I took my shahada today. I actually flew all the way back to the bay area to do it with two of my closest muslim friends, and an old professor friend who was the khateeb at UC Berkeley's Jumaa gathering today. I also wanted to be in the community where I first got to know Islam and Muslims as a living religion with real life practitioners (as opposed to a thing of history books). To my surprise, even after all these years away from berkeley (and really I was not closely tied to MSA circles at all my last few years in college) there were a number of people whom I knew from the good old days, and just having them in the audience made it... mean so much more.

Neways, some notes: it was interesting to have so private an experience be so openly public---committing to God and Islam as a formality is of course a reflection of a deeper resolution said in the deepest recesses of one's heart and soul, but doing so only has social meaning in a public space, and I think that's probably very necessary for most people, myself included, because no matter how private faith is, there is inevitably if not necessarily a public and social dimension to it, and why shouldn't there be when so many of the things laid out by Islam are social/public AND, more importantly in my mind, when dedicating our public and social selves publicly and openly is just another way or another dimension in which to strengthen the commitments we swear into inviolable sacredness. In this sense I feel like... maybe this is what marriage vows are like, and I conceptualize of their social and public significance very similarly.

On a funny note, so, my two Muslim friends were with me the whole day, but we broke fast with a bunch of my other friends, mostly non-muslim, and just chilled out into the evening. first just random goofing around, talking, etc. Eventually the non-muslim ppl are sorta like "well, this is nice but we're ready to go.... unless people want to go have a beer first and then go". So I'm like, yeah sure, I could use dinner #2.

When the server comes to take our order, she asks if we're all of age, and someone is like "yeah! Actually we're here to celebrate our friend's 21st birthday" (and he points at me). Which already I'm like, man, I know it doesn't matter but I always feel bad for being implicated in lying to the poor servers at times like this, but then she goes "oh really! Well, can I get a beer for you?" with a big "it's on the house" sort of friendly smile. And so for WHATEVER reason, I'm like, "uhhhh, actually... I just converted to Islam, and that's what we're all here to celebrate... so... I can't really have a beer... you see...." and then she sorta has a glazed look in her eyes like she just hears "blah blah blah, no thanks".

ppl definitely laughed at me. my two muslim friends were like "haaaaa!!! you sounded hellla lame man"


And as the penultimate modern parallel to the shahada, I simultaneously took the momentous step of changing the status of my religious views from blank to "muslim" on facebook.