"Islam 101"

Over the past several months, I've been reading about Islam on my own and talking online about Islam with a few Muslims.

I have also been taking an “Islam 101” class at the local masjid that is geared towards new Muslims (i.e. recent converts) and potential converts.

I go every week to this Islam class, and I try to appreciate it for what it is.

It is not a class run by scholars or for people with theological/philosophical interests.

It often feels like an Islam-based support group, a place in which people share anecdotes about their everyday lives and the class leader responds with a comforting hadith or Quranic passage. There is no clear structure to the class. Plenty of room for a 10-minute tangent conversation about different brands of turkey bacon or how to best place hijab pins.

For the most part, the class has veered away from interesting and challenging theological questions. I gather that the teacher does not want to confuse us newbies, overwhelm us with information, or make us think very hard. She wants to make the conversion process easier for the members of the class, and part of that project involves boiling down Islam to some basics.

The attitude of the teacher of the Islam 101 class is very open and forgiving of mistakes. She encourages students in the class to maintain views and practices that are “close enough” to halal even if they are not necessarily totally halal and correct by Islamic standards. The emphasis is not on precision, just on making the right niyya and "doing your best".

The group is for women only and takes place on the sisters’ floor (i.e. the basement) of the local mosque. The big room in which the class meets is the room of the masjid in which sisters pray, study, talk with each other, and care for children. It is also the room in which extra chairs and other such supplies are kept. As a result, there is a lot of traffic of sisters through the space and many of these women join in our discussions even though they are not converts themselves. I greatly appreciate the participation of these sisters, especially because I can then get differing perspectives from knowledgeable “born” Muslims, and see that Islam includes diverse opinions and experiences and not a singular unitary perspective.

The class is scheduled such that the group can do both Asr and Maghrib prayers together. My favorite aspect of taking part in this class is praying together in the mosque. Often times there is a brief talk by a brother following the prayers, and I have appreciated hearing those speeches, which can be an informative and thought-provoking complement to what I hear in the "Islam 101" class.

I recently learned that Muslims are required (according to many scholars anyway) to talk with non-Muslims who ask them about Islam. That knowledge made me feel very guilty about asking questions of a woman at the masjid. She is a born Muslim and a brilliant legal scholar and a wonderful resource—I appreciated her comments in/to the group. I asked her if I could ask her some questions about the Quran, and she then must felt obligated to meet with me; she could not say no because I was a non-Muslim asking about Islam. Now that I have that information, I would not so carelessly and greedily ask a Muslim to talk with me about Islam.

I also read recently that there is a big "reward" for Muslims who manage to convert other people to Islam. That gives me an uneasy feeling about certain interactions I have had with Muslims, particularly some very friendly and zealous Muslims who are active in teaching about Islam to recent converts and non-Muslims. This knowledge of the “reward” for dawah makes me wonder if the only reason these Muslims have helped me and talked with me was because they hoped to lead to my conversion and thus I wonder whether they would continue to engage in such conversations with me if I do convert--or if their task would then have been accomplished already and their reward assured. I want to think of these sisters as my friends, not as people who are just using me for their own spiritual benefit.

To me, a system of ethics and values rooted only in "reward" and "punishment" seems crass and simplistic. Such a carrot/stick approach sidesteps the need for rationale, moral reasoning, or debate. That language suggests that every person is their own individual subject with an insular relationship between Allah and the self, while other people are merely tests or means of reward/punishment.

I have very mixed feelings about this class. Still, I continue to attend, because I feel that I owe it to myself and to Allah to make at least that minimal effort.

On Conversion

My attitude towards conversion (or, as it’s often called “reversion”) has shifted over the course of these past months in which I have been learning about Islam. At first, conversion was not even on my radar as a possibility. I saw myself a non-Muslim, period. Converting to any religion, and perhaps particularly to Islam, was simply unthinkable to me at that time.

As I began to read about Islam, and especially as I read the Quran, I experienced moments of being overwhelmingly compelled by the poetry of the Quran. I began to toy with the idea of conversion as possibility, if only a remote one.

I was thinking in terms of "if I convert" -- I was engaged in an open process of learning about Islam, which might face conversion as one of many possible outcomes but certainly not the most likely one. For some of that time, I was staying in another city with some friends who are now adamantly secular atheist “born” Muslims and who productively challenged and questioned my evolving views. One of them told me, “If you convert, you better be sure, because if you convert and then leave Islam, they’ll kill you.” Obviously, that is a ridiculous prospect—no one would kill me for apostasy here in the contemporary United States—but his warning highlighted the high stakes of choosing Islam. For many people, choosing Islam means a matter of life and death—or at least paradise vs. the fire.

After I returned to my home town, I started taking the Islam 101 course at the local masjid, and began to think in terms of "when and how I will convert". Conversion seemed a likely, if not imminent, possibility. The "Islam 101" course is also known as the "New Muslims" course, and most of the other sisters in the class are recent converts who expect me to join them soon as a fellow new Muslim.

Most recently, though, I have wavered between intense moments of wanting to convert and moments of thinking that Islam is definitely not for me, all centering around the question of "why I would convert". I do not want to end up converting simply because it is expected of me—or because I feel that I owe it to the fine people who have been giving me Dawah. I want to feel that it is the right thing for me. If someone asks me why I am converting, I should be able to articulate a coherent and theoretically sophisticated response, as I would to explain any of my political or ethical positions. I am asking myself if my reasons for finding meaning in Islam are good reasons, insufficient reasons, or symptomatic of other issues.

Conversion in Islam consists of taking Shahadah—saying two basic sentences in Arabic in front of witnesses. That conversion process is, on face, simple and easy. However, speaking those words, knowing their meaning, and believing that meaning do not make for a simple matter and I do not wish to take that matter lightly.

Shahadah means “witnessing”—a strong public affirmation of unwavering belief. To witness does not mean “this idea seems most plausible to me at this moment” or “I believe some of this but the rest I’m not sure of or haven’t even learned about yet”. I feel that I need to learn more before I can be a viable witness.

These questions of “if” “when” “how” and “why” are questions that surface and submerge in the daily reconfiguration of my thinking about conversion in particular and my relationship to Islam in general.