Jama Masjid India

Description:  A Hindu girl marries a pious assistant of a swami, but one who later looks to other religions for enlightenment. Sister Nishani (previously known as Indrani) and her husband, Brother Rafiq (previously known as Chandara) shared with Sister Muneerah Al-Idros, their path toward embracing Islam. Indrani was 6 years old when her father died.  Her mother stopped praying as she felt that god had been unfair to make her a widow with 5 little children.  Indrani and here brothers and sisters were brought up as nominal Hindus.  They had neither an altar nor pictures of gods in their house, as many Hindus do. When Indrani was 10 years old she began to love god.  She collected pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses and worshipped them at home.  She felt the need to pray and thought it was odd that, unlike other Hindu families, her family performed few Hindu rites. During her teenage years, Indrani started going to temple thrice weekly.  She enc...

Description:  Yusuf Estes, now an active preacher of Islam, humorously tells his story about entering Islam. Many people ask me how a preacher or priest in Christianity can ever go to Islam, especially considering all the negative things that we hear about Islam and Muslims everyday.  Some people are simply curious, while others take a profound exception to my “conversion” to Islam.  Some have asked how I could have turned my back on Jesus, or if I truly understood the Holy Ghost, and some even questioned whether or not I considered myself as “born again” or had ever really been saved at all.  These are good questions to which I will offer answers to at the end of this writing.  I would like to thank everyone for their interest and offer my humble story, God Willing. One very nice Christian gentleman asked me in email why and how I left Christianity for Islam.  This is more or less a copy of the letter I sent to him. Introduction My name is Yusuf E...

Description:  A Catholic who rejects his faith and takes to Philosophy, and then later accepts Islam due to many unanswered questions. Part 1: Doubting in the faith. Born in 1954 in the farm country of the northwestern United States, I was raised in a religious family as a Roman Catholic.  The Church provided a spiritual world that was unquestionable in my childhood, if anything more real than the physical world around me, but as I grew older, and especially after I entered a Catholic university and read more, my relation to the religion became increasingly called into question, in belief and practice. One reason was the frequent changes in Catholic liturgy and ritual that occurred in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1963, suggesting to laymen that the Church had no firm standards.  To one another, the clergy spoke about flexibility and liturgical relevance, but to ordinary Catholics, they seemed to be groping in the dark.  God does not change revelatio...