During slavery, our ancestors came here worshiping the God of Abraham alone, without partner and they were whipped raped murdered and worked like dogs and forced under those circumstances to worship a man.

Those two facts make it pretty clear that my first struggle is the regain my freedom of worship and to worship the Creator, no matter how much trouble the white man gives me for it.

People are prejudice, but our Prophet left us a book and he clearly told us in ways that are not found in any Bible that slavery and racism are wrong. Some Muslims kill unjustly even though they say they follow. Some Muslims are racist and prejudice, even though they say they follow.

The most revolting Muslim racist I know are called the Nation of Islam. They killed Malcolm and they live in America and their history is American, so they are more wrong and backwards than the immigrant who comes from a place where there was only one race and now they are in this new melting pot and finding change hard. And let me finish by saying, I have seen immigrant Muslims work hard to drop the prejudice and police their own. We have black American Muslims who still praise fake prophet elijah Muhammad. Where are the black American Muslims openly condemning Louis Farrakhan?

The universal fight is against racism where ever we find it. Our battle as Muslims is to fight against the idea of worshiping anything other than the God of Abraham. Hate me and my skin all you want…

just please do not give any partner to Allah.

How true this is, yet how hard to accept. Such immense damage is caused by the majority to our children, let alone to others, by raising them with the expectation of a certain uniform life story and certain criteria that should ‘qualify’ them for the ‘target’ life story. Yet it is Allah who has written each one and they’re not the same.

I wager all discontent with one’s lot stems from this mismatch between what Allah has written and what one was brought up to expect as the ‘target’ or ‘deserved’ story. It would have been far better if everyone were raised to focus on learning things for the purpose of being able to develop oneself and find out this personal story, which may or may not involve certain jobs, loves, children, or may involve them at various timings across life. How much better would society be if Muslims, having chosen submission, then worked to define their given life story. Then we would focus much more on how to contribute to others from our own path, rather than constantly measuring others for theirs, with all the resulting disappointment, guilt, insecurity, rebellion, despair, apathy and loneliness that follows.

It’s such a pervasive thing that, even aware of it, even being among those Allah has not written the ‘desired’ path, I myself cannot quite completely get rid of this paradigm in my mind. I hope I get there in time.

I feel you, Akh–been there, done that, made du’a for patience, constancy and straight-up help from Allah (Highly Glorified is He)!

If you have time to search SuhaibWebb.com for my revert stories, I pray they help you a fraction of as much as your well-written story helped me.

JazakAllahu khayr!

Each soul is granted a story of its own from its Lord related to where and when He chose to author it. The purpose of those different stories is so that we might all learn and grow from them all and hence from one another. We are meant to be mirrors unto one another. I remain Muslim, among other reasons, because Islam dictates by virtue of tauhīd (oneness of God) that my story and the stories and experiences of my people have intrinsic value for humanity at large, even if many in the world, including and especially Muslims, fail to recognize that value for our skin color, class, culture, or whatever.