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Anja, Ex-Christian, Germany (part 1 of 4)
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Description: Over a period of two and a half years, this university student grew to take Islam very seriously. Part 1.
By Anja
Published on 09 Aug 2010 - Last modified on 26 Oct 2010
Viewed: 3733 (daily average: 6) - Rating: 4.4 out of 5 - Rated by: 7
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Category: Articles
> Stories of New Muslims
> Women
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“… This day have I perfected your religion for you, completed
my favor upon you, and have chosen for you Islam as your religion…” (Quran 5:3)
I was born 1967 in a small town in Sauerland County,
Germany. My younger brother and I grew up in the country, where my parents and
grandparents lived in a two-family house. My grandfather used to be principal
of a primary school. My father would have liked to become a forester, but instead
he only became a teacher in secondary school. He still does love nature very
much. But throughout the years he seems to have lost His love for Jesus Christ,
which was quite disappointing for my grandmother, who has always been a firm
believer. She was a member of a small church and all her life she participated
actively in the church and tried hard to set a true Christian example for her
children. My grandfather on the other hand could hardly be called a believer;
this was something that my grandmother only found out after the wedding. Steady
church attendance turned out to be no proof of faith. Till today after each church
service my grandparents engage in heated discussions about Christian belief in
general and the contents of the last sermon in particular. This situation did
affect their three sons. Today only one of them is a church member.
My mother on the other side comes from a family, where
devotion to faith was key. Belief was never subject to discussion. Actually
nothing ever was subject to discussion. My mother, being the youngest child,
was never taken seriously. What else could be the use of a daughter? Till this
day she regrets that she wasn’t allowed to learn another profession. And again
it was taken for granted, that my mother was to marry my father. Since he was
the son of a teacher he was a good match. The shared faith would guarantee a
happy marriage.
But during the first years the marriage became unstable
due to religions tensions. While my grandmother was elected as first woman
into the church’s council of elders, my parents one at a time left the church.
And there came a day, when they didn’t have anything in common anymore. So
after 20 years of marriage and uncountable tries to get along, both agreed on
throwing in the towel and in 1986 their marriage was dissolved.
At that time my brother and I weren’t too attached to
religion, which added to my grandmother’s dismay. We did join Christian Youth
groups and take Bible classes, but neither of us became church members. Actually
we haven’t even been baptized. The church my family belonged to doesn’t
baptize children, but rather grown up people, who consciously make a decision
for Christ. When we reached necessary age, we both decided against being
baptized.
Not that I wouldn’t have been interested in religion. Religion
always fascinated me. Christianity offers an acceptable approach, the belief
in one God, who contacted mankind by sending prophets. In this way God taught
the people who they are and how they should interact with each other and their
environment. But I was soon to notice that Christian values could so easily be
adjusted. What does Christian theology teach? Every human being is full of
sin; original sin is burdening us from birth. God sent His son into the world
to suffer and die on the cross and save us from this burden of guilt. A number
of questions remained unanswered for me; God’s son, who was supposed to be a
man and at the same time the true God, was praying to be saved from the
crucifixion, but to whom did he pray so ardently? His life became the turning
point of history, which divides people in “before” and “after” Christ. Belief
in him is the only way to be saved. Didn’t he say himself: “I am the way, the
truth and the life. Nobody comes to the Father but through me.” (John 14, 6)
With Jesus’ death the Hereafter lost its terror. Christianity
preaches that God is Love, so how can there be a Hell? The devil, who used to
be a mean of oppression to keep church members in order, has been pensioned. The
values of contemporary Christianity are pretty much limited to “Love your
Neighbor”. As long as I don’t hurt anybody, everything goes. Jesus says: “You
shouldn’t think, I have come to dissolve the law or the prophets. I didn’t
come to dissolve, but to fulfill.” (Matthew 5:17) The difference doesn’t seem
to be too big in modern Christianity. Commandments are out. Church goes with
time. Though not fast enough for some of its members.
The Bible hardly has any weight anymore. Probably some
truth can be found in it, but who decides on what is truth and what isn’t? Who
decides, what is valid and what isn’t? The church? The theologists? Or
everybody for himself? Doesn’t everybody according to best knowledge and
conscience fabricate his own belief? Let’s be truthful and no longer call the
result Christianity. Let’s call it “Brianity”, “Susanity” instead!
Believing Christians will of course protest by now. They
will say, the common basis is there. Well, where is it? The true revelation,
the words God told Jesus from Nazareth, where are they? In the Bible there
wasn’t even one chapter dedicated to them.
Central sentences of Faith, that divide the church, have
been derived from historical reports and letters, decided on during theological
conferences or just called out as State doctrine. And how many times did I
hear: “You can’t understand this. You just have to believe it!” I believe that
God gave us our brains so that we might use them. And I believe, that a
message of God, when it is questioned, has to offer more answers than that.
That’s what I told my religious instructor, when my high
school class spent a weekend in a monastery shortly before graduation. “Days
of reflection” that’s what they called it. The teacher surprised me with his
answer. He said: “God won’t let you go. You’ll see.” At the end he turned out
to be right, though he probably may have imagined it a little differently.
My interest in God and religion again caught up with me,
when I came across Islam. After taking my high school diploma I moved to a
city, to take up studies of economy at the university. At that time I thought
that this field of study would do me good in terms of finding a job. I wasn’t
too interested in the subject, but I thought, that my studies would come to
pass very quickly, but instead I was subjected to a very derpessin atmosphere Crowded
stuffy audition rooms, boring lectures by boring professors. As students in
these classes, we were busy with other things. “Did you see what the tall
blonde in the third row is wearing today?” - “Do you have a light?”
Student life on the other hand was fascinating from the
very beginning. I had till that point in time lived in a small town. Even
during my year as an exchange student in the U.S.A. I stayed in a small
country town that made it obligatory to visit the church on Sundays! Now at
university there seemed to be a new world opening up for me. I got to know so
many different people and I loved to discuss God and the world. Among my new
acquaintances were a few foreign students, who were born Muslims. So the
subject of Islam came up.
Generally I was quite amused by the thought, that actually
there are still people around, who seriously follow a law from the Middle Ages.
But in reality everything looked quite different from what I knew. The life of
foreign students in Germany doesn’t have anything in common with the tales of a
Thousand and One Nights. In the beginning I had still asked my Muslim
neighbors in the student homes kiddingly, why tomatoes don’t have to be
ritually cut? Or why a Muslim, who remembers God before he eats and thanks God
after the meal, doesn’t do the same thing when drinking his beer in the pub?
But the more I learned about Islam, the less funny those
jokes became for me. Actually the Islamic religion wasn’t that strange to me,
as I had always thought. I rediscovered a lot of those components that I had
always liked in Christianity. For one, of course, was the belief in God. Islam
is strictly monotheistic. There is only one God. God is in Arabic “Allah”. The
expression really doesn’t mean anything else but “the God” and is also used in
the Arabic language version of the Bible.
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