Welcome to Islam, - * From Yamilia to Hajar

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Hajar is the new name of Yamilia. She is a twenty-eight. A student of social studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia, she started studying Islam before two years to find out the truth which she had missed in the material life of the States. Yamilia got convinced and embraced Islam and changed her name to Hajar )The name of Abraham’s wife, mother of Ishmael(. She likes this name because it is the name of the mother of Ishmael )greatest grandfather of Muhammad, sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam(.
Hajar said that for many years she was thinking of the universe, existence, life and death. The research in these matters made her suffer a lot as she could not find convincing answers. The American materialistic culture could not solve these basic issues. She used to hear about Islam, but her view of it was distorted because she heard that Islam discriminates women and that it is a religion of atrocity and force. She knew nothing else about Islam till then. Hajar tells her story:
“I started to study Islam and soon discovered its purity and defiance of the materialistic power. I carried on more studies and my studies were very hard in the beginning, as there are not enough honest books on Islam yet in the English language. I loved Islam, as it is a religion of equity, justice, individual freedom and so on. Islam gives the individual freedom and a role of life as Well as responsibility for his actions. I started to understand more and more about Islam and as a result embraced Islam.”
HAJAR PROPAGATES ISLAM:
When she embraced Islam, she felt her religious responsibility toward Allaah and Islam. She started to call people to the truth she reached. She felt a strong desire to show the Americans the results of her research because they lacked the true knowledge about Islam due to distortions of Islam in the West intentionally done by its enemies and malicious orientalists.
Hajar responded to Islam and she was changed wholly from a careless American young lady into a responsible, modest one whose behavior and life is controlled by some Divine doctrines. She said:“ My noble aim is to fight in the cause of Islam against capitalism, tyranny and vices which reign the world now. Islam is the only solution for all these sufferings as well as starvation, war etc.”
She was asked why Islam is the only solution and she said:“ Islam is the only true religion that offers solutions, systems and principles for the social, political and economic problems of the world. Islam is a way of life that suits the dichotomous nature of man, the soul and body alike, as it is Allaah’s Message demonstrated by the Messenger,sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam, who lived it, practiced it and died just as anybody would die.”She added:“I found in Islam a solution for the philosophical issues which gave me really a hard time of research and reading.”She spoke truthfully and expressively as one would feel. She pronounced some Arabic expressions. She explained that Islam is not merely worship, but it is a coherent system of walks of life. Jihad for equity, justice and fairness is the most important feature of Islam and the most needed one at this time.
Hajar adopted Islamic Hijab since her conversion and her life style was adapted to the doctrines of Islam. She started to perform the obligatory prayers timely. She learnt some of the Quran by heart for prayers. She said that she liked problems for the sake of her religion. Many Muslims were tortured, but they never yielded. This is why she was prepared to tolerate the difficulties of reversion to Islam. She said she would care for nothing but Islam.
She believes that Palestine is a Muslim and Arab land which should legally be given to the Palestinians. She sometimes speaks on this issue to assert the Islamic claim on Palestine.
It is really strange to see such an American lady defending Muslim rights and propagating Islam in the States.
Muslims everywhere, especially the Arabs, should learn from Hajar a lot and assert their rights because it was they who kept the light on for the West and humanity. Hence they need not feel desperate as regards the Arab and Islamic land of Palestine, encroached upon by the Jews and their allies.

- PUBLISHERNajimudeeN M

Welcome to Islam, - * From a bathing suit to hijaab

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Somayyah was educated in a convent and as a teenager worked as a model and in cocktail lounges. Growing up in Ireland and Britain, she tried drugs and liquor and supported alcoholic and sometimes abusive parents.
Years later the 25-year old Irish woman moved to the Gulf Arab Emirate of Dubai where, through books loaned by friends, she learned about Islam.
“I would go to the beach in my bathing suit and listen to music on my walkman,” she said.
“One day I was going to the beach in a taxi driven by a Pakistani who had Quran on the radio. I got there and put one foot on the ground to get out.
“Then I looked at the taxi driver and said: ‘No, take me back home.’ I couldn’t go to the beach and take my clothes off.”
Now Somayyah, a school teacher who adopted the name of Islam’s first female martyr, will not leave her flat without covering herself from head to toe in Hijaab. Since she reverted her family has refused to see her.
In interviews, some said they reverted because they were disillusioned by changes in their own religious traditions.
Others said they were influenced by husbands or relatives or that they liked the sense of community.
“I had seen so many changes in the church that unsettled me,” said Kathy Grigg, an American in her mid-thirties whose family supported her reversion to Islam.
“Latin was dropped from the mass, women were not only no longer required to cover their heads in church but were permitted to wear pantsuits. Abstinence from eating meat on Fridays was dropped.”
“There was no more reverence. But to me, seeing a Muslim pray, to bow down on the ground…”
Dr. Bilal Philips, 49, a Canadian who had worked for the Saudi air force religious affairs department in Riyadh and who was well-known as a TV religious presenter, said he belonged to the communist movement in Canada and the United States.
“I became fed up. Basically I was searching for something meaningful,” he said of his reversion 24 years ago.
Some US military personnel were exposed to Islam when they served in the Gulf war.
Philips manned an Islamic information center in a tent at an air force base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. In the six months after the Gulf war 3,000 Westerners reverts at the center, 98 percent of them women, or US servicemen he said.
They gave up alcohol but wearing Muslim attire and praying five times a day clashed with military duties.
“You got out of uniform as quickly as you could and put Hijaab back on,” said one revert, Asma Markusson, a former US army reservist who grew up in Illinois wanting to be a nun.
As for prayers “I had to catch my prayers when I could.”
An organization called Muslim members of the military has now been set up in Washington to tackle such issues as prayer timings and wearing the Hijaab.
Markusson said that when she arrived in Saudi Arabia in 1990 she had “strange ideas” about Muslims.
“There was this chop-chop business,” she said, referring to amputations as Islamic punishment for crimes.
“And then what about all this harem stuff?” She now lives in Bahrain, one of two wives of a Saudi man.
Markusson gave up figure skating after she reverted. Others stopped wearing cosmetics and bathing suits.
Jumana Sharpe, British woman who is the second wife of a UAE national, lost her business.
“Putting on Hijaab has been difficult for me. I had my own beauty salon and it did cause a stir with my mostly Western clients,” she said.
Westerners who reverted say the hardest part is not the change in lifestyle but alienation from family and friends or discrimination when they return home wearing hijaab.
Some women say they have had objects thrown at them. Jan Lifke said her passport was held at a US airport because officials couldn’t believe she was an American!!
“My mother told me I was going to hell when I told her I reverted,” Markusson said.

- PUBLISHERNajimudeeN M