BEFORE embracing the religion of Allah,
Ahmad Holt was a Christian who was very familiar with the Bible, The Holy
Bible. He accepted everything that he read in it without question. And in later
years he accepted that it was fitting that the Jews should be returned to their
homeland. And in due course he felt a deep affection towards those people who
were being threatened by a surrounding hostile enemy, mostly Muslim, especially
the Palestinians.
The time came when he felt himself drawn
towards that land, what people call Israel,
to identify with those persecuted Jews who have suffered terribly in Europe during World War 2. At that period of time his
attitude towards the Muslims and towards the Palestinians was that they were
terrorists and they were among the least of humanity. He always had that mental
image of Islam advancing by the threat of the sword, the threat of death.
In the late seventies, he felt so moved
that he decided that he must go to Israel to identify with the Jews,
to identify with the Israelis, to help them in their struggle against the
Palestinians in particular and against the Muslims in general.
There is an old saying, and it is a very
true one, that Allah works in mysterious ways. And Praise be to Allah, it is
very true. He arrived in Israel
and he was welcomed by the Jewish people. He worked with them and he began to
meet Palestinians.
There was something about the
Palestinians. They knew who he was, his attitudes and thoughts and the reason
why he had gone to Israel.
There was something from their example that began to radiate into his life. Their warmth and their hospitality, their love
and their affection. They always referred to him as a brother. Never a
stranger, always a brother. And yet he had denied them and he had gone to work
against them. There were many wonderful experiences that occurred in his
meetings with the Palestinians. They never once tried to impress Islam upon his
life, it was hardly ever mentioned, it was their example that radiated so much
into his mind, his life.
The time came when, because of his
association with the Palestinians, he was ordered to leave Israel. In the
period time he had been there, a blindfold had fallen from his eyes and he
began to see a new picture. He saw the suffering of the people who had been
driven from their land. He saw the inhumanity of the Israelis towards the
Palestinians whose land that they had stolen. He saw young men who had been in
the prison and tortured. He saw people whose land had been confiscated and
taken from them. He saw school boys who been beaten up by the police. All these
things were revealed to him at first hand.
When he came back to England, he gave a lot of thoughts to these
events that occurred to him in what he always called and referred to as “Israel”, which
by then was imprinted in his mind as “Occupied Palestine”. In all truth, it was
like putting pieces of jigsaw puzzle together. He began to question. What was
it that those people, who had been denied their homes, their land and their
livelihood, many of them being so poor, what was it that they radiated into his
life? What did they give to him? And Holt began to search, to reach out.
One day, on a visit to London, he met an English brother and he
said, “You know, you are a Muslim and you don’t recognise it.” This was the
effect the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle fitting into position.
Before he could confess Islam, before he
could acknowledge Islam as his religion, there was an obstacle that he had to
overcome. This is related to Jesus (Prophet Isa, peace be upon him). He always
accepted Jesus as being the “Son of God” and “God-made man”. He began to
rationalise. To whom did Jesus pray? How did he pray? Jesus prayed as a Muslim.
He went into the desert and he prostrated on the ground to the Supreme
Authority, to the Supreme Creator. Holt began to give thought to the opening
line of the Lord’s prayer which Jesus (peace be upon him) taught himself. “Our
father who are in Heaven.” Not “my” father but “our” father. So Jesus is
telling us all that Allah (The Most Glorious, Most High) is the father of all
creation because all is created by Allah. This eased the conscience in Holt’s
mind and with a joyful heart, he became a Muslim.
