How Aisha Bhutta Converted her Parents, Family and 30 Friends
to Islam
Aisha Bhutta, also known as Debbie Rogers, is
serene. She sits on the sofa in big front room of her tenement flat in
Cowcaddens, Glasgow. The walls are hung with quotations from the Koran, a
special clock to remind the family of prayer times and posters of the Holy City
of Mecca. Aisha’s piercing blue eyes sparkle with evangelical zeal, she smiles
with radiance only true believers possess. Her face is that of a strong Scots
lass – no nonsense, good-humoured – but it is carefully covered with a hijab.
For a good Christian girl to convert to Islam
and marry a Muslim is extraordinary enough. But more than that, she has also
converted her parents, most of the rest of her family and at least 30 friends
and neighbours.
Her family were austere Christians with whom
Rogers regularly attended Salvation Army meetings. When all the other teenagers
in Britain were kissing their George Michael posters goodnight, Rogers had
pictures of Jesus up on her wall. And yet she found that Christianity was not
enough; there were too many unanswered questions and she felt dissatisfied with
the lack of disciplined structure for her beliefs. “There had to be more for me
to obey than just doing prayers when I felt like it.”
Aisha had first seen her future husband,
Mohammad Bhutta, when she was 10 and regular customer at the shop, run by his
family. She would see him in the back, praying. “There was contentment and
peace in what he was doing. He said he was a Muslim. I said: What’s a Muslim?”.
Later with his help she began looking deeper
into Islam. By the age of 17, she had read the entire Koran in Arabic.
“Everything I read”, she says, “Was making sense.”
She made the decision to convert at16. “When I
said the words, it was like a big burden I had been carrying on my shoulders
had been thrown off. I felt like a new-born baby.”
Despite her conversion however, Mohammed’s
parents were against their marrying. They saw her as a Western woman who would
lead their eldest son astray and give the family a bad name; she was,
Mohammed’s father believed, “the biggest enemy.”
Nevertheless, the couple married in the local
mosque. Aisha wore a dress hand-sewn by Mohammed’s mother and sisters who
sneaked into the ceremony against the wishes of his father who refused to
attend.
It was his elderly grandmother who paved the
way for a bond between the women. She arrived from Pakistan where mixed-race
marriages were even more taboo, and insisted on meeting Aisha. She was so
impressed by the fact that she had learned the Koran and Punjabi that she
convinced the others; slowly, Aisha, now 32, became one of the family.
Aisha’s parents, Michael and Marjory Rogers,
though did attend the wedding, were more concerned with the clothes their
daughter was now wearing (the traditional shalwaar kameez) and what the
neighbours would think. Six years later, Aisha embarked on a mission to convert
them and the rest of her family, bar her sister (“I’m still working on her).
“My husband and I worked on my mum and dad, telling them about Islam and they
saw the changes in me, like I stopped answering back!”
Her mother soon followed in her footsteps.
Marjory Rogers changed her name to Sumayyah and became a devout Muslim. “She
wore the hijab and did her prayers on time and nothing ever mattered to her
except her connections with God.”
Aisha’s father proved a more difficult
recruit, so she enlisted the help of her newly converted mother (who has since
died of cancer). “My mum and I used to talk to my father about Islam and we
were sitting in the sofa in the kitchen one day and he said: “What are the
words you say when you become a Muslim?” “Me and my mum just jumped on top of
him.” Three years later, Aisha’s brother converted “over the telephone – thanks
to BT”, then his wife and children followed, followed by her sister’s son.
It didn’t stop there. Her family converted,
Aisha turned her attention to Cowcaddens, with its tightly packed rows of
crumbling, gray tenement flats. Every Monday for the past 13 years, Aisha has
held classes in Islam for Scottish women. So far she has helped to convert over
30. The women come from a bewildering array of backgrounds. Trudy, a lecturer
at the University of Glasgow and a former Catholic, attended Aisha’s classes
purely because she was commissioned to carry out some research.
But after six months of classes she converted,
deciding that Christianity was riddled with “logical inconsistencies”. “I could
tell she was beginning to be affected by the talks”, Aisha says. How could she
tell? “I don’t know, it was just a feeling.”
The classes include Muslim girls tempted by
Western ideals and needing salvation, practicing Muslim women who want an open
forum for discussion denied them at the local male-dominated mosque, and those
simply interested in Islam. Aisha welcomes questions. “We cannot expect people
blindly to believe.”
Her husband, Mohammad Bhutta, now 41, does not
seem so driven to convert Scottish lads to Muslim brothers. He occasionally
helps out in the family restaurant, but his main aim in life is to ensure the
couple’s five children grow up as Muslims. The eldest, Safia, “nearly 14,
Al-Hamdulillah (Praise be to God!)”, is not averse to a spot of recruiting
herself. One day she met a woman in the street and carried her shopping, the
woman attended Aisha’s classes and is now a Muslim.
“I can honestly say I have never regretted
it”, Aisha says of her conversion to Islam. “Every marriage has its ups and
downs and sometimes you need something to pull you out of any hardship. But the
Prophet said: ‘Every hardship has an ease.’ So when you’re going through a
difficult stage, you work for that ease to come.”
Mohammed is more romantic: “I feel we have
known each other for centuries and must never part from one another. According
to Islam, you are not just partners for life, you can be partners in heaven as
well, for ever. Its a beautiful thing, you know.”
VOCABULARY QUESTS:
1)Tenement(n):meanings>> apartment house
Synonyms>>apartment complex,boarding house,high-rise apartment building,living quarters,coop
2)Evangelical (adj):meanings>>fundamentalist
synonyms>>Christian, apostolic,divine, evangelic, orthodox,pious, religious, scriptural
3)Austure(adj):meanings>>severe in manner
| synonyms>>ascetic, astringent,cold,earnest,exacting,forbidding,formal,grave,grim
4)Astray(adj): meanings>>off the path or right direction
synonyms>>adrift, afield,amiss,awry,gone
5)Paved(v):meanigs>>cover with asphalt, concrete
synonyms>>brick, cobblestone, flagstone, gravel, lay asphalt,lay concrete, macadamize,sruface, tar, tile
6)Bewildering(v):meanings>>confuse
synonyms>>addle,ball up, befuddle, bemuse,confound,muddle
7)Riddled(v):meanings>>perforate, permeate
synonyms>>bore,corrupt, honeycomb,impair,infest, mar, pepper
|
Destruction
(n) : devastation, ruin, demolition 
