My Journey to Islam

My abandonment of Roman Catholicism was spawned by a premature death, my mother's at age 49, on the day before my 22nd birthday. I prayed like crazy for God to spare her, and when He did not, I established a new line of communication. I called God Allah and prayed with my palms cupped (to catch blessings) and my eyes wide open (to keep Allah's creation in sight).

Given the irony and absurdity of events in racially torn Boston, where I lived, Islam was a godsend. A few months after my mother's death, whites assaulted a black man in front of Boston City Hall, using as one weapon a flagpole with an American flag attached. With that attack and my mother's death, a lifetime of frustrations reached the breaking point.

My odyssey 26 years ago was not unlike that of hundreds of thousands of blacks in the United States. The journey became my jihad--literally "struggle"--waged not for political power or economic enfranchisement but for control over my own soul.

Christianity did not offer a complete way of life the way Islam did. Attending mass once a week and calling it religion failed to satisfy my spiritual needs. Islam offered a code of conduct on how to run my daily life and how to communicate with God. Prostrating in prayer five times a day as a Muslim offered me more solace than I had ever found kneeling before a crucifix.

In 1974, as now, in the Roxburys and Harlems across America, only liquor stores outnumbered churches in vying for blacks' attention, and in my opinion, both stupefied millions of black Americans.

Islam, as I was familiar with it, seemed the perfect way to fight back. As a religion, it offered clear-cut guidelines for living; as a social movement, it stood for a pride born of culture and discipline.

Before my mom died, I had dipped into Malcolm X's autobiography. After she passed, I plunged into it. Malcolm had undergone a metamorphosis: from hoodlum to cleaned-up spokesman for the Nation of Islam and finally a convert to orthodox Islam, and through his own transformation he had shown that change, even from the most miserable beginnings, was possible.

Of course, Malcolm's life and mine were very different. He had discovered Islam in prison. I discovered it in college. He was the spokesman for a black theocratic visionary. I held down a mid-level white-collar job in a Fortune 500 company. Still, I felt a kinship with Malcolm and the Black Muslims. The color of our skin made us all cargo in a sinking ship, and Islam beckoned like a life preserver.

Two and a half decades ago in Boston and New York, however, there were few orthodox mosques. In black neighborhoods, one institution, the Nation of Islam, dominated in the teaching of Islam, or, rather, a homegrown version of it. Many blacks who converted took to the Nation's teachings--its admonitions to self-love and racial solidarity, its belief in productivity and entrepreneurship. And with equal ardor, they also took to the Nation's other teachings--its racial chauvinism and belief that white people were genetically inferior, intrinsically evil "blue-eyed devils" who had been created to practice "tricknology" against blacks.

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