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joanna lane said:
Thank you for your warm message Kittygyal, and hello to wilberhum. (How mature are you then, if it's OK to ask?)
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Assalmualikum warhmathullahi warbarakathuhu

are you asking me how mature i am:uhwhat

walikumassalam warhmathullahi warbarakathuhu
 
Greetings Joanna,

Welcome to the forum! I hope you will enjoy and benefit much from your stay here. It is a very admirable task to be learning Arabic at your age, and I hope that it will help you in many ways, God-Willing.

I look forward to reading your posts!

Peace.

P.S. I think you are the second english teacher I have met on this forum.
 
Sorry Kittygyal that was careless of me! Of course I meant just Wilberhum. (Wilberhum I tried clicking on your name but got a message that I was only a limited member and didn't have access, so thank you for telling me!)
Thanks for the encouragement Strider. I've been using Mastering Arabic by Mahmoud Gaafar and Jane Wightwick, and also the Gateway to Arabic books. I'd be grateful for any recommendations you have.
Thank you Mohammad for your kind message, and Salema too.
 
hi :)...:welcome: to the forums...hope you have a great and beneficial stay here :)

peace :peace:
 
Hello Joanna

I hope you will enjoy it here, I know I do..lol
 
Hey there Joanna!
Great to have you here. Looking forward to reading your posts.
Peace :)
 
Hi joanna,

Welcome to the forum,
hope You have a beneficial stay here.....inshaAllah(God willing)

Peace.
 
Hi Kittygyal and others, hope everything’s fine with you. I’d like to go back to Kittygyal’s first message where you said welcome, you were learning Arabic too, and ended with an illustrated Qu’ranic text which said that all unbelievers would go to Hell (this seems to have disappeared now). I found it hard to answer because you seemed to be saying “Welcome – but you’ll go to Hell”. I eventually replied “thank you for your warm message”, with a double-meaning in the “warm” and left it at that. (After all, I’d only joined to get help finding GCSE papers and I didn’t want to get into a heated debate . . ). But I’ve been thinking – one reason I’m learning Arabic is I think it’s important today for Muslims and Non-Muslims to talk – just ordinary people talking together - and I expect there are Muslims who feel the same way. Kittygyal was right, and honest, to raise the topic of Hell. And the internet is a good way because people say what they think without being too held back by the fear of hurting people’s feelings. So if you like (and only if you like), I’ll talk about how I came to be an agnostic and I’ll listen to your answers. It will mean telling you about two periods in my life – my time in an evangelical Christian group, and later in my life when my son was small and I had a terrible shock. It would be quite long, and I’m afraid of boring you to death, so I’ll only do it if people tell me they’d like me to . .
 
Hi joannalane.


Post away, :) we know that this life is a test, and calamities in this world are what bring a person closer to Allaah Almighty because man realises that he/she is not self sufficient, but the Creator provides for us all, so we should be thankful to Him and obey Him. Maybe these calamities may be a form of you getting closer to the Creator insha'Allaah.


I really look forward to your story insha'Allaah.




Peace.
 
joanna lane said:
Hi Kittygyal and others, hope everything’s fine with you. I’d like to go back to Kittygyal’s first message where you said welcome, you were learning Arabic too, and ended with an illustrated Qu’ranic text which said that all unbelievers would go to Hell (this seems to have disappeared now). I found it hard to answer because you seemed to be saying “Welcome – but you’ll go to Hell”. I eventually replied “thank you for your warm message”, with a double-meaning in the “warm” and left it at that. (After all, I’d only joined to get help finding GCSE papers and I didn’t want to get into a heated debate . . )
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hi joanna,
that is a signature - and you will see the same thing in that person's sig in all her posts. so it's nothing personal!
But I’ve been thinking – one reason I’m learning Arabic is I think it’s important today for Muslims and Non-Muslims to talk – just ordinary people talking together - and I expect there are Muslims who feel the same way.
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wow - that's really cool! i wish you luck with arabic. i don't think it would be super difficult to learn, but i think it would be hard for an adult to ever learn to speak without an accent.
 
Well, thank you for saying you’ll listen. I’ve broken my story up into chunks to make it easier to read. Please do scroll down to the bottom of the box to see the hidden parts.

The Christian group
When I was 16 I joined a Christian youth group at Bradford Cathedral. We used to meet very early, 7am on Saturday morning. We were young, idealistic and fervent and we prayed and read the Bible and listened to the priest explaining the essentials of Christianity – how you had to surrender to Christ and say “Not my will but thine be done.” He quoted the text “Behold I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door I will come in a sup with him, and he with me.” We had to imagine Christ knocking at our hearts and say “Come in, Lord.” Once we’d done this we would have a living relationship with God, and could look forward to eternal life.

Recruiting – saving people from Hell
A lot of us, myself included, did this. The next stage was to become Fishers of Men (from another text). You had to offer to other people the chance of everlasting life, because without it they would go to Hell. The priest didn’t describe Hell as a place of everlasting fire where there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth (though there are plenty of texts like this) but as the infinite pain of separation from God – but still, he was clear that only Christians would be saved. When people asked “What about good people from other religions?” he was definite that their religions were a delusion and their good deeds were hollow. He quoted Christ’s words “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No man cometh unto the Father except by me.” The Bible was the sacred word of God. You couldn’t argue with it, or pick and choose what you liked from it. I thought the priest was a very holy man and I accepted what he said.

The mission to befriend
So our mission was to make friends with non-Christians, encourage them to discuss religion and suggest they should come to the meetings. Up till then I’d made friends with people because I liked them, not for a secret reason, but the priest said by doing this we were giving them the chance of the greatest possible gift – salvation, so I ignored my feelings.

Putting it into practice
So we went out prepared, though I was very shy at that age. I began on a friend I already had. I spoke to her for ages in a roundabout way and finally she said “You’re telling me you won’t be my friend if I don’t become a Christian!” I still remember her hurt expression and my feeling of shame. Yet I was surely doing the right thing, trying to save her from Hell. Why didn’t it feel right?

My doubts
I had other doubts. I couldn’t help thinking I was lucky to have just happened to be born into the one true religion. I could easily have been born in India and been a Hindu. It was like being parachuted down from a great height and finding I’d just happened to land on a green field between the motorway and the electric power lines – a bit too good to be true. Ought I to check out the other major religions? I read the Qu’ran at that stage but it didn’t come to life for me, and I didn’t get on to the Bhagavad Ghita.

Other niggles
Also, there were things that grated on me. Nobody in the group talked like a normal human being. Everybody put on a saintly voice and spoke sweetly, using a lot of religious words. If they were angry with each other they never acknowledged it. They just said they would pray for the person who was annoying them. (The person never appreciated this.) And as I said, I didn’t like befriending people for an ulterior motive.

My mental legacy from this time
I went away to university a year or so later, but though I joined a similar group there, I didn’t really become part of it. I gradually got absorbed by other things. I was left with a sincere wish to behave as Christ taught – to be kind, to help people, to give money to the poor. And I also, though I was hardly aware of it, still believed deep down that other religions somehow didn’t count, they were mistakes.

This is quite enough to be going on with. Probably about Wednesday I’ll post my second half, which is about my life when my children were small. I will just say that I’m from the Protestant Christian church and my husband is from the Catholic church, and the Catholics think the Protestants will go to Hell too!
 
That's some real deep stuff joanna. I look forward to the next part. :)



Peace.
 
Thank you for explaining that Kittygyal’s Hell picture was a signature – I’m so inexperienced in chatrooms, I honestly thought it had been selected specially for me!

Anyway, now I’m in my stride so I’ll finish, hoping that some of you will be interested.

Cut to about fifteen years later, when I was married and had two small children. One thing I think is very good about Muslim society is how if you have small children there are usually plenty of aunts and cousins around to help. But in my case we’d moved to London away from my mother and sister, and although my husband’s mother who lived nearby was kind, I still felt lonely and stressed. Luckily there were other young mothers in the neighbourhood and we made a group. The two friends I saw most of I’ll call Penny and Miriam (they might not like me using their real names). Penny had a degree in Christian theology and belonged to the Baptist church. Miriam was Jewish and married to a Muslim. I didn’t realise then how unusual this was, but it was a successful marriage. They’re still together and their 2 sons are now confident adults with good jobs. I got on better with Penny than with Miriam, because Miriam was bossy and loud, and it irritated me how you could never even give her a biscuit without her scrutinising the packet to see if it contained “animal fats”, which she said always meant pork. (Of course on this one you’ll all sympathise with her, not me!) Her husband Abdul was under her thumb, but he was a nice educated man with a gentle sense of humour, who looked after all his sisters and gave generously to charities in Pakistan. He took his religion seriously and fasted at Ramadan.

Anyway, Penny, Miriam and I became a close trio. Our children played together every day and we always cooperated over life’s practical problems – the need for lifts to places, or babysitting, the lost front door keys. Time passed and I had a third child, another daughter. It was when she was about a year old that the crisis happened.

One weekend my husband and I took our children out to a children’s farm where you could pet the animals. My seven-year-old son Christopher had already visited there with his school, but it was new to the rest of us. Anyway, he ran on ahead, saying he was going to ‘the playground’ and we lost him, because we didn’t realise there was an adventure playground as well as an ordinary one. I still have a mental image of him running off, a little fair-haired boy in a dark blue tee-shirt with thin pale stripes. We got anxious after a while, and someone said “Have you lost a little boy?” We said yes. They said “He’s fallen out of a tree.” I can still remember how I thought of cut knees and bruises, and yet heard my own voice say “Is he unconscious?” and the woman said “Yes, he’s unconscious.” And I remember us running in a funny weak lumbering way across the grass to where he lay moaning rhythmically, with blood coming out of his ear, while the ambulance drew up from the opposite direction.

This still makes me cry when I think of it, all these years later, and I’m going to take a break now and go shopping.
 
This place welcomes thee Joanna. I am sure, as I am sure of the of the existance of the sun, that you will find this place helpfull in what you seek. I mean, isnt it already? :)

Seek the truth, and the truth seeks to seek you. Farewell!
 
Thank you Saifadin Qutuz for your message of welcome. At present I’m seeking two things. One is to explain my own standpoint on religion, and the other is to hear everyone else’s views. So I’ll carry on because I think people are waiting politely for me to finish before they launch into debate. Thank you everyone for listening, if you are!

I won’t dwell on the day of Christopher’s accident. He was taken to intensive care at the Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon and I remember a long, long night sitting by his bedside watching the monitor measuring the pressure in his brain. He had fractured his skull in the fall, and the danger with a head injury is that even though you may survive the initial impact, the swelling afterwards may press on the brainstem and kill you that way. I sat there willing the illuminated digits to go down, but no matter how I prayed they went steadily up, all night. I remember reaching a point in prayer when I managed to say “Not what I want, God, but what you want” – and after that I suddenly realised that if Christopher died he was OK, it was only myself and my husband I was praying for, how we’d survive the pain, and for some reason that made things seem better.

In the morning the nurse came in and said “That machine! It needs recalibrating” and twiddled a few knobs, after which the numbers looked much less alarming.

But what I really want to write about is how Penny and Miriam, mainly Miriam, helped me. She took care of my two little daughters, aged 5 and 1, so that my husband and I were free to be at the hospital as much as we wanted. She gave them such love, it was as though nothing was too much for her. She organised a party for my older daughter, whose birthday happened to fall in the middle of all this. She made her a cake. She uncomplainingly mopped up the vomit afterwards (“I was homesick Mummy” my daughter explained. “It was pink!”). She must have cuddled and reassured my younger baby daughter so beautifully that when I next came to see her she was confused about which of us was her mummy, and Miriam and I had to make a cuddling threesome to show her it didn’t matter. All the time I felt borne up by her amazing energy and strength – and of course that of many many other people, some of whom we hardly knew.

At one point – and everything I’ve said so far has been leading up to this - I remember her saying “Abdul and I are praying like mad. Muslim prayers and Jewish prayers – they’re very good!”

I didn’t say anything back except “Thank you”, but I was startled. I suddenly became aware of my old subconsciously-held opinion that other religions ‘didn’t count’ and other prayers were empty forms of words. And I knew then as clearly as I’ve ever known anything in my life, that that old teaching was wrong.

Muslim prayers are good. Jewish prayers are good. Christian prayers are good.

Other people who haven’t been through this experience and felt what I’ve felt will maybe see no reason to share my opinion. But I will just say this. When Miriam and Abdul helped me they were motivated by nothing but goodness and love, and these are the attributes of God. But the priest who taught us that Christianity was the only route to salvation – was he motivated by goodness and love? He was preaching a doctrine that leads to intolerance and division, in some places to war. He was teaching us to deny the validity of other people’s relationship with God, and there’s no deeper insult than that.

When you read the Bible – not that I’m saying you should - you find many, many texts that say God cares about what you do, not what you say. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in heaven.” is one example. What can that mean but “It isn’t those who say they’re Christians who will necessarily go to Heaven, it’s the people who do God’s will”? There’s another long passage about how those who feed the hungry and clothe the naked are feeding and clothing Christ himself, whether they know it or not, and will be recognised by God at the last judgment, which makes the same point.

So why did the priest home in on “No man cometh to the Father except by me” when he had all these others to choose from? Not from goodness and love. I think he was motivated by something much more human. He was protecting his patch. He was like the Tesco man who doesn’t want you to shop at Asda’s.

So now my position is that I don’t think any good and kind person will go to Hell, no matter what their religion is, and I’d like to know how many people share this view.

By the way, my son recovered completely, alHamdulillah!
 
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