How to Convert to Islam and Become a Muslim

[LAGC]

The Declaration of the Testimony (Shahada)

To convert to Islam and become a Muslim a person needs to pronounce the below testimony with conviction and understanding its meaning:

I testify “La ilah illa Allah, Muhammad rasoolu Allah.”

The translation of which is:

“I testify that there is no true god (deity) but God (Allah), and that Muhammad is a Messenger (Prophet) of God.”

--from an Islamic apologetics site, kind of the Islamic counterpart to the Christian Reasons to Believe site that tries to bridge the gap between faith and science.

What is interesting, is that just like with Christianity if you become "saved", all your sins will be forgiven:

With the pronunciation of this testimony, or “Shahada”, with sincere belief and conviction, one enters the fold of Islam.

Upon entering the fold of Islam purely for the Pleasure of God, all of one’s previous sins are forgiven, and one starts a new life of piety and righteousness. The Prophet said to a person who had placed the condition upon the Prophet in accepting Islam that God would forgive his sins:

“Do you not know that accepting Islam destroys all sins which come before it?” (Saheeh Muslim)

When one accepts Islam, they in essence repent from the ways and beliefs of their previous life. One need not be overburdened by sins committed before their acceptance. The person’s record is clean, and it is as if he was just born from his mother’s womb. One should try as much as possible to keep his records clean and strive to do as many good deeds as possible.

But once you convert, don't dare have second thoughts...

The Holy Quran and Hadeeth (prophetic sayings) both stress the importance of following Islam. God states:

“...The only religion in the sight of God is Islam...” (Quran 3:19)

In another verse of the Holy Quran, God states:

“If anyone desires a religion other than Islam, never will it be accepted of him; and in the Hereafter, he will be in the ranks of those who have lost (their selves in the Hellfire).” (Quran 3:85)

In another saying, Muhammad, the Prophet of God, said:

“Whoever testifies that there in none worthy of being worshipped but God, Who has no partner, and that Muhammad is His slave and Prophet, and that Jesus is the Slave of God, His Prophet, and His word<1> which He bestowed in Mary and a spirit created from Him; and that Paradise (Heaven) is true, and that the Hellfire is true, God will eventually admit him into Paradise, according to his deeds.” (Saheeh Al-Bukhari)

Kind of sounds like what Mormons believe, that someone who coverts to the faith but later falls away from the faith is bound for a worse after-life than someone who never knew about Mormonism in the first place. So maybe its better not to convert in the first place...

Also:

All who claim to be prophets or receive revelation after Muhammad are imposters, and to acknowledge them would be tantamount to disbelief.

Looks like they learned from the mistake that Judaism made of leaving room for a future prophet or messiah... after all, a widely successful religion can't have someone else coming along later on down the road and having a new revelation or it might diminish the previous religion's flock. That's one problem with Christianity, is that they are still expecting a "second coming" of Jesus. Leaves open the possibility of someone else down the road introducing new revelations like with Mormonism.

But how do you reason with people who are convinced you are destined for Hellfire if you don't believe in their creed? Makes you wonder why there are more (open) atheists in Western societies, than there are in most Middle Eastern ones... or maybe the reason is self-evident. :shrug:

[onager]

1. The same hypocrisy and stupidity as Xianity, only in Arabic.

As I often rant in here, I've spent nearly 6 years living in Muslim countries. Two of them in its Mother Country, so to speak, Saudi Arabia. And the rest in Egypt.

I wouldn't know where to start to describe some of the things I've seen in both countries.

For one example - take fasting (please). It's required for the Holy Month of Ramadan (tm). The nature of the fasting itself seems designed to create health disasters. From dawn to dusk, Muslims cannot eat, drink anything including water (a serious loss in desert countries), smoke, chew gum. Oh, or have sex.

If possible, what they do is stay inside all day long, then start frantically stuffing themselves at dusk with mammoth dinners. Just before dawn, they eat a huge breakfast to carry them thru the day. And as is true of many cultures, there are special delicacies during Ramadan, most of them killer sweets.

Several of my Egyptian co-workers had diabetes, and one elderly man very nearly died of it while I was there. Now the fasting requirements do not apply to sick people, including diabetics. (They also don't apply to small children and pregnant women.)

But that didn't matter - my co-worker was determined to do the full, complete fast, no matter what his doctor told him. He was afraid Allah would be mad at him, I guess.

Then there's Extra Fasting, which always fascinated me. I'm not quite sure of the theolgy involved, but apparently you can build up extra merit in Paradise if you fast for even LONGER than a month, and keep going with your fast after Ramadan. I knew several people who did that. Generally when I tried to buy them lunch after I knew Ramadan was over.

And Ramadan itself. I always thought it was going to kill me. Almost every day of my commute during Ramadan, I had some ironic thoughts about that phrase "The Religion of Peace."

The evening traffic is batshit insane during Ramadan. At least I lived in Alexandria, where there were only 4 million very hungry, thirsty and extremely pissed-off people trying to rush home and eat. Cairo is much worse. Fender-benders are common in Ramadan traffic, and shouting/cursing matches and fist-fights are even more common. More than once, I rolled up my car window because two clowns were right outside it pounding on each other.

Oh, and here's another nifty feature of Ramadan that you won't read about on an Islamic propaganda site - perfect strangers feel compelled to walk up to their fellow Muslims and publicly berate them for un-Islamic behavior.

An Egyptian journalist wrote a funny story about that. Some guy walked up and started bitching at him because he was talking and laughing with a woman in public during the Holy Month.

The journalist responded by saying: "Yes, you are quite correct, I should ignore this unworthy female. But I really can't - she's my sister."

:rofl:

[dimbear]

2. The situation in Christianity is a little more extreme, actually.

The rule is that you're not damned if you haven't ever even heard the gospel message. That's only fair, right? I mean, come on, the magnificent pagan philosophers and all that? Come on!! That's why missionaries take such a big risk with the folk they preach to--if they fail their listeners are damned.

The Spanish Conquistadores and their padres got a lot of mileage out of that supposed fact. Turns out that (according to them) it doesn't matter that you may not understand the language in which you are informed of the gospel message. So--after the Caribs heard the Spanish sermon and didn't accept what they didn't understand, they were not only damned but fair game to be enslaved.

[demosincebirth]

3. No thanks.I want to live in the present.