City of Residence:
Fridley, MN
Occupation:
Nursing Assistant
Excerpt:
“And New York actually had a pretty big impact on me because I went to Catholic schools, I was put in Catholic schools; I had a little stint every now and then in public schools, but I always wound up getting put back into Catholic schools. I think my folks were trying to protect my brothers and I and my one sister from juvenile delinquency, and that played out well, ultimately. But anyhow, for the first 15 years I was raised in Catholic school, and by the way, the Catholic school actually was the thing that kind of set me on the path, so to speak, to kind of try to understand God and religion, although, you know, it’s from the Christian perspective, but still, that was the thing that really inspired me to move on, you know, with my investigations which kept me, basically, on the path because, although, you know, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, they have a very dissimilar things; however, there are some very familiar and similar things about them, of course, you know, all professing the belief in the one supreme being, you know. So, the first 15 years were very valuable there; and then, of course, New York City, being a place where—I mean, this is, this is a major city, not only in the United States, but internationally, and of course, there’s a lot of different venues, a lot of different things going on there, and a lot of the cinema and especially the entertainment business, which ultimately I wound up getting involved in in later years, but the cinema, you know, they were always big on religious epics, especially in the ‘40s, a lot of the ‘50s, and somewhat in the ‘60s, so I was attracted to those too. I was in the entertainment business as a musician for a quarter of a century.
What happened was I embraced Islam just by myself: I said, oh Allah, I want to become a Muslim, I don’t know how to do this, but I want to become a Muslim. So I figured, oh, OK, the woman that I had met told me that you should pray five times a day, well, how do you do that? Well, she wasn’t actually sure. I said, well. So I went to, you know, bookstores and I found this book written by a Christian and it kind of described the prayer in English, so that’s how I prayed. I used to pray all my prayers in English and in whatever pictures I could find on how to formulate the prayer. I was praying salat, you know, most people would say that’s innovation right from the get-go, but I didn’t know what I was doing. So finally by August of ’78, and this is one year before I got out of the business, I was telling her, I said, look here, I have to learn how to pray; I know this isn’t right. You know. So I wound up coming here, this masjid here, and they weren’t praying Jummah here in 1978, they were meeting at Columbia Heights. They were meeting here on Friday nights and Jummah had not been established here, it had been established at Coffman Union, it had been established at Masjid Mujaddid, which was a Bilalian masjid, and a couple of other little musallahs that were—just a handful of them. Macalester College had it, Hamline University had it there, but anyhow—but the community was really small.”
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