{"id":111,"date":"2014-01-21T00:35:17","date_gmt":"2014-01-21T00:35:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/?p=111"},"modified":"2014-01-21T00:35:17","modified_gmt":"2014-01-21T00:35:17","slug":"episode-27-bilal-flomer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/episode-27-bilal-flomer\/","title":{"rendered":"Episode 27 – Bilal Flomer"},"content":{"rendered":"

City of Residence:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fridley, MN<\/p>\n

Occupation:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nursing Assistant<\/p>\n

Excerpt:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“And New York actually had a pretty big impact on me because I went to Catholic\u00a0schools, I was put in Catholic schools; I had a little stint every now and then in public\u00a0schools, but I always wound up getting put back into Catholic schools. I think my\u00a0folks were trying to protect my brothers and I and my one sister from juvenile\u00a0delinquency, and that played out well, ultimately. But anyhow, for the first 15 years I\u00a0was raised in Catholic school, and by the way, the Catholic school actually was the\u00a0thing that kind of set me on the path, so to speak, to kind of try to understand God\u00a0and religion, although, you know, it\u2019s from the Christian perspective, but still, that\u00a0was the thing that really inspired me to move on, you know, with my investigations\u00a0which kept me, basically, on the path because, although, you know, Judaism,\u00a0Christianity, Islam, they have a very dissimilar things; however, there are some very\u00a0familiar and similar things about them, of course, you know, all professing the belief\u00a0in the one supreme being, you know. So, the first 15 years were very valuable there;\u00a0and then, of course, New York City, being a place where\u2014I mean, this is, this is a\u00a0major city, not only in the United States, but internationally, and of course, there\u2019s a\u00a0lot of different venues, a lot of different things going on there, and a lot of the cinema\u00a0and especially the entertainment business, which ultimately I wound up getting\u00a0involved in in later years, but the cinema, you know, they were always big on\u00a0religious epics, especially in the \u201840s, a lot of the \u201850s, and somewhat in the \u201860s, so I\u00a0was attracted to those too. I was in the entertainment business as a musician for a\u00a0quarter of a century.<\/p>\n

What happened was I embraced Islam just by myself: I said, oh Allah, I want to\u00a0become a Muslim, I don\u2019t know how to do this, but I want to become a Muslim. So I\u00a0figured, oh, OK, the woman that I had met told me that you should pray five times a\u00a0day, well, how do you do that? Well, she wasn\u2019t actually sure. I said, well. So I went\u00a0to, you know, bookstores and I found this book written by a Christian and it kind of\u00a0described the prayer in English, so that\u2019s how I prayed. I used to pray all my prayers\u00a0in English and in whatever pictures I could find on how to formulate the prayer. I\u00a0was praying salat, you know, most people would say that\u2019s innovation right from the\u00a0get-go, but I didn\u2019t know what I was doing. So finally by August of \u201978, and this is one\u00a0year before I got out of the business, I was telling her, I said, look here, I have to\u00a0learn how to pray; I know this isn\u2019t right. You know. So I wound up coming here, this\u00a0masjid here, and they weren\u2019t praying Jummah here in 1978, they were meeting at\u00a0Columbia Heights. They were meeting here on Friday nights and Jummah had not\u00a0been established here, it had been established at Coffman Union, it had been\u00a0established at Masjid Mujaddid, which was a Bilalian masjid, and a couple of other\u00a0little musallahs that were\u2014just a handful of them. Macalester College had it,\u00a0Hamline University had it there, but anyhow\u2014but the community was really small.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Podcast Preview:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Podcast (full length):<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\"Play\"<\/a><\/object>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0schools, I was put in Catholic schools; I had a little stint every now and then in public\u00a0schools, but I always wound up getting put back into Catholic schools. I think …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":113,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ep","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions\/114"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}