Omar Suleiman

So two weeks in a row, I had a Methodist turned Buddhist turned Muslim.

And I called, yeah, I called my Methodist friends.

I have a lot of Methodist pastors in the city that I work with.

And I said, what's going on here, man?

You're sending people onto this interesting journey of Buddhism and then Islam.

But both of them had a very similar story, which is that they had sought in Buddhism, for example, some of the meditative practices that are found.

That really Western religion, which has been dominated by capitalism and dominated by very material things and can be very unfulfilling.

They found that in some of the Eastern philosophies and the meditative practices.

And then they came to Islam.

And it combines their belief in sort of the Abrahamic way.

It merged their belief in one God and the prophets like Abraham and Moses and Jesus, peace be upon them all, with a deep tradition of meditative practices, of consciousness, of connection to God on a regular basis.

And they found that to be very fulfilling, both intellectually and spiritually.

And so I was like, that's interesting, you know, two people in two weeks that went through that journey.

So I think Islam is very wholesome, comprehensive when people actually approach it with humility and appreciate what it has to offer.

It's interesting because 9-11 now, we're talking over 21 years ago.

So when I'm talking to young Muslims, I'm talking about post 9-11, post 9-11, they're like, I was born in 2005.

What are you talking about post 9-11?

I'm like, well, I remember being a teenager.

I remember being in high school when this happened.

So a lot of us that experience 9-11 as high schoolers or as college students and remember distinctly what it was like to be a Muslim pre 9-11 and post 9-11, we can relate to that experience and we could identify that juncture very clearly.