“Because Allah
Guided Me” - An Evening with Yusuf Estes
By Tahir Ali
Chairman
WIC Host Committee
From Left: Imam Hamid Mehmood,
Tahir Ali and Sheikh Yusuf Estes |
Massachusetts: “NOW,
THEREFORE, I, Timothy P. Murray, Mayor of the City of Worcester,
do hereby proclaim Saturday, May 6, 2006 to be: WORCESTER
ISLAMIC CENTER DAY” – these words from the proclamation
read aloud by Farah Baara resonated well among an estimated
thousand people who had gathered at the Worcester Islamic
Center (WIC) that day.
The event, an interactive session with Yusuf Estes, that
was live broadcast over the internet - drew a huge crowd
who came from various Islamic Centers in Massachusetts,
including New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
The program started on time, with Qira’t recited by
Imam Hamid Mehmood. Youth participation was encouraging
as Sr. Farah Baara and Mazen Ramadan, read the Mayors’
proclamation and introduced the keynote speaker, respectively.
Yusuf Estes, a former priest and preacher, who now preaches
Islam, enlightened the audience by revealing the amazing
tale of how he and his father, both ordained ministers,
plus his friend, a Catholic priest, became convinced of
the truth of Islam. “About 14 years ago,” he
said, “I ran into a gentleman from Egypt – when
he saw that I was trying to bring him into Christianity.
He said, ‘I’ll go to your religion if your religion
is better than my religion’. This will be easy, I
told myself: fill up the bathtub and we will dunk him tonight,
tomorrow he will be a Christian. But when he added, ‘But
you got to have proof.’ ‘But in religion you
have only faith,’ I argued. The Egyptian replied,
‘In Islam we have both, we have faith and we have
proof.’”
Estes frequently narrates his “priest story”.
He acknowledged the fact that the Karachi TV in Pakistan
has been broadcasting the “priest story” every
Ramadan since 2000 “and if they continue to run it
next year, I’ll beat ‘I love Lucy’ –
I’ll become the ‘I love Lucy’ of Islam.”
He added jokingly.
Estes admitted that the more he learned about Islam the
closer he got to it. When asked what had led him to embrace
Islam, his answer was the same that was given to him when
he asked the same question of the thousands of Christians
that he himself later converted to Islam: “Because
Allah guided me”
According to Estes, Christianity is not anything but Islam
deviated. “What is Islam? Who is a Muslim,”
he asked rhetorically. He went on to explain the usage of
‘verb’ in English, “In English we put
‘er’ at the end of the verb, it makes the one
doing the action: talk-er, think-er etc. However, in Arabic
we put ‘mu’ in front of the verb: mu- safar,
mu-iklas” Then he derived the word Muslim from mu-Islam.
“Islam,” he said, “means five things:
Surrender (we are getting good at that – he added
sarcastically), Submit, Obey, Sincerity and Peace.”
WIC and the audience |
Estes noted that Islam was
not a new message, and that it is the same message that
came with all the prophets. “In the Bible, Gospel
of St. Mark Chapter 12, verse 29 – they were asking
about Jesus ‘Tell us about the big commandment’
and he quoted from the Old Testament, ‘To know Oh
(people of) Israel that your God is one Lord, and you have
to worship or love him with all your heart, and all your
mind...’” Estes went on, “And it is not
really different than the Book of Exodus where the first
commandment in the Old Testament states: … you know
no other god besides me, beside me there is no other god,
thou shalt not have any other god besides me.” Estes
analyzed for the audience, “Said it in three different
ways in the same sentence, and those three are one: No god
except God”
A lively question and answer session followed the talk,
and Yusuf Estes responded to most of the questions posed
to him, although he redirected some of the enquirers to
his website for an answer to avoid redundancy. Most of the
time, Estes had the crowd jumping up in ovation and to laugh
heartedly at his comic remarks.
Toward the end, Mohammed Yousaf of WIC gave an account of
the WIC state of affairs, and the evening ended over a scrumptious
dinner, yet people were still thirsty and starving for more
knowledge out of Imam Yusuf Estes.
The WIC Host Committee comprisses Tahir Ali, Jihad Boura,
Saleem Khanani , Imam Hamid Mehmood, Nassar Kabbara, Shameem
Ahmed, Rasha Boura, Imad Khreim, Mohammad Mushtaque, Ziad
Ramadan, Miraj Ahmed, Iqbal Ali, Maher Taufeeque, Zakir
Magdum, Isa Mujahid, Muhammad Ramzan, Siraj Ahmed, Sultan
Saadeh, Abdulkeni Zekeria, Ihab Dabbag, Fazal Alam, Ashraf
al-Kerem, Jawad Hussain, Joan Pitcher, Farooq Mirza, Aashiq
Mian, Hanif Balaparia and numerous volunteers.
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