CHAPTER 3
“My people perish for lack of knowledge:..” — Hosea 4:6
It is difficult for us as normal people to objectively realize how much we don’t know. There are vast bodies of knowledge that we have never been exposed to and probably never will. Luckily God made children naturally curious.
So as we grow, we start to have more and more questions about the world around us as we try to understand how we fit into the grand scheme of things.
For me the world was something to be unraveled. It was a sort of mystery that we needed to figure out, almost a kind of puzzle, and I wanted to solve it.
The wise king Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes 1:18, saying, “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”. How true this turned out to be for me as a young adolescent. The more I learned about Islam and the path of Allah, the more I questioned every part of it.
Finally it got to the point that my relationship with my father became quite strained. As a 15 year old boy questioning the foundation of his entire belief system did not sit well with him.
In truth I believe that each one of us have the same burning questions inside and that my continues search for answers touched an exposed nerve of my old man. Surely as a young man he must have had all the same things on his mind. Through many years of life, my dad had managed to push down his inquisitive nature and began to accept that the little he knew was true and beyond reproach.
My mother remained always the optimist. At one point, when tensions were running high in our household, she decided to take me to see the imam. In Islam an imam is similar to a priest. He was supposed to be wise and have all the answers. At least so I was told. Even my father approved of the idea, thinking that the imam would set me straight.
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The day finally arrived and I was dropped off at the mosque for my meeting with imam Mohamed El-Hadi. He was a tall skinny man with a well trimmed beard and a soft smile that would make anyone feel at peace.
So me and imam Mohamed sat down in a corner of the beautifully ornamented mosque that was our local place of prayer and along with a few notebooks and a Koran I had brought along, we sat for what turned out to be many hours of discussion.
You see, imam Mohamed had a very different approach towards his faith in Allah. He was a man of thought. He spent much time digging deeper into what was actually meant through the writings of the Koran and with a soft kind nature explained it to me.
At first everything he said lined up with everything I already knew. Then, slowly, he began to show me a world that I had never dreamed existed. He would ask me questions and say things like, “what is the essence of this command? Don’t look at what it says, think about why it says that.”, or ,”It says here that Allah forbids us from eating pork. So is eating pork really that bad? Why did he give this command? What was he trying to tell us?”.
At first this kind of reasoning bewildered my young mind. A command was simply a command and basta. I had never thought to question Allah himself. Up to this point all of my thoughts were derived towards human conduct or speculation. The Koran was the final word on everything and beyond reproach, that was something I did not doubt; until then that it.
Thus our one meeting turned into a weekly meeting. I was sworn to secrecy regarding what we discussed and imam Mohamed taught me how to live the life of a good Muslim without raising all the questions. He said that Allah put these thoughts in my heart and that it was a thing that not all people could accept or think about.
This was my first introduction to the ideas and ideals of Sufism. As I was to find out very soon, my new tutor was a Dervish himself.
Sufism is a form of mystical Islamic belief. It teaches one to practice a form of Islam in which Muslims seek to find the truth through a direct personal experience of God. It is a teaching that focuses on love, as opposed to the cold hard punishment that my father’s Islam taught.
I would never have been able to guess that such a thing existed if not for this encounter with imam Mohamed. Yet even he was scared of prosecution from the other groups in Islam that does not approve of this sort of deeper thought. Here was a man that followed every single one of Allah’s laws to the letter, for one must be a very good follower of the law to become an imam, but at the same time he was scared of the others who believed in the exact same laws.
From all external appearances imam Mohamed was a just and upright Muslim, but if anyone was able to look into his mind and see the questions that he was contemplating, then he would have been thrown out of the mosque forever and banished from all he held dear.
Little did I know it at the time, but here began my journey away from the rigid teachings of Islam as I started to discover the true meaning of life that would ultimately lead me to Jesus Christ.
