User-agent: * Disallow: / ~*bean*~

~*bean*~

[ Friday, October 15, 2004 ]

 

Baby Steps

I never know how to respond when he says things like that. I usually just shrug it off and smile, not wanting to say anything to offend him or to give him an excuse to turn even further away.

I don't know why he even feels the need to tell me. Maybe it's to get a reaction out of me. Maybe it's arrogance. But I don’t think that's it. Maybe he thinks that he's already judged, so he has nothing else to lose. Or maybe he wants to show that he's not going to bother to front.

And yet…

He admits that he was at least raised a Muslim. He's so passionate about politics and civil liberties issues that affect Middle Easterners and Muslims that he writes editorials about them in the campus paper. He attends rallies and is an active member of the Arab Student Union.

"So what do you think of him? Do you like him?" one of my female friends recently asked after he had smiled and waved bye as he biked home. He had been walking with me from class as usual and I can't even remember now what we talked about. Her questions sure caught me off guard. I explained that we're not really compatible when it comes to religion and that I doubt we ever thought of each other in any way other than as classmates or acquaintances in the first place. She seemed disappointed because I guess she had envisioned her two Muslim friends who "look cute together" and "have so much in common" hooking up.

Afterwards, I thought about what I had said, and immediately felt guilty. Although I had been trying not to judge him, I had written him off as not my type simply because he was not religious enough to meet my standards. Not only that, I had betrayed his weaknesses to a non-Muslim, definitely influencing how she views him. It doesn't matter that he flaunted his weaknesses himself. I still shouldn’t have been so arrogant and condescending. How disappointing for me to forget. I had in fact proved him right.

Since then, he told me unapologetically that he flirts with girls, doesn't eat halal food, and drinks alcohol. He's probably waiting for me to "condemn" him, but I still think that he has a good heart and can change. I don't talk to him about Islam unless he brings it up himself, usually in relation to politics.

I was surprised to see him today at the local Muslim lunch hangout. I left my group of friends to talk to him. The first thing he asked me was if I was fasting, and when I replied that I would be starting tomorrow, he nodded and said that he wouldn't be fasting at all, but that a lot of his friends would. At least he has good friends. And at that moment, he was eating zabihah meat and giving a Muslim-owned café some business.

I guess what makes him stand out so much to me is that his situation hits very close to home. I always want to ask him, "Why are you so turned off? Don't you feel anything of what you were raised with? You should know better than to turn away from Islam, since you were raised with it." But of course, I never say that out of fear that it'll push him to cut the small ties he has to Islam. And really, it's not my business—it's between him and Allah (swt). I guess what scares me is that I don't want to lead him into a discussion where he may admit to shirk, because then I will be counted as a witness against him on the Day of Judgment. I'm hoping that having some Muslim friends will help slowly influence him for the better.

Insha Allah khair.

0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment