Why Islam is my choice — Page 120
120 R: But the other question about you, what happened after that, after you became Muslim. But there was one point, another point I wanted to make is that the difference between Isl ā m and Christianity. See, Christianity had a need to tell people untruth. Because if you tell people the truth, colonialism can not prosper. It can not work. You have to tell people lies in colonialism. You have to tell people things that are not true to make colonialism work. What I found in Isl ā m was that Muslims were more honest, they were more truthful, in the portrayal of themselves and in the portrayal of other people. Muslims never claimed that all the advances in the world were done by them. The Christians, they didn’t say that outright, but this was in their system. They never taught any achievements done by other people. Everybody who wears a shoe—the mold of the shoe, and how the shoe was made—that mold was invented by an Afro-American, but they never gave him credit for it, and many other ideas in the American society were invented by Afro-Americans, but they never got any recognition for it. What Isl ā m did—that was so impressive to me, and when I knew that this was the right religion for me—was that it did credit to other people who had made contributions in the human depth. For instance, Isl ā m readily admits that they borrowed things, information, from the Greeks. They readily admitted that they borrowed things from the Romans, and from the Mongols and from the Chinese civilization. There is one Ḥ ad ī th—and Ḥ ad ī th incidentally are the things that Prophet Mu ḥ ammad said, we call that Ḥ ad ī th—and the Ḥ ad ī th said that go to China to seek knowledge if you have to. Which indicates, that there is knowledge in China too, and there have been great Chinese breakthroughs in the past, like gunpowder, and paper itself was a Chinese invention. Isl ā m recognizes these things, and this is one of the things that attracted me to Isl ā m. W: Okay, good enough. So far as the question about