Angela, an Indigenous woman who grew up on a Native American reservation, has embraced Islam after a Catholic school education and a long search through different religions. Raised in a deeply spiritual family, she says that while the teachings of other faiths left her confused, she found in Islam the real answers to questions about the spirit she had carried for years.
The young American woman described her experience in a video interview with About Islam.
“My name is Angela,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t really know where my journey to Islam began. I grew up as an American. I spent my childhood on a reservation. A lot of you may not know what that is. But we were very spiritual.”
“My grandparents always talked about the Creator,” she went on. “They told me lots of stories, and I grew up hearing them from a young age. When I was 10, all of us Native children were sent to a Catholic boarding school. I think the idea was to make us more American. I spent two years there, but none of it made sense to me. The only thing I understood in those two years was that I was definitely not Catholic. As I got older, people started asking me, ‘What’s your religion?’ I’d say, ‘Honestly, I don’t know.'”
“We live a spiritual life, but it doesn’t have a name,” she said. “It is just part of how we live. We spend every moment of the day in prayer. Our elders always said we should walk so that every step is a prayer. Every step should be a prayer, they said, and if you can live like that, you’ll know you are living right.”
“But our way of life had no name,” she said. “So when someone asked, ‘What’s your religion?’, I got quite confused. In the end I started looking into other religions. I studied all of them. Whatever religion I had the chance to learn about, I wanted to know, ‘What is this, really?'”
“But with every religion I looked into, at some point I’d think, ‘This doesn’t really make sense.’ However many times a day I pray, I can never become God. That’s not possible. Time went on like that. Then I met a Muslim, and we started talking. I was amazed and said, ‘Wow, you really do these things? I do that too.’ Slowly I felt I needed to read more about Islam. I went online and read as much about it as I could. And the amazing thing was that it all made a lot of sense to me. Most of it was things I had already heard from my grandparents.”
On reading the Quran, Angela said: “I kept studying. One day at a grocery store I saw a small basket of books, where people dropped off their old books. Others bought them, and the money went to charity. On top of the pile were several books about Islam. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s great.'”
“I bought the whole pile and took them home, and started reading. I felt, ‘This really makes sense.’ Then I decided to try reading the Quran. At first I felt a little uneasy, because a lot of what I read in it didn’t match what I had heard from my grandfather. Some things seemed different to me. But I kept reading. At some point I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve been doing this all my life, and I never knew.’ Little by little everything became clear. Islam started to make sense to me. And here I am today.”
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report