What do you people who were Muslims think are the main reasons people convert to Islam? any one thing?
Ahh... where to start. I was a convert, and I've been trying to figure out what it was exactly that made me convert. I don't think it's any one thing, but a combination.
A major factor was the "scientific miracles" of the Qur'an... I couldn't think how they would be possible without supernatural forces at work. After converting, when I actually looked at the verses and analyzed how they got the "miracles" out of them it was obvious that it was just a game of words and interpretation, and that the Qur'an was far from either miraculous or scientific. I guess my problem was that I was too trusting. Still, it was over a year from the moment I found out about these "miracles" to the time I decided to convert.
So I think another major thing was being influenced by close Muslim friends. I didn't want to convert to "fit in" or anything like that, but I'm referring to the fact that living closely with Muslims made me see what peaceful, good people they were and how much they loved their religion. What Hassan mentioned about being exposed to the nicer sides of religion and associated cultures was a factor there. Whenever I asked Muslim friends about the darker side of Islam as I saw it in places like Saudi, they explained that this was a corrupted version of Islam using selected religious quotes. Eventually I reached the point where I truly believed it was a misrepresented religion, that the media and Islam-bashers were out to demonize it for political reasons. For this reason I never got close to Islam-criticizing websites like FFI, deeming its authors to be misinformed and/or full of hate.
Along the same lines was all the (mis)information I was given about women in Islam. All Shariah law was corrupted, I was told with what seemed to be convincing proof that it was going against Islam's teachings. Women in Islam were treasured and protected, given rights 1400 years ago that the West only gave them in the last century. All this is not hard to "prove" if you use the right hadith and Quranic quotes.
Anyways, I very much shared your opinion
For me though id start with the actual Quran, id demand to know what it says in every word before getting involved...lol
and that was my intent as well- to read the whole Qur'an and understand it before I made any decision. The problem was that, as you've seen, it's terribly hard for an average person to just pick it up and start reading and actually understand what it's talking about. So, a friend who actually teaches in an islamic institute volunteered to read it with me an explain. We did this whenever we both had some free time, but progress was very slow because she shared so much detail about the language (root words, multiple meanings, etc) and how it was a miracle in itself. After we completed the first chapter I already believed that the diction itself was if not miraculous at least highly impressive, because of how much information and feeling the author had managed to convey in so few lines.
While my education in that area went on, I
did research and find many various verses and rulings of Islam that bothered me. The worst, I think, was the verse that said you can beat your wife. I was shocked and indignant that my friends could defend such a "holy book", much less believe in it, and I told them I could never submit to a god that gave someone permission to hit me. I know this really worried them, especially considering how much time they had spent sharing Islam with me and how close they knew I had been to accepting it. So they set to work in clarifying the issue for me.
I was told about the hadith saying that "beat" only meant to tap with a toothstick, without leaving marks, not on any sensitive part of the body. This made me feel better for their sake, but I maintained that it was a degrading action nonetheless and I would not let my husband even approach me with that stick. Then they said, "well of course could you even imagine a man doing this? It would be utterly pointless! Obviously what the verse is really doing is putting a limit on what a man may do, even at his angriest state. Obviously what the verse is saying is you CANT beat your wife. And anyways it doesn't say that you have to let him do it to you, you can simply get a divorce as an alternative when it gets to that point. This is just a symbolic gesture to show the wife how serious the matter is to the husband, show her that this is the last straw before they must divorce. If you see in Islam how a husband is supposed to treat his wife, how much care and affection he must provide her with, then you'll see how this simple act would shock the wife into realizing the seriousness of the problem."
They convinced me that I should not let one "small" issue get in the way of all that I accepted and appreciated of Islam.
Anyways, to sum it up I think one of the main reasons that people in similar situations to mine convert to Islam is misinformation and misrepresentation of what Islam is, whether intentional or not. Obviously people have a duty to check the information for themselves, but a combination of 1) the difficulty of understanding and accessing the original texts and 2) trust of those that claim to be scholars explaining them, creates obstacles to getting a true picture of Islam anyways. ... back to Grey's Anatomy now
Topic: Converts to Islam.