Reasons to Believe

I'm feeling under the beautiful weather today, but I managed to scratch this out.

So the next question is, why did you convert to Islam? There are many reasons but perhaps there are 5 main ones.

THIS IS THE NUMBER ONE REASON
The main one was lack of justice, legal support and corruption that didn't ensure my Charter rights were protected by going to court with bad legal advice and without a lawyer against my will. This was a direct result of the Law Society's venture into public policy in 1997 and their inability to "regulate" their own. Because of this I gave up custody of my child.

The psychological impact of this form of state oppression is still not one I can talk about, because I can't. Just imagine the state run so irresponsibly and without accountability, to the point of criminality that you have to give up your only child.

Imagine how you would feel. Imagine what level of animosity and hate you would have towards your legal system, your laws, and your country. Why not express it the only way you know how without resorting to violence? Convert to a religion that is anti-Western, against our laws to the point of putting Islamic law on a pedestal that is held above our own Charter and Constitution? That was the ultimate political statement.

Ironically, the community was so bigoted against the Jewish community, the concerted efforts of some Muslim men to promote animosity towards non-Muslim women and lack of fostering of differences of opinion of Islamic interpretation within the broader community - we were told to parrot the same clauses about a religion of peace like everyone else even though we didn't know what those clauses were we were parroting or block voting - were the reasons I started to question my decision and ultimately leave.

TWO
Premiere Harris and his farther than right attitudes towards many Ontarians. I give the Dudley George/Ipperwash crisis and his direction to the OPP and Walkerton as examples. When he was elected, I cried that day because I knew people were going to die due to his policies. They did. To me at the time, he was a threat to "security of the person".

THREE
My family. Even though we are close and have fun times, it had darkness to it. In particular, my father, who at times had a cruel streak, in many ways, did not have a protective attitude towards all his kids. When I was 3 years old, my baby brother and I watched my eldest brother get beat by my father with a 2 x 4 plank. We both were trying to stop him. I tried to fight my father back then but I was too little.

My baby brother became a fighter in grade school, failing because he was acting out. He used to point his pellet gun in my face if he didn't like something I said but around that age, 14, he was roughed up a bit, like the time he was threatened by my father with a shovel because he didn't like the way my little brother was digging the garden.

The worst was the twisted psychological torment of the family dynamics. It took me to convert to Islam for all of us to realize what role we all had. It took my eldest sister longer, just last year, to finally accept her responsibility for a lot of the psychological twists, those kind that most in the mainstream would consider psychological "abuse". (I am deliberately trying not to use the term abuse even though it is. My intention is to be matter-of-fact. I don't wish to promote a sense of pity as it fosters weakness nor do I wish to be cruelly attacked).

I was always the fighter. I was the only one to fight back when my eldest sister's clothes were ripped off her after being punched and kicked. Years later this sister I was trying to protect would attack me with an iron over $16.

Even when I was 5, when my little brother was being punished my father would take him into a room, close the door where I couldn't see what was going on or interfere. My father tried to explain to me that he needed to punish my little brother for one reason or another, but I wouldn't have it. During all of this I could hear my little brothers screams. Of course the screams were bigger in life to a young child but none the less I was tortured psychologically because I didn't know what was going on behind the closed door. I only had my imagination. Very rarely on the conscious level, I have flash backs of this screaming.

In the early 80's Barbara Frum interviewed my eldest brother for a documentary on domestic violence featured on the CBC's "The Journal". My brother was chosen because he did so well in a program for male abusers. The catalyst for induction into the program was after my brother aimed an unloaded 22 gauge-hunting rifle at his wife and their kids, my kids, because I helped to raise them at a very young age. It was the first program of its kind in Canada for domestic assaults although I'm sure of its widespread use in Canada. Barbara and my brother talked about the 2 x 4 incident.

I don't blame my father anymore because the way he grew up wasn't his fault. It was the Catholic Church, Catholic Children's Aid and the Ontario Justice system's fault. Because of their views on morality, they took my father, his brothers and sisters away from his mum, a single mother who tried to make a living in a bar after her husband - my grandfather - had died of pneumonia working in the notorious relief camps of the 1930's digging the ground for the 401, the King's Highway.

Thanks to Hamilton's Children's aid and the Catholic school they were attending, they contacted Windsor where the family had to return to face a judge who was to make a decision to take them away from their mother. My father remembers the lawyer telling him to lie against his mother. He remembers being terribly frightened. The System removed all my grandmother's kids from her custody and put them in orphanages. Later those orphanages meted out the kids as child slave labour to surrounding Essex county farmers.

My father was treated badly, beat in fact and accused of stealing a pair of boots until they found that they had been under the coal that was dumped in the basement for the winter. For stealing, his punishment was to be banished from the foster home without proof and disbelief of my father's explanation and sent out to another. In these homes her adoptive father raped his sister. His little brother was shot "cleaning" a gun in the basement of his foster family's home, or so that is the official story.

(I would like to write a book on relief camps and child slave labour in the 1930's, if anyone who reads this knows of anyone whose family went through this, please writes to me at habamusrodentum@yahoo.com)

My father found solace in the union movement, which was very necessary considering how employers in the past had treated him. But tens of years later, he developed a Canadian AutoWorkers (C.A.W) Union mentality. When it came time for support his kids to succeed when bad things happened we were stepped on to keep us down, instead of helping us up. At times insisted some of us go on "welfare" because that's "what he paid his taxes for". (In the mid 1990's during the Harris regime, there was a hate-on for welfare recipients and supported by many of Windsor’s C.A.W members.)

Ironically, what was particularly attractive about Islam was it's religious laws on family matters. Supporting your children financially is not considered charity; it's considered a duty and an obligation. If you didn't help your family first, especially your children, it was a mortal sin. In Islam, if you didn't help your daughter before your sons, it was considered a moral sin because of the Islamic law on inheritance and the male's duty to support the women in his family.

FOUR
I had an unconventional personal life. I felt I needed to be "reigned in". I only found out later this was not my fault, that Western women are ridiculed by men in many Muslim communities by refusing to marry them unless they are virgins or convert to Islam usually because they are perceived as "impure" and "unpious" and there for, aren't "good enough" to marry, especially from those facing pressure by their families.

It was recently confirmed to me that "brothers" in the Sudanese community (it could be communicated by men in other communities as well) that when something that is done to them by our government they dislike, are told to "beat their women, be bad to them (be unfaithful or pass them around) and fuck them".

I have heard too often by Muslim men, practicing and non-practicing, that women in Canada have "too much power". Yeah...that "power" is written right into the Constitution, which I have mentioned before in Will the Real Islam Please Stand Up? that Sharia law proponents are wanting to change. But I'm sure many of our own Canadian males feel the same way, including politicians, and therefore face political pressure, including from these groups, not to comply with Charter provisions that guarantee equal protection and benefit of the law for women.

Religion has a part to play in this even if they are non-practicing Muslims. Even though I like the compassionate and direct style characteristic of non-practicing Muslim men - who are usually from Arabic countries - I thought they would be more faithful if they were practicing. Well...not exactly.

FIVE
I was in BIG love with a Moroccan who left me to work in America before I converted. For reasons I can't quite explain or understand yet, I converted with thoughts of him even though he was non-practicing. I articulated these things to him years later after I left the Muslim community. We both thought we understood at the time, that each didn't care for the other because of our own acculturated sensibilities. Once explained, he told me he shouldn't have left and I heard for the first time that he thought I was beautiful (even though I don't agree with him). He thought he should have said it then because not doing so just reinforced my feelings of indignity explained in reason 4.

Although my Moroccan is not in my life anymore and I am not in love with him, I still love him. He is a good person - according to my standards - and it shows that being a practicing Muslim didn't always reward one with better behavior. As a matter of fact, after 3 years practicing the religion, I found the practicing men they introduced to me for Islamic marriage, were worse in character than those who were non-practicing. Who woulda' thunk it?