque was, it was next door to the church that I used to go to, to learn how to become a missionary. And you could touch the two buildings like this.

So I didn't I didn't know that, um, that was scary to know that all these Muslims lived across the street from me

all my life. So I went to Juma and sat down. And if I'm getting long winded, somebody, please stop me. I'm almost at the end, maybe 510 minutes.

I sat down, you know, and the person who gives the sermon got up. He's called a hottie even Arabic, which means, you know, just a talker.

And he started his sermon sermon was ended.

And I said, Oh, my God.

I said, He's talking about me.

Because I was only non Muslim, there was only nonnamous in there. And I was the only person sitting away from everyone else.

He's talking about me, I'm in big trouble. You know, I said, this, this guy and this drug dealer guy and set me up.

Cuz I didn't see him.

He wasn't, he wasn't there. You know, I said he must be, you know, he must be the messenger to bring the non Muslims. So

for the Americans, I thought about it. Because there wasn't many Americans there either. It was mostly an Egyptian and Syrian and Jordanian you know, mosques. So they were all here, most of the mayors, and the ones that weren't, you know, they were fair skins. I didn't know the difference. So, you know, you know, I started shaking, I said, You know, I said, Okay, you're a martial artist, you can take a couple of them.

Take a couple of them, you find exit.

So, it only lasted about 30 seconds, he made it English, you know, and then he started translating what he recited in Arabic, you know, and the translation was, you know, All praise belongs to God, you know, alone, you know, we praise Him worship, we seek his help, and we ask for his forgiveness. And that began to ease my heart a little bit, you know, I said, I said, Okay, you know, I, you know, Okay, calm down just a little bit. You okay, so I started to ease down in my seat a little bit,

or my position on the floor. So, you know, then, you know, he, you know, he would make it through some. And then every time like, every five minutes, he would go back to Arabic, and then I would get scared again, thinking, you know, now he's talking about me, but then he would translate and it would be so beautiful, you know, what he was saying would be so beautiful words like I've never heard before ever.

And after that, and I remember to this day, what the sermon was about, because as an agnostic, and what I had believed through reading the Bible, that was, salvation comes from God alone. This was my conclusion that the Bible says this, Jesus says, this, nature tells you this reasoning tells you this logic tells you this, that God created me. Therefore, he's the only one who can forgive me. And this is what I would say to those who I was debating with, at the end of my stage of Christianity was that

God did not question Jesus, when he created me. He did not ask his permission. He made me and put me in a way, my mother. Therefore, why do I need to ask anyone to worship him? Why do I need to ask anyone? Or in anybody's name to forgive me? I didn't. It didn't make sense to me. It didn't. And I'm not here to bash anyone's faith. I'm just trying to give you my story, how I got where I'm at how I got from there to here. That's it.

And I remember that he told me, the sermon was that the forgiveness, don't despair in the mercy of God, that the door of mercy is always open to anyone at any time. And he said, as long as you have that die in and the day of judgment has not come, that you can always fall in your face in front of God

and ask Him for His forgiveness and he can forgive you and he's the only one who could grant you paradise him and him alone. No one else.

And he even said it. Your good deeds, your actions alone cannot even get you there. If you do good all your life, he said you cannot go to Paradise just married it on that alone because the price for paradise

is too high,

the exchange rate would be nil. All your deeds would just fall away as dust at the price of Paradise, he said, What don't get you there is God's mercy, and that alone, and how you obtain God's mercy, obeying His commandments and asking for his forgiveness. That's it. He said, that's the step manual. That's how that's the process to get there. These will not do it. So, this to me was like,

there's someone like, you see, someone agrees with me, somebody I had to come to this must to find someone who agreed with me, these people who worship the moon God and boundary bumps in the desert, at least they got this, right. So after this, they make prayer on Fridays. And so the Muslim started lining up in lines just like you see it.

And this really scared me because it looks, you know, almost kind of like military lines. And I said, Now they're coming to get me, you know, they've gotten their little thing out of the way. And now it's time to get the goodies, you know, go get the American guy. So, and but, you know, the guy told me he came to me I guess he saw my my apprehension, he came he said, No, we're gonna pray. You know, we're facing this way because this is the facing towards Mecca. And he explained to me really quickly that the Kaaba is not what we worshipping. But it's a symbol of our unity. It's a symbol of the unity of God, it was the first house of God built by Abraham. I mean, it's what Muslims still

bound to all over the world. And we're battling for God, we just facing that direction. I said, Okay, you know, make sense. Okay, I'll take that. And when they started to make prayer, number one, the recitation of the Quran was the most beautiful melodic tone I have ever heard in my life. And I was a lover of music.

Number two is when they started bowing and prostrating on the floor. The versus the Bible rang in my head, that this was the way the prophets prayed. This is the way the people of God prayed. So to speed it up to get there in two minutes, I got a copy of the Quran, because I asked him about the brief. You know, what is your religion about? They told me God is one, you know, we need the prophets. They started naming names like Moses, David, Jesus, and I said, Wait a minute, where'd you get those names? They're in the Koran. I said, Okay, you have a good one, Can I have one? Because I believed that a religion was justified by His book. If your religion is true, it must be justified

by its book, it must be there must be something concrete, not just what you say or what this person does, or what this person says, There must be something concrete, that I can have passed down to me that I can pass it on to someone else. That validity is this religion that validates it? So I asked him for a Koran. And when I started reading the Quran

in the first two chapters, I started getting two names that I remembered. I started reading the story of Moses, the story of David, the story of Jesus, the story of Haroon of Abraham.

And what I realized that these stories were different than any story I've ever seen in the Bible. These thought that these people were at the highest echelon of the society, they were at the highest peak of morality. They were the people to be followed. They were the guiding example, not only do they command the people to do good, they were the living example of it.

And this to me, was what made sense. This was what I was looking for. This was the people that I could follow. These were prophets. This was what I could call a prophet. So needless to say, I kept reading through the Quran. But I had given my heart to this book after the second or third chapter.

I sent myself I don't care what this religion is. But if this is the judge,

I want to be whatever these people are. And I want to be whatever this book tells me I need to be. And I would read in the book that it said that Allah has called us Muslims. So I said, I'm a Muslim, all alone in my room.

I said, Muslim.

And

I went back to the mosque. The next day. Three days later, I read the Quran beginning in three days.

I went back to the mosque because I wanted to be Muslim.

Muslim, so I come to the mosque on Fridays in 1998, except on Fridays.

So the guy at the gas station told me he said if you're looking for the Muslims and be back on Friday,

the handler now handler, they have five slots. They in the masjid in Jackson, I mean, in Greenville, South Carolina, they have an Islamic school there.

And praise be to God. So I came back on Friday. And I took my Shahada. You know, I said a shadow, no shadow.

I believe there's no God but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. Because I when I learned about Mohammed, I see

myself that if God chose him to reveal this book,

and he's a prophet, he has to be

this book you don't you don't. You don't pour water through a dirty pipe and get clean water at the end doesn't happen. You don't get this pure of a book through a man does not dispute one. So I became a Muslim. And needless to say that the rest is history.

Muhammad peace be upon him is a man like you've never read about.

This is why

we get so angry.

And when when when they wrote these cartoons about him in Denmark, maybe a lot of us overreacted, yes, we overreacted. But if someone insulted your mother, most of us probably would overreact, just because we love them so much.

We love him so much.

Because he gave us this Pure religion, this great way of life. It has changed me from being somebody that nobody wanted to be around

to somebody who now wants to be around everyone, because I want them to know where I've been and what I've come through. And even though my grandmother passed away in 2002,

and my parents are not Muslim, yet, I'm working on them. They are very staunch, they're very strict Christian still. But they love me to death. And they love the fact that I'm Muslim.

Because before he did not have any respect for me, even as a Christian, no respect for me. Now, as a Muslim, he called me every day, when I'm sick, he drops everything to come see me across the country. Why? Because his religion tells me as to

this is a way of life.

And I'm going to finish

Forgive me for not being a composer.

I'm going to finish with a statement of Bernard Shaw, who many of you may have read his works.

He said about Muhammad, and Islam, peace be upon

the if a man like Muhammad, or to assume leadership of the world today, he would solve every single problem. He was solved every single one of his problems.

During his afternoon, afternoon cup of tea.

This was this man.

This was the religion the phone.

I can't remember his name off top my head man. It was just there wrote a book called The ranking 100. The most 100 influential people in history. I don't remember his name is on is one of those things that I've known forever. And

Michael Hart, he chose him he's a Christian. He chose Mohammed is number one. I thank you for your time and hope that I have been of benefit. I finished by saying that there is no god worthy of worship except the one true God that created everything. His name is Allah in Arabic, which means the God at the Mohammed is the last and final message for mankind, and that Islam is the truth. Thank you very much.

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