Happy Anniversary!

Assalaamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatu everyone!

On December 31, 2008, I officially said the shahadah. I was a freshman in college and had been praying for about 3 months at that point, and I also had fasted for Ramadhan. During all of my prayers, however, when it came time for the tashahud I would always internalize the shahadah and never say it out loud. My mom had threatened a while back that if I became a Muslim while in school, they would stop paying for it and I would have to drop out, and I was afraid that they would really follow through on this. I was also putting it off for my own insecurities; I knew that once you said the shahadah out loud, there was no going back. It's not that I didn't accept Islam (heck, I was praying five times a day), but I feared that saying those words out loud meant that I would be expected to practice every part of Islam perfectly from then on.

December 31 is Tiffanie's birthday, and every year I go over to her house to spend the night, eat cake, watch bad television, and ring in the new year. It was about 15 minutes before midnight, and I excused myself from the living room to go into Tiffanie's room to say a special prayer for the new year. At that point, as I was praying, I decided that there really wasn't any point to putting it off, and why not start off the new year as an "official" Muslim? So alone in Tiffanie's dark bedroom, a few minutes before midnight, I took my shahadah. There were no witnesses but ALLAH. I had watched Youtube videos of people taking the shahadah in front of masjids full of people, and I kind of liked the idea of such an excited atmosphere, with everyone shouting takbirs afterward and total strangers coming up to hug and congratulate me. For me personally, I'm glad I did it this way. Even though I don't really show it, I'm an attention hog; I absolutely love it when people validate me and make me feel special. Taking shahadah in front of hundreds of worshippers after jummah would have been awesome. However, I think that I would have been too focused on all the attention rather than declaring with conviction the shahadah. When I was alone, I could say it with complete ikhlas (sincerity).

There are a bunch of monumental dates in my journey to Islam. I first learned about Islam in 2002, I saw "Not Without My Daughter" in December 2004 and decided to look into Islam seriously, in March 2005 I decided that I wanted to convert someday, in September 2008 I started fasting for Ramadhan and praying, on December 31, 2008 I said the shahadah, on February 14, 2009 I had my spiritual epiphany (I wrote about it in a post a couple years back), and on July 15, 2010, I retook my shahadah in front of several witnesses at my masjid and received my "official shahadah certificate". For me, though, this is the most outstanding of the dates, Subhanallah. Insha'Allah, I pray that my iman and 'ilm will continue to grow, and that I will live and die in a state of Islam, Ameen!