📘 ❞ Why I embraced ISLAM ❝ كتاب ــ Maryam Jameelah

عن كتاب Why I embraced ISLAM:
The writer tells his story and says


My discovery of Holy Quran was tortuous and led me through

strange by-ways
but since the end of the road was supremely worthwhile, I have never
regretted my experiences.
As a small child I possessed a keen ear for music and was particularly fond of
the classical operas and symphonies considered the high culture in the West.
Music was my favorite subject in school in which I always earned the highest
grades. By sheer chance, when I was about eleven years old, I happened to
hear Arabic music over the radio which so much pleased me that I was
determined to hear more. As soon as I heard Arabic music, Western music at
once lost of all its appeal for me. I would not leave my parents in peace until
my father finally took me to the Syrian section in New York City where I
brought a stack of Arabic recordings for my gramophone. The one I liked best
was a rendition of the Surah Maryam of the Holy Quran chanted by Um
Kulthum. Then in 1946, I could not foresee what an evil woman she was to
become in her later years; I admired her for her beautiful voice which rendered
those passages of Holy Quran with such intense feeling and devotion. It was by
listening to these recordings by the hour that I came to love the sound of
Arabic even though I could not understand it. Without this basic appreciation of
the Arabic musical idiom, which sounds so utterly strange to the Westerner, I
could not possibly have grown to love Tilawat (Recitation). My parents,
relatives and neighbors thought Arabic and its music dreadfully weird and so
distressing to their ears that whenever I put on my recordings, they demanded
that I close all the doors and windows of my room lest they be disturbed! After
I embraced Islam in 1961, I used to sit enthralled by the hour at the mosque in
New York, listening to tape-recordings of Tilawat (Recitation) chanted by the
celebrated Egyptian Qari, Abdul Basit. But one Fuma Salat, the Imam did not
play the tapes. We had a special guest ---- a short, very thin and poorly-dressed
black youth who introduced himself to us as a student from Zanzibar; buy when
he opened his mouth to recite Surah ar-Rahman, I never heard such glorious
Tilawat (Recitation) even from Abdul Basit! This obscure African adolescent
possessed such a voice of gold; surely Hazrat Bilal must have sounded much
like him!
From the age of ten I had developed a passion for reading all the books about
the Arabs I could lay my hands on at school or at the public libraries in my
community, especially those dealing with the historical relationship between
the Jews and Arabs, but it was not until more than nine years later that it ever
occurred to me to satisfy my curiosity about the Holy Quran. Gradually,
however, as I neared the end of the Arabs who had made Islam great but Islam