🌿 From Shadows to Light: My Journey Home to Islam

🕯️ When the World Tilted

September 11, 2001. I was fifteen.

Outside our Dutch farmhouse, the sky was indifferent—an ordinary morning. The scent of damp earth and the low hum of cattle should’ve grounded me in routine. But by the time I reached the living room, the world had already begun to crumble.

The television glowed with endless loops of falling towers, bodies suspended in mid-air before gravity claimed them. My mother sat stone-still, her face pale, absorbing the images not as news but as something ancient. “They warned them,” she murmured. “Israel told the West this would happen.”

Her voice held no triumph—only grief wrapped in prophecy. I didn’t know what she meant then, not fully. But something in me shattered. It wasn’t just the world changing—it was the beginning of my own unraveling.

🕳 Wandering in a Hall of Mirrors

I didn’t set out to find faith. I set out to find myself. And for years, I got lost in the attempt.

Dropout. Student. Caregiver. Whore. Advocate. Rebel. Lover. Each role offered a different mask, but none felt like home. Each new chapter promised freedom, only to hand me a mirror that showed a stranger—someone surviving, adapting, performing—but rarely being.

Amsterdam became my labyrinth. I moved through its streets with fire in my chest and questions I couldn’t answer. Under neon lights, I danced and disappeared. In university halls, I debated justice by day and dissolved into grief by night. The still canals reflected none of the chaos underneath. I was always in motion, but nowhere near stillness.

And then, there was Samir.

Samir was unlike anyone I had met—both a paradox and a mirror. A man marked by trauma, faith, and fire. An addict, struggling with his mental health, with a seeker, a fighter. He carried tenderness beneath his shadows. It was with him that I first encountered Islam not as stereotype or abstraction—but as something lived.

It wasn’t da’wah. It was presence. He never pushed. But one day, as we sat in the half-light of a borrowed room, he handed me a book—worn, underlined, with the scent of coffee and history pressed into its pages.

“Start with this,” he said. “It might not answer everything. But it will open something.”

It wasn’t just a book. It was a beginning.

More followed—books on the Prophet’s life, on the meaning of tawbah, on the echoes of justice in the Qur’an. I didn’t read them like a student. I read them like someone trying to remember something I had once known.

Through Samir, I glimpsed the contradictions of faith: how someone so broken could carry such softness. How prayer could coexist with addiction. How surrender didn’t always come with certainty, but with the courage to keep trying.

He wasn’t perfect. Neither was I. But something had been set in motion.

A door I didn’t yet understand had quietly begun to open.

🌌 A Whisper Beneath the Noise

It didn’t begin with a call to prayer from a distant land. It began with silence.

The kind of silence that wraps itself around your ribs after heartbreak. The silence of an empty kitchen late at night. The silence after your body has given all it can to survive another day in a world that barely sees you. It began there—in the wilderness of my own disillusionment.

I didn’t reach for the Qur’an because I was seeking structure. I was seeking meaning—something that could hold my grief without collapsing under it.

What I found wasn’t dogma. It was breath.

It was in the stillness between verses, the weight of Divine names, the resonance of surrender. Words like Tawakkul—trust—and Rahma—mercy—didn’t instruct me. They embraced me.

The stories of the Prophets weren’t myths. They were maps. Their griefs mirrored mine. Their doubts felt like kinship. Their eventual surrender wasn’t weakness. It was the turning point. It was what I had resisted most: letting go of the illusion of control.

Faith didn’t come in a blaze. It arrived slowly—through whispered prayers I hadn’t learned yet, through the way my breath softened when I stopped running. It came in acts of kindness from unexpected places, in a growing knowing that I was not alone, even when everything felt like abandonment.

I was not being erased. I was being rewritten.

🌙 The Hunger That Led Me Home

It was with Samir that I first tasted the hunger of Ramadan.

By then, our lives had already begun to entangle—two seekers walking through fire, each carrying wounds that rarely showed. He had lived through addiction, violence, and the weight of a thousand battles. But when Ramadan came, he fasted.

Not out of habit, but out of hope.

I was curious. Not for religion, but for the discipline, the stillness, the surrender that shimmered around him during those sacred days. He didn’t ask me to join. He never had to.

I began fasting—not because I knew how, but because something in me craved what I saw in him. That quiet kind of strength. That dignity. That tenderness that appeared each night as the sun fell and we broke fast together with dates, tea, and silence.

There were no lectures. Just the shared sacredness of presence.

The hunger was not unbearable. What was unbearable was the clarity it brought. By the second week, I began to feel not just lighter—but stripped bare. Fasting didn’t deplete me. It revealed me.

My thoughts sharpened. My heart softened. And then one night, alone and unable to sleep, I picked up the Qur’an and began reading Surah al-Baqarah. I had heard it was long, but I wasn’t prepared for its pull.

It didn’t read like a book. It read like a mirror.

Verses leapt off the page, confronting and comforting me at once. “This is the Book in which there is no doubt, a guidance for those who are mindful of God.” (2:2) I didn’t just read it—I recognized it. As if something dormant inside me had been named.

Somewhere between the words on justice and mercy, between the rhythms of remembrance and return, the decision crystallized. There was no flash of light. No dramatic sign. Just a knowing.

I wanted to say the Shahada.

Not later. Not after learning more. Now.

That very night, I whispered it aloud—my voice breaking mid-sentence, my body trembling, but my heart still.

Ashhadu an lā ilāha illa Allāh, wa ashhadu anna Muḥammadan rasūl Allāh.

I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His Messenger.

And just like that, what had felt like longing for years suddenly felt like returning.

🧕🏻 Faith as a Bridge, Not a Fortress

I didn’t abandon who I was when I became Muslim—I expanded.

My Jewish roots, my Dutch defiance, my hunger for justice, and the wounds I carried from a fractured world—they didn’t dissolve in faith. They found rhythm. They found a place in my salah, in the whispered dhikr, in the sacred tension between tradition and transformation.

Some days, I felt too Western for the Muslim community—too questioning, too visible, too defiant of silence. Other days, I was too Muslim for the world I came from—too veiled, too reverent, too unwilling to pretend faith was passé.

But Islam taught me that belonging is not the same as conformity.

Faith did not erase the mosaic of who I was—it illumined it.

I learned that the Five Pillars of Islam were not foreign structures. They were a continuation of something ancient. Something I had always known but never named. A rhythm that hummed beneath my skin long before I spoke the Shahada.

The Shahada—the testimony of faith—was not a betrayal of my past. It was a fulfillment. Declaring “La ilaha illa Allah” didn’t cancel the God of Abraham—it clarified my connection to Him. It was as if the lineage of prophets whispered in unison, and I was finally learning to respond. It wasn’t about changing allegiance. It was about deepening it.

“I bear witness.” Not just with words—but with my life.

Salat, the prayer, became my anchor. What struck me most was not the form—it was the direction. In Amsterdam, when I turned toward Mecca to pray, I realized with awe that I was also still facing Jerusalem. The direction hadn’t shifted—it had expanded. Mecca and Al-Quds aligned in my body the way they always had in my heart.

Where once I had felt torn between two spiritual homes, I realized they had never been at war. They were aligned—literally, spiritually, cosmically. My sajdah did not deny the teachings of Moses. It honored them. My Allahu Akbar did not cancel out my Shema Yisrael—it cradled it.

Zakat—charity—was already part of my DNA. In Judaism, tzedakah is justice through giving. In Islam, zakat is purification through generosity. Both traditions insist that faith without compassion is hollow. Giving wasn’t new—it was reawakened. Islam just asked me to give not only from my wealth but from my heart.

Then came Sawm, the fast. Not a denial of the body, but a reclamation of the soul. I had fasted before in protest, in grief, even in pain. But Ramadan taught me to fast in gratitude. To let hunger refine me, not define me. In Judaism, the Day of Atonement asks us to fast as an act of return. In Islam, we return every year—every day of Ramadan—to the clarity of our dependence on God.

Hajj—the pilgrimage—is still a longing in my chest. But even before setting foot in Mecca, I understood its essence. To leave behind the distractions. To walk with nothing but your body and your soul toward the center of sacredness. Judaism teaches aliyah, the spiritual ascent toward Jerusalem. Islam invites the same—but further east. The destination shifts, but the yearning remains: to meet God in the desert of your own illusions.

And finally, Salat, again. The daily ritual that carried me home each day. I learned to meet the day not with dread, but with takbir. I bowed not in shame, but in remembrance. In those moments—before sunrise, in the hush of night—I found a peace that transcended culture, language, even time.

I was never meant to choose one lineage over another. I was meant to walk their intersection.

Islam didn’t ask me to erase my past. It invited me to reweave it.

My prayer rug became a tapestry—woven with the threads of ancient prayers, Amsterdam canals, desert prophets, and rebellious tenderness. Every sajdah stitched me back together. Every fast softened my fire. Every verse became a doorway.

I no longer searched for belonging. I realized I was the bridge.

Between East and West. Between Mecca and Jerusalem. Between law and love. Between revelation and return.

I didn’t leave anything behind. I just came home to something wider.

And in that space—between traditions, between tongues, between worlds—I finally heard the Divine, not as a contradiction, but as a continuum.

🌸 Mercy in the Cracks

For most of my life, I saw my fractures as evidence of failure—signs that I was unworthy, unfixable, too broken to begin again.

But Islam introduced me to Al-Fattāḥ, the Opener of Doors—and everything changed.

The cracks didn’t disappear. They became sacred pathways. They were how the light got in—and how grace got out.

Tawbah wasn’t about guilt—it was a return to origin, a return to the One who knew every shadow I carried and still called me Beloved. Every mistake became a map. Every sorrow, a sacred detour. Every breakdown, a doorway to mercy.

Faith didn’t perfect me. It softened me. And in that softening, I found a quiet, defiant strength.

💌 Your Invitation

To the one reading this who stands on the threshold—between belief and doubt, between the person you were and the one you're becoming—I see you.

You don’t need perfect answers to begin. You don’t need to silence your fears. You don’t even need to feel ready.

You just need one whispered yes.

Faith is not the absence of struggle. It is the presence of God in the very heart of it. It is the reminder that nothing real is ever lost. That the Divine can meet you not in spite of your cracks, but through them.

If my journey has taught me anything, it’s this:

You are not too late. You are not too far gone. You are not broken. You are being opened.

And the cracks you carry? They are not your weakness. They are where the light is waiting to enter.