A Quote by G. Willow Wilson
In 2003, as a 21-year-old convert to Islam, I moved from Colorado to Cairo to see what life was like in a Muslim country.
Related Quotes
If you convert to Islam after a couple of decades of being a black man in the U.S., the discrimination you receive as a Muslim doesn't feel like a shock.
The religiously observant is lumped in with the nominal Muslim, the nominal Muslim is lumped in with the non-Muslim and the radical. If we want to make sense of this mess and stop pushing Muslims into the arms of the extremist, we need to make meaningful distinctions between the religion of Islam that a billion Muslims follow and see as a guidance as a peaceful righteous moral life and the puritanical Islam of a minority which so captures the media's attention.
I was way behind in my maturity. I was a 30-year-old acting like a 23-year-old. So when I was 21, I was probably acting like a 15-year-old.
That Islam you see on TV does not represent me, I'm too busy waging jihad against myself, My own nafs are my enemy. I'm sorry that Muslim and Muslim lands do not represent Islam, Our religion is perfect, but we on the other hand.
I moved to New York in 2003, I was a very young 22-year-old, so I just kind of started finding my way as a human and was working odd jobs here and there.
The truth is nobody was a Muslim until Public Enemy came out. Then, everybody was Muslim this and Muslim that. It's a bandwagon thing. Islam is a way of life... it's a religion. It's not just something you put on a record.
Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no. That's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president?
I come from an African-American family that is predominantly Muslim. I have had to covertly operate in parts of the Middle East and Africa. I've lived a Muslim life and prayed in Mosques, Husseiniyahs, and shrines where needed. One must respect Islam to understand Islam. I've read the Quran through and through a half dozen times.
We have reaffirmed again and again that the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam. Islam teaches peace, and when it comes to America and Islam, there is no us and them, there's only us, because millions of Muslim Americans are part of the fabric of our country. So, we reject any suggestion of a clash of civilizations.
America doesn't have the moral authority or weight to tip the scales in this fight between moderate Islam and less tolerant Islam. Muslim communities and Muslim nations need to be leading edge of this fight.
I have gone from being a 21-year-old with wide eyes to a 24-year-old woman. With success comes a lot of responsibility and power.
My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado, where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years, to San Francisco for one year, Connecticut for seven, Oregon for a couple years, and then I went to school.
I moved to London when I was 21 and I needed a job. I'd just done a year working in Waterstones in Manchester and I was looking for any old job. This advertisement came up for an editorial assistant on Dora the Explorer Magazine. Because I'd been working in the Children's Department in a bookshop for a year I just nailed the interview.
Growing up as a kid, we moved all over the country on a fairly frequent basis, from New Jersey to Texas, California, Illinois... we moved 21 times in my first 17 years.
The first time I went on a serious run was when I was 21 years old at Stanford University. From 21 to 30, I continued the tradition and ran 10 miles every year on my birthday.
If you're someone who doesn't have Muslim friends, and your only experience of Islam is what you see on the news - the angry man with a beard doing or saying something terrible - then you may inadvertently associate that with Islam and think that is what it's all about.
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