My Journey to Seeking Knowledge - A personal blog
Assalamualaikum Warahmatullah Wabarakatuh.
My Journey starts from before I was Muslim in September 2021. I was an international student at University in America on a basketball scholarship questioning how the people around me viewed God. The University I was at was a Christian University in Arkansas. I had just transferred there that August after 2 years at a previous school in Pennsylvania.
I wasn’t officially a Christian at the time even though I was baptised as a kid, I didn’t practise it apart from celebrating Christmas and Easter with family at home and I read a few stories from the Bible growing up. I went from not going to church or praying at all to having to go to church each week as it was mandatory at my new university. I also willingly went to church on weekends and weekdays with people I had befriended. At this point I was thrown into a very religious environment, trying my best to connect to people and what was going on around me. However I wasn’t fulfilled and lots of questions arose that I was not comfortable sharing with anybody. It wasn’t until I was in a Christian worldview class where my professor said something wrong about Muslims. My professor didn’t mention Muslims a lot in that class but when he did it was incorrect. I knew it was incorrect at the time because in the UK in primary school through to secondary school we did religious education and I lived amongst Muslims in a multi-faith society. As well as that I had befriended Muslims who were nothing like what my teacher was stating. There was one class where the professor said something completely absurd about Muslims and it annoyed me so much. I didn't speak up in class but I really wanted to. Then later on that day I looked up what he was supposedly talking about because I didn’t believe it and didn't understand why he mentioned it. This led me to YouTube. Through the videos I watched surrounding the topic I found that it was a misinterpreted weak hadith.
After that first connection with Islamic videos on YouTube I kept on going. I was watching a lot of Mufti Menk and Dr Zakir Naik to begin with. This is what I would call my first encounter with seeking knowledge. By October 2021, I had downloaded a few Qur’an apps, I was aware of the prayer times in my local area and I had also started learning Surah Al-Fatihah and Surah Al-Ikhlas. I wouldn’t have been able to do that without Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala allowing me to make muslim friends online from different parts of the world from 2020 to 2021. Even though we had originally bonded over anime and gaming, now there was something deeper. They shared lots of informative youtube videos with me and that fueled my love for watching Islamic YouTube videos. At the time I had not taken my shahada and it was an early stage so I didn’t fully understand everything that I was watching, I just knew I was interested. I had this yearning to want to learn more. What initially made me so keen to watch more videos was that there is so much to learn in Islam and that knowledge comes from credible sources, not a preacher just talking about his thoughts, feelings and current political views.
All the way through to December 2021, I had been watching YouTube, TikTok and Instagram content on Islam and my For You Page seemed to think I was Muslim. Additionally I had contacted a close friend of mine who is muslim and some old family friends who had reverted to. I knew that when I went home during the winter break I wanted to take my shahada officially. On Sunday, January 2nd 2022 I took my shahada at my local masjid with just my close friend and the Imam.
Leading up to taking my shahada, I had consumed a lot of Islamic content, I hadn’t spoken to any scholars, teachers or imams, apart from briefly talking to the Imam that I took my shahada with. What this meant was that I didn’t have a structure in a way I would consume knowledge. I was unaware how important that was at the time. After reverting I was jumping around into many different topics way above my level and I was getting random unfiltered Islamic reminders on social media that started stressing me out and causing anxiety. When I look back, the emphasis of studying and understanding tawheed and aqeedah was not so obvious to me. I knew it was something you had to believe in but I didn’t spend as much time learning about that.
Once I had returned to America in January, shortly after becoming Muslim, I was back in an environment where I was not physically around fellow Muslims and I could not go to the masjid in the city. That resulted in me contacting some Muslim groups online. Altho
