![]() ![]() ![]() I was presented with a Jesus who was less “Lord and Savior” than he was a best friend, someone with whom I could have a deep and personal relationship. On the contrary, I burned with absolute devotion to my newfound faith. I do not mean to say that mine was a conversion of convenience. Accepting him into my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American. He was the central figure in America’s national drama. My faith was a bruise, the most obvious symbol of my otherness it needed to be concealed. After all, in the America of the 1980s, being Muslim was like being a spaceman. But, for the most part, our lives were scrubbed of all trace of God. My mother still prayed when no one was looking, and you could still find a stray Quran or two hidden in a closet or a drawer somewhere. Islam was shorthand for everything we had lost to the mullahs who now ruled Iran. After the Iranian revolution forced my family to flee our home, religion in general, and Islam in particular, became taboo in our household. Like most people born into a religious tradition, my faith was as familiar to me as my skin, and just as disregardable. My religion and my ethnicity were mutual and linked. In Iran, the place of my birth, I was Muslim in much the way I was Persian. Never before had I felt so intimately the pull of God. For a kid raised in a motley family of lukewarm Muslims and exuberant atheists, this was truly the greatest story ever told. ![]()
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