Through Time
Qabil and Habil
Jihad al-Nafs
Prophethood
Capturing Beauty
Insha’Allah
It’s Monday Tomorrow
Yunus Found in Darkness
From So Far Away
Sajjadah in My Quietest Place
Glossary of Arabic Words and Phrases
From the very day on which I excitedly spoke my testimony of faith (shahadah) in a Peterborough mosque in parrot-fashioned Arabic – interestingly, as the only Caucasian amongst hundreds of happy and congratulatory Asians – I have been recording my spiritual journey not only in various articles for magazines and newspapers, but also in poems that I use, most days, as my primary means of examining, making sense of and expressing my thoughts, feelings and experiences.
My own voyage into Islam commenced on that worst of days: 11th September 2001. I was already a well-established defence scholar when 9/11 occurred and I could immediately see through the mistaken claim by several governments and the media that the world had changed because of a dangerous new phenomenon which was supposedly widespread within Islam: militant radicalisation. Unlike many people who seemed unable to find alternative explanations, I knew from my own extensive travels in Islamic lands and from research and reading that the great faith of Islam was no more violent than the faith I had practised for decades: Christianity. Indeed, I knew then Osama bin Laden was no more representative of Islam than Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was of Christianity.
The events of 9/11 nonetheless had a profound impact on me. I felt increasingly troubled by a growing public misperception that, while not all Muslims were terrorists, all terrorists were Muslims. Some of my own friends and family members, and even my students, talked negatively about Islam and seemed certain that the terrorists’ motivations must have originated from within the Qur’an.
Up until 9/11 the Qur’an had meant little to me. In our garage while growing up we had a tatty set of old green books, the 51-volume set of Harvard Classics, which supposedly contained humankind’s most important works of literature and philosophy. The books had belonged to my grandad but faded and grew grubby in our spiderweb-filled garage. I was (and am) a veracious reader and occasionally I would dust off one of those volumes and read it. In a volume titled Sacred Writings, I read as a ten-year-old boy a strange set of words that I didn’t understand: “Mohammedan: Chapters from the Koran”. I glanced through this fascinating material, which reminded me of The Thousand and One Nights, which I’d recently enjoyed, but for no real reason I chose instead to take Homer’s The Odyssey inside from the garage to read in bed. That epic poem filled me with love for the ancient world and eventually led me to learn Greek and undertake undergraduate and honours degrees in Classical Studies. I have often wondered how my life might have been different if, as a boy, I had devoured the Qur’an instead of Homer’s masterpiece. But, as I have since learned, Allah knows best.
I never actually got around to reading the Qur’an before 9/11. I studied the Bible intensely (even learning Hebrew to read it in its original tongue) and I read it many times as I tried to make sense of both Judaism (the religion of some of my mum’s forebears) and Christianity, which I embraced as a young man. Yet the Qur’an remained a mystery until 2001.
Concerned by the events of 9/11, I decided to study the Qur’an in search of anything that might have inspired such wanton violence against innocent people. I started at the beginning and read slowly and carefully through to the end, all the while making notes on verses that might support the violent and aggressive philosophy and actions of the 9/11 terrorists. I found some verses that dealt with armed combat within wars of justice, but none that would support indiscriminate or disproportionate violence during those wars, and none that would support any violence outside of formal warfare.
What I did find in the Qur’an shocked me to my core. Within the Qur’an I found the same prophets as those revealed within the Bible I had enthusiastically studied. I found Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and other biblical prophets. More importantly, in the Qur’an I also found my own favourite: Jesus the son of Mary. As a Christian I had always revered Jesus, but I had never known that the Qur’an spoke of Jesus in precisely the same way that I had come to see him: as a wonderful, righteous messenger who brought glad tidings and warnings to the children of Israel.
That does not mean that I had ever found the religion of Christianity entirely fulfilling. From the moment when I first felt the call of God as a young man I had always believed that God was truly the master of the universe and the creator of everything within it. He was Sovereign, All-powerful and All-knowing. I accepted that fully and willingly. Yet I had a problem. The Christian teaching of the Trinity – the Church’s insistence that the one God was actually three in one, and that Jesus was himself God and one third of the so-called Godhead – sat uncomfortably with both my intellect and my heart. I could not rationally see logic in it and I could not embrace it emotionally. Initially I wanted to believe what the Church taught. Surely two billion Christians could not be wrong about something so important. This issue mattered to me. It bothered me. After all, the Book of Deuteronomy (6:4) had proclaimed: “Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is One.” This revelation to Moses sits so centrally within both Judaism and Christianity that I found its power inescapable. I also knew that Jesus felt likewise about that specific revelation. When asked by a scribe what he considered the most important of God’s commandments, the Book of Mark (12:29) quotes Jesus as replying: “The first of all the Commandments is, Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is One.”
When I first read the Qur’an systematically after 9/11 I was amazed by the compatibility between the Qur’anic revelation and my beliefs as a non-Trinitarian monotheist. I was especially impressed by the Qur’anic emphasis on the messages revealed through Abraham, Moses and Jesus; messages I had believed for decades. On the other hand, I knew nothing about the Prophet Muhammad and the message that he seemed to bring to the Arabs. I began to read and study with the aim of learning whether Muhammad revealed anything new, whether the emphasis of this revelation was consistent with or different to those of previous prophets, and whether Muhammad himself lived a life, as Jesus had, worthy of emulation.
The eventual conclusion I reached after years of intellectual enquiry through in-depth study was life-changing. After methodically reading the Qur’an twenty times in seven years I accepted that God’s revelation through Muhammad was identical in every way to that revealed through former prophets. God is one! His oneness cannot be divided! He is worthy of all praise and He asks us to enjoy lives of willing submission. Moreover, unlike previous prophets, Muhammad – absolutely worthy of emulation – revealed a calling not just to the children of Israel, and not just to the Arabs (as I had initially thought), but to all of humanity.
What was I to make of my inescapable intellectual conclusion that the Qur’anic revelation was logical, coherent, consistent and persuasive, especially as I then had no emotional desire to embrace a “different” religion? The answer is easy for me to give. I submitted. On the basis of my rational investigation, I decided to take a step of faith knowing that my heart would probably quickly catch up with my head. I chose to become a Muslim. My heart has since caught up and now both mind and heart are in unison.
Throughout my years of spiritual exploration I continued to write poetry, much of it dealing with these very issues, but also, of course, with everything else I experienced or observed. Throughout creatively fertile periods I wrote one or two poems every day, while during barren phases I wrote far fewer, sometimes only one per week. My eventual conversion – which occurred after I saw four or five hundred Indonesian shoppers praying their Zuhr prayer together in a Jakarta convention centre and I knew I ought to be kneeling with them – ushered in a fertile period