Yasir Qadhi: My Conversion – Admitting One’s Mistake and Moving On
Posted by Yasir Qadhi • May 18th, 2009 • Printer-friendly
This is, in many ways, an awkward post for me. Admitting one’s mistake is not easy to do. Claiming that one’s past opinions were wrong – opinions that were defended publicly, in writing and speech, and championed for many, many years – is always a bitter pill to swallow. And this is even more difficult to do when the ‘mistake’ is not just one secondary matter or trivial opinion, but rather an entire framework or methodology.
But now, I am forced to make such a confession. I have given the matter great thought, and have realized there is no way forward unless I break clean of my past. And if I do so, I am not the first, nor shall I be the last, to make such a claim. Many great scholars in our tradition have gone through phases of their life, realizing later on that they followed an incorrect system in an earlier stage.
It is an open secret that there are two great traditions in our times competing with one another. Each of these two systems claims to be better and more perfect. Each one claims to be older, or more ‘orthodox’. Each one claims to have large numbers of followers. Each one presents an entire methodology – a holistic framework from which all other programs of one’s life should spring forth. Each one is eager for converts, critiquing the other tradition with utmost contempt (sometimes with very cheap and underhand tactics – as bloggers know all too well).
It is obvious that both of these systems cannot simultaneously be true in all that they say. One of the two MUST be the more correct and better.
For many years of my life, (in fact for ALL of the years that I have been of age), I had been an ardent follower of what I thought was the only system. As a young teenager, I never even knew that people followed other methodologies, and the first time I was exposed to the other system I truly found it incomprehensible. It seemed too difficult to follow, too ’strange’ and exotic. As I grew older, and learnt more about both systems, initially my faith in my own tradition grew stronger and stronger. It is actually ironic that I wrote many works, books and treatises in its framework. In many public and private gatherings, I had defended my own preferred methodology and mocked the other.
It is true that many people tried to convert me, and initially I rebuffed them quite easily. But as these efforts increased in earnestness, and I found close friends of mine, people whom I truly looked up to, convert one by one, I felt the seeds of doubt grow within me. Perhaps my system was not the best? Perhaps the framework that I had initially been led to believe was the truest and most perfect was not actually so?
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