“It wasn’t a trauma to see anyone taking up another route for them,” she told Arab News. And her family as supportive, Kennedy said. Her brother’s conversion paved the way for her own. She told Arab News that she was inquisitive, but “many things never clicked.” That changed when she began reading Islamic texts. Mary Kennedy, the Orlando-born English major who serves as an editor for the publishing house, grew up in a Christian family in Florida.
Her colleagues, two decades younger than Assami, followed soon after. “And I felt better than, somehow,” she wrote. “So I decided to continue my reading since I was unable to sleep anyway, in order to keep from thinking too much I began reading although my heart was not really in it, and suddenly before me were these words: ‘And give glad tidings to the patient, who say when misfortune strikes: To God do we belong, and to Him is our return.’” I found there were many things, I didn’t understand, but others impressed me,” she wrote. “I started to read the translation of the Qur’an from the very beginning. She was drawn by the similarities to the holy books she recognized. Yet when Assami eventually got her hands on the Qur’an, something clicked. But he told her that, to his chagrin, nothing in the library on that topic was written by Muslims. “She wanted to study about Prophet Muhammad and what he said about god and her opinion was if she could find it irrational, as she expected, she would abandon this subject once and for all,” the book states.Īssami then asked her father to help her find a book on the Prophet Muhammad. (Her father, a scientist, did not believe in God.) But she first grew interested in Islam after a biased comparative religion presentation by a history teacher. “She wished she had God who could talk to her and guide her like the Prophets had.”Īccording to that biography, Assami grew up in a family of atheists.
“She was always seeking after Truth but her father did not believe in God,” a biography of Assami in Why Women Are Accepting Islam states. These days, she’s better known as Umm Muhammad to followers, or by her chosen name, Aminah.
But before long, she found meaning in the Qur’an and pursued language studies at Damascus University, eventually converting to Islam and moving to Saudi Arabia. While her peers were busy getting high in bellbottoms, Emily Assami spent the 1970s studying Arabic in Damascus, Syria, where the California-born woman had moved with her Arab husband.
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