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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Converts To Islam Abdul-lateef Abdullah (steven Krauss) My journey to Islam - How Malay martial arts led a theologically dissatisfied American Protestant to Islam. My experience in Islam began as a graduate student in New York City in 1998. Up to that point in my life, for 25 years, I had been a Protestant Christian, but had not been practicing my religion for quite some time.

I was more interested in spirituality and looking for anything that didnt have to do with organized religion. To me, Christianity was out of touch and not relevant to the times. It was hard for me to find anything in it that I could apply to my everyday life. This disillusion with Christianity led me to shun everything that claimed to be organized religion, due to my assumption that they were all pretty much the same, or at least in terms of their lack of relevance and usefulness.

Much of my frustration with Christianity stemmed from its lack of knowledge and guidance around the nature of God, and the individuals relationship to Him. To me, the Christian philosophy depends on this rather bizarre intermediary relationship that we are supposed to have with Jesus, who on one hand was a man, but was also divine.

For me, this difficult and very vague relationship with our Creator left me searching for something that could provide me with a better understanding of God, and our relationship to Him. Why couldnt I just pray directly to God? Why did I have to begin and end every prayer with in the name of Jesus Christ? How can an eternal, omnipotent Creator and Sustainer also take the form of a man? Why would He need to? These were just a few of the questions that I could not resolve and come to terms with.

Thus, I was hungry for a more straightforward and lucid approach to religion that could provide my life with true guidance, not just dogma that was void of knowledge based in reason. While in graduate school I had a Jewish roommate who was a student of the martial arts. While I was living with him he was studying an art called silat, a traditional Malaysian martial art that is based on the teachings of Islam.

When my roommate would come home from his silat classes he would tell me all about the uniqueness of silat and its rich spiritual dimension. As I was quite interested in learning martial arts at the time, I was intrigued by what I had heard, and decided to accompany my roommate to class one Saturday morning.