CHAPTER 2: PRACTICING ISLAM.

After that, Ramadan started and I decided that I

will start my new life in Islam with Ramadan.

Alhamdulillah (thank God), I made it successfully.

I started to offer prayer on the 4th of August. It was

very hard for me at the beginning because people

around me were not that practicing Muslims, so I

couldn't ask anyone.

I learned how to pray by myself from the Internet,

because no one showed me how to pray or how to

make wudu(ablution), or what invocation to say

before it or how to do ghusl (ritual cleansing of the

body) or what are the etiquettes and the rulings of

Islam.

Once I had a friend, and he made me really down.

He told me you will never understand Islam,

because you were not born as a Muslim. When I told

him I want to start fasting Ramadan, he said it is

not just about being hungry. At that time I was so

new to Islam, I had converted just a month before

he said that.

I got so scared, what if I will never learn how to

pray in Arabic? What if I don't do it the correct

way? And I didn't have hijab or a rug to pray on,

and I didn't get any help. So I had lots of fears.

But when I started to pray, I was thinking God must

be smiling on me now. Because I used to write down

the text of the ritual prayer on a paper and its

instructions, and I kept my papers in my right hand

and read loudly and then bow down and read again

and so on. I'm sure I was looking so funny. But

afterwards I succeeded to memorize it in the Arabic

language so then there was no problem.

Then I came to Facebook and got many new friends

and many sisters. From online sisters I got so much

love and courage. Then a Muslim man proposed to

me and he got me my first hijab and prayer rug and

an Islamic book. And I got my first Arabic Quran

from Jordan by post because we cannot buy it here.

Now it is more than a year that I wear hijab.