A Moment of Weakness and the Paradox of God’s Grace | Ilyas Khan | Catholic World Report
Targeted by extremists, a Catholic convert from Islam reflects on the constancy that is as necessary to the Christian life as bravery.
In 1980, a month or so after I had turned 18, I took up residence at Netherhall House, an Opus Dei-run student hall in the leafy London suburb of Hampstead.
I turned 50 in early August this year, and it is only recently that I am able to pull off the feat of looking back across 32 years without a sense of vertigo. The passage of time since I was 18 often seems simply a continuation of the journey that started when I took my first steps up the stone entrance of Netherhall and across the hushed threshold.
I converted from Islam to Christianity on the basis of an encounter that dates back to my time at Netherhall. The seeds of Christianity had actually been sown somewhat earlier when I was a young child, but as I grew older the same tendency towards rebellion that was so prevalent in the 1970s and which led to the creation of the punk movement in Britain manifested itself in my teenage years with a full blown (and entirely frivolous) solipsist intransigence. Religion, in any form, was low on my list of priorities, a distant form of “noise” that tended, if anything, to irritate rather than stimulate. Having been raised by Muslim parents, if I was anything at that point, I was a Muslim. My application form to Netherhall (which required an identification of religious affiliation) shows in its now grainy and sepia-toned photograph, a long haired boy affecting the “Bob Dylan” look of melancholy mixed with disinterest, and with the word “moslem” in the box “Religion.”
In accepting Christ, I first had to overcome the core objections that all Muslims face when confronted with the language of the Holy Trinity and Christ’s divinity. Not inconsequentially, I also created, and had to contend with, a whole host of obstacles that were self-imposed and which allowed me to continue the habit of patting myself on the back whenever I sounded clever in the context of a debate. It’s easy, as all adolescent rebels will know, to challenge from the sidelines when skepticism can be dressed up to look very sexy.
The path that led me through and then out of these dense thickets of mostly juvenile negativity was built around my first encounter, in Netherhall’s library, with Hans Urs von Balthasar.
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