title: I Will Not Settle for Being Ordinary

What would 2,000 + American Muslims say to America if given the chance? I really wanted to know. So anticipating their replies, I braved the bad Internet connection, had a mini- panic attack when I thought my brother had closed the window with the short video being downloaded, and finally pressed “play” with anticipation that probably rivaled the “Twilight fanatics” when the new sequel came out (whatever it is called. I haven’t and will not read the books nor watch the movies).

Finally! Our voice would be heard, I thought.

A few minutes later, the gigantic grin on my face had turned to a raised eyebrow and apparent disbelief.

“You want the world to know that your son thinks that you named him after a Qur’anic word but that you really named him after your first crush? That’s what you would tell America if you had the chance? Or that you cheated your way through high school? Why would you want anybody to know that?

And most of all, why would you connect Islam to that?

Needless to say, I was really disappointed. Maybe it was because I was so excited about the video….

But, I honestly believe it was more than that.

It was the fact that this reflected the new phenomenon that so many of us Muslims seemed to have fallen into-
“I just want to ‘fit in’. I just want to be normal-like everybody else.”

Islam never asked us to be ‘just normal’ and like ‘everybody else’. Instead, Islam told us to be strangers, or it praised the strangers. In a well known hadith,the Prophet said:

“Islam began as something strange, and it shall return to being something strange, so give glad tidings to the strangers.”

Not only that, but Islam should make us exceptional; we should never settle for being “normal, just like everybody else”. So many of the things we know today, such as the way blood circulates in the human body (yes, Ibn Al Nafis discovered it more than 300 years before William Harvey), and so many of the things we have, including modern surgical instruments, we owe to the Muslim scientists, engineers, physicians, translators, artists and philosophers of the Islamic golden age (the period that started roughly 120 hundred years after the Prophet’s *sallah Allahoo alyhee wa salam* death and continued for around 400 years, when Europe was still in the dark middle ages), who sought to live by Islam’s commandments and who embodied its stress on seeking knowledge.

Howard R. Turner writes:

“Muslim artists and scientists, princes and laborers together made a unique culture that has directly and indirectly influenced societies on every continent.

Thus, Islam should make us leaders of the world. (People should want to copy us! Not us want to copy them.)

It should also make us the first in any community to do good. How many hadiths do we have about caring for the widows, orphans and poor? How many times does the Qur’an associate faith with doing good deeds? If we aren’t doing those deeds, the least we can do is refrain from telling others about our sins and disclosing things like “cheating through highschool”.

Islam doesn’t ask us to be perfect. Only Allah is. But, Islam asks us to regret our sins and to repent from them..not boast about them!

The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said: “My entire nation is safe, except al-Mujahirin (those who boast of their sins). Among the Mujaharah is that a man commits an (evil) act, and wakes up in the morning while Allah has kept his (sin) a secret, he says: “O so- and-so! Last night I did this and that.” He goes to sleep while Allah has kept his (sin) a secret but he wakes up in the morning and uncovers what Allah has kept a secret!” [Saheeh al-Bukhari]

On the other hand, the video also got me thinking about another group of Muslims, who rather than being concerned with “me, me, me/ I just want to fit in”, talk about “Islam, Islam, Islam” but forget about “me” and the fact that their actions represent Islam. It is not enough that we preach to others about the theoretical aspects of Islam. We need to remember that our actions represent Islam. We are “walking manifestations of Islam” and the way we treat our neighbors, the way we carry ourselves, the way we leave/pick up the garbage on the street, the way we talk to others, etc. all represent Islam. As Amr Khalad, the Egyptian da’ee, once said, “in the Western countries, Muslims are ambassadors of Islam”.

It is time that we remember that.

And it is time that we lived by that.