I was a Catholic until the age of 27 when I met my future husband and his brothers while teaching ESL at a local community college. I had always wanted to follow a religion closely but found myself slipping in the traditional sense of being a Catholic. When I met my future husband and his brothers, they treated me with a new and different kind of respect I had never experienced before.

He told me about Islam over coffee one evening and from that point I was hooked. I went out in search of the truth and after several months decided to convert. A month later I was engaged. After another month, we married, in North Carolina. A month later, I left the country heading to Dubai and spent an exhausting year teaching, paying off college loans, and learning about Islam. Upon returning, my husband and I started our family and we had moved several times to and from the USA to the UAE. We returned to the States in 2007 and have been in Chicago for about two years now, with five children.

Many people have misconceptions about this way of life. I advise everybody to actually read and study for themselves without taking any knowledge from other people — or better yet, go to your local mosque and listen to the Friday prayers, see how the Muslims pray and what they say during these prayers, as well as reading the Quran (Noble Quran is the best translation, although the original Arabic can never really be explained in such detail as is the original.)

May Allah, the Almighty, lead everybody to Islam, the way of life which is one of peace and submission to the One True God.