Yes, you read the title correctly. I am quickly figuring out that there is really no great way to “come out” to the world as a converted Muslim. Islam is clouded over with prejudice, assumptions, and bias. This is my whole-hearted choice and this is my story…

I think I’ll begin with a brief history lesson to get everyone on the same page. It’s very possible that many reading this don’t fully understand the true religion of Islam without all the stereotypes and generalisations. I certainly didn’t even know that Islam and Christianity came from the same Abrahamic God until I was in college. We’ll start a few thousand years ago when God came to Abraham and promised him many children even though Abraham and his wife Sarah were well beyond child bearing years. Sarah came up with the idea to allow Abraham to sleep with her younger slave so that Abraham could have children that way. The slave was an Egyptian named Hagar and she bore Abraham’s first born son named Ishmael. Yet still God wanted to show His work of a miracle by giving Sarah a son in her old age so she became pregnant with Abraham’s second son Isaac. Now that Sarah had what she had wished for all along she despised Hagar and Abraham’s first son that was not her own. She demands that Abraham send them both away. She didn’t want the inheritance of a great nation God promised to Abraham’s children to belong to Ishmael. Hagar is forced to leave with her child and wander in the desert. In the Bible it says that Hagar runs out of water in the desert and is destitute, she cries and worries about her young son. God appears to her and says, “Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation” (Genesis 21:18 NIV). God gives her water in the form of a well and she is able to move on and survive. Muslims believe that this well, called Zamzam, still exists today in the holiest city of Mecca where Hagar and Ishmael ended up after wandering the desert. After chapter 21 in the book of Genesis Hagar and Ishmael are never mentioned again nor is the great nation God promised to Abraham’s first son. So the Bible continues on with many more prophets through Isaac such as; Joseph, Moses, David and finally Jesus. For Christians Jesus is where the prophets end, but for Muslims Jesus makes the way for Muhammad. Prophet Muhammad is a distant relative of Jesus through Abraham. Jesus came through Issac’s line and Muhammad came through Ishmael’s line. In the Bible the “great nation” God promises to Ishmael is never really fulfilled even though the tradition is that the inheritance always goes to the first son, no matter the mother. The Quran fulfils this promise by sending Muhammad as God’s final messenger. And as with many of the previous prophets, Muhammad’s coming is prophesied with the prophet before him: Jesus. There are many verses in the book of John where Jesus speaks about the coming of an “advocate”, “helper”, “Spirit of truth”, etc. Of course Christians interpret this as the coming of the Holy Spirit, but that never really made sense to me because isn’t the Holy Spirit mentioned before in the Bible namely when Mary conceived Jesus?
“This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit” -Matthew 1:18 NIV.

And yet if Jesus was truly talking about the Holy Spirit in John then there are very large contradictions. Jesus states in John 16:7 NIV, “But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go I will send him to you.” So how is it possible that this “Advocate” is the Holy Spirit of the Spirit existed already to get Mary pregnant?

Another verse in the Bible Christians have interpreted as being about the Holy Spirit is this, “I have more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of Truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.” -John 16:12-15 NIV.

This Spirit of Truth Jesus speaks of rather exactly matches the description of Muhammad and the Quran. The first time the angel Gabriel appeared to Muhammad, while he meditated in a cave near Mecca, he was ordered to read. And so the Quran came from Muhammad through only the exact words he heard from the angel Gabriel. Jesus spoke of this Truth that would be revealed 600 years before Muhammad. God sent down this perfect book of Truth because He understood the corruption that was to happen to the Bible due to human error. The Quran can much more easily be trusted to be the unaltered word of God in that not a single word from the original Arabic has been altered over the years yet the Bible lays in dispute.

One of my biggest struggles when I started reading and researching the Bible for myself in my teenage years was the word “inspired”. I looked at what many scholars had to say about the Bible and its place as the word of God and the struggle became the fact that every scholar said the Bible was written by human hands that were inspired by God. Of course this is so beautiful and I still find it to be beautiful. Sifting through the pages and remembering the different hands and languages and cultures this holy book had to go through, left me thinking of how easy human error is. I realised that much of my faith was in the hands of monks writing in monasteries in candlelight or translators who could easily misunderstand. I still read the Bible and am in love with the narrative and the work of all the hands that went into the leather-bound I hold today. Yet the Bible has to come second to the Quran because the Quran remains unaltered from the perfect word of God that was revealed to Muhammad over the span of a few decades. It is the word that God sent down to correct the lies and misunderstandings that were recorded in the Bible. I love narrative and history so I still read the Bible and it has even played a large part in my conversion to Islam. The Bible is not to be tossed out but rather used as supplementary to the Bible and taken with a grain of salt.

People will inevitably feel threatened by my conversion. It’s easier for people of prejudice to believe I was brainwashed by a brown-skinned enemy. An all-American blondie lost due to misguided love and naivety. Lies and generalisations can be said in one breath, “She converted because she fell in love with a Muslim.” It’s easy for people to comprehend this short statement rather than the longer truth. People will pity me for all the “freedom” I am giving up but I don’t see it as giving up freedom. There is so much more freedom in submitting to Allah. Many people submit to the world and lose their virtue. Others submit to their hearts and find themselves lost and misguided. I spent a whole year following my own desires and becoming lonelier and lonelier.  I grew up Christian and I’m sure some people could’ve said that I was Christian because that’s what I grew up with. That’s what surrounded my and it’s certainly what surrounds me everyday in Poland in this Catholic majority country where every street corner you can find either a church or some sort of nod to religion. Rather if you’d like to see a mosque you must take a 30 minute train ride, walk 20 minutes from the train station to a muddy alleyway that leads to a small building where a small green sign in Arabic indicates you have reached the only mosque for miles and miles. The fact that I am converting in a time and place that will force much hardship squarely on my shoulders only convinces me more that this is right for me. Christianity was very comfortable for me and remaining a Christian would protect me from much prejudice and hardship in this life but I can’t lie to myself about the truth in my heart. I had no intention of converting to Rami’s religion when we started dating and he had no intention of convincing me to. The Quran even permits marriage between Muslims and Jews or Christians. I asked questions and opened the Quran on my own accord because I believe no one should discount something they have no understanding of. I felt my heart pulling me into this new truth but I kept it to myself. I didn’t want to tell Rami to get his hopes up and a large part of me wanted to find a major flaw in the foundation of the religion to push me away. The more I read and researched the more it made sense to me. One evening I broke down crying to Rami and confessed to him the changes that had been happening in my heart. I sobbed and said I didn’t understand how God thought I would be strong enough to grow up Christian and then reveal the truth to me later to challenge my heart. I had to remember how God had challenged the hearts of many of His followers with trials much harder than the one I was faced with. The Bible has the very beautiful chapter in Hebrews chronicling the blessed trials His servants in the Bible went though. Trials that no human could manage without the hand of God. As I revisit Chapter 11 of Hebrews my heart is filled with so much hope because I am reminded that I am never alone in this and I can feel so blessed to have the opportunity to use the mind God gifted me with to search for the Truth is a time and place where ignoring God’s call would be more than easy enough to do.

I’ll miss having hair that makes me look like my mom. Or being able to walk out of the house completely unnoticed by the world around me. I’ll miss not having it be completely obvious that I am the black sheep in my family photos. I’ll miss the melody of the Christian worship songs I once sang with all my heart. I lose little in this change and yet I gain so much more of eternal value.

I’m sure I’ll have a lot of questions about my choice to wear a hijab and I will later write a separate post about my experiences wearing a hijab as I begin the journey of wearing it daily. The biggest thing I want to stress here is my choice to wear what I wear every single day. Just like the clothing choice of any other woman in a free country. For me the hijab allows me to get rid of the vanity that the world has taught me to obsess over. It reminds me of the religion I represent every time I walk out the door. The hijab secures me and sets me free from the over-sexualization I became so familiar with in seeing the women of the media. Now I think more of how to express my mind and soul rather than be a pretty thing to look at. I have actually wanted to cover my hair for some time now because in the New Testament it states; “Every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonours her head, for that is one and the same as if her head were shaved.” -1 Corinthians 11:5. I really began to wonder why there were so many things in the Bible that we just ignored. Many people explained to me that much of the Old Testament is not followed because Jesus brought forward all this truth and grace with His coming and we would no longer have to carry out the traditions of sacrificing lambs for our sins and so forth. But this still didn’t account for the disobedience of New Testament commands. If this really was the inspired word of God then why was so much of it ignored as if it was just human ideas? I wanted to wear a headscarf to become less of a hypocrite and even tried wearing one to church a couple times but was mostly just met with stares. When I went to the Vatican City in Rome I decided to wear a loose headscarf to both show respect for the church and also protect my face from the blazing October sun. The tour guide was very surprised when I said I was from America and I was Christian and he admitted he expected I would say I was from some Middle Eastern country due to my choice in headwear. I just had to explain that sometimes I wore a headscarf in churches and that the Virgin Mary likely wore a headscarf so it’s also a Christian tradition, not only Muslim.

So many people continue to see the headscarf as an outdated tool of oppression but keeping my hair private seems a very practical as well as beautiful thing. It keeps me humble and causes me to rethink vanity and rather focus on displaying myself to the world with my mind and thoughts (not to mention making it way too easy for me to skip washing my hair when I don’t feel like it). That’s what the hijab was always meant for. Not to silence women but to allow a woman’s true character to be seen and her beauty to be a gift that God intends for a select few men to see. There is no denying that some women around the world have the hijab imposed on them by men and for that it is a symbol of oppression in the same way someone demanding me to take mine off would be for me. Every woman should have the choice of how she presents herself to the world, and simply covering myself is the choice I have made between me and God.

I have become a master of creativity in converting in a country where Muslims make up 0.1% of the population, in a city where I am the only hijabi that I know of. Nearly all of my “hijabs” have come from the local thrift store here and it was quite comical to experience me and Rami attempting to figure out exactly how to correctly style a hijab through YouTube videos. I recently had to go through my entire closet and figure out what shirts I would have to get rid of and which one’s I could make more modest by hand-stitching the neckline or pulling the sleeves down. I stumbled across an Islamic prayer rug at a flea market about an hour train ride away from my city. I like to think that this beautiful rug I found amongst random other textiles has an interesting history of how it wound up in Southern Poland. My baptism to Christianity was done in China so I find it fitting that my conversion to Islam happens is an equally unconventional location. Though I no longer believe every word I said on my baptism day, I do not leave my history as a Christian completely behind. I continue to love Jesus as one of God’s greatest prophets and I hold onto the intention to live everyday with Jesus in my heart as God’s great example to mankind.

I will have to prove my sincerity to everyone around me for a long time. I no longer fit into the Christian group I was in before, though I never truly felt like I belonged among Christians. And many Muslims will look at me with scepticism, so it’s a good thing I’m used to not belonging perfectly to any group. God knows my heart and that will always be enough for me. Some converts to Islam pick a new name to go with their new life and symbolize the past that they are leaving behind. I will always be Karissa simply because it is the never-changing piece of my identity that I can hold onto through each new period of my life. I have weighed my conversion more than any other decision in my life and I will stand by it every single day as I live my life full of intention despite the discomfort I will face in this temporary world. I am Karissa. I am a servant of God. I am Muslim.