As I have been asked many times by both Muslim brothers and sisters and non-Muslims to share how/why I converted to Shia Islam, here is an approximate outline of how this came about. Both Islamic Pulse (IslamicPulseTv.com) in Qom and Masaf Institute (islampfr.com) in Tehran have published interviews with me on this process. This article is part autobiographical, part commentary on my feelings about Islam. I am not a scholar, so can write only from my limited viewpoint.
Born into a non-religious family of Shetland Scottish/Lithuanian background, I was never baptised, although as a young child I had already started to ponder life and death, quite typical for young children. I did always pray to God in my own private way. Living in India for half a year as a six year old opened my eyes to poverty, and also how we are all the same. Looking out of the window of the nice Mumbai hotel I stayed in with my parents to see a boy my age begging in the street is something I have never forgotten. Playing with the local children in rural Gujarat, where my father worked in a largely Sikh community, meant I never really understood what “the other” is supposed to be. We are all made of the same stuff. “The other” is just a fabricated fear to exclude large swathes of the world population!
After the government contract in rural India had expired, my parents moved to Germany, missing India, and not wanting to return to Scotland. I was 7, entered the local German primary school, and the stage was set for picking up language skills that would later lead to my career as a teacher. In Germany at primary school, I made good friends, was bilingual within less than a year, and also had that infamous comment hurled at me, “Go back to where you came from!” Most recently, I have had this comment directed at me on social media, typically by “secular” women who tell me to “go back to Iran” (which I promptly, and happily, do).
At 10, I started at the local Grammat School, and it was only then that my parents told me that I had never been baptised. To me that meant I was able to attend both Protestant and Catholic religious education classes at my school, which were part of the normal curriculum. I never “accepted” Christianity though, as I had serious issues with the concept of the Holy Trinity. My private prayers were still ongoing. After graduation from Grammar School, I attended university in the UK to study Philosophy and German. After the BA degree I embarked on a Master’s in Modern European Literature ( I had hoped to do postgrad studies in Philosophy, but lacked the courage (!) to pack my bags and make the move to Montreal, where I had been offered a place in Philosophy.
So I stayed put for the Master’s at the same university. During the Master’s degree, I developed a research interest in German speaking Jewish writers of Central Europe, Galicia, Bukowina, the regions of the “shtetl” which had been eradicated by the Nazis. This interest in part derived from my Lithuanian heritage and the suspicion that my maternal great grandmother may have been Jewish.
Although I was offered a fully funded PhD place, I “ran off” to London, to live in the “real world”, thinking that many postgraduate studies are too ephemeral to be of use for anyone. While studying in London, I met a Jewish boy, and even though his family was more secular than orthodox, I started going to synagogue and learning Hebrew. There was a kind of hiatus when I started teaching languages at high school in London, and I returned to saying only private prayers. After a move to Australia to teach (no more lack of courage to make big moves), three children, and the oldest at around 9 years of age starting to ask me about God and death, the more active research into my faith resumed. As I was not Christian, and my most recent experience had been of Judaism, I started going to synagogue with my oldest child. She attended the Hebrew classes for children, I attended the service in the synagogue.
I also started online studies, first enrolling in courses in statistics and data analysis, then brushing up my Spanish, taking a few courses in Mandarin, until one day, a course called “Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World” caught my attention. While undertaking it, I started to develop an interest in Palestine and Iran in particular and was already carving out a research area for a possible PhD. Obviously, once I started the online courses, I also stopped watching TV, as I no longer had time. No more Western mainstream media. My academic/political interests were taking shape very fast, and I was near to writing the abstract for a PhD.
At the same time, after 4 months of going to synagogue almost every Saturday, I was finding it uneasy to watch the scroll paraded around the synagogue and kept behind the curtain. The “pomp and circumstance” was difficult for me. During the festival of Sukkot, my daughter and I were sitting in a “tent” in a friend’s garden, and it was then I realised that to worship God I only needed myself and a prayer mat. So in a sense, I said my personal shahada to Allah while celebrating a Jewish festival. We stopped attending synagogue, but strangely enough, that afternoon in the tent had also given me the idea to start on social media, something I had not done so far. With my interests in Iran and Palestine, I was soon very engaged and with many Shia Muslim followers. My political and religious views seemed to merge. I did discuss my abstract for the PhD with uni professors and was close to establishing a supervisor, but I also realised that the occupation of Palestine would have prevented me from carrying out my research (scales of measurement of trust in farming cooperatives in Palestine and Iran, if you’re desperate to know, I obviously still had the “rural” thing going). The PhD was out the window, for the second time…
I decided to read a book on the life of the Prophet Muhammad, and that was it, basically. I realised that the Prophet had been the best of men, and that anything the West had tried to present about Islam was badly skewed. Much more reading followed, along with my political interest taking in the whole Muslim ummah (especially the West Asia region). I was fortunate to have excellent followers who recommended good scholars. I was already reading Tabatabai, Baqir Al-Sadr, Motahhari, Khomeini, Shariati, etc, along with a translation of the Qur’an.
I had also answered a call-out for a locally driven humanitarian campaign in Iraq (no foreign NGO’s for me…), and felt ready to start wearing hijab. Not really knowing when/if I would travel to the West Asia region soon, I rang the local mosque (one of the oldest in Australia, it had been Shia, but was now Sunni), and their Imam asked me to come in that afternoon. The Sunni Imam did wonder why I wanted to be Shia, but let me be, and heard my shahada. From that day on, I did not take off my hijab in public, or in front of non-mahram males. The volunteering in Iraq disappeared down a bureaucratic sinkhole, it seems, but instead a Shia sister in Perth, Australia, recommended a course in Qom to me, closing date was within a week. I was accepted, and then faced the long wait to have my visa approved.
In fact, the visa took so long that my course had finished, but with the visa in my passport, I travelled to Iran for the first time, immediately to Imam Reza Shrine, also the first time I prayed in public. When I had to leave the Shrine and the Imam, I did indeed cry all the way back to my hotel, hoping that Imam Reza would invite me back again. Now, I write this on my second “ziarat” visa to Iran, quite an extended stay this time, many more videos being recorded, also having written articles for the two Institutes. This time, I am “putting my life in order” to work only for Allah.
Everything in my life now relates to working for the pleasure of Allah and gaining nearness to Him. I have lost touch with old friends, some have chosen to ignore me, but I have gained in my new Muslim brothers and sisters some of the best people. People of humility, great kindness, highly educated, gentle and loving with their family and strangers. Political discussion is also always there. As Islam is also sent to us to liberate the oppressed people from the tyrants, Muslim believers can be some of the most politically committed people.
I certainly encourage people of other faiths to explore the teachings of Prophet Muhammad and his progeny, the Ahlul Bayt. I now read an abridged version in English of one of the great Tafsir’s on the Qur’an, Alama Tabatabai’s Al Mizan. Alongside I read the first Tafsir to be authored in English, the Ascendant Qur’an by Imam Muhammad Al-Asi. Islam is the most natural and complete faith, the faith I realise I have had since I was a child. It is also a faith of complete submission to God, which is the only way for man to control and purify his self, and to gain true happiness. With Islam comes a progressive lack of career ambition in the stereotypical way, it leads one to strive only to do good, honest work for the sake of Allah, whatever that may be. Western arrogance is also highly eroded by Islam, with humility being the cornerstone of this complete way of life. Allah also helps us to seek the company of fellow believers so that the purity of our inner being (which is what we are trying to develop) is not tainted or corrupted.
The male and female role models in Islam, ie. Prophet Muhammad, the twelve Shia Imams, and the Prophet’s daughter Fatima Zahra, as well as her daughter Zaynab, amongst others, are the most perfect role models for raising our children. No cult of celebrities that corrupts the children’s minds, no shallow emphasis on a person’s outer appearance, rather, the Prophet and his progeny exemplify the best human traits which we need to emulate.
I do describe Islam as the solution for mankind, it is the only system capable of liberating man from his petty whims and worries and educating him in self-sacrifice for the sake of Allah, which is also for the sake of mankind. When a majority of mankind has accepted Islam, Islam in its original teaching by the Prophet, not the corrupted Wahhabi version, then mankind will be well on the way to peace. As Muslims, we are in fact awaiting the return of Imam Mahdi, the Saviour, who will return with Prophet Jesus at his side, and will establish peace and justice in the world. Accepting Islam is a big step in a person’s life, and it might be a very bumpy ride, but all good work is also hard work, as it is only through the hard labour of polishing away our imperfections that we can get a glimpse of the pearl inside us.
Theories 4 Change 
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