Famous Youtuber’s Revert Story to Islam! - “Maybe We Are All God?” @iamLucid
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I had a teacher in middle school, I'll never forget him. To me, like this guy was the smartest guy that I knew. He started asking 12-year-old kids, Prove to me, why is God real? So I realized maybe God is not real. Maybe this is all one big fairy tale lie so that people don't go around doing really bad things. They have to just blindly believe in this blind faith. So I kind of started to reject Islam, not only but all of religion. And I became somewhat agnostic during my young years. I'm thinking in my head, like, "Hey, nothing's wrong. Why am I breathing so hard?" And when I started to kind of gain consciousness, I opened up my eyes slowly and I see my friend doing CPR on me.
And I was in absolute shock, like I nearly almost died right there. And my friend is giving me those, like, chest compressions. First thing that I said after I woke up from that, was "Ashadu an la ilaha illAllah, ashadu anna Muhammadan rasulAllah." "Ashadu an la ilaha illAllah, ashadu anna Muhammadan rasulAllah." Assalam alaykum, Brother Alex also known as Lucid. We are very happy to have you with us. Let's start with who is Alex, and can you tell us briefly about your life? Wa alaykum as-salam. Alex is a 21-year-old YouTuber. I had dreams of making YouTube videos ever since I was a kid and I post videos on all different types of thought-provoking content.
I started making YouTube videos as if it was my full-time job, even though I was making nearly no money on it till eventually, about a year or two after I was able to drop out of college. And now I'm here traveling across the entire world, 16-hour flight to come here and record YouTube videos alhamdulillah. How was your life in regards to faith? What were you believing in? I was at the time a social Muslim. That's the word that I will kind of call it. So following social Islam means that you don't read the actual book, you don't follow the actual prophet, peace be upon him. You just kind of follow what everyone else is doing. You're following the Muslims. You like a backseat Muslim.
And that's what I was for the longest time. I'd fast just because all the friends, family, cousins and everybody around me was fasting and I'd pray just because everyone else is praying near me too. But I never truly knew why I was praying or why I was fasting with the benefits or why God even said it. I would just kind of doing what everybody else did around me. I followed just by watching and not by actually reading, and that was the biggest mistake. I was always raised upon the thing like, if the slipper is upside down, it's pointing up towards God. Astaghfirullah. This is like you're like saying God is only up and God can't see under these slipper.
So like, you're, you're giving extreme limitations to God, purely losing tawheed. You're kind of losing the whole essence of God by saying that He could only see from up to down. So if I go to my basement and close my door, then God can't see me commit sin. So all of these logical flaws were kind of imposed upon me and many Muslims actually around the world. And that's what kind of makes us a social Muslim. What events brought you to a point of leaving Islam? I was sent to a Islamic school to teach me how to pray and how to read and write Arabic. And I kind of like rejected like a lot of it during that time.
They, kind of really forced Islam down your throat type of school, and was really, really strict. I would cry every single morning going to the school like my first day of preschool to probably the very last day. I would walk in. I'd be hugging my mom's leg, to like not let me leave because I did not want to be away from her and into the school because it was very, very strict and stern. So by age four and five and six, I kind of realized, like, I didn't want to be a part of something that was so scary and that was so strict.
I kind of started to deviate away from that and what really kind of turned the tides and made me somewhat of an agnostic atheist for a little while was that I had a teacher in middle school, I'll never forget him, and he kind of explained to a classroom full of Muslims and Christians saying that God is not real. There's no empirical proof that you can prove God to me. So I don't want to believe in God. And he started asking 12-year-old kids, "Prove to me, why is God real?" All of us, obviously being not educated enough on the topic, now I could, but back then I had no idea. So like, to me, like this guy was the smartest guy that I knew. So I realized maybe God is not real.
Maybe this is all one big fairy tale lie so that people don't go around doing really bad things. They have to just blindly believe in this blind faith. And for me, to kind of see that as well, in my first year of like high school, I realized that maybe all of this, like, religion stuff is just some sort of like manmade thing to kind of control us, to make sure that we don't go and do bad stuff. And it's not the true word of our actual creator. If we really came from apes and it's being taught to us in school and school is never wrong, it's always right.
If five plus five is always ten, then we have to also accept that, yeah, maybe we were once apes and we just kind of transitioned into human beings and that's why we're here with no purpose, no guide and no creator. So I kind of started to reject Islam, not only but all of religion. And I became somewhat agnostic during my young years. After rejecting religions, did you feel content or you continued questioning? I was doing a little bit of research, independent from Islam, just to see if we actually do have a creator that has fashioned us. The thing that I was living by was that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. That's the first law of thermodynamics, and everyone knows that one.
And actually that's the kind of thinking that made me think maybe we are all God, maybe every human being, every living thing is God, and we're all just exploring God. So that really kind of didn't make some sense to me because if we're all God, then so many questions started to pile up on top of that. Like, where did we truly come from? Are we going to live forever? What if bad things happen? Should I feel the burden of pain if something bad happens to me or somebody else? And also if we're all God, isn't that a limitation to what God is? Because we're obviously not infinite. We have a start. If God has a start, is He truly God? Then what created that thing?
So all these questions were coming at me left and right, and I truly didn't have any true purpose. I didn't know exactly what my actual faith was. I was trying to just figure it out and I would actually cry myself to sleep so many nights. It was a really, really weird and strange time. Like I would look at the most basic things, like a tree, for an example, and it would freak me out knowing like, how- how could this thing be in such perfect order that it came from a little small seed and now it's this extremely heavy and very, very tall, perfectly ordained tree? How can something like this happen?
I would look at myself and my hands and think like, how am I actually alive right now in control of my own thoughts? Where was I before this life and where am I going to be after this life? And those questions like not having a pure belief in it, it really kind of made my whole life very unstable and I never truly knew what was going to happen to me next. I never knew how to deal with any of my real situations. But then when I looked into deeper of the thermodynamics, we have the second law, which states that entropy will continue to increase in energy.
So disorder will continue to increase and what this means, for an example, let's say on the right side of this room in the corner, I place a little space heater and I let it run for like one hour and then turn it back off. The heat is not going to stay exactly in the corner of this room. It'll- it'll influence and balance the entire temperature of this entire room. So that is what entropy is. It's the heat going from the hot to the cold side. And not only is that how it works in this closed space of this room, but that's how it works in the entire universe.
So with that type of thinking, you realize that eventually, in a very long time, the entire universe will have so much entropy, so much disorder that it cannot sustain life, it will be practically dead. And when I really realized that, I realized, okay, there has to be something that is beyond this that is truly ever living. There has to be a hayyul qayyum, right? From that, we can realize that if the universe has an end, if anything has an end, then it has to have a beginning. And if something has a beginning, then it has to have a creator. This is why God is God because God doesn't have a beginning or an end. God created the concept of creation, so we can't even hold him to it.
Diving deeper into that, I realize that God has to, for one, not be bound by time, and space, and matter. He can't be hold down to these principles. He has to be above entropy, so he has to be above disorder where he's not going to eventually get weak the same way that the universe is. He has to be self-sustaining. And that's exactly what Islam teaches. After accepting the existence of God, what made you re-embrace Islam? I eventually stumbled back upon the Qur'an. I, up to this point, never actually read it nearly my whole life until maybe like four-ish years ago. And I finally gave it a read for the first time. I thought it would be some like Shakespearean written book.
Really, really hard to understand, old English, but there's a bunch of new translations that are perfectly written in like, modern time English now. So I finally gave it a read. I let my ego down. I let down all the guards that I had, all the kind of like doubts that I had. And actually every page that I would turn, there'd be more and more miracles. That just shocked me. And I knew that there's no way this book could have been written by a human being, and especially not by an illiterate human being that had no idea how to write such eloquent words.
So as I was going through this book, and I'm seeing more and more of these signs, like for an example, how could someone have known 1400 years ago that the universe is ever expanding? Like that's such a wild, miraculous claim that we just discovered actually about 90 years ago, that the universe is expanding, that we can actually prove 1400 years ago. There has to be some some truth there. All of the miracles in the Qur'an, it's all true. There's not a single one that is flawed. Like for an example, if I gave you 55 statements and I didn't know if any of them were actually true, maybe one might be real. Maybe I can tell you the price of Bitcoin in 45 years is going to be $1 million.
That might be real. And if it's wrong, then you can disprove all of my previous statements. But in the Qur'an, back to back to back, all the statements just kept on proving more truth to me. I was absolutely shocked that this whole time what I had thought I was following was Islam was not Islam in the slightest. It's like me first stumbling upon this religion. Okay, pray five times a day and then fast and just do all these things. It's not that robotic. There are parts in the Qur'an where it teaches you to actually be a good person and to have these interactions with human beings. As I was reading the Qur'an, just a few times, I was so stunned. I took my shahada again, and again, and again.
I just I kept on saying it. And this time I said it, and I really, really believed it. And I truly said it in my heart. For the first time in my life, I felt true order, I felt true guidance. I felt actually happy and relieved. How was your family's reaction after you rediscovered Islam? So they weren't aware of me kind of stepping away from Islam, but now they definitely know that I am- I'm getting a lot closer to it, like I'm leading prayer in my house now and I'm- I'm doing, trying to bring Islam even deeper into my household, too, now.
So I went from being the the opposite side of the whole spectrum to now, like I'm in front of my own, my own father, leading prayer, which I never thought that I'd be doing, alhamdulillah. Did becoming a true Muslim have an effect on your YouTube channel? Yeah, so I was hiding the fact that I was a Muslim from my subscribers since I started my channel actually. I kept it as this underground secret. People in real life told me that I shouldn't do it. Everyone that knew me said, "You know what?
"People don't like Muslims outside." "You know, maybe in this community" "and city, it's fine to be Muslim." "Everywhere else, everyone hates Muslims." So if you come out as Muslim-" people actually warned me that "you're going to lose thousands of subscribers, "you're going to lose your very most loyal supporters," "you're going to be de-platformed" "and not make any more money off of your channel," "you'll have to lose your job." and all these very, very scary things. But the truth is, people were actually asking me, what is your faith? What do you believe in? Which religion do you follow?
And I said, "I'll tell you guys at 10K subscribers." Then I said, "100,000 subscribers." Then I said, "1 million subscribers." Then I realized, "What am I hiding?" I can die tomorrow morning. I'm not saying this so that I can gain some more popularity points for- for people. I'm saying this because this is the true message of God. I want God to be happy with me. So I don't care if I lose 1000, 10,000 or literally 890,000 subscribers, wallah it means nothing to me. If I'm doing it for the sake of God, then if I lose every single subscriber, I'm content with it. What were the harshest and the sweetest things for you after becoming a practicing Muslim?
The harshest and the sweetest thing were actually the very, very same thing. Because when I had to give up on the culture, for an example, of the music or of the, you know, touching girls and shaking hands, and the little cheek kiss kind of thing, when I had to give up on all of these things, you could see it as a limitation to myself, like, why would I let something else in my life limit me and make me have less fun? The truth is, is that when I started to give up these things in my life, I started to make these sacrifices in the name of God, I actually found that I was more free when I was, for example, giving up music, I feel like my thoughts are more clear.
I've been able to think of better video ideas and be on track more in my life. When I'm touching less girls, My- my thoughts are a lot more pure with the girls because I'm keeping my actual distance from them and I have no other ill intention. All these things people can see as a limitation, I saw as actual freedom. Have you experienced an extraordinary event where you felt a special connection with Allah? I was in Hawaii like four or five months ago and I nearly died. So what happened was I went to Hawaii, very spontaneous trip with me and my friend. The very first night I got food poisoning, I started throwing up. I couldn't drink any water and I was extremely and severely dehydrated.
The very, very next day I fainted. I was like talking to my friend and he saw like my eyes roll back and he, like, grabbed me because I was going to fall and hit the floor very hard. This moment was the most impactful moment of my entire life. All I felt was black nothingness. I just felt like I was dreaming actually. I started to feel myself, in the dream, breathing very heavily, like all I felt was me breathing like. And I'm like, I'm thinking in my head like, "Hey, nothing's wrong. Why am I breathing so hard?" And when I started to kind of gain consciousness, I open up my eyes slowly and I see my friend doing CPR on me and I was in absolute shock, like I nearly almost died right there.
First thing that I said after I woke up from that my friend is giving me those like chest compressions, was "Ashadu an la ilaha illAllah ashadu anna Muhammadan rasulAllah." That was the first thing that I said because I thought maybe if I die right now, these have to be my last words. I have to make sure that I'm purely devout in my faith and that I actually fully believe this. So that was the experience that truly brought me like really, really deep towards Islam. Did any of your followers become Muslim after you revealed your faith?
For me becoming Muslim, I feel like I've coincidentally inspired a lot of people on my YouTube channel In my Discord server, there's been many many shahadas of people coming in to the server and just like seeing my experience and talking to a bunch of like brothers and sisters in there as well, trying to find some sort of guidance or kind of take care of any doubts they might have about Islam. There's like an Islam channel. There is always a brother or sister that's on duty in my Discord server that can actually answer those questions for them.
So I feel like there's been many shahadas that I've witnessed myself or that alhamdulillah I've even given to people my- myself from me becoming more of a true Muslim. That's been the most beautiful feeling ever. I- like, one of my friends on Discord that I met years back. He's a very, very close friend of mine. He called me one day. He said, Alex, and I was totally shocked. Actually, he was a devout Christian. He called me. He said, "Alex, I know that Islam is truth. "Let's just do it right now." Like, what should I say?" And I said, okay, just repeat after me "Ashadu an la ilaha illAllah, ashadu anna Muhammadan rasulAllah." And he, when he became Muslim that day, I was- I was stunned.
I was actually, within the same week of the Night of Power, and as I was praying, I was so emotional. I was actually crying because my friend doesn't even know to this day how big of an impact he just made on his life and his- his afterlife. Like he doesn't know that this was the best, the single best decision that he has ever made for his entire existence that he ever will make. Insha'Allah one day he'll be seeing this video, he'll actually find out what a beautiful choice he made. And inshAllah I'll be- I'll see him in heaven, inshAllah, for- for his action and for his shahada. For someone who is curious about our religion, how would you recommend that person to research Islam?
Is it enough to write "What is Islam?" on Google? Yeah. Yeah. So definitely sheikh Google is not going to be the sheikh that you should go to. If you have a local mosque, you should definitely check that out. But most importantly, the only book that we can say for- for certain is the true word of God front to back from cover to cover is the Qur'an. So the best way to look into Islam is to look into Islam from the one true book of God. So to actually read the Qur'an. And then if you have questions, then maybe you can even ask sheikh Google, you might get a thousand different varying answers and start spinning your head.
So I'd find a local sheikh at your local mosque and try to just go to one person that you know is really high in knowledge, like it says in the Qur'an to ask those of knowledge when you have questions, right? If you had the chance to talk to all the non-Muslims in the world, what would you like to say to them if you had just one minute? I would tell all the non-Muslims of the world that you are born Muslim. You are born knowing that there is a higher power.
It's the best feeling in the world when you finally revert to who you were when you, on your first day taking a breath on this Earth, when you were Muslim, it's the best to revert to that kind of mindset because it's who you are naturally. We all know that there is an afterlife. We all know that there is a God, and it's through this the teachings and people in society that we kind of stray away from that. So I want you to see Islam as not some sort of abstract different pushed off-to-the-corner kind of cultural concept, but instead, Islam is a universal message for all of mankind.
To be Islam, you just have to believe that there is one God and Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, is His last and final messenger. That's all you have to believe. What projects are you doing right now? Islamically, I'm working with my local mosque. I'm going to try to help them at least to get their like, their like videography set up so that they can be posting their own YouTube videos, and they can kind of spread their own message. Because at the mosque, especially where I'm from, there's so much knowledge there is so many smart, intellectual Muslims there, there are so many sheikhs that can actually teach and spread the message of Islam.
They just aren't really up-to-date with like the technical parts of it, like recording, a microphone and layering, and sound, and all of the above. So I feel like since I have that skill, I can use it in the name of God and I can help them do it as well. What would you like to say as your final comments? My final comment is that me being Muslim has definitely made me a stronger person. It's made me more of a man. I've been taking steps in directions that I never would have thought I've done in my life. Never in my entire life would I sit on a plane for 16 hours, no matter what it would cost me.
But just knowing that I'm doing this in the name of Allah, I'm traveling across the entire globe in the name of God. If I was doing it for myself, for my own cynical purposes, I would not be able to get so far in life. But knowing that I'm doing it for the Hereafter, and for something that is truly infinite, the deity that has truly created us, I feel like I've become a lot more successful, a lot stronger as a person. I've been challenged harder and I've been able to face those challenges because I've been a stronger Muslim overall. Brother Alex, thank you for this beautiful interview. Hope to meet you in future projects, inshAllah. InshAllah. InshAllah. Salaam alaykum. Nice to meet you.
And I was in absolute shock, like I nearly almost died right there. And my friend is giving me those, like, chest compressions. First thing that I said after I woke up from that, was "Ashadu an la ilaha illAllah, ashadu anna Muhammadan rasulAllah." "Ashadu an la ilaha illAllah, ashadu anna Muhammadan rasulAllah." Assalam alaykum, Brother Alex also known as Lucid. We are very happy to have you with us. Let's start with who is Alex, and can you tell us briefly about your life? Wa alaykum as-salam. Alex is a 21-year-old YouTuber. I had dreams of making YouTube videos ever since I was a kid and I post videos on all different types of thought-provoking content.
I started making YouTube videos as if it was my full-time job, even though I was making nearly no money on it till eventually, about a year or two after I was able to drop out of college. And now I'm here traveling across the entire world, 16-hour flight to come here and record YouTube videos alhamdulillah. How was your life in regards to faith? What were you believing in? I was at the time a social Muslim. That's the word that I will kind of call it. So following social Islam means that you don't read the actual book, you don't follow the actual prophet, peace be upon him. You just kind of follow what everyone else is doing. You're following the Muslims. You like a backseat Muslim.
And that's what I was for the longest time. I'd fast just because all the friends, family, cousins and everybody around me was fasting and I'd pray just because everyone else is praying near me too. But I never truly knew why I was praying or why I was fasting with the benefits or why God even said it. I would just kind of doing what everybody else did around me. I followed just by watching and not by actually reading, and that was the biggest mistake. I was always raised upon the thing like, if the slipper is upside down, it's pointing up towards God. Astaghfirullah. This is like you're like saying God is only up and God can't see under these slipper.
So like, you're, you're giving extreme limitations to God, purely losing tawheed. You're kind of losing the whole essence of God by saying that He could only see from up to down. So if I go to my basement and close my door, then God can't see me commit sin. So all of these logical flaws were kind of imposed upon me and many Muslims actually around the world. And that's what kind of makes us a social Muslim. What events brought you to a point of leaving Islam? I was sent to a Islamic school to teach me how to pray and how to read and write Arabic. And I kind of like rejected like a lot of it during that time.
They, kind of really forced Islam down your throat type of school, and was really, really strict. I would cry every single morning going to the school like my first day of preschool to probably the very last day. I would walk in. I'd be hugging my mom's leg, to like not let me leave because I did not want to be away from her and into the school because it was very, very strict and stern. So by age four and five and six, I kind of realized, like, I didn't want to be a part of something that was so scary and that was so strict.
I kind of started to deviate away from that and what really kind of turned the tides and made me somewhat of an agnostic atheist for a little while was that I had a teacher in middle school, I'll never forget him, and he kind of explained to a classroom full of Muslims and Christians saying that God is not real. There's no empirical proof that you can prove God to me. So I don't want to believe in God. And he started asking 12-year-old kids, "Prove to me, why is God real?" All of us, obviously being not educated enough on the topic, now I could, but back then I had no idea. So like, to me, like this guy was the smartest guy that I knew. So I realized maybe God is not real.
Maybe this is all one big fairy tale lie so that people don't go around doing really bad things. They have to just blindly believe in this blind faith. And for me, to kind of see that as well, in my first year of like high school, I realized that maybe all of this, like, religion stuff is just some sort of like manmade thing to kind of control us, to make sure that we don't go and do bad stuff. And it's not the true word of our actual creator. If we really came from apes and it's being taught to us in school and school is never wrong, it's always right.
If five plus five is always ten, then we have to also accept that, yeah, maybe we were once apes and we just kind of transitioned into human beings and that's why we're here with no purpose, no guide and no creator. So I kind of started to reject Islam, not only but all of religion. And I became somewhat agnostic during my young years. After rejecting religions, did you feel content or you continued questioning? I was doing a little bit of research, independent from Islam, just to see if we actually do have a creator that has fashioned us. The thing that I was living by was that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. That's the first law of thermodynamics, and everyone knows that one.
And actually that's the kind of thinking that made me think maybe we are all God, maybe every human being, every living thing is God, and we're all just exploring God. So that really kind of didn't make some sense to me because if we're all God, then so many questions started to pile up on top of that. Like, where did we truly come from? Are we going to live forever? What if bad things happen? Should I feel the burden of pain if something bad happens to me or somebody else? And also if we're all God, isn't that a limitation to what God is? Because we're obviously not infinite. We have a start. If God has a start, is He truly God? Then what created that thing?
So all these questions were coming at me left and right, and I truly didn't have any true purpose. I didn't know exactly what my actual faith was. I was trying to just figure it out and I would actually cry myself to sleep so many nights. It was a really, really weird and strange time. Like I would look at the most basic things, like a tree, for an example, and it would freak me out knowing like, how- how could this thing be in such perfect order that it came from a little small seed and now it's this extremely heavy and very, very tall, perfectly ordained tree? How can something like this happen?
I would look at myself and my hands and think like, how am I actually alive right now in control of my own thoughts? Where was I before this life and where am I going to be after this life? And those questions like not having a pure belief in it, it really kind of made my whole life very unstable and I never truly knew what was going to happen to me next. I never knew how to deal with any of my real situations. But then when I looked into deeper of the thermodynamics, we have the second law, which states that entropy will continue to increase in energy.
So disorder will continue to increase and what this means, for an example, let's say on the right side of this room in the corner, I place a little space heater and I let it run for like one hour and then turn it back off. The heat is not going to stay exactly in the corner of this room. It'll- it'll influence and balance the entire temperature of this entire room. So that is what entropy is. It's the heat going from the hot to the cold side. And not only is that how it works in this closed space of this room, but that's how it works in the entire universe.
So with that type of thinking, you realize that eventually, in a very long time, the entire universe will have so much entropy, so much disorder that it cannot sustain life, it will be practically dead. And when I really realized that, I realized, okay, there has to be something that is beyond this that is truly ever living. There has to be a hayyul qayyum, right? From that, we can realize that if the universe has an end, if anything has an end, then it has to have a beginning. And if something has a beginning, then it has to have a creator. This is why God is God because God doesn't have a beginning or an end. God created the concept of creation, so we can't even hold him to it.
Diving deeper into that, I realize that God has to, for one, not be bound by time, and space, and matter. He can't be hold down to these principles. He has to be above entropy, so he has to be above disorder where he's not going to eventually get weak the same way that the universe is. He has to be self-sustaining. And that's exactly what Islam teaches. After accepting the existence of God, what made you re-embrace Islam? I eventually stumbled back upon the Qur'an. I, up to this point, never actually read it nearly my whole life until maybe like four-ish years ago. And I finally gave it a read for the first time. I thought it would be some like Shakespearean written book.
Really, really hard to understand, old English, but there's a bunch of new translations that are perfectly written in like, modern time English now. So I finally gave it a read. I let my ego down. I let down all the guards that I had, all the kind of like doubts that I had. And actually every page that I would turn, there'd be more and more miracles. That just shocked me. And I knew that there's no way this book could have been written by a human being, and especially not by an illiterate human being that had no idea how to write such eloquent words.
So as I was going through this book, and I'm seeing more and more of these signs, like for an example, how could someone have known 1400 years ago that the universe is ever expanding? Like that's such a wild, miraculous claim that we just discovered actually about 90 years ago, that the universe is expanding, that we can actually prove 1400 years ago. There has to be some some truth there. All of the miracles in the Qur'an, it's all true. There's not a single one that is flawed. Like for an example, if I gave you 55 statements and I didn't know if any of them were actually true, maybe one might be real. Maybe I can tell you the price of Bitcoin in 45 years is going to be $1 million.
That might be real. And if it's wrong, then you can disprove all of my previous statements. But in the Qur'an, back to back to back, all the statements just kept on proving more truth to me. I was absolutely shocked that this whole time what I had thought I was following was Islam was not Islam in the slightest. It's like me first stumbling upon this religion. Okay, pray five times a day and then fast and just do all these things. It's not that robotic. There are parts in the Qur'an where it teaches you to actually be a good person and to have these interactions with human beings. As I was reading the Qur'an, just a few times, I was so stunned. I took my shahada again, and again, and again.
I just I kept on saying it. And this time I said it, and I really, really believed it. And I truly said it in my heart. For the first time in my life, I felt true order, I felt true guidance. I felt actually happy and relieved. How was your family's reaction after you rediscovered Islam? So they weren't aware of me kind of stepping away from Islam, but now they definitely know that I am- I'm getting a lot closer to it, like I'm leading prayer in my house now and I'm- I'm doing, trying to bring Islam even deeper into my household, too, now.
So I went from being the the opposite side of the whole spectrum to now, like I'm in front of my own, my own father, leading prayer, which I never thought that I'd be doing, alhamdulillah. Did becoming a true Muslim have an effect on your YouTube channel? Yeah, so I was hiding the fact that I was a Muslim from my subscribers since I started my channel actually. I kept it as this underground secret. People in real life told me that I shouldn't do it. Everyone that knew me said, "You know what?
"People don't like Muslims outside." "You know, maybe in this community" "and city, it's fine to be Muslim." "Everywhere else, everyone hates Muslims." So if you come out as Muslim-" people actually warned me that "you're going to lose thousands of subscribers, "you're going to lose your very most loyal supporters," "you're going to be de-platformed" "and not make any more money off of your channel," "you'll have to lose your job." and all these very, very scary things. But the truth is, people were actually asking me, what is your faith? What do you believe in? Which religion do you follow?
And I said, "I'll tell you guys at 10K subscribers." Then I said, "100,000 subscribers." Then I said, "1 million subscribers." Then I realized, "What am I hiding?" I can die tomorrow morning. I'm not saying this so that I can gain some more popularity points for- for people. I'm saying this because this is the true message of God. I want God to be happy with me. So I don't care if I lose 1000, 10,000 or literally 890,000 subscribers, wallah it means nothing to me. If I'm doing it for the sake of God, then if I lose every single subscriber, I'm content with it. What were the harshest and the sweetest things for you after becoming a practicing Muslim?
The harshest and the sweetest thing were actually the very, very same thing. Because when I had to give up on the culture, for an example, of the music or of the, you know, touching girls and shaking hands, and the little cheek kiss kind of thing, when I had to give up on all of these things, you could see it as a limitation to myself, like, why would I let something else in my life limit me and make me have less fun? The truth is, is that when I started to give up these things in my life, I started to make these sacrifices in the name of God, I actually found that I was more free when I was, for example, giving up music, I feel like my thoughts are more clear.
I've been able to think of better video ideas and be on track more in my life. When I'm touching less girls, My- my thoughts are a lot more pure with the girls because I'm keeping my actual distance from them and I have no other ill intention. All these things people can see as a limitation, I saw as actual freedom. Have you experienced an extraordinary event where you felt a special connection with Allah? I was in Hawaii like four or five months ago and I nearly died. So what happened was I went to Hawaii, very spontaneous trip with me and my friend. The very first night I got food poisoning, I started throwing up. I couldn't drink any water and I was extremely and severely dehydrated.
The very, very next day I fainted. I was like talking to my friend and he saw like my eyes roll back and he, like, grabbed me because I was going to fall and hit the floor very hard. This moment was the most impactful moment of my entire life. All I felt was black nothingness. I just felt like I was dreaming actually. I started to feel myself, in the dream, breathing very heavily, like all I felt was me breathing like. And I'm like, I'm thinking in my head like, "Hey, nothing's wrong. Why am I breathing so hard?" And when I started to kind of gain consciousness, I open up my eyes slowly and I see my friend doing CPR on me and I was in absolute shock, like I nearly almost died right there.
First thing that I said after I woke up from that my friend is giving me those like chest compressions, was "Ashadu an la ilaha illAllah ashadu anna Muhammadan rasulAllah." That was the first thing that I said because I thought maybe if I die right now, these have to be my last words. I have to make sure that I'm purely devout in my faith and that I actually fully believe this. So that was the experience that truly brought me like really, really deep towards Islam. Did any of your followers become Muslim after you revealed your faith?
For me becoming Muslim, I feel like I've coincidentally inspired a lot of people on my YouTube channel In my Discord server, there's been many many shahadas of people coming in to the server and just like seeing my experience and talking to a bunch of like brothers and sisters in there as well, trying to find some sort of guidance or kind of take care of any doubts they might have about Islam. There's like an Islam channel. There is always a brother or sister that's on duty in my Discord server that can actually answer those questions for them.
So I feel like there's been many shahadas that I've witnessed myself or that alhamdulillah I've even given to people my- myself from me becoming more of a true Muslim. That's been the most beautiful feeling ever. I- like, one of my friends on Discord that I met years back. He's a very, very close friend of mine. He called me one day. He said, Alex, and I was totally shocked. Actually, he was a devout Christian. He called me. He said, "Alex, I know that Islam is truth. "Let's just do it right now." Like, what should I say?" And I said, okay, just repeat after me "Ashadu an la ilaha illAllah, ashadu anna Muhammadan rasulAllah." And he, when he became Muslim that day, I was- I was stunned.
I was actually, within the same week of the Night of Power, and as I was praying, I was so emotional. I was actually crying because my friend doesn't even know to this day how big of an impact he just made on his life and his- his afterlife. Like he doesn't know that this was the best, the single best decision that he has ever made for his entire existence that he ever will make. Insha'Allah one day he'll be seeing this video, he'll actually find out what a beautiful choice he made. And inshAllah I'll be- I'll see him in heaven, inshAllah, for- for his action and for his shahada. For someone who is curious about our religion, how would you recommend that person to research Islam?
Is it enough to write "What is Islam?" on Google? Yeah. Yeah. So definitely sheikh Google is not going to be the sheikh that you should go to. If you have a local mosque, you should definitely check that out. But most importantly, the only book that we can say for- for certain is the true word of God front to back from cover to cover is the Qur'an. So the best way to look into Islam is to look into Islam from the one true book of God. So to actually read the Qur'an. And then if you have questions, then maybe you can even ask sheikh Google, you might get a thousand different varying answers and start spinning your head.
So I'd find a local sheikh at your local mosque and try to just go to one person that you know is really high in knowledge, like it says in the Qur'an to ask those of knowledge when you have questions, right? If you had the chance to talk to all the non-Muslims in the world, what would you like to say to them if you had just one minute? I would tell all the non-Muslims of the world that you are born Muslim. You are born knowing that there is a higher power.
It's the best feeling in the world when you finally revert to who you were when you, on your first day taking a breath on this Earth, when you were Muslim, it's the best to revert to that kind of mindset because it's who you are naturally. We all know that there is an afterlife. We all know that there is a God, and it's through this the teachings and people in society that we kind of stray away from that. So I want you to see Islam as not some sort of abstract different pushed off-to-the-corner kind of cultural concept, but instead, Islam is a universal message for all of mankind.
To be Islam, you just have to believe that there is one God and Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, is His last and final messenger. That's all you have to believe. What projects are you doing right now? Islamically, I'm working with my local mosque. I'm going to try to help them at least to get their like, their like videography set up so that they can be posting their own YouTube videos, and they can kind of spread their own message. Because at the mosque, especially where I'm from, there's so much knowledge there is so many smart, intellectual Muslims there, there are so many sheikhs that can actually teach and spread the message of Islam.
They just aren't really up-to-date with like the technical parts of it, like recording, a microphone and layering, and sound, and all of the above. So I feel like since I have that skill, I can use it in the name of God and I can help them do it as well. What would you like to say as your final comments? My final comment is that me being Muslim has definitely made me a stronger person. It's made me more of a man. I've been taking steps in directions that I never would have thought I've done in my life. Never in my entire life would I sit on a plane for 16 hours, no matter what it would cost me.
But just knowing that I'm doing this in the name of Allah, I'm traveling across the entire globe in the name of God. If I was doing it for myself, for my own cynical purposes, I would not be able to get so far in life. But knowing that I'm doing it for the Hereafter, and for something that is truly infinite, the deity that has truly created us, I feel like I've become a lot more successful, a lot stronger as a person. I've been challenged harder and I've been able to face those challenges because I've been a stronger Muslim overall. Brother Alex, thank you for this beautiful interview. Hope to meet you in future projects, inshAllah. InshAllah. InshAllah. Salaam alaykum. Nice to meet you.