Transcript:
You should get to know me more, i’m a daughter of immigrants, My father coming from Kenitra, Morocco and my mother coming from Ocotlan, Jalisco. I am a Muslim-American woman living in the U.S. Also, I live on the northside of Chicago in Bucktown which I find to be a diverse part of Chicago which makes me who I am today. Being an immigrant for me, means you would have to find who you are in order to make a decision, for example, leave your country for a better one.
I am usually comfortable in the fact that I know what I believe in. Because I am a Muslim in the U.S., you might think with the current political climate that I would be thinking more about who I am and how and if I am going to change. I know what I believe to be true and that lies within my beliefs such as religion. Because I follow the religion of Islam so strongly,
I believe in finding the truth within my religion. I find that if I didn’t find the truth in my religion, religion wouldn’t play a huge factor in my life and the way that I live daily. I have a conscience of my own. I know what is right from wrong. People believe that religious believers have a conscience of God and the way that we view things is strictly due to religion, but the fact of the matter is that it comes from the person that we have grown into. Our experiences have a great deal to do with the way that we view things. That is why finding the truth in something you believe in for example, religion plays a role in finding the truth.
There was a moment in my life where I doubted a lot of what was true and what was fake. I wondered if what was being told to me was a lie and what people wanted me to believe in coming from a family who was strict and knew what I should be believing in, and I think that it’s not just something that I went through for example, growing up and every night of ramadan having a whole arrangement of food set for 8:30 which was time where I knew my father had to break his fast, or waking up the day of eid and seeing presents for me but I didn’t really know why I only knew that it was for religion but at the same time I didn’t know what my religion had to do with fasting. but it’s also something that every child goes through when their parents have a religious background. Wanting their child to grow up believing in something when the child himself doesn’t know exactly what they are believing in.
Now that I was turning 15, my mexican side is telling me that I am turning from a child to a young adult. Things are not the same for me anymore, I have more independence now to figure out who I am and where i’m going in life. Making these life changes will allow me to figure out who I am. On the other hand, I have my father being muslim. At that time, I was wondering a lot of what I believed in. Now that I was trying to find out who she is, there is a role I need to play as I am a muslim woman. Wearing the hijab is a decision that is made between you and Allah.
Don’t get me wrong, of course there were moments like before I turned 15 where I strictly believed in my religion, yet I didn’t really know why. I thought that I was just supposed to believe in a higher power and that higher power was supposed to be with me and protect me. Until one day, I was watching a muslim youtuber, Subhi Taha, where he was talking about “Allah doesn’t need us” we need God in order to grow and to be safe and protected when we are out, wherever we are in the world. That really stuck to me because it’s all about the actions and the way that we think that the Quran can relate to philosophy. In class, we were talking about different philosophers, what they believed. Natural philosophers, one of my favorites Heraclitus because he used the natural material around him in order to gain knowledge. These natural philosophers. used nature around them in order to connect with the beginnings of the world related a lot to Islam. I think I see myself as being more observant and maybe more interactive with the natural things around me because Islam can connect to a lot of science. Big Bang theory is covered, Prophet Muhammad, may peace be upon him, mentioned the atom’s, the formation of clouds, the water cycle, etc. were all mentioned before these were proven to be true.
I started to think about God. When I think about God I think a lot about doubt. Many ideas come to my head; I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder when I was in third grade. There are moments where a thought can come to my head and I will dissect it and think about it until I start to believe that the thought is true. I starting to think that God wasn’t real which made me very nervous because I was thinking about what my parents would think. I’m a person to not give up, and I don’t want my thoughts to control the person who I was or thought I was. I started to read into the Quran. There were nights where I would cry just reading because our book is relatable to all the moments in our life including the parts where you are feeling doubt and worry. The way that I can connect to my religion at a time that I needed it most when I was separating from it, yet at the same time I was becoming closer to it was an eye opening experience for me.
Overall, I believe the truth lies within yourself, and within yourself you can find your ethnicity, gender identity, but most importantly something that you follow, for me it would be Islam. Having something that you are strongly connected to creates a strong feeling and also highers your self esteem. When you believe in something so strongly you are able to use it in all of life. Finding something that you believe in will not come out of nowhere, just how God doesn’t need us, more like we the people need God or in any scenario whatever we believe in to be true. In order to believe in something you must find it.
