Why Did They Become Muslims

17
JALÂLEDDÎN LAUDER BRUNTON
(G.B.)
(Sir Brunton, who comes from an eminent family and who
possesses the title of Baronet, graduated from the Oxford
University and made fame with his publications.)
I am grateful to you for giving me the chance to explain why I
became a Muslim. I grew up under the influence of Christian
parents. Theology was one of the subjects that I was interested in
when I was young. I met some missionaries and closely concerned
myself with the activities they had been carrying on in foreign
countries. My heart felt like helping them. Without being officially
appointed, I joined them in their journeys. To say the truth,
although I had taken religious lessons, the Christian theory that
“People come to this world in a sinful state and they therefore
must be sure to expiate,” sounded bizarre to me. For this reason, I
was gradually developing hatred against Christianity. I could not
tolerate the idea that Allâhu ta’âlâ, with all His infinite power to
create anything He wished, would have to create only sinful
creatures, which would run counter to His almightiness and
compassion, and I therefore harboured doubts as to the
genuineness of a religion that described Allâhu ta’âlâ as such.
These doubts developed into curiosity about the instructions that
the other religions gave in this respect, and consequently I decided
to examine the other religions as well. My heart was innerly
craving for a just, merciful and compassionate god, and I was
looking for such a creator, i.e. Allah. I was wondering whether that
was the real Nazarene religion that Îsâ ‘alaihis-salâm’ had brought.
Or had the pure religion preached by him been polluted in the
process of time? The more I thought about these, the stronger did
the doubts in my heart grow, so much so that more often than not
I would pick up today’s current Holy Bible, delve into the book,
and at each time find more deficiencies and unintelligible
discourses. Eventually, I reached the conclusion that that book
was not the genuine Holy Book revealed to Îsâ ‘alaihis-salâm’.
People had made a myriad of wrong accessions into the Bible, thus
turning the pure heavenly book into an irreparable mixture of
facts and fictions.
Having reached an absolute conviction as to this fact, I
substituted Bible-reading with other sorts of preaching to the
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