Following My Dreams

Literally.

My path to Islam was long, long, long in coming and has been heavily influence by dreams that I believe with utmost certainty came directly from Allah.

I had been wanting to post about this and never found an opportunity, but now I have been prompted by a similar post by the Saudi Stepford Wife and an evening bout of insomnia.

Dreams are intensely personal and their meanings and symbols are often only intelligible to the dreamer. Why do I want to reveal something so personal? I want to demonstrate that a connection to God is possible and, in many ways, tangible.

My first dream about Islam actually came when I was twelve years old. I think I must explain that while I had a fairly multi-ethnic upbringing it was definitely mono-religious. The most religious variance I had seen was between my Non-denominational Christian mother and my Catholic Christian aunt and the most religious choice in my city was choosing churches. I had, to date, met only one girl who was Jewish and my knowledge of her religion extended mainly to the draedl that she brought to show and tell. Oh, and I read Anne Frank.

So to have the dream I had, with the detail that I had it in, meant it had to have come from a source other than experience.

In my dream I was standing in a perfectly square room lusciously carpeted with the pile all laying towards one direction. The walls were solid wood and unadorned except for one on my left side which was ornately carved into a screen of ivy and flowers, beyond which was another room that I knew was there without needing to have entered it. A room I knew was meant for women while I was rebelliously standing in the room meant for men with my head uncovered. I could feel the judging eyes of unseen peers upon me but I didn't care, what I was focusing my attention on was the overwhelming presence of God I felt. I could feel God's love for me and sadness at my choice to not cover my head. I could bear the judgement of the others but it was God's sadness that broke my heart.

All these years I can still feel those emotions and I can still see every detail of the dream. At twelve I didn't know what a headcovering was, nor what these odd rooms were, but it made a mark on me deeper than I will ever realize.

I also had a dream around the same time of french-kissing a dark-skinned man with what I would later realize was a sunnah beard. The fact of it is that the man in my dream looked remarkably like my husband- although I didn't know that yet. I remember the dream because 1- I had never french-kissed and the dream was incredibly vivid and tangible and 2- the man looked nothing like any men I had ever seen in my life. Why I was sent this dream I'm not entirely sure, except that it may have had something to do with recognizing my naseeb when I met him (alhumdulillah.)

My other two important dreams came after I was Muslim and in response to marriage istikhara I had been praying at the time. One was for a proposal I turned down and the other was for a proposal I accepted. And the reason that I am revealing both of them is because they have eerie similarities.

With the first dream I had been making istikhara for weeks and refusing to listen to what my heart was telling me the answer was. You know when you have one desire in your heart and you want your istikhara to back it up no matter what? Yeah. Like that, except God finally sat me down and gave me an irrefutable answer in the form of another vivid dream.

I was standing in a room getting ready for the wedding, in my wedding gown, with everyone waiting for me and all I had left were to put the gold bangles on. But they wouldn't stay on my wrists; I would slip them on and they would slide right off again and I began to get irrationally afraid, I felt there was no way I could get married without the bangles. I abandoned the effort and slipped out the door trying to find my way out but was discovered and brought to the auditorium where the wedding was to take place. The groom and the sheikh officiating were sitting and waiting for me on a platform at the top of a large flight of stairs (remember the stairs for future reference.) Feeling as if I were facing my doom I started up the stairs but as I ascended one by one my body began to get heavier and the effort to climb higher became greater until at the top I was climbing on my hands and knees, heaving my thousand-pound body up one stair at a time. When I got to the top and was about to take my seat next to the groom I panicked and, in a moment of distraction, made a break for it, racing down a back way and out the doors. My groom came after me and when I realized that there was no escape I collapsed into the grass and wished for oblivion. He came and laid down next to me as if we were jut companionably watching the clouds float by. Eventually I mentioned that we should probably go back and he just laughed and answered, "Why? We're already married." At which I felt like my life was over and the weight of the world was crushing my chest and then I woke up.

There was no misinterpreting that dream, but when I brought it to a local sheikh I found that in dreams bangles/bracelets are synonymous with religion. If the bangle is so tight you can't get it off it is a good sign meaning that it will be good for your religion, but if it won't stay on it means that which you were praying about is bad for your religion.

But I already knew it.

When it came to the decision to marry my husband I only made istikhara a few times but the dream I received in response was as obvious in its meaning as the other had been.

My dream began with me relaxing in an unending and perfect green field beneath an unblemished blue sky. Pretty much exactly the windows xp default wallpaper down to the giant hill, I kid you not. And this area I was contently chilling in was called Islam, as in thats what it was labeled on the map. Anyways, as I was hanging out I got a call from my family that my cousin (Oogie's older brother) had been killed on duty in Iraq and my family was in mourning. I knew I needed to be with them so I walked to the white marble wall that marked the border between Islam and Jahilya and hopped back into oblivion. In Jahilyah (its actual name in my dream) it was permanent dusk and there was no life, I immediately forgot about Islam and entered into a zombie-like state. I hooked up with my cousin (Oogie's younger sister) and began to go around with her from party to party. I never drank or partook in the sexual orgies and disgusting past times that marked everywhere I could see but I was a silent observer of it all. Eventually depression engulfed me and I left my cousin behind to wander looking for happiness (exactly like I had before I found Islam) until I realized that my phone had been incessantly ringing. I checked my voicemail and found messages from my husband-to-be saying that he knew I was not the person I had become, that what I was doing wasn't me, and that I needed to return. In that moment I remembered Islam and realized what spell I had been under and I set off back towards Islam. I came to the marble wall but getting back into Islam from Jahilya was going to be harder than leaving it had been. To leave I jumped a four-foot wall, but now between me and the wall, which had become now one hundred feet tall, was a gaping divide filled with hellfire. In order to cross the ravine and get over the wall I had to climb up a staircase of thin, razor-sharp silver wires. I dutifully began to climb and as I did the wires cut my hands and feet and I could look down straight into the hellfires and the demons waiting inside. But each step I climbed I shed my sins and my body became lighter until the wires no longer cut me and I felt as I were floating. I got to the top and rolled over to land back in Islam where my husband-to-be waited for me dressed in pristine white clothing. I clung to him crying about the terrible dream I had had about being stuck in Jahilya but he only brushed it away smiling with love into my face saying, "Don't worry habibty, it was only a dream. You are Muslim and you don't need to worry about a thing, its all over," and I woke up completely content.

From that moment I never feared the future with my now husband. I felt completely at peace with the decision to marry him and this peace has carried through to every part of our lives together.

God has granted me the supreme blessing of receiving my answers in such a concise manner. Not all istikhara is answered by dreams, not all of MY istikhara has been answered in dreams, but when it mattered I was given an answer there was no way I could deny.

Its been a long journey, but the blessings and rewards are great.

And I guess, if one is to believe my dream, Islam/Janna looks a lot like windows xp.

Also something I found out after I had that dream is that the soul must cross a bridge of razor thin wire between heaven and hell, each cut the soul receives removes a sin so by the time it reaches Janna it is pure.

I'm only reciting this from memory and not from an actual source as I find myself quite tired now and ready to go to bed.

To sleep, perchance to dream.

Three years and all my life

Its coming up on three years of being Muslim for me, only three years. See, I feel like its been my entire life already, like I was never anything else but Muslim. How is this that in three years I've lived one whole lifetime?

Maybe it was because I was half-Muslim for about 4 months before I took the plunge.

Maybe it is because the sleeping soul inside of me was Muslim long before I ever existed.

Maybe its because I really was recreated and born again the moment I took my shehada.

I don't know, but to me its been a lot longer than 3 years as a Muslim.

Its been my whole life.


* * * *


I don't remember the exact date I took my shehada, I think this is better and it may have been subconsciously intentional to not mark the day. I feel like to have marked it would mean I would have had to celebrate it every year that it came around. Like a birthay, I guess, which it is in its own right. But I don't think it is the day which is remarkable, but the event instead that changed my life.

As I said above, I playacted at being Muslim for about 4 months before I actually converted. It was like I knew I was, but my heart hadn't yet told my brain. I had never really been in denial before then so I didn't realize that while I was putting on hijab for an Islamic History class at the U I was really being who I was, and everything else was just an act.

I don't know how to explain it, its a singular insanity that is all my own.

I would be at halaqas in abaya and khimar and when other sisters asked me, "So, how long have you been Muslim?"

I would pause for a second and then answer quite matter of factly, "Well, actually I'm not."

What a strange creature I must have seemed.

And when that moment finally came where I realized that my thinking had changed from "if I ever became Muslim..." to "when I become Muslim..." it hit me like a bucket full of cold water. I probably even made a funny face.

I had denied it while living it for far too long.

I was reborn in my life the moment I took shehada. Wiped clean like a slate pockmarked with ground-in chalk. I swear I even felt like I sparkled from the inside. And thats when the real change began.

I made baby steps, I stumbled a lot, I never fell down but I emerged with the same scars an adolescent would carry on her knees. Bruised but still striving to become a fully-fledged adult. I even carried my Muslimness like the awkward limbs of a post-pubescent, unsure and wobbly, and not exactly comfortable inside her skin.

I grew and I rebelled, and I hit the point where it was fight or flight. I took off my hijab and tested the strength of my convictions, and in the end the only person I could rebel against was myself.

I put the hijab back on unhappy with the absence of what truly defined 'me' and I knew at that moment that there was nothing on earth that could make me return to what I had been. Not even the empty promises of a spit-shined dunya could tempt me away from the beauty of my religion.

And the instant I stepped out of my door and faced the world with my hijab again, the stares of my uni mates who had seen me with and then seen me without and then saw me again with, I grew up in my Islam. Like a graduation, I had passed.

I married my soulmate, possibly the only man who can tell me what to do and still have me love him for it. My patient teacher, my lover, my best friend, and my confidante.

With him I fulfilled the final half of my deen.

And in three years I find myself an adult in my Islam, having lived an entire life in so short a time.

So pardon me if, when asked, I reply that I have been Muslim my whole life.

Because in a sense, I truly have.

You don't want to be a Muslim?

Ok. So don't.

My little cousin is dating a Muslim. I am currently the only Muslim in my entire family (that I know of) so this would make her a non-Muslim. Christian to be exact, Lutheran if you really want to get specific.

When she saw me at our family Christmas party she came over and gave me a hug and commented on how pretty my hijab was. And then she confessed that her boyfriend is a Muslim and that he wants her to be a Muslim.

What?

I asked her if she believed in it and she said no. "Ok," I said, "so don't be a Muslim."

Just to let all of you, who believe that Islam was spread by the sword, know: we don't want forced conversions. We don't accept forced conversions. If someone is forced to convert without belief and against their wishes then its quite obvious that they are not really Muslim. End of story. We don't have the baptisms where someone's outsides are washed and they magically become Christian like the Roman Catholics did in the New World. Its an internal choice made from the heart and if its not your choice then you're not Muslim, even if you just do it to make your significant other happy.

I have an issue with men who date non-Muslims and then pull out the "I can't marry you because you're not Muslim" card when they want out of the relationship. I mean, this breaks all sorts of moral codes above and beyond the religious striction against dating. I myself have been at the receiving end of this line although it was not said as a way out but as a sort of blackmail against me.

"I love you but I can't marry you unless you're Muslim."

Oh really? I ended up converting, but it was not for him. In fact I remember saying to his face "I'm going to become a Muslim, but this doesn't mean I'm going to marry you," and I later turned down all the proposals he made for me. So you're not going to marry me unless I'm Muslim? Well, I'm Muslim and I'm not going to marry you anyways.

I converted for myself, for my heart, for my love of God, and because I knew it was right. Sure, if you look at the percentage of women who convert because they married/dated a Muslim its very high. In fact most Muslims when they first meet me assume that I converted for my husband and their first question is "where is your husband from?"

But that doesn't make it ok for a man to say that he won't marry his non-Muslim girlfriend unless she converts. Whats the point of having a spouse who says they're Muslim but really aren't?

On the upside my cousin told me that her boyfriend has never said "convert or else" and has even gone so far as to say that he would marry her no matter what but that he wants their kids to be raised Muslim. Spouses of two different religions bring up a whole other set of problems for their children, but we'll leave that for some other blog. I'm happy to know that he makes her happy and treats her well no matter what religion she is.

And thats good for him because I'd take him out at the knees if he ever tried to force her to convert.

For right now I'm content to be a source of knowledge and support for her when she has any questions. I'd love for her to be a Muslim, but only if she herself decides thats what she wants.

Its the only right way to do it.