Convert Stories
2 / 4
Part 2: "Are There Muslims in My Lineage?" | A Muslim Convert Story
#ConvertStories | Am I Muslim, Ghanian, or American? How I Learned To Be All Three
During his early years as a new Muslim, Sh. Abdullah Oduro struggled with his family, his culture, and his roots, until his uncle arrived at his door.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. What is Islam? When I embraced Islam, I started to culturally apostate from my American slash hip-hop culture. Even though that was the lens that I heard about Islam from, I looked at the lifestyle and what it contained, and I looked at it from a lens of Islam, kufr, iman, kufr. What is belief and what are the products of belief and what are the products of disbelief? And at that time, I took anything that was a product of disbelief or non-Islamic, what I understood, and threw it out the window. As they say, I threw the baby out with the bathwater. I didn't want to have nothing to do with it, and I wanted simply to be a Muslim and live an Islamic life. So even at that time, some of the people that I was hanging around that called me to Islam, I kind of departed from them because that portion of the culture was still strong with them. And at that time, I didn't realize that that was something that could be maintained. So as a new Muslim, my uncle, my mother's brother, came to America. You see, my uncle was like a governor of a village called Apatrapa, a small village in Ghana. And he was an uncle, or he was a chief of this tribe, like a governor at that time. And I saw, I remember seeing a picture of him on the local magazine, and he's sitting there like a king. He's sitting there like, you know, if any of y'all rappers know Slick Rick or any of these people that had, you know, Big Daddy Kane, they had all these rings on each finger, gold, sitting there chilling, straight face. That was from the, you know, from the culture. They sit there with the straight face, and people are sitting below him, and he's on a stool, his foot's on a footstool, footstool's from gold, and he's sitting there like the man. This guy is in my house, Nana. He's in my house. Nana told me something that I never heard before from my mother, because at this time, I'm a new Muslim,
arguing with my mom. My mom doesn't want me to pray in the house. Whenever I told her I got to pray, she would give me the keys to go to the local mosque, Mohammadi Masjid, right down the street from my house. When I would pray in the middle of the night, she'd hear me, she'd get up, and she'd try to put her hand on my head and start doing what is called tongues. Some of y'all know what tongues are. It is basically making some invocations to protect herself and to take out what she may have thought was the Satan from me. This is what was going on in my house when I was a new Muslim. I'd go to sleep sometimes, and she'd put her hand on my head and recite, and I would hold her hand and say, No, this is what was going on. Around this time, her brother comes, and we would talk. He would tell me about my culture. He'd tell me about the Ghanaian lifestyle. I'm like, Yo, what is it like to be a king? I mean, what is it like to be a chieftain? What is it like to have all that gold and all that leadership and responsibility? Whereupon one day, he said, You know that your uncle was you. I said, What are you talking about? He said he was a Muslim. A Muslim. The first thing that hit my mind was, Why didn't my mom ever tell me about that? So he started to tell me things that he didn't even know he was telling me, but it confirmed that he was a Muslim. From them, he said, You know, your uncle used to walk around with this thing all the time. He used to walk around doing this all the time, and he used to go and do as I see you do. And I'm like, Oh, he had the zikr beads, and he was making salah. You see, my uncle was a rich man. It was actually my grandmother's uncle that converted to Islam, and he was a moneylender and cocoa farmer because cocoa was one of the main natural resources of Ghana. So he would supply people with that, and he even knew Kwame Nkrumah during the time that Ghana was trying to, you know, to change the state of Ghana. He was someone that had this business and these businesses.
Actually, he even bought the three story house that my grandmothers are still in, that my mother's, my mother's mother and my grandmother's sister still live in three stories, and their whole family still resides there, mashallah. But hearing this from my uncle started to unravel things for me. Do I have a Ghanaian Muslim background? Are there Muslims in my lineage? That's when I started to inquire more. That was the first incident. Next, after that, during this time, you know, I wanted to study the deen. I was only concerned about studying Islam. Anything that had to do with American values, etc., etc., was put to the side. It was more of what is Islam, and that is it. What is the Islamic culture? That's the culture I'm interested in. So I started to study more lessons at the masjid. I would go and study. I would try to memorize Quran. I was learning from my sheikh that was from Kerala, India. He taught me how to read the Arabic language, which is another story, another beautiful story. And I realized that it's possible. It's possible to learn this religion. So I started to embark upon that, whereupon I made hajj. I made hajj, and making hajj really changed it for me, and made me step my game up when it came to learning the religion of Islam.
Welcome back!
Bookmark content
Download resources easily
Manage your donations
Track your spiritual growth
1 items
1 items
1 items
25 items
50 items
9 items
