ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Converts To Islam Dr. Kari Ann Owen, Ph.d. / Sister Penomee A salaam aleikum, beloved family. There is no god but Allah, and Muhammed is his messenger. These are the words of the Shahadah oath, I believe. The Creator is known by many names. His wisdom is always recognizable, and his presence made manifest in the love, tolerance and compassion present in our community.

His profound ability to guide us from a war-like individualism so rampant in American society to a belief in the glory and dignity of the Creators human family, and our obligations to and membership within that family. This describes the maturation of a spiritual personality, and perhaps the most desirable maturation of the psychological self, also. My road to Shahadah began when an admired director, Tony Richardson, died of AIDS. Mr.

Richardson director was already a brilliant and internationally recognized professional when I almost met him backstage at the play Luther at age 14. Play writing for me has always been a way of finding degrees of spiritual and emotional reconciliation both within myself and between myself and a world I found rather brutal due to childhood circumstances. Instead of fighting with the world, I let my conflicts fight it out in my plays. Amazingly, some of us have even grown up together!

So as I began accumulating stage credits (productions and staged readings), beginning at age 17, I always retained the hope that I would someday fulfil my childhood dream of studying and working with Mr. Richardson. When he followed his homosexuality to America (from England) and a promiscuous community, AIDS killed him, and with him went another portion of my sense of belonging to and within American society. American and Western society to Islamic culture for moral guidance.

Why Islam and not somewhere else? My birthmothers ancestors were Spanish Jews who lived among Muslims until the Inquisition expelled the Jewish community in 1492. In my historical memory, which I feel at a deep level, the call of the muezzin is as deep as the lull of the ocean and the swaying of ships, the pounding of horses hooves across the desert, the assertion of love in the face of oppression.

I felt the birth of a story within me, and the drama took form as I began to learn of an Ottoman caliphs humanity toward Jewish refugees at the time of my ancestors expulsions.