Whenever you travel to a foreign country, there are inevitably some cultural differences that take awhile to get used to. It's often the small things that remind you most that you're far from home. To offer a personal example, in Egypt on Fridays and during Ramadan, the sound of the Qur'an being recited is almost ubiquitous. You'll hear it on portable radios as you walk down the street, in taxis, and while shopping at your local supermarket. Competitions for reciting the Qur'an are a common occurrence in mosques and schools there. Having lived in New Jersey for most of my life, where it's difficult to imagine walking around on a Sunday and hearing the Bible or gospel songs everywhere, this aspect of life in Cairo took some time to adjust to.
Over the year that I lived in Egypt, though, I came to appreciate this difference more and more. At the very least, I began to prefer Qur'an recitation over the muzak and greatest hits of the 90s, 00s, and today that you hear in stores in New Jersey. A few months after I arrived, I began to take lessons in how to recite the Qur'an properly. As I studied, there was one particular surah (one of the 114 chapters in the Qur'an) that I would listen to and recite over and over again. I found the performance of it by my favorite reciter, Sheikh Mishari Rashid al-Afasy, to be remarkably beautiful. It was rare for me to get very emotional about aspects of Islam, but when I would listen to his recording, I was liable to shed some tears.
We have indeed revealed this Message in the Night of Destiny (or Power).
And what will explain to thee what the Night of Destiny is?
The Night of Destiny is better than a thousand months.
Therein come down the angels and the Spirit by God's permission, on every errand.
Peace it is till the break of the morning. (Surah 97)
The chapter discusses a very important night in the Muslim faith that occurs some time in the last ten days of Ramadan. It is believed that remarkable blessings can be granted to Muslims who spend this night in prayer, contemplation, and acts of kindness. Oddly enough, no one can know for certain which date the Night of Destiny falls on. One of the reasons I loved Ramadan in Egypt was seeing the devoutness and kindness of the people around me during that month. That piety seemed to be magnified on nights that were candidates for being the Night of Destiny.
I don't think that this was solely a result of Muslims wanting to earn righteousness or a place in Heaven by their works, as some Christians might accuse them of today. Rather, there is a sincere desire among many Muslims to please Allah and lead good lives, and that awareness of this goal shines stronger on these nights than on any other. At the time, I was struggling to maintain my own belief in Islam, so I looked on what I saw as the deep faith of the people around me with something approaching envy.
More than anything, I wanted a sense of peace in my spiritual life like the one depicted in these verses. Whenever I listened to the chapter, I found myself imagining an empty landscape in the hours before sunrise, with angels descending from Heaven to do the will of God. Quiet. Serene. In the preceding year, my spiritual life had been anything but. I had had so many moral and theological doubts about Islam, questions that deeply unsettled me. It seemed like whenever I had resolved one issue after months of reading and thinking, two others would pop up in its place. I wanted to do what God wanted me to do and believe. I wanted to be able to live out my life with faith in a god and a scripture that I didn't have persistent and seemingly insurmountable objections against.
No matter how hard I tried, though, I could never find that peace in Islam. So in my last six months living in Egypt, I began to pray for guidance, for God to reveal Himself to me, to help me find out the truth, instead of asking Him to get rid of my doubts. In April of last year, He answered my prayers. Only then did I realize that those rare and faint feelings of God's presence that I found in the piety of Muslims during Ramadan, and in the beauty of some of the Muslim scripture, were a signpost pointing me toward something much greater. Now I know that the emotions that I felt while listening to and reciting the Qur'an were only a pale reflection of the sense of peace that God had always wanted me to find through His Son.
Until I became Christian, my hours thinking and reading about Christianity and Islam were never easy. They always involved some kind of mental and emotional stress. But, as the Qur'an predicts in some of my favorite verses, “So verily, with every difficulty there is relief. Verily, with every difficulty there is relief.” (94:5-6) It took me several years, but I eventually found that relief in the form of a human being. And his yoke is easy, and his burden light.
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