[panholio]

Excuse me for seeming harsh, but I hope to just express this issue clearly insha Allah:

Let us not pretend that by being able to write a 50 page report rather than a one page essay, a person will convert to Islam. The uncles of the Prophet Muhammad (saw) and leaders of Makka KNEW Muhammad's (saaw) character was unimpeachable, impeccable, of the highest and most noblest in all of Arabia. They KNEW the Quran was miraculous in its arabic style and nature and that it ordered for Man to submit to his Creator. But they resisted and rebelled because in their hearts, they deemed themselves superior, more deserving of adulation, self sufficient, and so forth. Many of the same arguments that Iblis made against Adam:

Translation of the Holy Quran Sura/chapter 38:
The angels fell down prostrate, every one, (73) Saving Iblis; he was scornful and became one of the disbelievers. (74) He said: O Iblis! What hindereth thee from falling prostrate before that which I have created with both My hands? Art thou too proud or art thou of the high exalted? (75) He said: I am better than him. Thou createdst me of fire, whilst him Thou didst create of clay. (76) Iblis KNEW Allah was the Lord of the Worlds, and yet he rebelled. Thus, it was NOT a matter of reasoning.

God addresses the Prophet's uncle and Quraishi leaders of Makka specifically in the Quran which uniquely elevates them to be among the worse disbelievers and rulers in human history, along with the notorious Pharoah who rivalled Moses (as), Nimrod who rivalled Abraham (as), and others.

Disbelief is about the heart felt notions of self sufficiency, superiority, rebelliousness.

Sura/chapter 96:
Nay, but verily man is rebellious (6) That he thinketh himself independent! (7) Lo! unto thy Lord is the return(8)" BTW, this surah, 96, titled Alaq, or Iqra, has a main archenemy who is targetted by Allah for punishment in the next life. This is Abu Jahl, a Makkan Quraishi tribal leader who tortured and murdered Muslims, attacked and assaulted and tried to murder Muhammad (saaw) and killed and starved Muslims while trying to sustain a regime of tyranny and corruption of financial enslavement by maintaining idols in Makka and inventing new ones for Arabs to worship and pay new religious fees from which Abu Jahl and his cabal of elite tribal leaders profitted.

The issue of conversion is about man overcoming his lower inclinations, his base character, much like zen Buddhism claims for man to overcome.

I converted to Islam years ago without reading or studying the Quran or studying much about Muhammad (saw). One of the closest companions of Muhammad (saaw) Umar (rah), knew of Muhammad (saw) but resisted converting to Islam until he listened to a single sura/chapter, Taha. number 20. Umar was 35 years old or there abouts when he converted to Islam.

http://www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/A...al_khattab.htm

The issue of conversion is an entire conversion of mind, heart, being, body, spirit. It is not merely an intellectual inquiry, though anyone is welcome to inquire.

I examined zen Buddhism and my father was a mild practitioner of Zen Buddhism of which I read about and studied, though I was raised a unitarian Christian like my mother.

Buddhism does not address the reality of the Creator, of an all powerful Lord who offers love, mercy, forgiveness, who knows of each person's intimate affairs and yet still forgives and loves.

It essentially obliverates the concept of God at the moment that the mind should approach it:

dharmakaya [is] the equivalent of God ... The Buddha also speaks of no time and no space, where if I make a sound there is in that single moment a million years. It is spaceless like radio waves, like electric space - intrinsic. The Buddha said that there is a mirror that reflects consciousness. In this electric space a million miles and a pinpoint - a million years and a moment - are exactly the same. It is pure essence ... We call it 'original consciousness' - 'original akasha' - perhaps God in the Christian sense. I am afraid of speaking about anything that is not familiar to me. No one can know what IT is

To define more exactly the Buddhist notion of the highest being, it may be convenient to borrow the term very happily coined by a modern German scholar, 'panentheism', according to which God is ... all and one and more than the totality of existence Thus, by examining reality and nature, Buddhists claim that all of existence has in common the essence of what?

Here, common sense must be used. All existance has in common dependency, limitation in dimensions. There is no 'god' inside creation. All creation is dependent upon a Creator, a Designer, a being of Self Sufficiency, as all creation is designed, created, dependent.

"Awareness" is the cognition and sense of the existence of the All Powerful God.

Zen Buddhism attempts to keep the matter clean, but buddhism elsewhere does NOT keep the notion of panentheism, rather it allows people to descend into worshipping Buddha himself, so that while there may be a few monks capable of sustaining the doctrine, the vast majority of Buddhists resort to idol worship. And thus, the natural instinct of religiosity is mismanaged in Buddhism so that the society succumbs to irrational idol worship so that people in Thailand and elsewhere have idols for ancestor worship and worship of animals even phalluses.

Islam presents all of humanity, the highly disclipined and intelligent to the common man, a simple reality consistent with nature and creation and human nature: there is no multitudes of gods or god in all things; rather there is a single God, a single Creator, who is utterly self sufficient and Independent of all of this creation.

Before I converted to Islam, I struggled between the conceptualizations of zen Buddhism and Abrahamic monotheism of which I had known only through the bible.

Was there an enlightened nothingness of which only Buddha had acquired and for which he should be eternally revered, or the God of Abraham (as) who created the universe and to whom all humanity must face on the Day who should alone be revered?

Islam settled the issue of the spiritual awareness arriving at 'nothingness' of creation as there was only the Creator, the All Powerful One before creation, not nothingness.

The Message of Islam is the answer to mankind's fundamental dilemma.