Stressful Shahada Moments! -"Religions Are All Just Fairy Tales"@uticamasjid
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I was involved in the Bible study and the church choir and all that sort of extra activities that were going on. I got my first Bible when I was 12, and then when I became a teenager... things changed. I started to question my faith. Okay, wow! These people aren't who they say they are. There's a lot of people out there who are putting on a face that they're very religious and then they come and they're doing not very religious things. You know what? This stuff is not for me. I identified myself as an Atheist. This is all just fairy tales people tell each other to kind of make themselves feel better. They're going to die. Their existence is going to end. Assalamualaikum brother Tom.
Thank you for accepting our invitation. We are very happy to have you with us. I want to start with "Who is Tom Faccine?" Assalamualaikum Warahmatullahi. Thank you so much for having me. I am from New Jersey in the United States of America. I was born into an Italian-American family. I'm 33 years old, raised as a Christian. I accepted Islam In 2010. 2015, I went abroad to study Islam in Medina, and I returned in 2020. And I'm now an Imam in upstate New York, in the city of Utica. How was your life in regards to faith? What were you believing in? So I was raised a Christian in between two traditions of Christianity.
My mother was a Protestant, a Presbyterian specifically, and my father was from a Catholic family, although he didn't practice. So because my father never really took us to mass or to church. My mother kind of took responsibility for that, and she was very keen. She took us to church every single Sunday, and I was very passionate about it too. I insisted that we would sit in the front row. I was involved in Bible study and the church choir and all the sort of extra activities that were going on. I remember I got my first Bible when I was 12 and I tried several times to read it from front to back, even though I was never a successful, I tried.
So I really cared about my faith as a young person. And then when I became a teenager, things changed for a couple of different reasons. I started to question my faith. So what were the reasons that made you question your faith? There were some political issues and also some theological issues as well that didn't sit right with me. I think my experience is typical of a lot of people, at least in the United States. Is that what we stand up and say what we believe when we repeat the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed is one thing, and then how we actually live our faith and interact with our our religious practices, an entirely different thing. Right?
So I can't ever remember once in my life praying to Jesus, though I know that there's people out there that do. I didn't really have any sense of Jesus being God, even though if you had asked me, I probably would have said, yes. That's the right answer, because that's what we were taught. But it wasn't like I was praying to Jesus or thought of Him as God. I was always praying to God, even if I considered at that point as God. The Father. Right? What in the Christian formula would say in the Trinity again, something that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. But I didn't really think about it.
It wasn't until I started having the other issues with Christianity, like the political issues and kind of the social issues that I started also reviewing those things and starting to think, "Wait a second, this doesn't make any sense at all." And that, I think, was part of what really undermined my belief in Christianity, specifically seeing that, how I suspected that this was probably something that was authored by human beings, right. This type of sort of convoluted system of of balance between three and one and divine and human. It didn't seem very intuitive to me. So what was the final thing that made you leave Christianity?
So the Presbyterian Church, they have a youth conference every three years. It's called "Triennial". And how it works is that every Presbyterian church, they choose one young person from their congregation and they send them to a place. I think it was Purdue University. So I was chosen from my church to go to this sort of event. And it's a week of like worship and you stay in like the college dormitory. So it's this kind of really interesting experience. But when I went there, I think I had the expectation that this was going to be mostly based on faith and mostly based on sort of connecting to God and worship and this sort of thing. And I was very disappointed, actually.
There were a lot of bad things that the other young people were doing. They were sneaking an alcohol, they were hooking up girls and boys and stuff like that and doing all these sorts of things. And I was very innocent at that time and I was very shocked! And I think that really started to get me to question some things. Another thing that happened at the same conference was that this was a time when the movement towards homosexual marriage or homosexual unions was starting to happen in the United States. And there was a presentation that was given that was very much had a pro LGBTQ message, and that was very controversial even among the people who were attending this gathering at the time.
So the two main things that I walked away from this entire experience with was that, okay, wow! These people aren't who they say they are. There's a lot of people out there who are putting on a face that they're very religious and then they come and they're doing not very religious things behind everybody's backs. I think the last piece of the puzzle for me was that I never felt like what I was doing for my faith was enough. I felt like it wasn't sufficient just to show up once a week and sing some songs and then go home and you forget about church and forget about God the rest of the week. It didn't feel like it was thick enough, like it was weighty enough.
And so all these sorts of things, I just kind of came to the 16 year old conclusion, right, that you know what, this stuff is not for me. And I came to actually have a very, very low opinion of religion. I identified myself as an atheist. I thought this is all just fairy tales. People tell each other or they tell themselves to kind of make themselves feel better. They're going to die. Their existence is going to end. So how did your journey to Islam start? When did you first hear about it? I first heard about Islam itself probably from 911, but it didn't register with me. All of what that meant. Again, I thought about Muslims as kind of like a political category or population.
I didn't really come to think about what Muslims believe in in a substantial way until I got to college. I actually actually had a muslim professor and I started to learn it was kind of a happy confluence between two interests that I had. So one of those was these politics. And then sort of what was the political motivation or what was the engine of a lot of political movements in the Middle East and in the Muslim world. So I was a political science major and specifically international relations. And so I had one professor actually, she was a visiting professor. She was Moroccan. She taught several courses that were very, very interesting about sort of the intersection of Islam and politics.
One class that she taught was just about Malcolm X, all of his interviews and speeches and writings and things like that. And another class that she taught was about military interventions in Muslim countries. Through this, we kind of were studying some of the resistance movements historically that have happened. I kind of for the first time saw that, okay, what was motivating these people? Because if you're from the West, if you're maybe an American, you think that everybody just believes in freedom and liberty and these sorts of democracy, right? These sorts of political ideals that we imagine are universal.
And then it's kind of a big shock when you see that some people are saying, well, we want to live in an Islamic society or we don't like this intervention, and Allah said this in the Qur’an or there's a Hadith. The Prophet Mohammed Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said this, and they're using that as like, wait a second, you guys can't come and invade us or you know, bomb us or kill us or we're bound or we're duty bound to resist. And so that really messed with me and that kind of shocked me, to be honest. So what happened that attracted you more to Islam? I took a class at college that was by a professor I was very close to, is called "Political Modernity in Turkey".
And that was kind of an interesting class. It got me close to kind of some Turkish culture. Actually. I ended up going down to Paterson. I would pass through Paterson, New Jersey, on the way to visit my parents And Paterson, New Jersey, has a very large Turkish population. And so it was kind of because we were in this class and we would go down there and buy Turkish tea and we buy the jazwa (Coffeepot) and Turkish coffee and these sorts of things kind of bring it back. And it was kind of a fun thing. But that was kind of our first experience. After the class was over, we had the opportunity through this Professor there was an Erasmus program to study abroad in Turkey.
And so actually my future wife and I decided to both do it together. And that was 2009. Okay, so this is just the year before I take my Shahada. So we came and we studied at Bilgi University and for a semester and we lived in Uskudar and we just had the best time. I mean, it was just amazing some of the kind of young students at Bilgi. They were concerned for us because we lived in Uskudar. They said, "You guys aren't Muslims, you're going to get hurt". They're going to do something to you. And we found the opposite was true. You know, people were so nice and so helpful and going out of their way.
There were people in Uskudar at that time we needed to pay a bill or we needed to find a converter for our plugins or things like that. They would stop everything that they're doing and they would be with you and go with you through the alleyways and find what you need. And it was really touching. It was really an amazing experience. At that point and, you know, I used to be a musician before before I was a Muslim, and so I played a bunch of instruments and things like that. I just remember listening to the Adhan and especially in Uskudar you have all these masajid and all these mosques that are just around and I would cry, to be honest. I would hear the adhan and I would just cry.
It was just such a beautiful thing. I just open the window and just listen. And I felt this tension because I wanted at one time to go in, but I was too shy and I wasn't ready to become a Muslim or anything like that. And so when the term of study was over and we went back to the United States, I was very close. I think I was very, very on the way to becoming a Muslim. And I started experimenting with Muslim worship. I started experimenting with the prayer, the sala and with fasting. And I loved it. What convinced you that Islam is 100% the truth? For me, the big thing was looking into the authenticity of the texts, and that was something that was important to me from the beginning.
And so I was very concerned about, okay, is this actually what the Creator said? Is this actually what the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) was given? I knew the changes that happened in the Bible. I knew that different things were added and subtracted and reinterpreted over the hundreds of years. Was it the same in Islam? What about the Hadith? How certain can we be that the Hadith are actually things that the Prophet (SAW) said himself? But I got to a point quickly, when I looked into those things, I was like, "Wow, yes, they take authenticity really, really seriously". I think you can even just tell the difference in attitude.
If you try to talk about authenticity with a Christian, it's like they look at you like you're speaking French, like "What are you talking about?" Like it's not even on their radar about what authenticity would look like. How would we know? How would we be able to tell, "This book is actually preserved and this book isn't." They'll just say, "Well, you can't have such high standards. If you have standards like that, you'll never accept anything." I'll say "No, actually will accept the Qur’an." Because because because of the Qur’an, we actually know the names of the narrators that passed down the riwayat or the qira’at of the Qur’an.. So we can go to the manuscript evidence.
There's over 50 manuscripts that can be carbon dated back to the time of the Prophets (saw) 97% of the Qur’an that we have today. So there's actually a ton of evidence. How did you take your Shahada and how did you feel? So when I graduated, I was praying five times a day. I was fasting. I didn’t take my shahada I didn't understand that there was a Shahada to take. I didn't know what the Shahada was. I understood myself as a Muslim.
So the Moroccan professor that first introduced me to Islam, she called me up out of the blue one day she said, "Tom, you're a Muslim, right?" I said, "Well, I pray five times a day and I'm doing this thing." I said, "Yeah." She's like, "Have you taken your Shahada?" I said, "What's that?" She said she was giving at a conference and philosophy said, "Come over to one of the Masjid here and take your Shahada.' So I said, "Okay." So we all got in the car, me and my wife, and at that point we had given birth, we had our first son and we went over to the Masjid in Philadelphia, and I went down to a basement and I said the Shahada for the first time.
The feeling was kind of mixed because this was not a place that I had any connection to before. I kind of flew in blind. And knowing what I know now as an Imam, I can criticize the way that they did it because they took me down to a basement alone with one person. I didn't know who he was, what his name was. Was he the imam? I didn't I don't think he was. And he kind of just said a few general things about Islam. And then I took the Shahada and that was it. I never heard from that person again, I didn’t exchange numbers, nothing. So I had absolutely no, I was just on my own. Person got the Shahada, point in the bag and that's it.
The other thing that was problematic was, you know, I think the attitude that a lot of people have towards new Muslims and their family. So as I mentioned, I mean, my wife was not yet a Muslim. And upstairs while I was down in the basement taking my Shahada, there was someone talking to my wife and basically another woman who was also a convert, but was kind of scaring my wife a little bit. So she asked my wife if she was ready to convert and my wife said, "No, I'm not. I'm still thinking about it.
You know, I'm interested, but I'm not really ready yet." And then without knowing anything about our situation, this woman says to my wife, "Well, you know that every touch between you two is haram now." And I'm in the basement. Poor guy. I come upstairs and my wife is angry, like what happened? Right? And this is something that set us back a lot when it came to trying to encourage her to grow in the faith. And imagine that somebody tells you that, you know, welcome to the religion. Sorry you guys are done. You know, it's a very, very difficult thing. So it wasn't a very happy, necessarily Shahada experience to be, to be honest.
I settled into a Muslim community back in New Jersey where my parents lived, and that's where I kind of made my first connection with the Muslim community. And I started attending regularly. How did your family and the people around you react to your conversion to Islam? Yeah, it was a mixed but how my family reacted? It was a mix of reactions. My father, because he wasn't really a practicing religious person, he couldn't really say anything, so he didn't really react either way. My mother, because she had taken responsibility for our religious upbringing, she felt, I think, that she had failed at first, which is hard to see your mother feel like you failed her.
But as time went on, and especially as you know, my children were born and grew up and they're praying and they're reciting a Qur’an and they're doing this thing, and she understands that it's not a phase and it's not a dangerous sort of cult or anything like that, that I have a position of leadership. I give speeches, I give talks, I travel and try to reach people and connect with people that she understands that this is something that's actually very important. You know, my wife was supporting me. She did not accept Islam right away, but she got me a prayer rug and she got me CDs. We were using CDs back then of the Qur’an and things like that.
And so there's a degree of acceptance that I can't complain about. So how did your wife become Muslim in the end? There was an Imam that was also a convert and who had graduated from the Islamic University of Medina. And so I took some classes with him and I started to get close with him and he suggested that I apply as well to the Islamic University of Medina. And so I started giving the application ready and he wrote me a recommendation letter and I applied. Yeah, it was a year or two later I was accepted. And one of the problems and one of the major sort of obstacles I faced and one of the leaps of faith that I had to take was that, you know, Medina is only a place where Muslims can live.
And at that point my wife was not a Muslim, so I basically went ahead with it, hoping in Allah that she would become Muslim before I had to go. If I got accepted and not really knowing what I was going to do if that didn't happen. And Subhan'Allāh I'm really glad that I did, because just maybe some months before I got the acceptance letter from Medina, she she also took her Shahada and became a Muslim. So it all worked out. She definitely was coming along in her own ways, but she had more hesitation than I did and she had more sort of unresolved issues than I did. She also was afraid of doing it for me. She wanted to make sure that she was doing it for herself, which I respect a lot.
And it was funny because we moved around quite a bit. I won't get into the details, but we were in a new community and we lived very close to a Masjid and we went a couple of times to talk, you know, I said, "If you have any questions, we can go talk to the Imam." And we did a couple of times, but it never really did anything. And then one of these times we were in there talking to the Imam, she was asking some questions. And then he just asked her like, why don't you take your Shahada? And she did. She she she did. And after that, she's like, "I'm not sure why I did?" But it was something that, you know, she continued to grow into. And at first she was like, "What did I just do almost?
But as the days and weeks and months passed, you know, was something that she grew into very nicely. And then it became, you know, kind of the obvious thing to do. What were the challenges that you faced after becoming Muslim? So there were several points at which I had to give things up or I decided to give things up. And they were wonderful, amazing decisions. You know, one of the first things that I did when I became a Muslim was I stopped playing music. I was very capable musician before Islam.
Maybe there was some disagreement or there was this and that opinion, but I just said, "I know myself and I know what it feels like to be on stage and what it feels like to play for people" and these sorts of things. And I know right away that it's not good for the soul. There were certain things like when it came to jobs. Okay? So I had worked in restaurants for some years. It just wasn't suitable anymore. I mean, there was alcohol and pork in the restaurant. There were women that would flirt with you. They would give you their number sometimes and things like that. And so I didn't have another job lined up, but I decided one day, you know, I can't keep doing this.
And I just decided to put in my two weeks, as we say, and leave. Allah replaced it. That's the thing. And so I got another job in no time. What impressed you the most about Islam? What impressed me most about Islam is definitely that it was comprehensive and specific. The Qur’an is a miracle. It's different because it speaks about so many different spheres of human activity and human life and different areas of ontology and what exist and what doesn't. I think a few things shown through were very clearly in just those translated texts that I was just being exposed to for the first time, and something that self understood as the words of God himself.
He's talking to you and in a very direct and straightforward manner. The other thing was how specific the guidance was, and not just specific, but also comprehensive. When I was an Atheist, I had gone through Marxism and Communism and Anarchism and sort of these leftist political ideologies. And I think my concern was always about justice. But I had found in those ideologies the opposite problem of what I had found in Christianity. When I encountered Islam, it was like for the first time it clicked. It was like the meeting of these two worlds. Like you see that you have guidance for your personal and interpersonal life, your individual life, and also your collective life.
Every single sphere of activity that you have to participate in as a human being, right? Your economy and your warfare and your politics and everything. It was all kind of right there. Were practices like praying five times a day or fasting difficult for you at first, and how did you learn them? That was the time of the early Internet. And so I learned from whatever was on Google. That's not the way I would recommend, but it was something that was better than nothing. I didn't find any difficulty in it. I actually loved it. It filled a void for me that I had been searching for a long time, even when I was a young boy, and I felt that Christianity should have been more serious.
It made immediate sense to me that we should have to pray five times a day. Even if I wasn't used to it. And it was difficult in the sense that I still had to get used to it. I agreed with it. It made sense. I mean, if you want to be a soccer player, you want to be a football player or a basketball player, how many hours do you have to spend in the Gym? What's more important than that? Your success in the afterlife? Shouldn't we have to spend maybe an hour total a day between wudu and prayer and everything, it's nothing, really. And fasting was the same. You know, I went through a lot of hardship fasting because I used to work on farms, manual labor in the sun, long days, ten hour days.
But when I look back on it, those were the best fasts. They were the best Ramadan of my life. Sometimes the fasting when you're in an office job and sitting at a computer is harder. Even, I don't know why? It's just because Bakarah. It's because we believe in the unseen, the first quality of a believer . Allah says in surat Al-Baqarah, (يُؤْمِنُونَ بِالْغَيْبِ) Every second is not like every other second. Every calorie is not like every other calorie. Allah can put Barakah in something. And so if you're doing something and it has hardship in it, even if it's difficult, Allah can put Barakah in it and He can make ease inside of it فَإِنَّ مَعَ الْعُسْرِ يُسْرًا It's built into the ‘Usr.
Sometimes, built into the difficulty is the ease. How is your relationship with the Qur’an? How do you feel when you recite or hear it? One of the biggest blessings of my life is being touched by the Qur’an. I'm a mess in Tarawih. I try to tell my Masjid. I can't lead Taraweeh because I just cry too much because just the Qur’an is so beautiful and not just the sound and the musicality of it, but also the language of it. And, you know, we don't know... We don't know in this life if we’re sincere or not. But there are certain things that Allah says in the Qur’an that give us hope. And one of those things is being touched by the Qur’an.
If you hear the Qur’an and it touches your heart and affects you, you know you're still alive. What projects are you doing right now? I've got a few I'm a full time Imam at Utica Masjid, in Utica in New York. I also teach Tafsir to middle schoolers on an online high school. It's called "Legacy." So I teach Tafsir to middle schoolers. I teach Islamic history to I co-teach a class in Islamic history to high schoolers in the same institution.
I also am a part time chaplain at a Liberal Arts College in New York called "Hamilton College." So I also recently started a research fellowship with Yaqeeninstitute founded by Omar Suleiman and to talk about sort of modern ideologies, both religious ideologies and other sorts of ideologies. If you had a chance to speak to all the non-Muslims in the world, what would you like to say to them? I would say that the definition of religion is what God wants from us, nothing else, and that anybody who believes in God has to take responsibility for being as certain as possible that what they are doing is what God wants from them. If they take that and run with it, they'll be fine.
At the end of the day, it all comes back to the virtue of sincerity. If you are a sincere person and you try to look Allah will take care of the "How?" Allah will take care of the rest.
Thank you for accepting our invitation. We are very happy to have you with us. I want to start with "Who is Tom Faccine?" Assalamualaikum Warahmatullahi. Thank you so much for having me. I am from New Jersey in the United States of America. I was born into an Italian-American family. I'm 33 years old, raised as a Christian. I accepted Islam In 2010. 2015, I went abroad to study Islam in Medina, and I returned in 2020. And I'm now an Imam in upstate New York, in the city of Utica. How was your life in regards to faith? What were you believing in? So I was raised a Christian in between two traditions of Christianity.
My mother was a Protestant, a Presbyterian specifically, and my father was from a Catholic family, although he didn't practice. So because my father never really took us to mass or to church. My mother kind of took responsibility for that, and she was very keen. She took us to church every single Sunday, and I was very passionate about it too. I insisted that we would sit in the front row. I was involved in Bible study and the church choir and all the sort of extra activities that were going on. I remember I got my first Bible when I was 12 and I tried several times to read it from front to back, even though I was never a successful, I tried.
So I really cared about my faith as a young person. And then when I became a teenager, things changed for a couple of different reasons. I started to question my faith. So what were the reasons that made you question your faith? There were some political issues and also some theological issues as well that didn't sit right with me. I think my experience is typical of a lot of people, at least in the United States. Is that what we stand up and say what we believe when we repeat the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed is one thing, and then how we actually live our faith and interact with our our religious practices, an entirely different thing. Right?
So I can't ever remember once in my life praying to Jesus, though I know that there's people out there that do. I didn't really have any sense of Jesus being God, even though if you had asked me, I probably would have said, yes. That's the right answer, because that's what we were taught. But it wasn't like I was praying to Jesus or thought of Him as God. I was always praying to God, even if I considered at that point as God. The Father. Right? What in the Christian formula would say in the Trinity again, something that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. But I didn't really think about it.
It wasn't until I started having the other issues with Christianity, like the political issues and kind of the social issues that I started also reviewing those things and starting to think, "Wait a second, this doesn't make any sense at all." And that, I think, was part of what really undermined my belief in Christianity, specifically seeing that, how I suspected that this was probably something that was authored by human beings, right. This type of sort of convoluted system of of balance between three and one and divine and human. It didn't seem very intuitive to me. So what was the final thing that made you leave Christianity?
So the Presbyterian Church, they have a youth conference every three years. It's called "Triennial". And how it works is that every Presbyterian church, they choose one young person from their congregation and they send them to a place. I think it was Purdue University. So I was chosen from my church to go to this sort of event. And it's a week of like worship and you stay in like the college dormitory. So it's this kind of really interesting experience. But when I went there, I think I had the expectation that this was going to be mostly based on faith and mostly based on sort of connecting to God and worship and this sort of thing. And I was very disappointed, actually.
There were a lot of bad things that the other young people were doing. They were sneaking an alcohol, they were hooking up girls and boys and stuff like that and doing all these sorts of things. And I was very innocent at that time and I was very shocked! And I think that really started to get me to question some things. Another thing that happened at the same conference was that this was a time when the movement towards homosexual marriage or homosexual unions was starting to happen in the United States. And there was a presentation that was given that was very much had a pro LGBTQ message, and that was very controversial even among the people who were attending this gathering at the time.
So the two main things that I walked away from this entire experience with was that, okay, wow! These people aren't who they say they are. There's a lot of people out there who are putting on a face that they're very religious and then they come and they're doing not very religious things behind everybody's backs. I think the last piece of the puzzle for me was that I never felt like what I was doing for my faith was enough. I felt like it wasn't sufficient just to show up once a week and sing some songs and then go home and you forget about church and forget about God the rest of the week. It didn't feel like it was thick enough, like it was weighty enough.
And so all these sorts of things, I just kind of came to the 16 year old conclusion, right, that you know what, this stuff is not for me. And I came to actually have a very, very low opinion of religion. I identified myself as an atheist. I thought this is all just fairy tales. People tell each other or they tell themselves to kind of make themselves feel better. They're going to die. Their existence is going to end. So how did your journey to Islam start? When did you first hear about it? I first heard about Islam itself probably from 911, but it didn't register with me. All of what that meant. Again, I thought about Muslims as kind of like a political category or population.
I didn't really come to think about what Muslims believe in in a substantial way until I got to college. I actually actually had a muslim professor and I started to learn it was kind of a happy confluence between two interests that I had. So one of those was these politics. And then sort of what was the political motivation or what was the engine of a lot of political movements in the Middle East and in the Muslim world. So I was a political science major and specifically international relations. And so I had one professor actually, she was a visiting professor. She was Moroccan. She taught several courses that were very, very interesting about sort of the intersection of Islam and politics.
One class that she taught was just about Malcolm X, all of his interviews and speeches and writings and things like that. And another class that she taught was about military interventions in Muslim countries. Through this, we kind of were studying some of the resistance movements historically that have happened. I kind of for the first time saw that, okay, what was motivating these people? Because if you're from the West, if you're maybe an American, you think that everybody just believes in freedom and liberty and these sorts of democracy, right? These sorts of political ideals that we imagine are universal.
And then it's kind of a big shock when you see that some people are saying, well, we want to live in an Islamic society or we don't like this intervention, and Allah said this in the Qur’an or there's a Hadith. The Prophet Mohammed Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said this, and they're using that as like, wait a second, you guys can't come and invade us or you know, bomb us or kill us or we're bound or we're duty bound to resist. And so that really messed with me and that kind of shocked me, to be honest. So what happened that attracted you more to Islam? I took a class at college that was by a professor I was very close to, is called "Political Modernity in Turkey".
And that was kind of an interesting class. It got me close to kind of some Turkish culture. Actually. I ended up going down to Paterson. I would pass through Paterson, New Jersey, on the way to visit my parents And Paterson, New Jersey, has a very large Turkish population. And so it was kind of because we were in this class and we would go down there and buy Turkish tea and we buy the jazwa (Coffeepot) and Turkish coffee and these sorts of things kind of bring it back. And it was kind of a fun thing. But that was kind of our first experience. After the class was over, we had the opportunity through this Professor there was an Erasmus program to study abroad in Turkey.
And so actually my future wife and I decided to both do it together. And that was 2009. Okay, so this is just the year before I take my Shahada. So we came and we studied at Bilgi University and for a semester and we lived in Uskudar and we just had the best time. I mean, it was just amazing some of the kind of young students at Bilgi. They were concerned for us because we lived in Uskudar. They said, "You guys aren't Muslims, you're going to get hurt". They're going to do something to you. And we found the opposite was true. You know, people were so nice and so helpful and going out of their way.
There were people in Uskudar at that time we needed to pay a bill or we needed to find a converter for our plugins or things like that. They would stop everything that they're doing and they would be with you and go with you through the alleyways and find what you need. And it was really touching. It was really an amazing experience. At that point and, you know, I used to be a musician before before I was a Muslim, and so I played a bunch of instruments and things like that. I just remember listening to the Adhan and especially in Uskudar you have all these masajid and all these mosques that are just around and I would cry, to be honest. I would hear the adhan and I would just cry.
It was just such a beautiful thing. I just open the window and just listen. And I felt this tension because I wanted at one time to go in, but I was too shy and I wasn't ready to become a Muslim or anything like that. And so when the term of study was over and we went back to the United States, I was very close. I think I was very, very on the way to becoming a Muslim. And I started experimenting with Muslim worship. I started experimenting with the prayer, the sala and with fasting. And I loved it. What convinced you that Islam is 100% the truth? For me, the big thing was looking into the authenticity of the texts, and that was something that was important to me from the beginning.
And so I was very concerned about, okay, is this actually what the Creator said? Is this actually what the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) was given? I knew the changes that happened in the Bible. I knew that different things were added and subtracted and reinterpreted over the hundreds of years. Was it the same in Islam? What about the Hadith? How certain can we be that the Hadith are actually things that the Prophet (SAW) said himself? But I got to a point quickly, when I looked into those things, I was like, "Wow, yes, they take authenticity really, really seriously". I think you can even just tell the difference in attitude.
If you try to talk about authenticity with a Christian, it's like they look at you like you're speaking French, like "What are you talking about?" Like it's not even on their radar about what authenticity would look like. How would we know? How would we be able to tell, "This book is actually preserved and this book isn't." They'll just say, "Well, you can't have such high standards. If you have standards like that, you'll never accept anything." I'll say "No, actually will accept the Qur’an." Because because because of the Qur’an, we actually know the names of the narrators that passed down the riwayat or the qira’at of the Qur’an.. So we can go to the manuscript evidence.
There's over 50 manuscripts that can be carbon dated back to the time of the Prophets (saw) 97% of the Qur’an that we have today. So there's actually a ton of evidence. How did you take your Shahada and how did you feel? So when I graduated, I was praying five times a day. I was fasting. I didn’t take my shahada I didn't understand that there was a Shahada to take. I didn't know what the Shahada was. I understood myself as a Muslim.
So the Moroccan professor that first introduced me to Islam, she called me up out of the blue one day she said, "Tom, you're a Muslim, right?" I said, "Well, I pray five times a day and I'm doing this thing." I said, "Yeah." She's like, "Have you taken your Shahada?" I said, "What's that?" She said she was giving at a conference and philosophy said, "Come over to one of the Masjid here and take your Shahada.' So I said, "Okay." So we all got in the car, me and my wife, and at that point we had given birth, we had our first son and we went over to the Masjid in Philadelphia, and I went down to a basement and I said the Shahada for the first time.
The feeling was kind of mixed because this was not a place that I had any connection to before. I kind of flew in blind. And knowing what I know now as an Imam, I can criticize the way that they did it because they took me down to a basement alone with one person. I didn't know who he was, what his name was. Was he the imam? I didn't I don't think he was. And he kind of just said a few general things about Islam. And then I took the Shahada and that was it. I never heard from that person again, I didn’t exchange numbers, nothing. So I had absolutely no, I was just on my own. Person got the Shahada, point in the bag and that's it.
The other thing that was problematic was, you know, I think the attitude that a lot of people have towards new Muslims and their family. So as I mentioned, I mean, my wife was not yet a Muslim. And upstairs while I was down in the basement taking my Shahada, there was someone talking to my wife and basically another woman who was also a convert, but was kind of scaring my wife a little bit. So she asked my wife if she was ready to convert and my wife said, "No, I'm not. I'm still thinking about it.
You know, I'm interested, but I'm not really ready yet." And then without knowing anything about our situation, this woman says to my wife, "Well, you know that every touch between you two is haram now." And I'm in the basement. Poor guy. I come upstairs and my wife is angry, like what happened? Right? And this is something that set us back a lot when it came to trying to encourage her to grow in the faith. And imagine that somebody tells you that, you know, welcome to the religion. Sorry you guys are done. You know, it's a very, very difficult thing. So it wasn't a very happy, necessarily Shahada experience to be, to be honest.
I settled into a Muslim community back in New Jersey where my parents lived, and that's where I kind of made my first connection with the Muslim community. And I started attending regularly. How did your family and the people around you react to your conversion to Islam? Yeah, it was a mixed but how my family reacted? It was a mix of reactions. My father, because he wasn't really a practicing religious person, he couldn't really say anything, so he didn't really react either way. My mother, because she had taken responsibility for our religious upbringing, she felt, I think, that she had failed at first, which is hard to see your mother feel like you failed her.
But as time went on, and especially as you know, my children were born and grew up and they're praying and they're reciting a Qur’an and they're doing this thing, and she understands that it's not a phase and it's not a dangerous sort of cult or anything like that, that I have a position of leadership. I give speeches, I give talks, I travel and try to reach people and connect with people that she understands that this is something that's actually very important. You know, my wife was supporting me. She did not accept Islam right away, but she got me a prayer rug and she got me CDs. We were using CDs back then of the Qur’an and things like that.
And so there's a degree of acceptance that I can't complain about. So how did your wife become Muslim in the end? There was an Imam that was also a convert and who had graduated from the Islamic University of Medina. And so I took some classes with him and I started to get close with him and he suggested that I apply as well to the Islamic University of Medina. And so I started giving the application ready and he wrote me a recommendation letter and I applied. Yeah, it was a year or two later I was accepted. And one of the problems and one of the major sort of obstacles I faced and one of the leaps of faith that I had to take was that, you know, Medina is only a place where Muslims can live.
And at that point my wife was not a Muslim, so I basically went ahead with it, hoping in Allah that she would become Muslim before I had to go. If I got accepted and not really knowing what I was going to do if that didn't happen. And Subhan'Allāh I'm really glad that I did, because just maybe some months before I got the acceptance letter from Medina, she she also took her Shahada and became a Muslim. So it all worked out. She definitely was coming along in her own ways, but she had more hesitation than I did and she had more sort of unresolved issues than I did. She also was afraid of doing it for me. She wanted to make sure that she was doing it for herself, which I respect a lot.
And it was funny because we moved around quite a bit. I won't get into the details, but we were in a new community and we lived very close to a Masjid and we went a couple of times to talk, you know, I said, "If you have any questions, we can go talk to the Imam." And we did a couple of times, but it never really did anything. And then one of these times we were in there talking to the Imam, she was asking some questions. And then he just asked her like, why don't you take your Shahada? And she did. She she she did. And after that, she's like, "I'm not sure why I did?" But it was something that, you know, she continued to grow into. And at first she was like, "What did I just do almost?
But as the days and weeks and months passed, you know, was something that she grew into very nicely. And then it became, you know, kind of the obvious thing to do. What were the challenges that you faced after becoming Muslim? So there were several points at which I had to give things up or I decided to give things up. And they were wonderful, amazing decisions. You know, one of the first things that I did when I became a Muslim was I stopped playing music. I was very capable musician before Islam.
Maybe there was some disagreement or there was this and that opinion, but I just said, "I know myself and I know what it feels like to be on stage and what it feels like to play for people" and these sorts of things. And I know right away that it's not good for the soul. There were certain things like when it came to jobs. Okay? So I had worked in restaurants for some years. It just wasn't suitable anymore. I mean, there was alcohol and pork in the restaurant. There were women that would flirt with you. They would give you their number sometimes and things like that. And so I didn't have another job lined up, but I decided one day, you know, I can't keep doing this.
And I just decided to put in my two weeks, as we say, and leave. Allah replaced it. That's the thing. And so I got another job in no time. What impressed you the most about Islam? What impressed me most about Islam is definitely that it was comprehensive and specific. The Qur’an is a miracle. It's different because it speaks about so many different spheres of human activity and human life and different areas of ontology and what exist and what doesn't. I think a few things shown through were very clearly in just those translated texts that I was just being exposed to for the first time, and something that self understood as the words of God himself.
He's talking to you and in a very direct and straightforward manner. The other thing was how specific the guidance was, and not just specific, but also comprehensive. When I was an Atheist, I had gone through Marxism and Communism and Anarchism and sort of these leftist political ideologies. And I think my concern was always about justice. But I had found in those ideologies the opposite problem of what I had found in Christianity. When I encountered Islam, it was like for the first time it clicked. It was like the meeting of these two worlds. Like you see that you have guidance for your personal and interpersonal life, your individual life, and also your collective life.
Every single sphere of activity that you have to participate in as a human being, right? Your economy and your warfare and your politics and everything. It was all kind of right there. Were practices like praying five times a day or fasting difficult for you at first, and how did you learn them? That was the time of the early Internet. And so I learned from whatever was on Google. That's not the way I would recommend, but it was something that was better than nothing. I didn't find any difficulty in it. I actually loved it. It filled a void for me that I had been searching for a long time, even when I was a young boy, and I felt that Christianity should have been more serious.
It made immediate sense to me that we should have to pray five times a day. Even if I wasn't used to it. And it was difficult in the sense that I still had to get used to it. I agreed with it. It made sense. I mean, if you want to be a soccer player, you want to be a football player or a basketball player, how many hours do you have to spend in the Gym? What's more important than that? Your success in the afterlife? Shouldn't we have to spend maybe an hour total a day between wudu and prayer and everything, it's nothing, really. And fasting was the same. You know, I went through a lot of hardship fasting because I used to work on farms, manual labor in the sun, long days, ten hour days.
But when I look back on it, those were the best fasts. They were the best Ramadan of my life. Sometimes the fasting when you're in an office job and sitting at a computer is harder. Even, I don't know why? It's just because Bakarah. It's because we believe in the unseen, the first quality of a believer . Allah says in surat Al-Baqarah, (يُؤْمِنُونَ بِالْغَيْبِ) Every second is not like every other second. Every calorie is not like every other calorie. Allah can put Barakah in something. And so if you're doing something and it has hardship in it, even if it's difficult, Allah can put Barakah in it and He can make ease inside of it فَإِنَّ مَعَ الْعُسْرِ يُسْرًا It's built into the ‘Usr.
Sometimes, built into the difficulty is the ease. How is your relationship with the Qur’an? How do you feel when you recite or hear it? One of the biggest blessings of my life is being touched by the Qur’an. I'm a mess in Tarawih. I try to tell my Masjid. I can't lead Taraweeh because I just cry too much because just the Qur’an is so beautiful and not just the sound and the musicality of it, but also the language of it. And, you know, we don't know... We don't know in this life if we’re sincere or not. But there are certain things that Allah says in the Qur’an that give us hope. And one of those things is being touched by the Qur’an.
If you hear the Qur’an and it touches your heart and affects you, you know you're still alive. What projects are you doing right now? I've got a few I'm a full time Imam at Utica Masjid, in Utica in New York. I also teach Tafsir to middle schoolers on an online high school. It's called "Legacy." So I teach Tafsir to middle schoolers. I teach Islamic history to I co-teach a class in Islamic history to high schoolers in the same institution.
I also am a part time chaplain at a Liberal Arts College in New York called "Hamilton College." So I also recently started a research fellowship with Yaqeeninstitute founded by Omar Suleiman and to talk about sort of modern ideologies, both religious ideologies and other sorts of ideologies. If you had a chance to speak to all the non-Muslims in the world, what would you like to say to them? I would say that the definition of religion is what God wants from us, nothing else, and that anybody who believes in God has to take responsibility for being as certain as possible that what they are doing is what God wants from them. If they take that and run with it, they'll be fine.
At the end of the day, it all comes back to the virtue of sincerity. If you are a sincere person and you try to look Allah will take care of the "How?" Allah will take care of the rest.