- My name's Yusuf, I'm 52 years of age, I've been a Muslim for 27 years. Ethnically, I'm from Irish stock, with a bit of English in there as well. Father was Catholic,
my mother was Catholic, although only nominally Catholic. They didn't really take it that seriously. We didn't have any
religious upbringing at all, no education in terms of religion and we lived our lives as we saw fit, as our desires took us, we went. My mother and father used
to give me some indications of what is right and what is wrong, but very, very little in the
way of religious instruction, so we were free. Basically, I left school at the age of 15, I ran away from home at the age of 15. My father had already
left home when I was 4 and the last thing I
said to my father was, Dad, you better leave, because my mom doesn't like you anymore. That was the last time
I saw him as a child until I was 24, I went to
seek him out after that. That was part of the journey
for me to find myself, because once I'd left home,
I started traveling a lot, I started broadening my
horizons, meeting people. I'd always ask lots of
very difficult questions and usually, people would come back to me, saying, why do you ask so many questions, you're so annoying,
(laughs) get out of here. But I kept asking
questions, because my idea was that I'm on this amazing journey with thousands of thousands
of people around me, millions of people around me
and I should be asking them, like they should be asking
me, what's it all about? Where's this journey taking us? Has someone got a road map? Where's the sat nav? So, yeah, I spent years
and years and years asking and traveling and asking again. And naturally, when I read
books on philosophy or religions or the purpose of life,
so I started to seek out those people that were
writing those books, so I met the Christians, I met the Jews, I met the Buddhists, I met
the Hindus, I met everyone, apart from Muslims, by the
way, because I didn't even know what Muslim was or Islam
was at all at that time. I asked the Christian,
at least one or twice, and they said they
didn't know who God was. I met some Hindu worshipers and they weren't able to answer the simple questions about
what the purpose of life was, in a very, very simple,
easy, understandable, digestible way, so I left them. I met the Buddhists and I
started doing Buddhist meditation for at least three months, I was doing, and it made me feel good,
so I didn't leave off the Buddhist meditation. But I asked the question, I
popped the question one day, and I said, to one of the guys, he happened to be white, Buddhists as well. I asked him what's the purpose of life? So, he was stirring his
herbal tea at the time and he got round 15 rounds of stirring and then he tried to answer the question. He said to contemplate the supreme. Nothingness. I said I'm confused, confused.com. He tried to justify why
he had evidently mentioned a contradiction in terms, by
any stretch of the imagination it's difficult to imagine
something supreme, and yet absolutely nothing. So he tried to give me the Golden Sutras and I started reading that,
and I couldn't understand it. I didn't think I was a shallow individual who couldn't understand things
because I'd been reading a lot, I'd been reading
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Russian authors and very complex
materials in order to try and find the purpose of life, not to try and be big and intelligent. So this book I couldn't understand. I said it can't be the truth. Because the truth has
to be easily understood by most of the people
if not all the people. I left that, but I continued
doing my Buddhist meditation. I started looking into
the Chinese philosophies. I started doing martial arts,
I started doing Tai Chi. I did Tai Chi for three years. I was still reading and reading,
every -ism and every schism and every possible thing
which would help me to try and find me, Tim, who am I? It was a big struggle, massive struggle. So I went off and I was told that that top 5% of the world,
they go to university. I got to Sussex University
studying politics and third world development because that seemed really interesting to me. But it wasn't the paper,
it wasn't the subject, it was the fact that I was
going there with this top 5% of the world, sitting with me. So I got there and I was
mortally disappointed because most of them were
just out to get drunk and have a hedonistic
lifestyle while they were away from their family for the
first time in their lives. I was there in the university
and I was pushing, prodding, poking everyone again, again,
and again, trying to find out what this life is, and 99% of the people just don't want to talk about it. This is what I found. You gotta find the 1%. When you find the 1%, you
don't want to leave them. One day I had a particular female friend who told me not to bother
calling her the day after. I went to the Islamic Society
because I was so confused and I had a real bust up with her and a fall out with her and an argument. I wanted to know why she kicked me out, because she said as
she was kicking me out, something to do with my religion. I happened to know she was a Muslim. After all of these millions of questions, and unanswered questions at that, what led me to this faith was an argument about a religion which she
claimed to be following. So anyway, knocked on the
door of the Islamic Society and I found this Iraqi
guy with his head scarf and a smile as well, kind of a nice smile, and I said, look, I've got a
problem with my girlfriend. He said you got a problem
with your girlfriend, why? Well, she's Muslim and she just told me that she didn't want me to come today and I want to know why. He kind of said, well
look, best thing I can do is give you these, give
me a pile of books, and he said read all these,
so I did for two weeks. I just read and read and read and read. I read about how to purify
yourself as a Muslim, how to have a bath as a Muslim. How to pray as a Muslim,
what's the history of Islam. I started reading some of the chapters, small chapters of the book which they claimed was sent from God. Slowly but surely, the
answers started popping up. Just miraculously from this incident. Then I discovered, of course,
the month was Ramadan. Then I started to learn that
these guys were fasting. For 30 days, not continuously, of course, but they were fasting the
daylight hours of this month, and this month was about
the coming of this book which I'd been reading, the Koran. It was a revelation to
me at the time as well because of course I never
knew Islam, Muslims. That was the first time
I heard about Islam, but I never, ever knew
that Islam was a way that white Catholic people like me, growing up in Britain
could possibly accept. I thought it was a religion
for brown people and ethnics. I slowly but surely
started getting the answers to the questions that had been dominant in my life before that 10 years. I couldn't sleep, days and nights would go by where I couldn't sleep. There were moments when I
just think what's the point of this life without knowing,
without having any certainty about a direction, about a
purpose, what's the point? I mean would anyone go on a journey without knowing the
destination, the purpose? Absolutely not. This is plaguing me. Every day I would be looking at the stars and I would be literally
crying every night, crying myself to sleep because
you're tiny and this is huge. This has a game plan. This is more than just a mere coincidence, a mere happening. That is something that just
happened out of nothing. This is by design. You have to find the purpose. So you come across this book which answers all of the questions. You don't like what you read,
some of it you don't like. But it's kind of good for you, right? You realize it's good for you. It was probably the third
week of Ramadan then. I was reading and I
was watching these guys that were fasting and
were praying in that place five times a day in that
center and I would join them and I would be doing
the prayers with them, but I couldn't really
know what was going on, but it felt right. One day I woke up and I said,
look, I'm going to fast today because the fasting is the
thing that really seemed to be very attractive and it
was a challenge for me. I thought it might help me on the journey. So I prayed. I started fasting that day and it was like somebody
had removed the blindfold. They'd unlocked the door. They'd removed the earmuffs. And I was able to think clearly. And just that moment on
that day, on that time, was the moment when I found Islam. Because when you're fasting sincerely to find the one that created everyone here and everyone out there
and everyone that's going to be created later on after
we go, we leave this planet, leave this journey, is
the ultimate sacrifice, when you give of your food
and give away the luxuries that you have, and water. You do it sincerely,
seeking the face of the one that created you, is the
moment when you truly, you've found yourself. So that was that day, that was the day. I hadn't taken what
was called the Shahada, or the declaration of
faith because I thought God knows me better so why would I bother? Anyway, I went on right
until the end of Ramadan, and one night I was just
super aware of myself, of needing to get rid of the
past and start something new. It just felt like that. So the whole night I was
just like, I was making this ritual ablution, you know, washing, because I was reading it
all the time in the books I had with me, and trying to get rid of something that was in the past. Then in the morning, very early in the morning, I just walked. I went out and I started
looking for a mosque. I went into a mosque. I got to the top of the stairs and a guy grabbed hold
of me and said, look, what's going on, what are you here for? Can we help you? I said, yeah, I've just
come to embrace Islam. He said, well, we don't know
you, we've never seen you. What do you know about Islam? I said I'd been reading
about Islam for the last two or three weeks, in fact, and
I'd been fasting as well. They were quite surprised and they said, well, have you washed? I said I've been washing the
whole night, man (laughs). I made the declaration of faith, and then I kind of got hugged by 300 men. I've never been hugged by a guy before, not even my father, I don't think. I remember feeling that it
really was a very amazing moment. It was unlikely that I
would feel that way again, that feeling of elation, the feeling of, actually, I felt very relieved, because, imagine spending 10
years searching and searching for something which you
don't even know what that is. It's not like you go and you
search for something, right, which you know, and you pretty much know where you dropped that thing. So you've got a very small
area that you can check from home to work back to school, yeah, I can trace, retrace the journey. But with something like the
purpose of human existence, in a sea of eight billion people, with millions and millions
of potential miles you need to travel and
that took me 10 years. I was 25 or 26 by the
time I embraced Islam. So the feeling was amazing. It was something which is ground-breaking, and then, of course, ever
since we got all the challenges of being a person who does
claim to believe in God. So I didn't really have any concerns about taking that plunge
and becoming a Muslim because I was doing it sincerely to try, and if I didn't do it, what
was I going to do instead? How would, I was destined
to fail, to literally become an alcoholic or to be a person that would just live
their life as a hermit, literally, that's the
way I was thinking it at the time before I embraced Islam. I didn't really have any hang-ups
about accepting something that was going to really,
truly speaking help me here. It doesn't matter, the
external didn't matter to me. At that point, I would do
anything to find the truth. And there's a lot of people out there like that in this world. I've met lots of them. They're genuinely good people. They have that feeling in their heart. They really want to spill it out, but really there's
nothing to be fearful of. Rather that you should
be fearful of the fact that you're not being sincere to yourself, true to yourself. That creates mental conditions. There's a lot of people
that have psychosis and mental issues because
they're not true to themselves, what their heart and their
soul is telling them, they're not doing that. We call it hypocrisy. We mustn't be hypocrites. The community of Muslims
practicing the faith of Islam is a family that most people don't have. I gained that family. It's 1.6 or 1.7 billion people world-wide. I go and visit them, I can
just say, peace be unto you in a gathering of people in a
room and I've got potentially a thousand invites right
in front of my face. If I go and pray in a
mosque, wherever it is, Abu Dhabi or Kuwait or America or France. So that's the community that I never had, and I yearned that community. I remember when I married my
wife, I said I need to marry into a family, I need a
family, because we increasingly in the world, not just in
the western hemisphere, we don't have, we're lonely. Forty percent or more of the population of London lives on their own. That's shocking. People don't even know their neighbors. This is just London, London
number one capital of the world, that everybody loves to be part of, but people are not part of each other. They're distant from each other. So I believe that the
greatest thing that the faith of Islam gave me, apart
from the massive direction and being able to have secure in the fact that there is a purpose. I don't need to go out to the
pub and get drunk anymore. If I want to get drunk,
I just pray (laughs). If I want to find direction,
I've got the sat nav. I've got the map. If I want to know
anything about the faith, I rest assured, I can
go to someone who knows about the faith and they will
give me direction as well. I have that massive,
beautiful unending family. If you find the right
members of that family, then you feel great. Let's just be brutally frank,
we need to know who we are, where we're going, who we created us. We ask ourselves these
questions on a daily basis, even if we don't vocalize
it, we certainly think it.
