I was kind of interested in these intellectual and spiritual questions about the meaning of life, the structure, nature of reality, you know, this kind of stuff. I was really into scriptures, and so I was, I had resolved pretty early on that my plan in life was to be a priest. And then the problem was, though, after I had graduated high school, as I was getting ready to enter seminary, I started having this crisis of faith, where I grew convinced as a result of my engagement with the scriptures that Jesus probably didn't understand himself to be God. And this is a problem for Catholicism.

How serious was your vocational pull?

It was very serious. I had been mentored by Father Greg, the father of the local parish off base, St. Andrews. We were geared up for this for years. I mean, I didn't have a plan B. This wasn't the plan. And, you know, I talked to the local priests and stuff, as I was kind of having these theological struggles, and we tried to work through them, but I couldn't, couldn't shake this feeling. And so I stepped back from that. I basically convinced myself that religion, whole cloth was bullshit, and there was no God. And I really tried to live as if there was no God. The problem was living this way, it didn't bring me happiness and fulfillment. It just kind of made me feel sad and empty mostly. So that was the one problem I had. The other problem I had was that I had kind of rationally convinced myself that religion was nonsense and that there was no God and all this stuff, but I couldn't really make myself feel it like I had.

I read the Tao Te Ching and some other, you know, texts like this, looking into Taoism. I looked into Judaism, Hinduism. As part of this journey, I ended up reading the Quran, and became convinced that it was a prophetic work. And then I was like, well, if I believe that Muhammad is a prophet, and I do believe in God, like that's the Shahadah, that's like the two big things. So maybe Islam might be a good fit for me. And so I looked into Islam more and eventually took the plunge. It's a faith tradition that allowed me to embrace a lot of what I found compelling and attractive about Christianity and other Abrahamic faith traditions, but without particular theological complication.

Musa al-Gharbi / New York City