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Hussein Abdulwaheed Amin, Ex-Catholic, Ireland (part 1 of 4): Introduction and Personal Background
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Description: And Irish Catholic who has loved in some Muslim countries decides to research Islam due to a relationship with a Muslim woman and discusses what he finds.
By Hussein Abdulwaheed Amin
Published on 26 Nov 2007 - Last modified on 16 Dec 2007
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> Stories of New Muslims
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Introduction
I have written my story of conversion to Islam mainly
for the benefit of other (would-be) western converts, especially those who,
like myself, come from a genuinely religious Christian background. Whilst
Christianity and Islam have much in common, there remain fundamental
differences about which no compromise is possible, principally concerning the
Christian doctrine of Trinity and the belief that Jesus is divine. Moving from
being a practicing, sincere, if somewhat intellectually dissatisfied Christian
to embracing Islam is therefore in some respects a major theological journey.
As someone who has already undertaken that journey, I hope that my travelogue
may in some way help smooth the path of those who follow. The following
hadeeth (saying of Prophet Mohammed) comes to mind:
“Once a man, who was passing through a road, found
a branch of a tree with thorns obstructing it. The man removed the thorns from
the way. God thanked him and forgave his sins.” (Saheeh Al-Bukhari)
Through detailing my own experiences for the benefit of
others of a similar background, I would like to think of myself as removing
some of the figurative thorns which obstruct the road from Christianity to
Islam.
I converted to Islam before I became Internet-aware and
had to do all the research for myself. It was essential to me that my
investigation of Islam result in intellectual and theological satisfaction. I
trust that others from a similar background to mine will find that some of my
experiences along the path from Christianity to Islam serve as useful pointers
and starting points for investigation in their own spiritual quest.
My Personal Background
I converted to Islam in October 1998 when aged 31. I am
originally from Ireland where I was born into a practicing Catholic family, but
I have spent nearly all my adult life abroad. In the mid to late 1990’s I was
in love with a Muslim lady whom I had met whilst in an Islamic country. I knew
that if I were interested in marrying her, I would have to convert to Islam, as
Muslim women are prohibited from marrying outside their faith. I did not at
all welcome the prospect of having to become a Muslim. In fact, although I knew
very little about Islam the religion, a particularly negative experience I had
just had of working in a different Muslim country had, if anything, rather
soured my opinion of things to do with Islam and reinforced whatever general
western disinclinations I may already have felt. Nevertheless back in Europe during the spring and summer of 1998, I read all the text books I could find in
college and public libraries about Islam (factual accounts, textbooks, mainly
by non-Muslims) and discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that I could agree
with 90% of the religion without any difficulty. I actually became rather
enthusiastic. I realized that I had been making the mistake of judging Islam
by the behavior of some of its more unsavory nominal adherents rather than by
the theological and moral teachings of the religion itself.
Jesus - Son of God?
Where I did have a real problem, though, was with the
role of Jesus. I had been brought up a Catholic Christian, believing in the
Holy Trinity of God the Father, Jesus the Son plus the Holy Spirit - three
persons in one god. Islam rejects this and teaches the absolute oneness of God
(Tawheed) and specifically that Jesus, though a great prophet, was only human
and not divine.
“O People of the Book [Christians and Jews]! Commit no
excesses in your religion: Nor say of God aught but the truth. Christ Jesus the
son of Mary was (no more than) a messenger of God, and His Word, which He
bestowed on Mary, and a spirit proceeding from Him: so believe in God and His
messengers. Say not “Trinity”: desist: it will be better for you: for God is
one God: Glory be to Him: (far exalted is He) above having a son.” (Quran 4:171)
“Christ the son of Mary was no more than a messenger; many
were the messengers that passed away before him. His mother was a woman of
truth. They had both to eat their (daily) food.” (Quran 5:75)
“[Jesus] said: Surely I am a servant of God; He has given me
the Book and made me a prophet.” (Quran 19:30)
“In blasphemy indeed are those that say that God is Christ the
son of Mary.” (Quran 5:17)
“They do blaspheme who say: ‘God is Christ the son of Mary.”
But said Christ: “O Children of Israel! worship God, my Lord and your Lord.’” (Quran
5:72)
“And behold! God will say: ‘O Jesus the son of Mary! Didst
thou say unto men, worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of God?’ He
will say: ‘Glory to Thee! Never could I say what I had no right (to say).’” (Quran
5:116)
Islam preaches pure monotheism. The absolute
fundamental of Islam is that God alone (what Christians refer to as God the
Father) is the sole deity. Surah 112 of the Quran is quite explicit about
this:
1. Say (O Muhammad): "He is Allah, (the) One.
2. "The Self-Sufficient Master.
3. "He begets not, nor was He begotten;
4. "And there is none co-equal or comparable
unto Him."
What was I to do? This was so alien to me. I certainly
could not betray Jesus.
In terms of religious belief and practice, my own
personal situation was that I had mainly ceased going to Sunday Mass for some
years, in large part due to annoyance at the political, non-religious content
of many Sunday sermons. (I much preferred the short, non-obligatory, weekday
Masses where I could concentrate without distraction or annoyance on feeling close
to God, as no sermon is preached.) Yet on a theological level I remained a
committed Catholic (as opposed to Protestant) within the context of
Christianity. For example, within the ring fence of Christianity, based on my
study of the Gospels, I believed in the doctrines of transubstantiation and
apostolic succession. However, I had serious doubts about the validity of
Christianity per se, specifically with the doctrine of Original Sin and the
consequential need for the blood sacrifice of Jesus, Son of God, as a spiritual
redeemer of souls in atonement. Both these concepts are unknown and alien to
the Judaism from which Christianity is supposed to be derived. Nevertheless the
notion of Jesus as Son of God, had been so deeply ingrained in me that it was
extremely difficult for me to countenance any other interpretation.
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Hussein Abdulwaheed Amin, Ex-Catholic, Ireland (part 2 of 4): Investigating the Christian Resources
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Description: Hussein talks about his experience of researching into the Bible and gives us a glimpse of his conclusions.
By Hussein Abdulwaheed Amin
Published on 03 Dec 2007 - Last modified on 03 Dec 2007
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Saint Paul and the early Christian Church
Having gone as far as I could at that time with my
research of Islam, I next set about a serious study of the historical Jesus and
the early Christian church. I was astonished at what I learned - things I had
never even heard about in my fourteen years of Religious Education at Catholic
schools. As my knowledge increased, I came to reject what I now regarded as
the doctrinal innovations of the foremost evangelist of the early church, Paul
of Tarsus, usually referred to as Saint Paul the Apostle. Paul was not an
Apostle at all. In fact, he personally never even met Jesus, yet claimed to
receive visions of Jesus which overrode the first-hand historical and
theological knowledge of those who had known and followed Jesus during his
actual ministry. Paul’s abrogation of the Law of Moses was decried by the Jerusalem church, led by Peter, and comprised of the original Jewish disciples of Jesus.
They saw themselves as a movement within Judaism and would not accept gentiles
unless they converted to Judaism, for example, through circumcision and
acceptance of Jewish dietary law. For the original Jewish disciples of Jesus,
the notion of a literal and physical Son of God would have been blasphemous and
in direct contravention of the First Commandment. In Exodus 20:2-5 we read:
“I am the Lord your God...Worship no god but me...I
tolerate no rivals.”
And Deuteronomy 6:4 is variously rendered as:
“Hear O Israel, the LORD - and the LORD alone - is
our God.”
Or
“The LORD, our God, is the only God.”
Or
“The LORD our God is one.”
There seems no scope for a “Son of God” or Trinity based
on those readings, only for God “the Father” in Christian parlance or Allah as
He is known to Muslims. [Allah is simply the Arabic word for the God (capital
G). He is not some other deity, as some people in the West mistakenly think.
Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians use the word “Allah” too and “Allah”
appears throughout the Arabic Bible.]
This understanding that a literal, physical Son of God
would have been (and still is) blasphemous to Jews was subsequently confirmed
to me in private correspondence with a Jewish university professor of
religion. Speaking of the Jewish understanding of the Messiah, he stated: “The
figure described here is clearly a human being, not a divinity or son of God”.
Saint Paul’s missionary work was overwhelmingly directed
at polytheist pagans in the northern Mediterranean. In Corinth he gave up in
exasperation on the Jews who stayed faithful to the worship of God alone and to
the oneness of God. In Acts 17: 6 Paul declares to the Jews:
“If you are lost, you yourselves must take the
blame for it. I am not responsible. From now on I will go to the gentiles.”
The notion of gods having children would have been very
familiar to gentiles such as the Greeks. I suspect that Paul distorted the
message of Jesus to make it more acceptable to this audience and thereby gain
as many converts as possible as quickly as possible. We see evidence in Acts
17: 22-23 of how Paul in Athens draws explicitly on the existing religion of
the Greeks to introduce his corrupted version of Christianity to them. There
is also evidence that Paul made things up as he went along and conjured up
doctrine on the hoof without reference to Jewish scripture, the teachings of
Jesus or even one of his own famed visions. For example, in 1 Corinthians 7:
25 in reply to a query about unmarried people, Paul admits that “I do not have
a command from the Lord”, yet nevertheless proceeds to offer his own private
opinion in his self-proclaimed capacity as “one who by the Lord’s mercy is
worthy of trust”.
The Questionable Validity of the New Testament
Growing up in a Catholic home and attending Catholic
schools, I had always unquestioningly regarded the Bible as the Word of God.
As a result of my private study in adulthood of the history of the writing and
compilation of the Bible, I now came to view the New Testament in particular as
deeply suspect. Paul or his followers wrote most of it. Note, for example,
that from chapter 16 onwards, the Acts of the Apostles follows the career of
Paul, not his co-missionary Barnabas, an original disciple of Jesus. Barnabas
was acknowledged as the founder of the Christian Church in Cyprus and was the author of a Gospel which was accepted by the earliest Christians. But
his Gospel was arbitrarily excluded from the Bible when the New Testament was
officially compiled for the first time at the behest of the pagan Roman Emperor
Constantine three centuries after Christ. Barnabas had originally vouched for
Paul when the Jerusalem disciples of Jesus wanted nothing to do with him, but
then parted company with Paul after a bitter argument (Acts 15: 36-40).
As for the four Gospels now accepted as canonical by
Christendom (and only since as late as the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E.!),
these were compiled from unreliable third and fourth-hand accounts long after
Jesus’ lifetime.
Mark 65-75 C.E.
Luke 80-85 C.E.
Matthew 85-90 C.E.
John 95-140 C.E.
Source: University of Calgary, Department of Religious Studies
How can the true Word of God contain two glaringly
different genealogies of Jesus (Matthew 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-37)? And why
include human genealogies at all if Jesus were truly the literal or physical “Son
of God”? How many thousands did Jesus really feed with loaves and fish? Two
different gospels give two different figures. The actual numbers are a
relatively trivial detail, but these examples highlight an important point -
the unreliability of the Gospels concerning the life and teachings of Jesus and
therefore their unsuitability as a basis for doctrine.
Moreover, in general, it is particularly important to
consider that not only are the Gospels not contemporary accounts, they were
actually written retrospectively in a climate of disassociation from Judaism
and ingratiation with pagan Rome during or following the failed Jewish
anti-Roman uprising of 66-74 AD. In contrast, the earlier and more authentic
gospel written by Barnabas was excluded from the official Bible and suppressed
by the Pauline-dominated Church establishment from the 4th century onward.
In addition, it seems silly to have to point it out, but
Jesus, his apostles and disciples were Jews whose scriptures were in Hebrew.
However, the New Testament was written in Greek. And an appendix to the Good
News Bible authorized by the Catholic Church lists 85 instances including 15
in the Gospels where New Testament writers have Jesus and the other central
characters of early Christianity quoting from, paraphrasing or alluding to
texts not from the original Old Testament in Hebrew but the from Septuagint
version, a Greek translation made in Egypt around 200 BC. The appendix states:
In a number of instances this version differs
significantly in meaning from the Masoretic Hebrew text.
It is not credible that the Jesus and his followers
would be quoting from a foreign language translation containing significant
differences rather than from the Hebrew original of their Jewish scriptures.
This casts further doubt on the accuracy of the New Testament and again
undermines its validity as a basis for doctrine.
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Hussein Abdulwaheed Amin, Ex-Catholic, Ireland (part 3 of 4): From Trinitarianism to Unitarianism
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Description: Catholic Christian to Arian Unitarian to Muslim.
By Hussein Abdulwaheed Amin
Published on 10 Dec 2007 - Last modified on 10 Dec 2007
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The Quran - perfectly preserved and unaltered
I would like to mention in passing that in contrast to
the compilation of the New Testament and specifically the Gospels of Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John, the Quran, which is one book, was revealed in its entirety
to one prophet, Mohammed. It was memorized by many of his followers as it was
received over a period of 23 years and was also written down during Mohammed’s
lifetime. It was definitively transcribed within two decades of Mohammed’s
death and verified by his closest surviving companions. Two of the four copies
of the original Quran made at that time are still in existence - one in Istanbul in Turkey, the other in Tashkent in Uzbekistan in former Soviet central Asia. Every Arabic Qur’an in the world today is, letter for letter, identical to this
ancient script.
Indeed, in the 19th century, an institute of Munich University in Germany collected a staggering forty-two thousand different copies of the
Quran including manuscripts and printed texts produced in various parts of the
Islamic world over a period spanning thirteen hundred years. Research work was
carried out on these texts for half a century, at the end of which the
researchers concluded that apart from copying mistakes, there was no
discrepancy in the text of these forty-two thousand copies, even though they
were produced at different times between the first and fourteenth Islamic
centuries and had been procured from all parts of the world. Unfortunately this
institute and its priceless treasure of Quranic manuscripts were destroyed in
an Allied bombing attack on Germany during World War II, but the findings of
its research project survived.
In short, the Quran stands or falls as one. The
integrity of the text itself is above reproach. There remains only a personal
decision whether to accept it or not as the word of God.
In addition to the Quran, the ahadeeth, or sayings of
Prophet Mohammed, which form the secondary strand of Islamic scripture, were
meticulously collected and authenticated by the second Islamic century by
Muslim scholars who only accepted a given saying as genuine if it had a proven
chain of trustworthy transmitters stretching back to one or more original
companion of the Prophet. Many thousands of plausible sayings were rejected
if they did not meet these strict criteria.
Doubts about Jesus’s divinity even within the Gospels
Even within the four canonical Gospels there are
numerous passages which cast doubt on the divinity of Jesus and therefore on
the concept of Trinity which presupposes it. There are at least twenty
instances where Jesus prays. See Matthew 14:23, 19:13, 26:39, 27:46, 26:42-44;
Mark 1:35, 6:46, 14:35-36; Luke 3:21, 5:16, 6:12, 9:18, 9:28, 11:1-4, 22:41;
John 14:16, 17:1, 17:9, 17:11, 17:15. If Jesus were himself divine, i.e. God,
to whom is he praying and why?
Consider also these passages:
Matthew 26:39
Jesus and God had different wills.
Matthew 19:16-17, Mark 10:17-18 and Luke 18:18-19.
Jesus denied divinity by distinguishing between himself
and God.
Luke 7:16, 13:33, 24:19; John 4:19
Jesus was regarded by his disciples and other
contemporaries as a prophet. They do not acclaim him as an incarnation of God
or the Son of God.
My Journey from Catholic Christian to Arian Unitarian to
Muslim
As a result of my studies and after much soul-searching,
I came to reject Pauline church doctrinal innovations such as the Trinity, a
concept unknown to Jesus’ disciples and not definitively established as
official church doctrine until as late as 381A.D. I found myself in sympathy
with the more purely monotheist beliefs of the late third and early fourth
century priest Arius of Alexandria and others such as Bishop Eusebius of
Nicomedia (later Patriarch of Constantinople), their teacher, the respected
priest and martyr Lucian of Antioch and, in later decades, Roman Emperor
Constantius II. The Catholic Encyclopaedia
defines Arianism as:
“a heresy
which arose in the fourth century, and denied the divinity of Jesus Christ,...
not a modern form of unbelief, and [it] therefore will appear strange in modern
eyes.”
What the encyclopaedia fails to mention is that what
they are describing as heresy was, in fact, official church doctrine in the
middle of the fourth century. For example, after the Council of Ariminum
(present-day Rimini in Italy) in 359A.D. St. Jerome wrote, “the whole world
groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian”. This prevailed until after the
death of Constantius II and his fellow Arian successors when a changing
political climate within the Roman Empire resulted in the persecution of Arian
Christians and the conclusive imposition of Trinitarianism as official church
doctrine at the Second General Council in 381A.D.
When I too came to the conclusion that Jesus was not
divine, I had crossed an essential hurdle in terms of mindset and beliefs.
Whether or not Jesus is divine is the absolute crux of the matter as far as any
believing, theologically aware Christian is concerned. Once I had come to this
new understanding of Jesus, it was but a small step for me to be able to accept
a later prophet and embrace Islam, just as the North African and Iberian Arian
Christians, denounced by the Church but physically safe outside the shrinking
borders of the Roman Empire, had done en masse when Islam was introduced to
them in the decades after the death of Mohammed. Because of my Christian
upbringing, I was used to the concept of God sending prophets periodically
throughout history at times when mankind had fallen away from His teachings.
Islam recognizes the Old Testament prophets I was familiar with plus John the
Baptist and Jesus. Given that, by the seventh century, Arabia had lapsed into
polytheism and much of the Christian world was Trinitarian, it made sense to me
that God should send a new prophet, Mohammed, to call mankind back to the
correct worship of Himself, the one true god.
There are 25 prophets recognized by name in the Quran.
All but three of them are also mentioned in Jewish or Christian scripture:
1) Adam
2) Idrís (Idrees)
3) Núh (Noah)
4) Húd
5) Sálih
6) Ibráhím (Abraham)
7) Ismá’íl (Ishmael)
8) Isháq (Isaac)
9) Lút (Lot)
10) Ya’qúb (Jacob)
11) Yúsuf (Joseph)
12) Shu’aib
13) Ayúb (Job)
14) Músa (Moses)
15) Hárún (Aaron)
16) Dhu l-kifl (Ezzekiel)
17) Dawúd (David)
18) Sulaimán
19) Ilyás (Elijah)
20) al-Yasa’ (Elisha)
21) Yúnus (Jonas)
22) Zakaríya (Zakariyah)
23) Yahyá (John the Baptist)
24) ‘Ísa (Jesus)
25) Muhammad
I had now reached the point where I genuinely wanted to
be a Muslim in my own right, whether my interest in the Muslim lady mentioned
previously led to marriage or not. (In fact the relationship in question
eventually did not work out.) For I see my conversion to Islam not as a
rejection of what I regard as true Christianity, simply as a rejection of the
tangent or erroneous path along which Paul and his followers led astray the
new, gentile, former polytheistic Christians of the Greco-Roman world. Sadly,
all major forms of modern Christianity - Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy
and Protestantism - stem from Paul.
The Catholic Encyclopaedia states that Arianism has
never been revived (although it concedes that such eminent figures as Sir Isaac
Newton and Milton displayed Arian sympathies). What it fails to acknowledge is
that Arianism has, for the last fourteen hundred years, been incorporated
within Islam. There is no one left within Catholicism, Protestantism or
Orthodoxy to espouse the oneness of God. The reason why Trinitarianism now
rules unfettered within the greatly reduced geographical boundaries of old world
Christendom is that the peoples of all the southern Mediterranean formerly
Arian Christian strongholds are now overwhelmingly Muslim!
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Hussein Abdulwaheed Amin, Ex-Catholic, Ireland (part 4 of 4): Statement of Theological Beliefs
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Description: Hussein felt completely at peace with pure monotheistic theological beliefs exemplified by Islam.
By Hussein Abdulwaheed Amin
Published on 17 Dec 2007 - Last modified on 17 Dec 2007
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With a clear conscience and with none of the mental
torment on this issue that I had to face when I first started studying Islam, I
can now state that I believe Jesus to have been an entirely human prophet of
God, one of the greatest prophets of God and worthy of the utmost respect, but
that he was neither an incarnation of God nor the Son of God. I believe that
Jesus, a pious, monotheistic Jew, would be absolutely horrified by what
Trinitarian Christians have made him out to be. Previously I feared that I
would be betraying Jesus if I became a Muslim. Now I realised that I had been,
in effect, inadvertently blaspheming and saying what I had no right to say
about him.
I believe Mohammed to have been a later (the last)
prophet of God. And just as the true Christianity of Jesus’ genuine apostles in
Jerusalem is the successor to Judaism, so is Islam, the final revelation of
God’s word, the legitimate successor to and fulfilment of original
Jerusalem-Jewish Christianity.
I would like to make absolutely clear that I did not
convert to Islam because of a romantic relationship. The possibility of
marriage to a Muslim woman was the spur, the catalyst, which sparked my initial
investigation of Islam. For the record, the relationship in question later
broke down in 2001, but I still remain a Muslim.
My conversion to Islam, when it came, was a sincere one,
not one of convenience. It had to be sincere. I could not in good conscience
have undergone a fraudulent one. Religion, God, is too important to be trifled
with. One’s soul is at stake.
I rejected Christianity as it is known to us today
because I no longer believed in the doctrine of Trinity and the claim that
Jesus is God. I came to believe wholeheartedly in the oneness of God. And I
judge this belief to have found its best expression in the religion of Islam.
Whatever the future may hold in terms of personal relationships, I will
continue to hold these beliefs.
At times I can’t help but seriously wonder whether vast
swathes of the religious community I have joined have forgotten the theological
core of Islam and buried it with cranky behavioural regulations which they seek
to impose on others, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, although God clearly states
in the Quran that there is “no compulsion”. I admit at times to feeling rather
disillusioned at certain interpretations I have encountered among Muslims of
what constitutes legitimate Islamic practice and behaviour. I assure you that
people with a Taliban mindset are not confined to Afghanistan.
And I am sickened by the politicized hate-filled philosophy,
which passes itself off as Islam when in fact not only does it violate the
most basic Islamic rules of warfare, it is often indicative of a complete lack
of trust in God’s promise that no one will have to suffer more than they can
endure. These extremists have set the cause of the spread of Islam back
decades. At times I can’t help but echo the lament of British convert, Michael
A. Malik: “Islam is
wonderful, but I can’t stand the Muslims!”
But in spite of my frequent disillusionment with the
behaviour and attitudes of many of those who call themselves Muslim, in terms
of beliefs about the nature of God, I will remain a believer in the oneness of
God - for life.
Some time ago an American Protestant friend brought a
wonderful quotation of Martin Luther’s to my attention:
Everyone must do his own believing, as he will have
to do his own dying.
I am completely at peace with myself about my new, pure
monotheistic theological beliefs exemplified by Islam. And this is my
statement of belief:
He is God,
the only One,
Qul Huwa Allāhu ‘Aĥad
God the
Everlasting.
Allāhu Aş-Şamad
He did not
beget and is not begotten,
Lam Yalid Wa Lam Yūlad
And none
is His equal. (Quran - Surah 112)
Walam Yakun Lahu Kufūan ‘Aĥad.
I bear
witness that there is no god but the God
Ashadu an la illaha ill allah
and I bear
witness that Mohammed is a prophet of God.
Wa ashadu anna Mohammadan rasool Ullah.
Thanks to Parents
Finally, I would like to express my sincere appreciation
to my parents - devout, practicing Catholics - who, although strongly disapproving
of my conversion to Islam on theological grounds, have accepted my decision and
have continued to show me great love, understanding, sensitivity and practical
support. I have been most blessed in this regard.
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