MY JOURNEY TO ISLAM

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

I was born in 1953 and my Christian parents gave me the name Feliciano J. Nagac, II, who, 40 years later, would convert to Islam and adopt the Muslim name, AbdulSalaam J. Nagac.

A native of Cagayan de Oro City, Philippines, which is predominantly Roman Catholic, my pious parents taught me and my younger brothers how to pray the rosary and enjoined us to go to the church on Sundays. For a while I felt proud that I was growing up religious like my parents, but as I saw followers of Christian sects debating or disagreeing with other Chrisitian sects in their interpretation of the verses of the Bible, I became confused and somehow felt uncertain about Catholicism. Consiequently I began to feel hesitant to go to the church and felt lazy praying the rosary until I totally abandoned both. Deep inside me, however, I felt and believed that there is One Supreme Being who’se in control of everything and everyone including me. Nothwithstanding my obvious doubts on the authenticity of my faith at that time, I didn’t switch to any other Christian sect or to any other religion.

My first encounter with Islam was in 1993, through the preachings of Omar Ali, my only Muslim fellow-employee at the Philippine Helicoper Services, Incorporated (PHSI), renamed Eurocopter Philippines, Incorporated (EPI), Domestic Airport, Manila, where among the functions I held was, Technical Librarian.

Omar’s Islamic preachings came at a time when I was very much active in music who sang and played the guitar as Cat Stevenz, my ‘idol’ during those days was doing before he became Yusuf Islam. As such, I was very much present in birthdays, Christmas celebrations and other social gatherings, and, naturally, I felt my importance to those people who loved me for my music. In short, it seemed to me then that Omar preached Islam to me to take away my happy-go-lucky lifestyle or to ‘brainwash’ me to submit to the many do’s and don’ts prescribed by Islam, because according to him, only by submitting myself to such does and donts that I will be able to enter Paradise and enjoy everlasting happiness.

Other than explaining to me a lot of things about Islam, Omar from time to time gave me Islamic literatures, and on one occasion he made me watch Ahmed Deedat’s video tape “Is the Bible Word of God?”. What I now consider as Omar’s ultimate blow to my loyalty to my faith then, was when he loaned me the English translation of the Qur’an on the condition that in accepting it, I should, as a pre-requisite, first take a bath and put the Qur’an on an elevated place every after reading. How Omar was able to convince an anti-Muslim that I used to be since childhood to read the Qur-an and at the same time follow the rules on how the material should be handled is rather strange. I must admit that, as I started reading Omar’s scripture, I began to feel both excitement and fear: excitement that as I, one by one find answers to the questions in my mind, I’d find myself no longer ignorant or uninformed. I felt fear also that as I gradually become confortable about Islam I would eventually desire to become a Muslim, and, consequently, be forced against my will to abandon many of the things that made me feel happy now and then, and, perform certain duties like regular prayers, abstaining from food and drinks, etc., during Ramadan, which seemed too much to me.

Upon Omar’s invitation, I attended the 1993 Eid’l Ftr celebration at the Nayong Pilipino masjid just a walking distance from PHSI. It was there that I told him of my intention to embrace Islam. After the Khutbah, I was made to execute my Shahadah and all the male Muslims who were there came one after another to hug me.

Among the changes to my personality since I converted to Islam was that I gradually abandoned my vices and my guitar-singing hobby at home which was now replaced with either reading Islamic literatures or listening to Islamic cassette tapes and or watching Islamic videos. During weekends I attended seminars at the Islamic Wisdom Worldwide (IWW) in Quiapo, Manila where I listened to lectures on Tawheed, Comparative Religion and Arabic Level 1.

The Islamic seminars I attended at IWW also gave me the chance to take home Islamic reading materials from time to time, which either I distributed to relatives and officemates or kept in one area of the house which eventually grew into a small Islamic library. At the PHSI library on the other hand, during breaktimes I had ample opportunities to preach Islam to fellow-employees.

To my great surprise and happiness, last year 2000, Dr. Muhammad Amin Gafari, the Director of IWW, informed me that I was being recommended for Hajj free of charge on my part along with 20 other Filipino Muslim converts. The journey enabled me not only to perform pilgrimage to Mecca but also visit the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah. The entire trip was unforgettable to me having recorded on a journal my daily observations while I was there and eventually published it in my blog, “Message from the Desert”

My experiences on Hajj made me even more enthusiastic in sharing the message of Islam to my fellow-employees, unaware that years after my resignation from the company in 2004 to lead a simple life and have more time for Islamic studies specially Qur’an reading, 3 of those guys I had conversations with about Islam at the library namely Dennis Regaspi, Perlito Urquiola and Joel Fariñas eventually got employment in aviation companies the Middle East and while there they embraced Islam.

My change of religion became an emotional issue between me and my parents. To my Dad who used to be a world war II veteran and then an air force personnel after the war, my becoming a Muslim means joining a religion that teaches wanton and merciless killing of innocent people simply because they belong to another religion, while my mother warned that my prolonged refusal to return to Christianity would eventually cause her death. None of their fears came true and none of their pressures affected me till they realized that I’ve embraced Islam and will stick to it till my last breath.

That I used to be a musician as I mentioned here earlier made me forget about marriage. In 1996, however, or 3 years since I became a Muslim, I met a woman who embraced Islam in 1994 while working for a Palestininian family in Ajman, U.A.E. and whom I found adhering to the Islamic rulings on attire aside from being more capable than me in reading the Arabic text of the Qur’an, I didn’t waste time in proposing marriage to her and on the 18^th of May 1997 our Islamic wedding was solemnized not far from the apartment that I was renting and which eventually became our first residence.

Today, 18 years since I declared, “I bear witness that there is none to be worshipped other than Allah, and I bear witness. that Mohammad is the Slave and Messenger of Allah”, my wife Fatmah and I now have 4 children namely, Jameela 13, AbdulMajid 12, Abdulaziz 9 – all except Mariam 5 who is the youngest and who knows only Surah Al Fatiha, Sura Al-Ikhlas and a few verses of Surah Ya Sin, perform the 5 times daily obligatory prayers in Arabic and fasting during the month of Ramadan. With this, I can say that my lonesome journey to Islam in the past is now a joyful journey for myself and my immediate love ones, to Paradise.

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