Although I did not realize it at the time...

Although I did not realize it at the time, my experience in Islam was beginning that morning at my first silat class in New York City back on February 28th, 1998. There I met my teacher, Cikgu (which means teacher in Malay) Sulaiman, the man who would first orient me to the religion of Islam. Although I thought I was beginning a career as a martial artist, that day back in 1998 actually represented my first step toward becoming Muslim.

From the very beginning I was intrigued by silat and Islam and began spending as much time as possible with my teacher. As my roommate and I were equally passionate about silat, we would go to my teachers house and soak up as much knowledge as we could from him. In fact, upon our completing graduate school in the spring of 1998, upon his invitation, we spent the entire summer living with him and his wife.

As my learning in silat increased, so did my learning about Islam, a religion that I had hardly any knowledge of prior to my experience in silat. What made my orientation to Islam so powerful was that as I was learning about it, I was also living it. Because I studied at the home of my teacher, being in the presence of devout Muslims allowed me to be constantly surrounded by the sounds, sights and practices of Islam.

For as Islam is an entire lifestyle, when you are in an Islamic environment, you cannot separate it out from everyday life. Unlike Christianity, which lends toward a separation between daily life and religion, Islam requires its followers to integrate worship of Allah into everything we do. Thus, in living with my teacher, I was immersed in the Islamic deen (lifestyle) and experiencing first-hand how it can shape ones entire way of life.

In the beginning Islam was very different and powerful to me. It was also very foreign in many ways and the amount of discipline it requires was difficult to understand. At the time I was liberal in many ways, and was used to shunning anything dogmatic or imposed, regardless of where it came from! As time went on, however, and my understanding of Islam grew, I began to slowly see that what seemed to be religious dogma was really a lifestyle put forth to us by our Creator.

This lifestyle, I would later learn, is the straight path to true contentment, not just the sensual and superficial way of life that my society and culture promote. I realized that the question is quite simple actually.