My wife is telling our guest about her own journey of faith. About how she came from a Muslim country a non-Muslim, and returned a Muslim.
Even our guest, who was raised Jewish, is a bit perplexed by this, but this story is even more baffling than that. The first person who gave her a book about Islam was the English Muslim proprietor of a fish and chip shop near her work. My wife was likewise perplexed when she encountered him. One busy lunchtime she asked the man: “What have you found that we have lost?” That was when he gave her that book.
Some time later, one Bank Holiday weekend, she would visit Regents Park mosque and would end up making her testimony of faith in the imam’s office. Unbeknownst to either of us — for we wouldn’t meet for another three years — that was the same weekend I decided to take up this path myself. My own shahadah would come at the end of that weekend, after wandering through Covent Garden in a near daze: twenty-five years ago this coming May.
Life is funny like that. Our guest’s friends, also Jewish converts have a story not dissimilar. In their youth, they went to Israel to live on a kibbutz, but instead discovered Islam and returned back home as Muslims. That didn’t go down very well with the young man’s father, who was a rabbi, but there we are. When the One calls you, you have no choice but to respond.
It’s really surprising the roads we’ve been carried down in our lives, and all the people we have known, each with their own amazing story to tell. Subhanallah, there is nothing ordinary in the lives we live. Sometimes you don’t see it for years and years, until a guest visits and your beloved tells you a tale you don’t remember hearing before. Thank God for guests, always.
Last modified: 25 December 2022
