In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful… 

Out of the Darkness

Brother Paul

I was raised Christian (Protestant) from birth and went to church on a regular basis with my grandmother, my mother is not religious, and my father was not around at all. It was that way until I was about 8 years old, then my mother informed me that I didn’t have to go to church anymore if I didn’t want to…man, did that sound good as an 8-year-old, no more church! That meant sleeping in and being able to play with my friends all day without any interruptions. Of course I made that decision based on an 8-year-old mind and not my love or understanding of God. I soon became what I would call more of an Atheist then anything else, I grew to feel a resentment towards God and believed that organized religion was a joke and I didn’t want any part of it. As I got older, my life started to fall apart, my grades dropped, I lost my friends, and my relationship with my family got to an all time low. I found myself in a state of severe depression that left me dead to myself. All of this peaked in the eighth grade when I decided that life was no longer worth living. 

My family was destroyed by the economy. My mother lost one job after another and she would always complain about how much it cost to raise me. I figured that since I saw myself going nowhere, my life spiraling downward, not having any good friends left, feeling that my family resented me, because of all this I felt I had nothing to live for. Most important, though I didn’t realize it yet, I hadn’t brought God into my life. 

On one fateful day in April, 2003 I made the decision to stop the pain and what I saw as suffering. I gathered all of the pills I could find in the house and set off to a secluded island in the middle of a river close to my town. I ditched my bike, waded into the chilled early spring water in nothing but a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. I made it to shore and moved through the thick, leafless brush and trees, and finally found a rock about the size of a dinner table sunk into the ground and partially covered with leaves, I sat down, and began to cry. I didn’t really know why I was crying, I was thinking about my whole life, everything that was negative to me. I thought about all the kids who had tortured me in school, mentally and physically, all the teachers that made my life so hard, my family who I was positive hated me and wouldn’t care less if I died, but they would never know. That’s why I went out to that rock on a hidden island, deep in the woods. They would never find me, and they would just assume I had run away. I laid back on the rock, resting my head on some moss, still crying and becoming filled with anger as I reminisced about my failed life. It started to rain slightly, a cold icy rain that soaked my sweatshirt and pants; I could hear shallow thunder off in the distance.  

I could feel something shifting around in my pocket, I pulled it out and I remembered that I had brought along the pills. I started to shove them down my throat not stopping to realize that I was actually going through with it. I began to get light headed and dizzy, after this I cant recall how much time passed but I do remember, as cliché as its sounds, my life pass before my eyes, but this time nothing negative, but everything that I would be missing in life, my future. I saw myself in high school, in college, I saw myself getting married, everything that I would miss if I had died right then and there. The thing that saved my life was throwing up, I threw up multiple times, releasing the poison that I had ingested. I ended up stumbling back home, calling 911, and getting to the hospital.  

That incident changed me completely. I figured out that there was something missing in my life, that I just didn’t have that was acting as a void and damaging everything else. So from this point forward I was determined to find what was missing, and fix it. I started to get more involved with friends, it helped but I just found myself struggling to hard and getting no where. So I tried doing better in school when high school started in the fall, it also helped but I just didn’t feel how I wanted to and started getting discouraged once again like in eighth grade. After a lot of thought I finally figured out that which was missing, God, and religion. The logical thing to do was go back to Christianity, so I did. I went to church every Sunday once again but after a few weeks, nothing made sense to me, I found myself bored and resentful of the pastor for wasting my time, just like I was 8 again. Even though Christianity didn’t work for me it still made it clear that religion was what I needed, so I began to intensely research all religions, all sects of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Taoism, you name it I probably did some kind of study into it. When I came across Islam, every little bit I read made so much sense to me, it illustrated to me how I wanted to live my life as an adult and it reinforced all of the morals that I had and that my family had taught me.  

Even though the factual knowledge appeased my thoughts for a right religion, I still had to make sure; I began to change my life a little bit at a time. I first stopped eating pork. Any person who has ever eaten pork knows that it is very addicting, but I was able to stop, cold turkey. This was the first sign to me that I was on the right tract; if I could stop eating one of my favorite foods then I knew that I was heading down the right path.        

The next thing that I changed, or rather, started, was fasting during the holy month of Ramadhan in 2004. I didn’t know much about what to do, nor, was I praying yet, but I figured that the fasting would prove my self-discipline and help me to mature. I completed it, nearly perfect. I considered it another sign I was following the right path.  After the month of Ramadhan I considered my self to be Muslim, I still didn’t start going to a Mosque for about 6 more months, that includes my Shahada, but nevertheless, I called my self a Muslim.  

One of the worst events that I have ever experienced and one of the greatest tests came on New Years Eve 2004. It was a beautiful night, warm (for Michigan) which was like 45 degrees, and it was clear. I had made it my New Years Resolution to exercise more and get in shape and get on the football team come spring. So that night I had gone out jogging at around 8pm. I went to the park near my house, only about ¼ mile from my home. I jogged around the wooded path about 3 times when I stopped to take a break at the top of a hill. There were a few kids up there standing around in black sweatshirts and smoking. I sat down on the freezing cold metal bench about 10 yards from where they were standing. I leaned over to stretch my legs when I hear laughter coming from one of them. Then one of the girls, that accompanied them, begins to make jokes about how I was dressed (I was wearing a tee-shirt and running pants), I guess they thought it was funny because it was so cold. I stood up and turned to face the group. I told them to “shut up” and turned to walk away and started up running again, I could feel the atmosphere growing quite bad and so I just wanted to get out of there. The only thing I remember hearing was a guy yelling out some profanities along with the phrase “where the hell are you going?” 

I started running down the hill when all of a sudden I felt myself hit the ground and I went blank. I heard a loud ringing and could feel, but couldn’t see, myself getting dragged. It felt like a dream, it was surreal, like it wasn’t really happening but I knew it was. When I came to, I looked up and could see the stars and the tops of trees swaying in a calm breeze. I then realized that I couldn’t feel my body, in fact, I couldn’t feel much at all! I was numb all over. I then tried to move my arms to push my self up, I couldn’t. I yanked them forward, nothing, I tried to turn my body around but my arms just weren’t there. I was finally able to look over my shoulder and see that my arms were bound with something behind my back, making them useless. I tried to pull them apart but nothing worked. I tried to stand up and I felt my hip pop and I stumbled over, I looked over at my legs and they were tied by something to a tree. I tried to pull them away but there was no use. They were also bound together with some kind of boxing tape. I could hear it crunch and crinkle as I tried to move. My whole body was numb, but now that I had started to move I started to get really cold as feeling slowly began to fill my skin. There were only a few spots on my body that felt warm; I could feel the blood oozing out of wounds. I laid back exhausted from struggling, and with the little light there was left I could see that the lightly snow covered ground around me had been soaked with blood, How long had I been out there to bleed this much? This is where I panicked, fear swept over me. I knew that I was going to die, I was in the middle of the woods, tied to a tree, bleeding profusely and I had been there for hours. My body began to shut down, my vision, my movement, my hearing was almost gone; my mind was running all around and my heart felt like it could stop at any minute. I tried to scream for help, but no sound came out.  I tried to scream at the top of my lungs, I felt something pulling at my face around my mouth. It was tape; it was wrapped part way around my head and gagging me at my mouth.  

After what seemed like hours more of muffled screaming the tape finally came loose from the moisture of my mouth and it slid down enough so that I could finally be heard. I managed to sit-up and continued screaming for help I could taste blood and I could feel it running down my face. My lips felt frozen and torn. After a long time I gave up, I collapsed back down. I was going to die, this was it, I was going to face my whole life soon, and Allah would be there, that is all I could think about. My mind was racing around, thinking about everything.  

I suddenly saw light as it swept across my face, burning my eyes as I tried to open them. I could hear yelling in the distance. I could see the light reflect off of the tall oak tree that I was bound to. I was scared, I felt confident the light was coming from that group of kids who had done this to me. They were coming to finish me off. I was defiantly going to die now. I blacked-out again, some how I saw my self praying, I knew nothing about how to pray as a Muslim, yet there I was, alone, and praying, some how without any prior knowledge of proper Islamic prayer, I knew what I was doing and doing it right.       

Subhan Allah, my eyes then opened and I managed to cry out once more, a man overheard my cry and came to my rescue untying me. He flashed a light on me as he continued to unbind me. At this point I could see the extent of the damage to my body. My skin was in shreds. He made an attempt at unbinding my arms but they were too tightly bound.  The man then managed to help me up but my legs were weak and I fell to the ground into a puddle of water. The icy water felt like fire as it drenched my scarred body. On a second attempt I was able to manage to walk with his assistance. I was barefoot and half-naked. As we struggled to make it to the man’s house only a few hundred yards from where I laid I noticed flashing lights and paramedics and police. I looked down and could see that behind me I left a blood trail through the snow. Immediately police officers and paramedics surrounded me, they cut the tape from around my arms, and I then blacked out again. I didn’t wake up completely until I was in the hospital, where I would recover for two weeks.     

The kids that perpetrated this crime were not found and they probably never will be but I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart. This crime against me made me the person that I am today. This misguided group of kids showed me the true worth of life and they proved to me that I am a Muslim.      

I do recall that when the paramedics rushed me to the hospital I was in a dream like state of mind. I could see myself as a Muslim. I saw myself praying once again, but this time in a Mosque. I was praying in a small and quiet Mosque somewhere in an oasis of trees and shrubs that looked foreign to me. To this day  I still don’t know where that Mosque is or if it even exists, all I’m certain of is that one day I will find it whether it’s a thousand miles away or as close as inside me.