Page 6 The Islamic Bulletin Volume XXIV No. 28 Why I Embraced Islam A Latino Brother’s Conversion to Islam considered one? And the concept of Jesus’ death; it all just didn’t make sense to me. However, I knew that it was my parents’ faith, so I accepted that fact and would thus follow the faith blindly. So up until I was the age of 20, I lived my life with the idea that I would take advantage of everything that this life had to offer. But it hit me one day that here I am partying, taking advantage of life, not sleeping, and yet one day I’m going to die. I started asking myself, “What’s going to happen to me? Where am I going to go? Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to see?” I started to get worried. I thought to myself, “I don’t want to be doing this for forever. I don’t want to be with a bunch of knuckleheads partying every day for the rest of my life.” That is when I took the initiative to start researching about the purpose of life. Since I had never been very religious in my own religion, I thought, “Let me start doing my very own research and my own reading of the Bible and see what it has to say.” We had a Bible in the house so I decided to open it up and start reading it. But it had many different things that I just didn’t understand and that didn’t make any sense to me. Although from a very young age I had been taught about the Prophets of God and the stories of Noah, Moses, Abraham, etc. were familiar to me, however, when I started reading the bible, my understanding of the prophets didn’t correlate to my understanding of the purpose of the prophets. I thought to myself, “God sent these messengers down and they were supposed to be the best example of man from among the people. However, the Bible would state that the Prophets committed crimes; for example, it described Noah as an alcoholic and David as a fornicator.” I thought to myself, “How could Prophets do something like this? The Prophets of God?” This did not make sense to me. So I decided to go and speak to a priest at church. I stayed after the sermon and went up to him to talk to him privately. I specifically remember when I asked him these questions that he gave the excuse that this was the time of the Jews and that they were very corrupted people. He then told me to “Just stick to the New Testament; just read the New Testament.” He really didn’t explain the details about this issue so I decided to follow his advice and see what the New Testament had to say. At 20 years old, I wanted to read the New Testament and see what it had to say about Jesus being God. I have been told my whole life that Jesus is God, however, as I read through the New Testament, I couldn’t find anywhere in this book telling me that Jesus is God or explaining to me the concept of the Trinity. I went back to my priest and told him that I had further questions. I showed him passages from the New Testament and asked him, “We’re Catholics. So we believe that Jesus and God are a part of the Trinity?” After he replied in the affirmative, I asked him for proof. I wanted him to point out to me the passages in the Bible that explained this phenomenon. I Q: Can you please tell me your name, your background, and a little about yourself? My birth name would be Richard Sagastume. My muslim name now is Omar. I was born in San Francisco and I’m 26 years old now. I graduated from high school and pharmacy school so far, Alhamdullilah. Q: Can you tell me a little about your religious upbringing? I was raised Catholic, but not in a strict religious family. It was more that if we ever were to go to church, it would be to attend services during the holidays, like around Easter time or Christmas. But at a young age my parents would teach me the basics of religion; who God was, what to follow, what you must do to be a good person, not to steal, lie, or cheat. I was taught basically the human instincts of religion. It wasn’t until I reached the age of 14 that I started to get a little more knowledge about Catholicism. When I visited El Salvador, my aunts and my uncles would read the Bible to me. As a child, I remember one time when we were attending church services and I asked my mother, “What does God look like?” She pointed to the man on the cross and said, “That’s God right there.” I asked, “Well, isn’t that Jesus?” After she replied, “yes,” I asked her, “Well how can God die? Isn’t God eternal?” I was asking her a ‘common sense’ question that needed to make sense to me and she didn’t have an answer. She just told me to be quiet and listen to the sermon. In my mind, I was still very confused. I always was told that ‘Jesus is the son of God’ and ‘God is One’ and yet the concept of the Trinity was never explained or how it worked. I always thought that Jesus was one separate thing and God is separate. Growing up I didn’t have any religious knowledge. Like I said previously, it was when I was about 14 or 15 years of age that people told me that ‘Jesus is God,’ and ‘the Holy Spirit;’ they are all one and together. And I would continue to ask them the question that bothered me at this age. “Well, that doesn’t make sense.” How can three things be put together and be
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