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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Seeking the Straight Path: Reflections of a New Muslim How Could Everyone I Have Ever Known Be Wrong? As a child growing up in America, my education about Islam was very poor. There were one or two times when Islam was presented briefly in a history book at school.

What I remember from those readings is that Muslims had a god called Allah and a warlike prophet named Muhammad and that they prayed and dressed strangely and, finally, that Islam was an Arab religion. I guess that the rest of my education about Islam came from the media. Islam was exotic, backward and evil. Muslims were uneducated, led by tyrant rulers, and were cruel. Some of them thought it were good to blow up babies on airplanes and to beat women and treat them like property.

I did not understand that there was any relationship between Islam and Christianity or Judaism. As far as I knew, Christianity and Judaism were the only two religions that dealt with the One God, the God of Moses and Abraham (as). Islam was bunched with all the other religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. There was not much out there to make me want to learn about Islam.

I was sure that Christianity held the Truth, and had no inclination to look at other religions, especially not one that was so obviously evil. In those days, I could actually believe that an entire nation of people was evil at heart, and that we (meaning the West, or America) were surely the good guys. After all, how could everyone I had ever known be wrong? An obvious question, then, is what made me finally look at Islam.

In order to answer that fairly, it is necessary to first briefly explain my religious life prior to that point. Mostly everyone I knew believed in God and that Jesus (as) had died for our sins. Often, it didn’t go much beyond that. People I knew had religious belief and tried to be moral people, but they did not associate with a particular church or do anything outlandishly different in their lives that marked them as religious. Spirituality and religion were not the stuff of conversations.

God was not talked about at home or at school. Religion was a private thing between the individual and God. When I was little I was sent to a few Sunday Schools to gain a basic acquaintance with religion. My parents very rarely went to church but rather dropped my brother and I off at the Sunday School and then picked us up when it was over.