My Journey to Islam in 2020! How I Became Muslim! British Revert Story Part 1!

salam hello and welcome to this video as you can tell by the title this is going to be about my journey into islam this year in 2020 i mean what a crazy year this has been anyway um but for me this has been a complete awakening i really didn't expect this out of this year and i know a lot of people watching this who maybe know me or have been following me previous to this and my travels may be surprised as well um but for those of you that are new my name is ellie quinn i am a total travel addict i've been traveling on and off for the last 10 years two years ago i quit my job in london to travel full-time and i run the travel blog thewanderingquinn.com which has got loads of information on all of the places that i have visited and i've also been uploading videos and vlogs from my travels on this youtube channel as well but now i do want to talk about something a little bit different and there will be quite a few videos i'd say going forward about islam because yes let's just jump into it i did do my shahada two days ago here in london there will be another video on that that'll be the next video so if you're not subscribed already um then please do as you will hear about in this video youtube has played a huge part for me in learning about islam especially because so much of my learning came from lockdown during covid so youtube really has been just like the most amazing place to just get to know other people that have maybe reverted most importantly for me actually i've watched so many reversion stories and just so many informational videos so because i have a platform on here i love creating content i want to now create my own content based on my own experiences to hopefully inspire motivate just give some people some information um on what it is like to be a revert from the uk or just a rebirth in general so anyway let's get into the video on yeah my journey into islam so i would say up until the very end of last year i really didn't know anything you know i remember being in cappadocia i remember being in mostar in bosnia and indonesia as well and hearing the call of prayer and i do remember loving that sound i mean to be fair so many people do really love this the sound of the call of prayer i feel like it really does cool people in um but that was really it of course growing up in the uk i did also face a lot of media headlines a lot of opinions on muslims a lot of islamophobia in fact i one thing that i really remember really vividly was when subway won the big food chain wanted to start doing or said that they were going to start doing halal meat and it kicked off like in the uk and i do remember thinking which is really really bad you know yeah like why do we need to have halal meat and now when i think about that i think that wasn't my uh it was my opinion but it was my opinion based on just so much i'd been told it was my opinion that that was the headline and i just agreed with the headline but there were no other headlines saying this is why we should and in that case i probably would have seen that and i was a lot younger as well i hadn't even traveled at this point i don't think so i was a lot more naive but thinking about that now i just think like wow that's really really terrible and that is also how a lot of the people here in the uk feel so i definitely not uh didn't have anything to do with islam in my childhood i was christened when i was younger but i also went to church when i was younger and a child with my dad um but after that i never really followed christianity or never looked into it on my own as i became an adult so then i guess really it all really started um in pakistan which was last year i went to pakistan in october 2019 i have lots of videos from there if you want to watch those and pakistan at the time didn't have a huge effect on me islamically it had a huge effect on me like travel wise because i just had the most amazing time there with my friend tom um we definitely got to experience that really good hospitality we met some amazing people but we did go to faisal mosque which is in islamabad on a friday evening obviously at this time i didn't even know that friday was like a holy day in islam he said let's go into the mosque so i went in one door they said you have to go in this store as a woman and we'll go in this door as a man now i thought we would then like meet in the middle because all of the mosques that i'd been to before um you know women were allowed in the domes and you walked around um but i actually got taken up some stairs onto a balcony which i was very confused about obviously as it turned out it was prayer time which i didn't realize and so that's why i couldn't go into the actual main part of the mosque but i was up on the balcony and very confused because i could see my friend tom down there and i'm wondering why can't i go down there and you know i'd heard things about islam with like women not being represented and not equal and i was very much not very happy the fact that i couldn't we that we were just on this balcony but i didn't quite recognize it was prayer time so my friend did explain to me afterwards and then i kind of and then i understood but i did then get to watch the men pray and that was actually a really i don't know i felt so emotional afterwards just seeing everyone pray and i'd never seen anything like that at all before um so i definitely say that was like uh just something in my mind clicked then and i was like wow after pakistan i definitely knew that i wanted to travel to more islamic countries you know a lot of us travelers we hear about the really good hospitality in islamic countries and i love that pakistan you know not many people go those are the countries that i love and actually my list for 2020 my travel list was basically full of islamic countries obviously that's now not happened but inshallah it will happen next year but anyway apart from that i didn't really have any other interests apart from going to more islamic countries but then i went to saudi arabia i got there on the 1st of january this year and i was very very nervous about going because of course it's saudi arabia i've heard so many negative things about it but just like pakistan i wanted to go and find out for myself and i met some really nice people in saudi um i was there for about two and a half weeks in january and then i actually went back in february as well to stay with some friends that i'd met and to be honest the main thing that really got to me in saudi and made a huge huge impression on me was prayer because in saudi arabia you know the shops shirts and the cafes shirts at prayer time i definitely got caught out of some cafes a few times which was a little bit annoying but once you know the prayer times then you learn to uh to not get caught out but i just really loved how everything stopped for prayer and i was also with some people that i'd met there and you know when we then would drive past a mosque they would say okay we need to stop and we're going to go and pray and up until this point i myself for the last few years would say that i was quite a spiritual person i've enjoyed learning about other religions and also just about kind of like the universe and the law of attraction and manifesting and meditating and yoga and all of these things and i had like my own like prayer practice and meditating practice which i'd done on and off but it was never something i could really stick to and i didn't like that i always thought i need to meditate i need to have that time but you know things get in the way or you just make excuses and you i just didn't do it so i really loved that there were these five times a day that everything closed and that is when you prayed and then you know the people that i'd met in saudi just told me how not how good they felt after praying and i was like wow you do this five times a day like that is just really really amazing so honestly that was my really main kind of eye-opening thing with islam was prayer next biggest biggest thing for me was going to medina now i know a lot of people on my channel here actually found me through my medina video and i know it also caused a lot of controversy about whether non-muslims can visit medina now for me again like when i think about it i'm like how did i think that i wanted to go to medina like where did that thought come from so when i did know that non-muslims could go i researched it and it is very clear that non-muslims can go and i was already going to jeddah anyway from riyadh i managed to find a bus that was a really good price from jeddah to medina i managed to find a hotel which was a really good price in medina which is something that's pretty uncommon in saudi arabia because hotel prices there are crazy um and it just basically flowed and then managed to get a flight back from medina to to riyadh and for me like when my life has felt like it's in flow like that and things seem easy i'm like this is the right thing to do if it wasn't the right thing to do something would have came up and it wouldn't have happened so i guess now i can say that's all god's plan as well it was just such an amazing place to visit and it really really really really did uh i would say is probably was the main reason that i wanted to leave there and start learning more about islam because it was just so peaceful i also learned like a lot about the history i've also got a video on the light bus tour that i did around medina um like uh mountain and just learning about the stories of the prophets and then the other thing for me was seeing prayer as well witnessing also just hundreds and thousands of people praying at one time being right next to the mosque was just such an amazing experience for me as well and so i guess my message to people that think that non-muslims shouldn't go to medina is that i don't know if i would have had such an impression of islam if i hadn't have gone so in a way that was a huge part of my me becoming a revert but anyway after that i went to india and i run well this year i started running group tours in india two week group tours for women which was really really amazing it's something that um yeah i wanted to keep doing but obviously kovid stopped that but i do plan to do in the future inshallah so um yeah i'll leave all the information below if there's anything that if you're interested in traveling with me in the future um and actually this was really interesting as well because obviously india has so many muslims i think it's the third or second uh country with the largest pop muslim population but i didn't really know that i learned a lot about hinduism in india buddhism sikhism but really nothing about islam but then when i was we had a really really good tour guide in agra and we were at akbar's tomb which is like an incredible incredible building and he said to me in my group like do you know what the term akbar means and said no and he said it means the great he says that's why muslims say allahu akbar and i don't know why but there's just one moment as well it was just another click for me i think it was maybe just because like i love india i love india so so much maybe it was just two things that i'd known about and then coming together i don't know but that him just saying that just had such a huge effect on me and in india then i downloaded a copy of the quran on my kindle and i also started to learn how to pray or at least youtubing how to pray but then that leads us to march and to covet so i had to leave india pretty quickly and i decided to go to indonesia to the gili islands because i'd spent two months there last year my best friend lives there and yeah it felt like a much better place to go than to go back home to the uk now i do have a video as well of my life in isolation on a tiny tiny island i will link that above but the most amazing thing about that is that it is an islamic island so the first place the first accommodation that i got for my first month i was literally opposite a mosque so bear in mind that just like a week before i'd you know started to youtube like how to pray and then next thing you know i'm staying next to a mosque i can hear all five prayers now in the end i was in indonesia for four months and this is really really where all of my learning started and all of my learning happened and all of my just everything because i basically left indonesia uh saying like i'm pretty sure i want to do my shahada so this was a really really big step for me um and it very much started from just how to pray i definitely was not doing it at the right times wearing the right clothes not doing would do like nothing particularly right but i guess that's just what you've got to do when you start off i also just started watching a lot of youtube videos mainly kind of just youtubing like the questions that i wanted answers to like why don't muslims eat pork why don't muslims like dogs because i'd heard that muslims don't like dogs which is actually incorrect a lot of videos about hijab and women in islam and actually then we were coming up towards ramadan and i found the yakin i think that's how you pronounce it yakin institute i just learned so much from them they did a like pre-ramadan series which was 30 days and they emailed you the video every single day and so i watched that video every day and i had my notebook and i made notes on every single video to really just remember because i was like that's how i know how i remember is by writing things down um and the video was very much just about you know our imam and how to keep it high but also just talking about you know it will fluctuate and especially after ramadan it will go down and that's okay and i think very much the things like that it was just really normalizing it for me and it was also just saying like muslims are never gonna be perfect like we weren't born perfect we weren't bored angels um but just how to navigate that and that really kind of like humanized it for me but then we got to ramadan and at first i wasn't sure if i was going too fast because the idea sounded very very daunting um but at the end of the day i then decided no one is forcing me and i just felt like yeah i really really want to fast so even just learning about like iftar and the timings and stuff was all again such a such a learning for me um but i'm so so grateful for it and i didn't fast from water the whole of the month because obviously it was my first time fasting i was also on a tropical island in a lot of heat and it was very very sweaty and hot there as well lasting from food for me was um much easier than i anticipated as well and i also really at this in this month really understood why my muslim friends had told me that they just love ramadan so much because i really did have this feeling of peace over me the whole month and the fasting you know on a normal day i think i could not do that but in ramadan you just do it and i was also learning to pray still learning to pray and i said that my goal for ramadan was to learn to pray basically and to kind of know the prayer as much as possible especially al-fatiha which i had all written down and i was reading it then when i was praying and i was using a youtube video and also throughout ramadan i read the quran i based i like had already got it on my kindle from earlier in the year and i set myself like a target of what basically three percent of the kindle um every single day which did take me you know two or three hours sometimes longer because my distraction is very it was very easy to get distracted especially in sections that i just didn't really understand finishing it also just felt amazing i was like well i've literally finished the quran obviously don't understand all of it but i feel like that's not the point if you understood it all at the first time then what would be the point in reading it multiple times every year and it's always going to be a different message to you uh depending on where you are in your life and your understanding of the religion i guess for um born muslims and also rebirth so i yeah isla and so ramadan was yeah really really really good i'm yeah i really did love it and even though i was very much by myself i also was just so grateful for the time of lockdown you know that i was didn't really have much to do during the day i could just read i could nap i could get up early and pray you can kind of speed it up from there and i know this video is getting really long um because after ramadan i gave myself the goals to keep praying um not necessarily five times a day and i definitely didn't and haven't been doing that um but just two or three times a day learning a lot more i've read a couple of other books um watching some more youtube videos and also kind of being able to uh recite uh the prayer myself and i kept on doing that until um when i left indonesia so i was in indonesia like i said for four months in total i left in the middle of july to go back to the uk where i am now and at the end of my time there i knew that i wanted to do my shahada but i was also very cautious um and conscious of the fact that in indonesia i was very much in a bubble like i could hear the call of prayer five times a day like i said you know there were muslims around me i was a little bit worried like maybe i'm just in a bubble and you know can i take this into my into my actual life like being there just like many of us in lockdown is not your actual life um but i got back to the uk and i still felt very much the same i'd ordered myself like a travel prayer map for when i got home and i did basically just keep praying a couple of times a day and i definitely changed my mindset as well very much to uh as if i was kind of muslim already or at least trying to think what would be the right thing to do in this situation and still learning a lot still watching youtube videos and reading books i read a really good book called reclaim your heart which also has a huge huge impact for on me after that um book i was very very sure on the fact that i wanted to do my shahada and i had a week planned in london which i'm on right now and i knew that the mosques had started to open up i then went two days ago to pray for the first time uh in the mosque with one of my friends which was um yeah a really nice experience and something that i've been wanting to do for so long but obviously i couldn't because of covering there was a lot of things that i couldn't do in the last few months and i also couldn't kind of had rushed into my shahada like maybe i could have i could have done it in indonesia if i really really wanted to but i just didn't really feel pulled to do it there at all um and i'm also really glad for that as well that i really have waited and i've made um a decision over quite a period of time um and then yeah we went to the mosque the other day that will be in the next video just talking about how that went and also just like a really short kind of clip of my shahada which i'm gonna show you as well and i think that's all i have to say i know this is a very very long video so if you're still here thank you so so much i really do appreciate it and i hope that you have enjoyed uh listening to this also be sure to give the video a like and yes subscribe if you haven't and then my next video will be all about my shahada so thank you very much for watching

Channel: Ellie Quinn

Views: 296,217

Rating: 4.9011087 out of 5

Keywords: revert story to islam, revert story, british revert story, british revert to islam, british revert, journey to islam story, shahada, madinah non muslim, faisal mosque islamabad, female muslim revert, british women converts to islam, muslim convert stories, islam revert, muslim revert, islam convert story, accepting islam, why i converted to islam, why i converted to islam story time, my journey to islam, revert, ellie quinn, the wandering quinn, convert to islam, muslim

Id: StxmtgZaHU8

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020