A Journey From Christianity To Buddhism To Islam

Bismillah Alhamdulillah Salam aleikum, which means peace be unto you. Welcome to another episode of the deen show, which is a way of life we try to put out there for everyone to see helping you understand Islam and Muslims. And if you were just flicking through watching a TV and you heard Islam and Muslim, don't think anything's about the blow up. We're here to educate you on Islam and Muslims. And thank you for coming to the source. My next guest is going to talk about his experience before Islam, and then why he chose to enter Islam. So I'm sure you're here, you're eager to hear his story. Let's bring him out without further delay.

There's only one

is His Messenger.

I'll do green, Jesus.

So why Islam, you got Christianity, you got Buddhism, this ism, you got things blowing up over here people associate in Islam with everything bad. If you go to a social event, you might get divided again, if you're a Muslim, why Islam?

Well, if you're the sort of person who cares about stuff like that,

then I don't think it would really matter what I say.

Because what is important is the truth, not the consequences of accepting the truth. And the truth is something that is virtuous in of itself. And for me, the simple. The simple answer to your question is why Islam? Islam? The reason is because the truth is it. The Quran is the word of God, and Mohammed is the final messenger of God. And this is the way of life that God has ordained for the benefit and for the mercy of all the human beings. And that's why it's lambreaux. concise, to the point. And it's simple. You want to know that you you found out what the truth is, and you submitted to it, you didn't care what people are thinking what they're going to say you were

sincere, and you came to it correctly. That's about it. Now, I'm sure you've told this story a lot of times, several times. But

for the people who've never heard this story, and now they're getting to hear for the first time, and they wonder, okay, what led you to this before? What kind of life did you leave? Before you were a Christian? What did you believe? And first of all, a bit about my background background? Yes, sir. I come from what we

what we would call in England, an upper middle class family, England, is a lot more of,

you know, England has a sort of strata of clauses, maybe a lot more than, for example, the United States of America to have like a butler service. I'm not and I don't mean like that. But I mean, you have the aristocracy, right, which is the Queen and the relatives of the Queen and the landed gentry and people like that. So you have the aristocracy, and then you have the upper classes who are, you know, in one way or another connected with with the aristocracy. It's not just about wealth. You know, it's also about, you know, it's also to do, I suppose, it's also to do with culture is to do with, you know, what you might call breeding backgrounds, there's a lot of things that come into,

into that. So

you know, I mean, for example, My my, my father was a colonial administrator in the British Empire. I was born in Tanzania. He was born in Singapore. My great grandfather was a high court judge in Bombay.

So we have this colonial background.

And anyway, so that's the sort of background that I come from. I was sent to a Roman Catholic monastic boarding school, which is basically a school that was run by monks, my mother because she's polish.

She wanted me and my brother to be brought up as Catholics.

So she sent us to this very well known boarding school. in UK we call private schools, public schools.

Okay. Private schools are called public schools. And public schools are called government schools are comprehensive. Gotcha. So when someone says I went to public school, it means they actually went to a private school.

I'm not quite sure why that is. Because in when schools started, the only schools were the private schools, or it may be that they were the public schools, but because they're so old, and they're so part of the institution, they

became the private schools. But

anyway, so I went to this Roman Catholic monastic school, it's a public school, as I said,

very well known.

And because the, because it was a monastic school run by Benedictine, monks, the whole religious ethos of the school was quite strong.

So in that sense, I had a quite religious as you can say, upbringing.

You know, we had a lot of, you know, Bible studies, Christian history studies, and so on and so forth. But for me, I had some deep questions about Christianity.

You know, amongst the first questions that I ever started thinking in my head was, you know, the Catholics have a prayer called Hail Mary. Yeah. And you know, Hail Mary, Mother of god bless it out there amongst women. And I thought, well,

how does God have a mother? You know, God's not supposed to have any beginning or end? How can you? You know, how can God have a money? Yeah, you know, what does that supposed to mean? You know, Mommy, yeah, Mommy, Mommy, no more, you know, MMA, whatever. And, you know, it's just didn't make any sense. And I thought, you know, as a little kid, I was thinking, well, if God has a mum, then you know, this man must be a bigger God than God.

Right? I mean, this is how you try, you know, because you don't think that, as a kid, people are teaching you full suit.

Right? You tend to trust the people around you, and you tend to trust what the society is telling you. And so these questions come to your head, but you try to find an explanation for yourself. Because at the end of the day, you know, you know, you trust your environment, that's what you tend to do. But I guess if these questions are often enough, and they're persistent enough, and they're deep enough, and they're confusing enough, you ain't, you're not going to be able to ignore those questions. And so that's how it was, for me, I have to say, it was a sort of jewel thing. It wasn't only me questioning the religious aspect of, for example, you know, what does it mean? Mary's the

Mother of God, why do I have to go and confess my sins to a priest? Why can't I just ask God, to forgive me?

You know, what is this Trinity? What is how can God be one of the three at the same time? I mean, what is that all about? It wasn't only that it was also

it was also the whole materialistic philosophy, the whole idea that, you know, the purpose of life was to make as much money as possible to have a good job, and you know, to have to get a good degree. So you get a good job. So you got a nice cars, you got a nice house, you know, and that was the purpose of life Was that supposed to be the reason for our existence? just didn't seem to me that. That's, that's all there was to life, there must be something more. And so then I started to begin to look into different religions, and different philosophies. And you know, Buddhism, for example, I studied Buddhism for a while.

So that was how my sort of search began through different religions and different ideologies. And, you know, I was trying to find the truth. Now, did you have or did you feel? Did you feel you had a connection with Jesus? Now, because you said that you left off

to go study Buddhism. But so at that point, you were done with Christianity?

It wasn't that simple. Uh huh.

Are you just inquiring, you're inquisitive? And you were out there? You want to? Well, I mean, first of all, Buddhism. Yeah.

You know, some people would argue that Buddhism is not a religion, it's a philosophy. And you could follow any religion and be a Buddhist at the same time. Yeah.

Because Buddhism doesn't really deal with whether there's a god or not.

At least certain aspects. Buddha says that, you know, you should find your own path to salvation. And so if it helps you to take something from this religion or that religion, and, you know, then you can do that, like a buffet now? Well, I think it certainly, uh, no, it does. I mean, to be fair, it has some core principles. Yeah. But it lays down some core principles, but

as core principles, you know, you I suppose they could fit into many religious traditions.

But anyway, generally, by and large, we could say that Buddhism is considered to be, you know, a religion in and of its own right. But I mean, although Buddhism never deals with the issue of God, I never stopped believing in God. While I was a Buddhist. Yeah. I you know, I was practicing yoga.

I was trying to apply, you know, the principles of the Eightfold enlightened path of Buddha.

You know, I was I was, you know, practicing meditation and so on and so forth, I sort of tried to adopt a form of vegetarianism. So there were certain things that I was trying to adopt.

And I found that Buddhism, to be honest was, you know, well, it did have a positive effect on me, it had a very,

you know, it did have a positive effect for me. But at the end of the day, it still wasn't answering the fundamental questions. Why are we here? What's the purpose of life? What's the reason for our existence? You see, Buddha teaches that life is suffering.

And although there is suffering in life, you couldn't say that life is suffering.

And so if, if your whole philosophy is based upon something that's really not true, because this is what he says, life is suffering, and the suffering in life is caused by the ego, it's caused by the self.

So what he teaches is that you need to annihilate the self, this is what Nirvana Nirvana doesn't mean, you know, bliss or paradise, it means annihilation, self annihilation, that you annihilate your ego, you annihilate yourself.

Which if you take it to a certain, you know, extreme, it sort of means that you almost become lifeless, you become. I mean, they would look at this as a virtue. I mean, it's very hard for us to understand in the West, because we have in the West, the culture of the individual, you know, the individual is so important and character and personality, and that's driven into us about having character having personality. But in Buddhism, in Buddhism, the idea that everyone's just the same, and everyone is just, you know, it's not, it's a virtue, because your ego is destroyed. It's not about you anymore.

However,

I wasn't really convinced by this.

As I said, already, I wasn't really convinced that life was suffering, no doubt there is suffering in life. And no one's ever really convinced that all the suffering in life is caused by the ego. Is it really necessary to annihilate the ego? Or is it actually the problems in life? Are they because we don't control our ego? In other words, the ego is good. It's cool is good. What is bad is that when we take it beyond certain bounds, and this is ultimately what Islam is teaching, yeah, Islam teaches us to purify our knifes, which is the Arabic word for self, your ego, it's about purification of the self, it's about controlling the knifes the knifes is like a horse. In fact, the

knifes is essential. It's, it's your knifes, your that makes you feel hungry and thirsty, and makes you want to love and so these passions are not in and of themselves bad. It's only when we allow them to control us rather than us controlling them. That's the issue. That's when it becomes a problem, you see. But anyway, Buddhism was working to a certain extent, but I still didn't find satisfactory answers in it. And then I began to look through, you know, everything I could. And that's, that's when I reached this shopping market, you know, the supermarket state? Yeah, I was taking a bit of this and a bit of that, mixing all together, you know, and I actually invented my

own religion, my own religion, which was sort of a mixture of Christianity and Buddhism and Hinduism, and you know, what, psychosomatic yoga and magic and, you know, whatever I read about and studied and philosophy and, and I just put it together in the self made religion.

That was the worst

of all the experiences, you know, spiritual experiences I've had, that was the worst. And I realized that

I got to the stage, I thought,

maybe there is no religious truth. Maybe there is no big answer. Maybe there is nothing more to life than having money.

And being rich, maybe my problem was that it was that I didn't have enough money. I wasn't rich enough.

So I started thinking to myself,

who are the richest people in the world

who have done the least amount of effort in order to get their money? Because that's what I thought. If I want to enjoy my life,

I need maximum money. And minimum effort. Yeah, right. So I started thinking and I thought about the British and industrial revolution. I thought, too much hard work. Americans are rich, but you know, the American Dream is you know, you dig yourself out of the gutter, gutter, numerous

You become a self made millionaire. And there's way too much hard work the Japanese.

Back in those days, they were famous. That's all they did. Japanese just work. They didn't do anything else except work. So I thought no. And then it came to me. I thought, Wait a minute, those Saudi Arabians have been sitting on accounts for, I don't know, 1000. However, many years ago, Allahu Akbar, and the goal was money. I said, That sounds good. No work lots of money. I said, Well, I started thinking, What's the key yet? What's the religion? What's that book was that.

That is what made me go down and pick up a copy of I went to the bookshop, picked up translation, and started reading it and studying, studying it. And then reading it and rereading it. And it's not an easy book to read. It's not like, you know, a novel. It's not even like the Bible begins in the beginning and ends at the end. Well, it's not like that. It's it's a very different type of book.

But I wanted to understand what it had to say it wasn't contentious to read it, I wanted to understand what it had to say to me. And then it hit me.

I realized that if I had ever read a book that was from God, this was

from all the books I had read all the religions I'd studied. If there was one that was true, this was the true religion. This was the true book, this is the one that was from God.

I guess. And in a, in a real sense, that's when I became Muslim. That's when I accepted the core of what Islam is teaching, that there is one God, and that the Quran is the word of God, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God. Now, before we go into that area of Islam, let's just reverse again, and tell us, you mentioned Mary, you couldn't grasp that she got had a mother. But what about now that God was a man or that he had a son or that Jesus died for your sins? How can you elaborate on this a little bit? Well, I think all of those things, at the end of the day, you know, we, naturally, human beings, understand that God is transcendent. God is not like anything in this

universe.

God is infinite, God is eternal. God is self sufficient.

What does it mean then to say that the infinite became finite,

the eternal, became temporary, the self sufficient, became needy, and still stayed eternal, and infinite, and self sufficient. That doesn't mean something can't be eternal, and temporary, both at the same time. It's an impossibility. It's not a paradox. It's not something that seems to be a contradiction, but isn't really it is a contradiction. It's the very definition of contradiction. And of course, from the Islamic point of view, every single Prophet came to warn people away from making God like the creation or imagining that the creation was like God. This is the message of all the prophets, that God is one God is not like any created thing. That's why the first commandments,

okay, the first commandment, thou shalt love the Lord your God, right, and you should love him and worship God. But the second is, you shall not make any graven image of anything in the heavens and the earth, and you shall not bow down and you shall not worship them. In fact, there's two commandments. The first commandment is the prohibition of making any graven image of any living creature.

That's in the Bible. That's the second commandment. And then it says, and you shall not worship them. So here it is very clearly nothing in the heavens or in the earth is God. Nothing in the heavens on earth should be worshipped.

Because God is not a creative thing. God is not a man. It actually says that in the Bible, in Hosea, it says, For I am God, not man.

So this is a blatant contradiction. it contradicts the message of all the prophets. it contradicts reason it contradicts common sense.

And it actually supports the idolatry that all the prophets have been fighting against, since the beginning of time. So the claim that Jesus is God, or that he is God incarnate, or that he is a co equal with God re as part of God, any claim that a human being is equal to God is an insult to God. It is disbelief in God it is making the one who is great, like something insignificant.

God is not a human being. That's very clear and very obvious. So then who is Jesus and did who sins did he die for? Jesus is a prophet of God and Jesus didn't die in die for anyone sins. I mean,

Again that the idea that you know, the idea

that God needed. I mean, there is straightaway,

something that you cannot attribute to God. You can't say God needed to do something. But Christians say, God needed to sacrifice Jesus in order to be able to give you forgive human beings for their sins. God doesn't need to do anything. God just needs to say be in it is, if God wants to forgive your sins, you can forgive your sins. Why does someone need to die? All you need to do if you want your sins forgiven is to call upon God, to believe that God is one not to make any partners or equals with God from anything in this creation, whether it's Jesus or anyone else, and ask God alone, to forgive you for your sins. And if you're sincere, and you mean it, and you feel bad about

what you've done, and you really commit yourself not to repeat that sin again, not only will God forgive you, but God will give you good deeds nearly as great as the evils you did to replace it. Now, that's the mercy of God. That's God's forgiveness. Simple, simple, and so simple. No one needs to die on the cross, no sacrifice needs to be made. And this claim that God cannot forgive sins without sacrifice. No, that's not true.

God can forgive sins with sacrifice or without sacrifice. If you you know, in Islam, we have sacrifices in Judaism, you have sacrifice, but actually, both Muslims and Jews do not believe that sacrifice is a condition, an absolute condition for God's forgiveness, even if I'm not able to sacrifice so even if I don't make sacrifice, I can still repent to God and get God's forgiveness without that sacrifice. So

the idea that somehow God needs the sacrifice and you know, in order to be, it's just, it just doesn't make any sense. And sorry, from another point of view, is, what does it mean that someone else is being punished

for your sins? I mean, if if I go if I have some kids, right, and this kid, you know, kid, number eight does something bad, right? So I take my I take one of my other kids and stick them on a cross and crucify them, and say that so I can forgive you for the bad thing you've done? What sort of nonsense is that? Anyone who said that would say that person is an evil tyrant. Okay, because you punish the guilty, the people who should be punished the people who committed the crime? Not a perfectly innocent human being? Is it right to punish an innocent human being? for the sins? Not at all?

Okay, so then what does it mean to say that because Adam ate from the tree, I'm punished, you're punished, everybody's punished? I didn't eat from the tree? Did you eat from the tree? Not at all. So why should I be punished? And you'd be punished for something that you only never did? Does that make any sense either? Not at all? Well, you know, I'm not saying that God couldn't do that if you wanted to. But we couldn't say that the person or the one or the being that did that is just it doesn't fit the description of justice.

Not at all. Not at all. So I don't think we can I think it's actually How can anyone attribute such a theology to the Creator of the heavens and the earth, and then label this as God's love? Right? Is I'm sorry to say it's just, you know, it's absurd. It's absurd. So you pass through this, that innate nature that you have inside rejected it, you didn't get dogma ties, and somebody drilling this in your head? Yeah, you I did, I was joking with them. But you got out it was drilled in my head. But I have to say, you know, fortunately, someone did sit down with me, and had a really good conversation with me, and exactly about these things about the Trinity about all of this stuff that

we've been talking about. He was a Muslim. And he said, he wasn't being aggressive. He wasn't being rude. He's being perfectly polite. And at the end of this conversation, he said to me, so you believe Jesus is God? I said, Yeah.

And he said, Can you believe that Jesus died on the cross for your sins? I said, Yeah.

I said, so you believe God died.

And it's like,

you know, the lights went on, the penny dropped. You know, it was just a moment where I just suddenly realized that everything I had been taught as a Christian, made absolutely no sense whatsoever, but no one had ever spelt it out for me. There it is. If you believe Jesus is God, and if you believe Jesus died on the cross, you believe God died. And I knew that I didn't believe in a God that could be killed. I didn't believe in God that dies. I didn't. I realized I didn't believe

God died on the cross. Because God is the EverLiving, who never dies. And then I just realized that the whole doctrine of Christianity was false. Now for someone saying, you know, I see a lot of confusion here, all these religious making the claim that they're the truth, they say what I don't want to follow any organized, really, I still believe in God, I'm gonna do good, I'm not gonna hurt nobody. You kind of fill in that trapping, and you start to take from here, take from there. What do you got to advise someone who's going down that path? You know, I, you know, I mean, say, for example, you had a disease? Yeah, you had a disease. And you know, you have a bad experience with

one doctor. And you have a bad experience with that doctor, because, you know, he's a bad doctor, he was pretending to be qualified. And he wasn't, say he was lying about his qualifications, or maybe he was a qualified doctor. But he was claiming that he had a skill in some area, which he didn't have. Does that mean, you're just going to give up on medicine? Does that mean you're going to give up on it altogether, and just like, you know, do a bit of witchcraft and a bit of Voodoo and a bit of acupuncture. You know, just mix it all up, you know, you're not gonna do that, right? You're gonna realize that it's not medicine, that's a fault. It was this doctor who was lying about some

aspect, and it's your fault for not checking him out properly. You just accepted what everyone else said. But God's given you a brain, you know, you've got the reasoning ability, you can check out this person's qualifications, you can see for yourself and think for yourself, Is this true? Or is this not true? So just to claim that, you know, you don't like organized religions? I mean, you know, there's lots of things we don't like, you know, but I'm not liking it has got nothing to do whether with whether it's the truth or not. The only question is this. Did God revealed the Quran is Mohammed, the Messenger of God? is Islam the way of life that God has ordained for human beings,

you've got a simple choice. You either follow that.

That's what you need to deal with? is Islam true or not? If you can prove to yourself in your heart and your deepest heart of heart, and you can prove to me that it's not true, that sits between you and God.

Right, but just to make claims like that is just nonsense. You just, you think a person who says something like that just thinks they will. They're making their life easy. They want to, as we say, you want to keep you want to eat the cake and keep the cake. You can't keep the cake and eat the cake. Right? You know, the moment you take a bite of it, a piece of it is missing. Okay, that's it. Yeah, you can't have both. You can't, you can't. So but people want that I believe in God am a good person, they say, you know, whatever. Right? And that's it. They want to, they want to, they want to have the advantages of believing in God, but they don't want to take any of the responsibility that

comes with it. And the responsibility that comes with believing in God is that you follow God's commandments, you follow God's guidance, you follow the religion that God has revealed. The core answers, show me any book that says, Do what you like, show me any book, any guidance from God that says, Do what you like, it doesn't exist.

Okay. And if you think that's what religion is about, you just invent your own religion, you end up just doing whatever you feel like. So the point is, is that, you know, there was a philosopher, Roman philosopher, his name was Cicero, he said, that the only way to true freedom is by submitting yourself to laws. It's only by submitting yourself to laws, that you're able to find true freedom, because that's the nature of the human being, we are limited. And because we're limited, we need structure. We need organization. We need rules, right? Imagine you said, and you live in a country and you said, I don't believe in organized law, I don't believe in an organized country. I'm going

to take what I like and leave what I don't like, I'm going to do what I feel like and don't do what I feel like imagine every day everyone I did that in America, you'd have chaos, right? Why is religion any different? Why should it be any different than the way you live your life and in respect to God? Why should it not be ordered? Why should it not be structured? Why should it not be organized? You want to make a cake? Right? You have to put the ingredients in the right way in the right order. If you don't put the ingredients in the right way in the right order. It doesn't work. The cake doesn't rise, it doesn't taste right. And it's all lumpy. It's the recipe. So God has given

us a recipe for success. That is recipes from his perfect knowledge. He has given us laws, which we live by and the truth is if we submit to the laws of

God, then we will find the true freedom. The true freedom comes from submitting oneself to God, not by submitting yourself to your desires. And this is the thing people are, the devil has fool people into thinking that you can do what you like, and you're free. No, that's not the case. Because you're not free, you're only now a slave to your desires. It's only now your desires are telling you do this and do that. Doing what you want means obeying my whims and my desires. So you become a slave to your desires, and who is more astray than a person who is a slave to their passions and their desires. Who is more straight, no one's more straight than that. Okay, so this claim that, you

know, I don't want to follow organized religion, bla bla, bla, bla, bla bla doesn't, there's no logic in that. There's no rationale in that. It's just pure desires. That's all it is. And it will lead nowhere and will never lead to any modicum of happiness or success in life. You got their attention, male or female, and you know what, everything they're grasping is making sense. But they got this misconception to hear some, some falsehood from the media, they're associating Islam with some terrorism, they want to take the step, but you know what they think, Okay, I'm gonna become like, this person who's in Afghanistan, or this person who's blowing something up, and they, what do

you have to say about this? Well, I could say 100 things about that. I mean, one of the things I could say, imagine everyone judged Christianity by David coration. But, you know, the Seventh Day Adventists, who followed him in that siege in Waco in Texas, or imagine everyone judged Christianity by the Oklahoma Obama, who was a right wing christian fundamentalist? Imagine everyone judged Christianity by Adolf Hitler, and said, Well, you know, imagine some people and whoever in the world said, Oh, that's Europe, they're all Christians. And off Hitler, therefore, must be a Christian. Therefore, that must be Christianity. I mean, no one with three brain cells would really come to a

conclusion like that, right, if you bothered to use them. So just looking at some things that some Muslims do, and then coming to the conclusion that that is Islam is not

an intelligent way to behave. You can't judge Islam by what some Muslims do, or even to tell you the truth, even by what Pete most people who call themselves Muslims are claimed to be Muslims do. Okay? Islam says don't drink alcohol. If all Muslims you find them drinking alcohol. Do you blame Islam? Do you say Oh, Islam is a religion that allows you to drink alcohol? How do you know I saw Muslims drinking alcohol? Yeah, but the short answer is don't drink it. The Quran says don't kill women don't kill children don't kill old people don't attack the civilians. This is what the prophet Mohammed told us. Okay. Yes, the Quran does teach us about fighting. And there is a time and a place

to fight in defense of your land of your religion, whatever. But you never allows you to kill women and children and civilians, for example. That's what Islam teaches. So an intelligent person rather, would want to know, what does the religion teach? What did the prophet of Islam Mohammed, what did he do? What did he say? You know, then you really know what Islam is. But you can't judge Islam by Muslims, any more than Christianity could be judged by, you know, the Spanish Conquistadores or the Spanish Inquisition, or Hitler or, or whatever. Okay. So I don't think that the judge is slammed by those criteria, you know, is the right way to go at all. But just from another angle, I just want to

come at it from a totally different and I hope, I hope everyone listening is intelligent enough to be able to understand what I'm trying to say here. Okay. Even if Islam said that you should go and blow yourself up.

For the sake of God, even if I'm just it doesn't, but let's just say it did.

What does that got to do with whether it's true or false?

Because every Christian out there, and every Jew out there knows that God told Abraham to sacrifice his son. What sort of religion is that what God tells a father to slaughter his own son, if you're going to judge

Islam by that, which is not true anyway, but just say it was true, then you might as well forget your own religion. Because in your own religion, Abraham's told by God to kill his own son. In fact, according to Christianity, God kills his own son in order to forgive you for your sins. Right? So whether it's Islam or Christianity or Judaism, the truth is a lot of killing going on because the sad fact is, that's just the way the world is. But what are you fighting for? Are you fighting for truth? Are you fighting for justice? Are you fighting for the right thing? you when you fight, do you fight in the right way? Do you fight in the ethical way? Okay, this these are the real

questions.

So I mean, it was not my intention in any way, shape or form to try and justify terrorism. I'm not it's not right. Okay. But I'm saying that even if that was the case, it still wouldn't have anything to say about whether Islam is the truth or not. And that comes back full circle to where I began, what everyone out there needs to investigate is the simple thing. is Islam the truth? Is it from God? Did God reveal the end? is Mohammed the messenger, you can't pick on some things like, oh, Mohammed married more than one woman. And you know, the end says this or, you know, some aspects of morality, right? That's not the way to judge it. Is the Quran consistent? Does it agree with itself?

Doesn't it say things that no one could have known 1400 years ago, by way of science and history and a whole range of subjects? Where did this information come from? How did Muhammad the Prophet Mohammed know things that we're going to happen in the future and we see them taking place right now today? Okay. I mean, there are so many things that we can look at, that could make any intelligent, reasonable person know that the Quran is from God, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God. You know what they gotten past all this, they see some of our shows, this person won the lotto lost money, this person doesn't have peace, you know what he's ready to submit to the creator alone

without any partners, not his desires, not to a man, a monkey, a cow, any of these things. Tell them what they need to do to get to paradise, to live this life that God wants them to live. The key to Paradise is to testify and to bear witness, that there is truly nothing worthy of worship except for one God, the Creator of all things, and to testify and bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God in Arabic, they say the quote of the Shahada, I shall do and La ilaha illAllah. Wa, Shadow, Mohammed and Abdullah surah when you say that you're a Muslim, that's a shadow in La ilaha illAllah Muhammadan rasul Allah,

simple. That's done. And then from there, continue on, and then you do your best to worship God and to pray and to fast and to live that life because that's what it is. Islam is that program, it's that recipe. It teaches you how to live a life that is centered around god, it's centered around goodness. And I want to emphasize that Islam is about goodness, it's about being good to other human beings. It's about doing good. And that's that that's so important in Islam, not because your good deeds get you to paradise you hear some people say all Muslims believe that you get to paradise through you know, you get to paradise because God is merciful to you. But good deeds are evidence of

your of your faith. If you're really a faithful person, you will good deed do good deeds, and if you do good deeds, it increases your faith and increases your closeness to God. So, you know, that's where the proof is. It's in you personally. By doing good that's how you get close to God. So that's what a person has to do once they become Muslim they say those simple words. Then it's just about you know, walking the walk, you've talked the talk now live up to it live up to the action speak. Yeah, the checks just suck. Hello, how to thank you very much for being with us on the D show. Pleasure. And like to thank you for sitting through another episode of the deen show. You heard the

message. There's one god worship Him alone. That message has been the same since day one. All the messenger brought the same way of life, submission and surrender to God alone and not his creation. If you can dig this, then you can dig Islam. It's as simple as that. We'll see you again next time on the deen show. Until then, I set out more local peace beyond to you.

There's only one Mohammed is His Messenger.

Jesus was his messenger.

There's only one Moses was his messenger.

There's only one