Story to Islam - Tim Humble & Ismail Bullock

[Music] welcome again to another episode of your live weekly islamic chat show live by islam i'm your host ismail bullock and today as you know we've been going through various themes based upon different verses from surat al-fatiha the opening chapter of the quran and as well when we have the opportunity when we have guests who are new muslims or became muslims should we say some of them are not really new anymore but they became muslims so they could have been previously christians or whatever religion may be so today with us inshallah we have brother muhammad tim humble and thank you for joining us it's a pleasure now inshallah you'll be inshallah one of our frequent guests inshallah from time to time but today specifically as it's your first time with us on the show and the fact that you at one stage were not on muslim like myself so we wanted to give the viewers the opportunity to hear the story of why you being from the uk from the west decided to to leave what is often termed as a western religion for what is incorrectly often termed as a eastern religion even though we know they all came from the east so we want to hear a bit about introduce yourself first of all i've given your name and uh a bit how you know how you started to you know look into islam okay brilliant so as you said my name is mohammed tim i was born timothy michael humble i was born into a christian family although like many people of many religions and i suppose muslims are no different a lot of people are not really practicing and my family were no exception to that they were your typical english western christian family which means that they had very little connection to christianity i wouldn't have known where my local church was uh we went to church for weddings funerals um maybe some odd you know christening or something like that but otherwise we don't really have any link between us and the church but it we were brought up as christians and most of my family were protestant christians but there's a couple of interesting kind of i always argue in my family that i wasn't the first to convert although i was definitely the first to convert to islam my mother actually my my maternal grandfather became a jehovah's witness okay he had a scary experience one time in his life um some sort of you know otherworldly type experience and he decided to become a jehovah's witness that's quite significant because it meant that my mom was brought up not celebrating christmas and not believing in the divinity of jesus in the way that many christians believe in it it's kind of a 50 50 thing there i believe that they don't also celebrate birthdays is that correct i'm not sure about the birthday that possibly impossible i remember when i was at school there was a a girl and a boy who were jehovah witnesses and what always stood out about them apart from the fact that in theory they weren't supposed to have girlfriends and boyfriends is that they also wouldn't celebrate birthdays i believe so they like so they're they're a little bit in in some ways they're a little bit nearer to islam than than some other many other mainstream christian groups also within my family there were a couple of converts to catholicism and not a lot not a lot of people probably know this but you actually do have to convert to to change from protestant to catholic and christianity you have to go through a conversion study process and then you have to actually make a statement of conversion or a ceremony of conversion to actually convert so my grandmother's sister she converted to become a catholic when she got married so i had a bit of a mixed christian background within the family it's very very similar to mine because even from my side of the family on the father's side we were protestant slash church of england and on my mother's side catholic so i kind of had both those experiences and like yourself there wasn't we weren't really that religious but there was a time where um me and my father and my mother on stage were living with our grandparents and um and there was time actually my mother and father split when i was quite young so for quite a while i mean my father lived with my grandparents so my grandad was quite active in the church so i we didn't necessarily go to the church we would always hear about it sunday grandad's going to the church to assist the vicar that kind of thing but i had both of those sites like you said mixed you know one side this and one side that see my mom left being a jehovah's witness when my grandfather died actually to be fair to her she probably never did become a jehovah's witness she was kind of pushed into it by her father but i don't think she ever really genuinely believed in it but what's interesting is that she did a lot of things that as a muslim i might do now like give lectures to people and like you know give little talks and encourage people to do good things and tell people not to do bad things and you know so i guess it wasn't so strange uh for her the kind of things that i do now are almost a reminder of some of the sort of you know activities that she would do she identifies with that although there's still some huge huge differences obviously between between the belief that they haven't and an islam and one of the big ones was of course what we would in islam call belief in belief in the divine decree they have real big issues with this and one of the things that they they have is that they don't accept they don't accept blood because they believe that blood is sacred uh and so they believe that if you were to treat yourself by taking on blood you would go against god's will now as muslims of course we know you can't go against god's will you can't you know you can't overcome the will of god it's it beats everything it's supreme but they have that kind of understanding you'd be going against god's will and so that caused a lot of problems because my grandfather died of some kind of cancer and he was during his treatment he refused some treatments due to his beliefs so that pushed them away from it and in many ways that made more of a problem for me because uh although i think it's somewhat easier when the family is not practicing so much but also there was an aversion in my house to organize religion as much as there was an aversion to uh to islam so they were quite against the whole idea of look we've just left that lifestyle you know we've we've grown up we've left it we've walked away we don't want an organized religion in our life we don't want something that tells us get up at this time and go to bed at this time and pray at this time and do this and do that we want something that is just you know believe and you'll be saved you know like just the the nominal belief that you take on the box that says you know when they ask you on the census are you christian you take the box so that that's the kind of background to the family that's kind of where my family was i probably should talk a little bit about where about me myself um it was a bit of a contradiction as a child uh i was pretty good academically i was in the top top of my class and you know the sort of one of the the brightest students but i desperately didn't want to be that person that i was and i was trying to look to be something else so one of the things i was really really rapidly trying to do was to shake off the idea of being in any way like intelligent or good at school or you know gifted in any way at all and to try as much as possible to get in as much trouble as was possible for me to get in at that age you think that's like because of peer pressure or the stigma of being of being intelligent you know unfortunately there are a lot of people if you study hard they like to call you a nerd or something you know you can't like it's so unfortunately many times uncool to be to be to study and be smart yeah i think uh i think peer pressure probably formed in my own mind this concept that i don't want to be i don't want to be that person i don't want to be the person who studies so i would make every effort not to study you know and things like that also i think that from my side i was a very rebellious child and one of the things i linked this in terms of how i became muslim is i find that islam is the first thing that i've ever been able to submit to the first thing that i've ever felt this is deserving of me saying i will take it 100 with no no exceptions as for everything else i've ever been told i had a very i had i don't have now but i had a very rebellious nature so i love to do things you know if i was told to be at a certain time i'd love to not do it if i was told to study something i would love not to study it i was a very rebellious kind of child but i was living lit i was i was living very much a double life i was living a life where i was going out with friends and doing some not very good things um the socializing you know the not a lot of drinking and stuff at that age but some and just generally getting myself into trouble and doing things i shouldn't be and uh really the i didn't want to be that person that wasn't that wasn't who i wanted to be neither did i really want to be that student who was sat there with a you know head always in a book i kind of wanted to be somewhere else completely which i didn't really understand at the time but i i was in other words trying my best to be non-conformist not to conform to anything at all and not to sort of fit into any particular box it actually sounds very i mean very in some ways familiar to me because before becoming muslim i went through that stage as well of doing some other kind of things you might be like you know trying to smoking trying this trying that just kind of like you said you know no real reason but apart from that kind of rebelling feeling or i can relate very much to not being there and not being there and could have got you know could have continued could have got really good grades then but decided to to play up that kind of thing so it's quite interesting i think it's probably quite a familiar story for many people i would have i was going to say i think a lot of people probably go through that a lot of young people go through that rebellious phase and to be fair to them sometimes it is because what they're being asked to do doesn't always make a great deal of great deal of sense and of course as a young person you're always told you know your your elders always know better and you know like uh the system is always right and i was very much of a of the belief that it wasn't and until islam came along i didn't find anything that i was willing to really sort of change myself for in fact everything i found i wanted to just do the opposite whereas when islam came along that that's when things really changed but i mean i wasn't particularly interested in religion i mean with the time we're talking about now is probably uh the least that the memories that i have the strong memories i have turned about year eight which would be 12 years old maybe 11 years old going to 12 years old something like that so around about 12 years old getting into a lot of trouble messing around just generally being mischievous nothing really serious but also i could see where it was going some of the friends i was associating with were within a couple of years they'd be doing really seriously bad things you know like serious crimes and stuff like that at this age they weren't but they you could see where it was going and i could see where it was going and it wasn't it wasn't going anywhere anywhere very good so that was something that i wasn't particularly interested in religion at that time although i do always remember believing in god i i really do believe that i don't think that that's a memory that i've kind of imposed in myself i kind of i really do think that i remember for example when i wanted something for a present when i when i got myself in a real fix and there's no way out oh god please god please help me now you're saying i cannot eat i can relate i can remember things like that as well as a child they'd always do that oh god please you know that kind of thing and i really did believe that there is a god uh but i just wouldn't have been able to answer any more than that if someone had said who is he what does he do what religion i would have probably said all religions are just there to manipulate people and control the masses and you know there's no benefit in organized religion and that's probably the kind of thing i would have ended up saying but i did believe there was a god um and i don't think i had closed my mind i wasn't like a person who would say i don't believe i there is no religion that is true in the world i would more likely have said i haven't found it yet like i don't think i closed my mind to that extent that i would have said like you know there's nothing true about any of them but i felt like that based on what i had read and i love to read i love to read a lot in fact my mother always tells me that when uh i was young when i was a small child i used to i used to dislike having the tv on i used to i used to cry to have the tv switched off and give me a book and i used to love to read and of course when you read you're introduced to a lot of stuff you know good and bad but a lot of stuff that i was introduced to was probably probably through reading that i began to be introduced to religion that and during the time when i was in that year that eighth year eight or eight grade whatever they call it uh that was where i probably first was exposed to religions other than christianity and because in the religious education lessons we had in year eight at a very energetic and a very likable teacher um he was a guy his name was mike and he was he was a very very very very friendly very nice guy and very um uh he also you couldn't put him in a box of anything you know like i i until now i have no idea what religion he even was you know like he had a long ponytail and he wore funny cowboy boots and he just used to make everybody laugh in the class but the interesting thing about him was he actually opened my eyes that there are religions elsewhere in the world other than christianity i don't remember him teaching us islam although i presume that he probably got touched upon it somewhere but i don't remember ever hearing anything about islam but i do remember seeing hinduism sikhism judaism probably and thinking okay there are other places in the world where people think differently to me uh that was probably something that in in hindsight like looking back on it now had a pretty big impact on me because it made me start to think that okay maybe the answer doesn't lie within my the four walls of my house maybe there are people elsewhere in the world who might be able to answer the questions that i personally have and i think that combined with reading probably started off the process or at least nudged it further forward and i think the next major thing that happened was that i changed school i changed from uh i don't know they don't have this all over the uk but in newcastle where i was there was a three-tier school system so um primary middle and then high school so i changed from year in year nine to a new school whereas a lot of them now they change it at year seven whereas i changed it i changed it year nine so i went to i went to a um to a different school and that gave me something different because it gave me a chance to break away from the negative cycle that i was in probably being grounded for large periods of time helped because i probably was by that time grounded to the nth degree it's actually funny now to say grounded it's just it's such a great thing because now you cannot you can't ground your children anymore can you because they don't hardly leave the house in the xbox all the time or something yeah the ground and then it was like you have to literally take the xbox and yeah hide it somewhere i think switch up the wifi yeah i do that a lot you know confiscate the modem that's the modern day grounding yeah that's it so i think being grounded a lot probably helped uh i didn't get rid of the problems but it definitely made me think look the friends i'm with are there was no there was no friendship there was no friendship every not not among any of them it wasn't like they weren't friends with me none of them were friends with each other every one of them looked up for an opportunity to take advantage of the other person uh it was all about me like about about saving yourself and getting somebody else in trouble or blaming somebody else or somebody else is not cool as long as you get to be saved from whatever these guys are planning to do then that was fine so that was one thing that i noticed uh was a chance to break and a chance to look for something different and i probably spent my year nine time most of it pretty much secluded in other words i kind of pretty much drew into myself a little bit i didn't have anywhere near as many friends um i didn't go out anywhere near as much although i still continue doing a few silly things from time to time um but it wasn't like it wasn't like it was before it had calmed down a bit and i i think the new school the environment that's a little bit scary for you you know you're kind of trying to find your feet so it was a time of a lot of self uh reflection and i and i'll be honest i still wasn't looking for a religion you know if anyone had said to me that you know for example if someone stopped me in the street and said would you be interested in islam would you be interested in me telling you about islam i would have said no way not interested don't want to know not interested in religion and walked away probably because i didn't know what islam was at the time but really i wasn't i don't you know people often have stories where they become muslim where they're looking for a religion and then they find islam i i wasn't looking for a religion i might have been looking for answers as to why like why am i here but i didn't really want anyone to tell me those answers i just wanted to figure them out by myself so there i am in that year you know so i've turned 13 um probably heading towards 14 probably while i'm 13 it's usually that's the time when i spend most of my time on my own probably and then moving towards being 14 and at this point i really started to um i started to we had a religious education classes which continued we had obviously a totally different teacher she was a lady and she was very uh i mean she was not in favor of islam at all uh and she wasn't to be fair really very much in favor of christianity either um i heard religiously although i've never been able to confirm this that she was uh sort of one of these sort of um modern kind of influenced by buddhism sort of like karma and reincarnation and bit of hinduism and some kind of strange stuff like that like in there she had some sort of like funny sort of very far far eastern religious mystical kind of thing yeah mystical kind of beliefs and stuff so definitely there there was that there she didn't talk about her beliefs very much and i haven't been able to confirm that whether that was the case that's what we understood from her but she was factually very true you know she kept it as it was um and i remember that something really i mean the process was just the strangest thing uh i believe in the national curriculum at that time we had to do either we had to do christianity that was mainstream syllabus no choice and along with christianity we had to do one other major world religion and i believe the choice was probably between judaism and islam because ultimately you know for someone teaching kids in the uk at that time the resources were not there to teach another religion you know so realistically if you're going to teach christianity you're probably going to teach with it either judaism or islam teacher chose islam i i don't know whether that was forced upon her whether she wanted to teach it whether she chose it but we got christianity in islam and i just remember the first thing that i remember doing was talking about concept of god like who's god and of course she talked about what chris most christians believe not all christians but the majority of christians believe in the trinity they believe that that god has three forms or three parts the father the son and the holy spirit and in some forms or another they explain what that means and that for me was never i never believed in that because it's the most it's just incomprehensible you can't you can't understand it you can't it doesn't make any sense it doesn't matter how many times you try and explain water ice and steam and whatever and there's lots of sort of worldly examples the egg the egg the shell the yolk and the white but you know what like bits of the egg don't die like separate to each other and bits of the egg don't you know like don't you know one bit doesn't end up praying to the other bit i mean it like it it's a nice example of how you can have three things in one box but it's not a very good example of the trinity because the trinity is about god it's not about an egg it's not about cooking your prayers it's about telling you that god is actually not one but he is one and this is where christianity gets complicated because at least trinitarian christianity because you end up starting to talk about okay god is one but he's not one okay so when you say okay god is one say yes if you don't believe god is one you can't be a christian okay i believe god is one but you also have to believe that he is three and if you don't believe he's three you also can't be a christian so that's very difficult for people to explain and most christians will suffice themselves by saying it's just a matter of faith it's just a matter of belief there's no way you can understand it there's no way you can comprehend it there's no way you can ever explain it to anybody you just gotta believe it to be saved and that was exactly the type of thing that i didn't believe in i didn't believe in anything i couldn't understand i didn't believe in anything that couldn't be explained with simple clear you know easy to understand language uh i i wanted something clear and simple so i got that christianity and then i got the concept of god in islam and that's it i mean what you're saying again which is probably most but actually from a christian background become muslim exactly the same thing that just you know i believe there was a god but this whole trinity just you know it wouldn't resonate on me i couldn't work it out just didn't make sense you know there was something there just didn't make sense i always had this thing like you know how can god have a son and you know whereas as you as you're probably gonna mention we know that in islam it's the opposite i mean just like if you try to go to the christian to ask them to explain the trinity it's something they can't really explain each one will try and explain in a different way or like you said they pretty much put it down to blind faith whereas obviously us as muslims of course there is an element of blind faith the fact that you know god will not appear to you uh we have to believe that there's heaven and hell we may never see these things but if you ask us to talk about our fundamental belief on how god is one and what affirms that and what negates that we can have episodes and episodes and episodes telling you on how god is one and if you do such and such then you are going against this oneness of god in his worship for example we can talk about it for weeks and years there's a big difference there where and that i mean that if you if you think about it that has to be the case i mean for any of our viewers out there who may be thinking if you the fundamental belief that is your salvation is what will save you make you of the chosen people of god it has to be something that you know makes the average as they say tom dick and harry can comprehend and understand yeah as a as a basic belief it has to be quite straightforward and makes sense otherwise it would be unfair if it's some really complicated thing that most people just can't make sense of it and then you have to believe it anyway yeah absolutely and then it has more problems because historically you ask okay how did jesus explain the trinity to which point the christian says uh jesus didn't and some of them say jesus didn't even know that he was part of a trinity so there's a there's a huge just a huge pile of problems with it and then you get islam one god never born never had any offspring or children sons or daughters all-powerful all-knowing all-merciful all-loving it's like wow that was like wow i mean like it's just it's so simple it's so easy to understand and it's not blind faith because there are so many signs to that you know for example we're told in the quran that if there were more than one god that had created the earth the earth would have become corrupted because when you have two people working on the same project with the same amount of authority they would you get clashes you get contradictions and likewise you get another thing okay if they're not the same authority then it would be the case that all of those other gods would seek intercession with allah and as we're told in the quran they would they would all be the ones you know seeking nearness to allah so ultimately you know you islam just it has many many proofs and many signs for it and those proofs and those evidences those signs that we see in the world along with our natural inclination to believe in god along with scripture and prophethood and miracles all of them come together to prove conclusively that islam is the truth so and then we'll get to that in a bit in more detail but just the concept of god but when i heard that concept of god i didn't just jump up and say hey i'm going to become muslim now. i just thought wow just proves to me that some people somewhere else in the world could have been right about something and what's interesting is i often say if people were to look with an open mind and they are really sincerely looking for the truth and they come across this concept of god in islam a lot of time if not all the time that alone is enough to seal the deal as they say i remember myself seeing some muslims praying on my school 14 years old going home and let me read a bit more again i had religious education as you mentioned but it wasn't in great detail so i remember going home my grandad had this you know the uk we have the regis digest publications and there was a big book he had called the world book of facts so i went over to the to the bit about religion and i remember like you like you said which also struck you is reading about the different religions of course everybody has some good concepts and but then it again it struck me as well muslims believe the same kind of you know god is one nothing like him he has no partners no children he is the ultimate creator there's no into you don't have to pray to somebody else to go to him and that just struck me and i and even at that young age like yourself i said to myself wow you know that sounds that sounds like god yeah everything else when i read it doesn't sound god or sounds like a half god or you know it doesn't sound like the alt the almighty the all-powerful creator of everything in fact it sounds very much like the kind of concept of of pagan gods that exists in things like wrong women and greek mythology you know there was a guy who had a fight with another guy exactly it's it's literally humanizing god and really what i you know what we understand now is that really what what happened is that christianity compromised with paganism in order to appeal to the pagan people and to get them to accept christianity christianity became a pagan religion it became paganism it adopted things that were never taught by jesus never taught by his disciples and was simply just introduced for the benefit of getting pagan people to accept it as their religion that was a very relevant time now we're going through easter i mean the whole easter bunnies the easter eggs this is all something they had in there in the uh easter water was a time where they would have a pagan festival to do with uh to do with what's what i'm looking for to do a rebirth kind of thing oh yeah fertility yeah hence the bunnies the bunnies they are example of a bunny a new baby and the eggs laying on an egg it was all to do with some kind of celebration to the praying to the god of fertility hence why they'd have the little the little bunnies and the little eggs but we're going to have to go for a mohammed tim before the break we we you we were talking about obviously the concept of god in islam and how that struck yourself and how it struck me but you you basically said this is where you know it struck you in the the re the religious education classes and that's the beginning you could say but you didn't like you said you didn't just jump and become a muslim but this is where it started for you i think that's it's it was a process of of and i'm gonna guess about between six and ten weeks approximately of me going to classes and in the beginning i'm hearing about islam and just thinking wow you know just proves that there are people elsewhere in the world who know things we don't and that suited what i believed i believe like look you know i was never a person to be particular i wasn't i was never in favor of sort of racism and and not even patriotism i wasn't a very patriotic person like i i didn't believe that everything good was in britain or that every good idea was was you know like started off in the uk or something like that i was a person who's like okay wow that just shows that there are people elsewhere in the world who got something right i didn't say this is a proof it's from god or anything like that i just wasn't thinking like that but over time weeks went by and i start thinking it again and again and again and again and then it got to the point where i would preempt it where i would go into class and think you know what it is whenever i hear about islam that's the one that's going to be right that's the one that's going to make sense and then by the time it had got to sort of a few weeks after that it got to the point where i started to think something is really seriously happening here because every time i hear something about islam and we talked covered things like prayer we covered even things like punishments the system of punishments and things like that like just everything i heard about islam it made so much sense and i think sadly the biggest problem is that we as muslims don't implement or many of us don't implement islam as it should be implemented and people have a false impression of islam by what muslims do and my teacher tried to reinforce that so i remember her when we talked about prayer i remember her saying how many of you pray five times a day there's a class of 14 year old kids and you know there's three muslims in the class or four muslims in the class nobody puts their hand up so then she says okay four times a day nobody puts their hand up or one person puts their hand up three times a day one person puts their hand up for me that didn't ever affect me that didn't ever make me think but it does for a lot of people a lot of people say but you know look at the terrible things that are happening in muslim countries but that's not representative of islam islam is what the quran says what the prophet peace be upon him said you know it's it's it's not somebody's culture it's not somebody's country you know it's bigger than that and a lot of people do that i remember even some of my family members they would say to me you know like you know oh we you know the muslims you know the guy he walks in front and the woman she walks halfway down the street basing upon some subcontinent cultural practice or you know all their ideas of muslims were certain cultural muslims who were actually doing things that were in their culture that were also done by maybe subcontinent hindus some continent sikhs subcontinent christians but they think that that those negative things that you know there therefore become islam yeah absolutely so that didn't really affect me but i like that i imagine that would affect a lot of people and the teacher really tried to push that look you know it's you might think islam sounds great but islam is not practical you can't live life is a muslim and i actually disagreed i when i listened to that i was like you know you can't this is this is something that is so simple but i still believed that i would find a fault i still believed that even though i was preempting it and even though i loved i was at that point i was i was into islam i was hooked on it i still believed i would find a flaw i i still ultimately believed islam would just turn out to be better than christianity but not like a hundred percent perfect it would just be better and that's why i started researching i went home i opened whatever existed of the internet at that time i don't think it was google i think it was maybe alta vista or something like that probably something something or in those lines and it's long long forgotten and subhan i remember just looking through uh stuff about islam of course i didn't find accurate information i found a hodgepodge of different beliefs different groups telling different things but i found enough to make me convinced that there wasn't that flaw that floor just didn't exist it wasn't anything wrong with islam and that moved me into the phase of okay if there's nothing wrong with islam and there's no flaw it must be from god and if it's from god i should become a muslim but i didn't want to become a muslim at 14 because i was 14. peer pressure i've just escaped peer pressure i've just escaped all of these problems that everyone that i've been having i've just trying to run away from you know being associated with a particular group the last thing i want to do is come out and say that i'm a muslim so i had this idea i would delay it until i was about 18 years old um i tried that i can't remember how long i tried it before i tried it for a while but it's one of the most horrible things you can ever do is try to be someone else so you're someone on the inside and someone else on the outside and it was really it was really painful so ultimately i uh i couldn't do it and i remember lying awake one night just you know looking out the window you know just looking out the sky at night just thinking i can't do this i can't pretend i can't be a muslim in my heart and not be a muslim on the outside and i can't be sure that i'm gonna live long enough to to become most limited so i think the time is now and again at no point did i have anyone give me what we would call douwa at no point did anyone come and say to me become muslim or would you like some literature about islam i knew some muslim friends by that time i had some friends who were muslims they probably themselves would have said they weren't the best example of islam but they were muslims and and definitely they had some influence on me but they no but none of them ever asked me to become muslim or ever told me anything about islam i remember i remember getting like you like yourself because obviously i also became once when i was 14 but there were a few muslim guys who didn't actually pray five times a day but they would now and again pray juma and it was that's the first real introduction when i saw them bowing down and praying that made me go to my grandfather's book and the same thing i mean none of them actually gave me doubt and when i approached them some of them were like how can you be a muslim you know that kind of thing and i was like no i'm interested seriously and i remember the one guy actually made an effort it's not really tower but it's something that gave me some kind of motivation or my first kind of prayer he wrote on a piece of paper allah there is no true god worthy of allah and then he said to me you are not a muslim so the last one you've got to read it a lot so i actually took that as well that's the funny thing so i was actually reading i was walking around the on the way home from school by myself saying subhanallah because i already read in my grandfather's book and the whole concept of god made complete sense and then and i actually said to him i think you know i want to become muslim they were like oh you can't just become muslim and you know like you said they didn't really have any this tao or knowledge or they didn't know what they're supposed to do apart from that paper they so their idea was just keep making vikar keep saying subhanallah especially for allah for maybe keep on god knows maybe one of them would have said to me do it for years i don't know but for days and days i was walking around even some of my anonymous and friends but what the you know what are you reading i remember going to play tennis one of my friends called chris and he was like what's that that's some kind of muslim prayers like yeah he said you crazy i said no you know i like this you know and i've been walking around reading it until the end i actually went there and said to the guy like i want to become a muslim and there was one guy who had a bit of knowledge he'd be bit involved in some islamic activities so he basically sat me down and said repeat after me that i remember doing it in school and then later on going do it going doing it in the mosque so that brings me to how that happened for me some some parallels definitely there i relied on the internet and of course when you rely on the internet that means that you get a lot of misinformation and i got i i got the bit of what to say i figured out that i have to say muhammad rasool allah but i was told you have to have two witnesses and that's not true because you know and as soon as you hear that you instantly think that doesn't make any sense you know some guy is is is on top of a mountain you know hanging off the edge of a cliff and he decides finally that you know time has to come to become muslim well if he doesn't find two witnesses he may as well just let go because he's not you know he can't become muslim that doesn't make any sense at all so i i didn't realize that so i looked for two witnesses but of course i didn't want to tell anybody i didn't want to tell my muslim friends that i was going to become muslim so i figured i would tell my mum and dad i didn't realize you had to have they had to be muslim or anything they just said you have to fight two witnesses you know but then the local fish and chip shop yeah i think i know witnesses i uh i i told my mum and dad but i didn't tell them i'd become muslim i just said mom dad i want to read you something and then i said my mom said what's that and i said something in arabic it's just that some words i found you know like on the internet and then i left um and it the first person i told was after quite a while i think two weeks of reading on the internet still of being a muslim and not telling anyone the first person i told probably a week to two weeks was one muslim friend and i remember sitting in his living room and saying to him that i've got something to tell you it's like yeah what's up i said i've become a muslim and he just took it completely in his stride he didn't even blink he was like oh that's good you've saved yourself from jahannam do you know like next topic you know like it was like and then after a while it kind of struck him and then he told his family and then they told a lot of other families there's a big sort of you know kind of everyone's very happy everyone want to talk to me and everyone wanted to offer advice and that is sometimes not the best recipe for success that led me to a lot of problems as my in my practicing of islam in the beginning because everybody with every different belief and every different sort of group and every different party wanted to give me advice about islam and that caused me a lot of difficulties but the biggest obstacle i had after that was telling my parents um in the end my mom guessed it she actually said to me have you become a muslim i said mom don't be ridiculous muslim you're crazy become a muslim and then after some days later after that incident i said to her that mom i became muslim i've never asked my mom how she knew i don't know why i haven't asked and every time i give this lecture i say that those same words and every time i give i make a mental note and think next time i see my mom i must ask her how she ever but i've never asked her how she knew maybe she saw me praying maybe she saw me reading on the internet or something like that but she had figured it out i told her she sat me down she said why um at that time islam didn't have the the negative reputation as much as it as it does as it does in the west today yeah um but still there were some elements of that there were some incidents and some things that had happened people doing crazy things in the name of islam that had definitely you know put somewhat of a strange name you know or association with the snap but the thing is my my mom always is uh she she's she's the one who makes the decisions in the house my dad is very much just does what my mom said and i remember her turning to him for support and saying you know peter what are you going to do you know like your son's just become muslim well he seems to be you know quite convinced and she said you know wow you know how can you say this he's just changed his religion in the end we all agreed that there would be no discussion of islam but i could be a muslim as long as i didn't give them any doubt as long as i never tried to preach to them about islam i could be i could be a muslim i could i could basically privately and and in a very sort of secular sort of hidden way be a muslim but as long as i didn't share it in the house because my mom didn't want it to go back to what it was like when her father was a jehovah's witness she didn't want it to become like preaching and don't do this and this is not allowed so she said look you do what you want but on the condition on the condition that you don't talk to us about it you don't preach to us you leave us with our religion you have yours and she pushed me very strongly and it was quite a good idea really not to tell too many people about it because she said look you don't know whether you're going to keep your religion you don't know whether you're going to stay as a muslim it might just be a phase you're going through so don't tell the world and then make problems for yourself and then that actually might be the wrong reason but it's actually the right advice and the wrong reason the reasoning was wrong but the advice was probably right is that when someone becomes a muslim it's not a bad idea for them to be a little bit you know be a little bit sort of restricted in how many people they tell in the beginning while they get a handle on islam themselves it doesn't work for everyone some people are able to just shout it out from the rooftops but a lot of people including a lot of the companions of the messenger of allah salallahu islam didn't announce their islam immediately they took some time to just get used to it in themselves learn and then start to slowly tell more and more people that they had become they've become muslim now we've got about five or six minutes left of this episode now what would you advise people out there who may be looking er into islam are curious the ones who are curious the ones who feel that islam is the right way but are hesitant what would you advise both kind of people in these last five minutes i think one of the most important things is to get authentic knowledge about what islam really is because actually if you read islam uh with or from authentic sources without culture without weird ideas and weird sort of implementations of islam and you get the pure islam as it was taught by the prophet peace be upon him as was practiced by his companions then that's all you need to understand the truth of islam the biggest problem we have is that the message is not delivered in a pure and true way instead what happens is the message is distorted through cultural practices through strange beliefs and different groups and ideologies and each one of them has their own agenda to put forward and they use islam for that and so a very twisted very substandard version of islam is is what people end up taking so what i would say is the importance of really going back to genuine authentic reliable information about islam i think if a person does that they will be they they mean nothing else because islam is is so convincing and so beautiful and so perfect and so suitable for the time that we live in and suitable for every time and every place uh it it does it it sells itself you don't need someone to sell it but you just need to make sure that they get the real message of islam so i would say even be very picky where you get your knowledge about islam from be really careful to get reliable authentic genuine knowledge um to go back to the original sources the quran the sunnah the guidance of the prophet muhammad peace be upon him and i think when you do that you get you get a genuine message of what islam really is and that's more than enough for people whether they are people who are non-muslims who are looking into islam or whether they're muslims who've just strayed away from the path a little bit and are a bit confused because you know you might have been given a very cultural understanding of islam uh as a child and and grown up to think well islam is not really all that great but actually if you re if you learned the real islam and the true islam you would value it for what it really is and and that's i think that would be my my most important piece of advice i mean that's also important what you mentioned not even not just for the non-muslims but even like you said muslims who feel like they're a bit disheartened or a bit confused it's so many of the practices that they have been brought up with and or non-muslims have seen muslims doing in their daily life a lot of the time aren't actually proper islamic teachings and they can resemble many of the practices resemble other religions or are just completely cultural just like in every culture there is uh every all cultures there are some bad elements i mean no one can say my no no my you know even british culture there is some negative some negative things we have a very big pub culture which then leads on to uh which is can associate to football hooligans no one can say that football hooligans are a good part of british culture that we should be proud of so likewise there are many muslim you know nations which have muslims but they will have some culture that you know will not be in islam and many of the people in the west have seen certain cultural practices which they think you know oh look at those muslims and and i recently read something actually even about child marriage and we off we often it's a bit of a topic and we've only got a little little left of the show but i read an article that you'll often hear how muslims child marriage child marriage talk about really young children we know you know uh which even you know islamically is not allowed um they literally said that 88.8 percent of young young child marriages in the world were actually uh happened to be in india from the hindu religion but if you love me and you only got like 15 seconds left but we would obviously think that that has to be muslims the way it's always portrayed out there in public so that's so many things are like that and that's not the real facts and we could go on forever on this for coming on the show and we'll have you inshallah on some future episodes i hope so and thank you again viewers for joining us and insha allah same time same place next week lived by islam which we all try and do inshallah i

Channel: Digital Mimbar

Views: 44,096

Rating: 4.8815279 out of 5

Keywords: islam, muslim, muslims, islamic, quran, koran, allah, muhammad, mohammed, mohamed, prophet, hadith, sunnah, shaykh, imam, lecture, khutbah, khutba, ramadan, bilal philips, sufi, salafi, hanafi, hijab, nasheed, nashid, almaghrib, dars, halaqa, bayan, convert, revert, shahada, dawah, da'wah, maher zain, sami yusuf, atheism, science, atheist, qur'an, recitation, surah, afasy, religion, religious, deen, madhhab, shia, sunni, Tim Humble, Ismail Bullock, Story to Islam

Id: 69lrHRoFP8U

Length: 50min 3sec (3003 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 30 2017