Grateful To Allah

Bismillahir Rahmaanir Rahiim

I don’t think I express it often enough, but I am so grateful to be a Muslim, so grateful that Allah opened my heart to this beautiful path.

This evening I went to my son’s school concert, which was at the Catholic church where he attends school. Now, I know there are alot of Muslims who would say that I shouldn’t have gone to begin with, but I support my son just as he supports me, and I go as a Muslim. I wore my abaya and niqaab and very few people haven’t gotten used to seeing me that way already from his basketball games and other such events.

They are celebrating the church’s 120th year. So it was a bigger event than my mother had realized it would be when she asked me to attend, just thinking that the children’s choir was going to sing a few “end of the school year” songs. The children’s choir and bell choir performed, as well as the adult church choir, the “contemporary” adult choir (can I just say that I find it ridiculous enough when kids do motions during songs, but it’s really too much when the adults are doing motions and jazz hands while singing? Ick), and a smattering of other little groups. Some of the songs were Catholic and some were secular (the appropriatness of singing purely secular music in a church is actually, I confess, another thing that makes me glad I’m not Christian anymore - is nothing sacred anymore?).

A young woman who has been singing in the church since she was 10 performed one of my favorite songs from The Phantom of the Opera. Then a very talented young man played a song from a Shakespeare play. I haven’t heard the violin in so long and it really is one of my most favorite instruments… I confess that I cried during the Phantom song (which is very romantic, but could as easily be about something other than losing a human lover), and closed my eyes during the Shakespeare song. Listening to the violin with my eyes closed, I pictured myself in a beautiful natural setting, with flowers, trees, my bare feet touching the grass, the smell of the earth close, butterflies and birds around. As I imagined this nature scene, all I was thinking was “subhanAllah, You have given us such beauty, such blessings, in Your creation”.

When they sang Ave Maria and Salve Regina, both songs I loved when I was young, I thought of the high status that Mary has in our Islamic tradition. I wondered if I might find an opportunity to talk about this with my parents, to do daw’ah in this regard. We were not Catholic when I was a child, but I was very attracted to Catholicism and one reason was because of Mary. But in our Islamic tradition, we have so much more “meat to her story”, and such a beautiful understanding of who she was and why she was chosen to be the mother of a great Prophet (peace be upon him). I love that in Islam we actually talk about who she was besides just being a mother, that we recognize her traits and devotion to Allah as a woman and sincere believer, not just “some random woman who was chosen”, which is often about as deep as some Christian tradition ever gets. In Christianity, she was just a vessel. In Islam she is a role model for all women. Even as they sing her praises for giving birth, we honor her for so much more but within a limitation that does not set her up next to Allah either. I was so at peace sitting there listening to the songs but thinking of the reality of her story, and trying to find a lesson for myself in it.

Anyway, throughout the program, I was reminded constantly of Allah, and how being a Muslim makes me different from those sitting around me. How although they all appeared happy, even excited, in their worship, it didn’t make sense to me. I cannot any longer remember why I ever did believe that Jesus (peace be upon him) was the “son of God” because it is such a foreign and almost laughable (no disrespect meant) concept to me now. All I could think was how much more beautiful the ilahis are that are sung in the dergah, than the hymns sung in this church, how much more sacred our worship seems than the secularizing of programming within the church. And I made it home just as the Maghrib adhan was going off and felt so much more where I belonged, so much more appreciative of hearing the adhan and its call to pure worship.