In 1999, having been a "born again" Christian at a Oneness Pentecostal church in the heart of the inner city in Youngstown, I was journeying toward Islam. That is a story in itself. In 2005, having just been interviewed for the CBS Saturday Evening News, I contributed an article to my local newspaper about my experience as a "Muslim" for a weekend.
At some point I will rewrite it through the lens of time and experience. It's pretty airy but if you read between the lines you can get a real point of view. Though it's pretty much as I wrote it, I hated the title and found it interesting to see what was edited ("conflated" in the original was changed to "blended" which completely changed what I was saying).
Even more interesting was the interview on the CBS Saturday Evening News. I was interviewed in my home for about fifteen minutes by an interviewer from New York via phone. The camera man was in my house and I had to look as if I was talking to the interviewer as if he were in front of me. Fascinating the prep and posing we see on the news. Though a great experience, it reinforced my skepticism of the news as selling a point of view.
The questions got to be pretty in depth and the interviewer was genuinely curious as to how a Christian firm in his faith could genuinely study and participate in Islam without feeling threatened and without, in the end, losing faith.
But this wasn't the topic of the piece on the news.
CAIR was giving away a free copy of the Qur'an to anyone who was interested and the news piece covered this. A professor of Islam at my local university who I had gotten fairly well had been contacted by CBS News and asked if he knew of anyone who was a non-Muslim and a non-scholar who had read the Qur'an in its entirety. He gave them my name. Imagine the surprise when CBS News called my house for an interview. I didn't really care so much about that. I was more honored that he thought of me.
Here's a copy of the transcript:
Out of everything I said, they took one snippet, out of context, and highlighted it. I learned a lot about media and how they "sell" a point of view. Though I meant what I said, without the context it is easy to see how soundbytes get misconstrued. Requests for the videotaped interview were denied and the video of the clip from the news (June 5 or 12, 2005) have disappeared from the Web.
The copies they were giving away was the Yusuf Ali translation (which is the "safest" translation to give away to an American audience). They ran out and sent me a copy of Muhammad Asad's translation, The Message of the Qur'an.
I already had a copy of his so kept the one sent from CAIR (it's beautiful) and listed the other copy online. Were I to become a Muslim it would have been Islam as presented in Asad's translation. In fact, Islam as I had come to understand it aligned with his view even before I had found his translation.
I hold an "if only..." nostalgia for his translation and Islam as presented by the Traditionalist school. On occasion I do read it though certainly not as much as during the period of time in which I lived and breathed Islam.
This period of time radically altered my view of both Christianity and Islam for the better.
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