Dear Reverts, Here’s Why Most Born-Muslims May Take Islam For Granted
Dear Reverts,
We admire you. We really do.
So you've been Muslim for, what, a year? Two? Three?
But you show up with this little glowing fire in your chest that makes you weep at surahs we've heard a thousand times without blinking.
You could memorize and recite them as beautifully as Mishary Rashid Alafasy (though now we know he’s in hot waters ever since that tweet) just by listening on Spotify, over and over, until the verses bloom in your chest like something you've always known.
And…you're actually excited about tahajjud. (Tahajjud! The prayer we sleep through with the expertise of sloths).
We're happy for you.
Actually, we’re happy to see more people joining the faith we were born into.
It gives us a strange sense of validation that our faith is true after years of being shamed for our Muslim identity in this largely Islamophobic world, especially since 9/11 (or, maybe, forever).
Forgive us our Rabb but we may have put you reverts on a pedestal.
We say, “Masha'Allah, your journey and perspective are so inspiring” and we mean it.
But sometimes we also say that because it's easier than sitting with the discomfort of our own stagnation.
To admire your bright noor and the hidayah you’ve been blessed with by our Creator is a million times easier than to wonder why ours flickers.
But if we're being honest, that’s also a little uncomfortable for us.
You’re out here living Islam because you chose it while most of us are just coasting on autopilot.
Since we were born into it, our faith feels pre-packaged in a way.
Microwaveable, even.
We warm the deen up with du‘a only when we need something. Like when our bank account is still empty and rent is due, when job or college applications keep getting rejected, when a health scare shows up uninvited or when life hits in a way we can’t ignore.
After all, the Qur’an has called this out repeatedly:
وَإِذَا مَسَّ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنَ ضُرٌّۭ دَعَا رَبَّهُۥ مُنِيبًا إِلَيْهِ ثُمَّ إِذَا خَوَّلَهُۥ نِعْمَةًۭ مِّنْهُ نَسِىَ مَا كَانَ يَدْعُوٓا۟ إِلَيْهِ مِن قَبْلُ
When one is touched with hardship, they cry out to their Lord, turning to Him alone. But as soon as He showers them with blessings, they forget the One they had cried to before.
Surah Az-Zumar, 39:8
Then you come along with your fresh eyes and pure awe when it comes to the very basics of Islam and Allahﷻ Himself. Suddenly we're face-to-face with the gap between the deen we got and the deen you found.
So sometimes, when we’re not in our best state, we get super defensive.
We’d roll our eyes (internally, of course) when you get excited about something we've heard so many times before by our practicing family members or our ustadha back in school. We may say things like, "you're still in the honeymoon reversion phase," as if that explains it away.
Your fire is just a phase.
That’s not fair to you. We know, deep down, it’s not.
But taking a dismissive stance is a lot ‘gentler’ on our precious ego than being accountable and admitting we’ve let our deen die a slow death.
Now you're probably looking around at us, the born-Muslims, with that expression. The one that says, “Wait, you guys have had this your whole lives and THIS is how you act?”
You may not say it out loud but we can sense what you're probably thinking:
“If I'd been born into this, I'd never take it for granted.”
We hear you.
But our trials as born-Muslims are tricky to begin with.
We’re not saying the fitnas we face are harder than yours (God forbid, we’re not trying to compete and to each our own).
Yours is a mountain climb that’s dramatically visible because the contrast of your before and after is so sharp. You know you're ascending because your lungs burn, your legs shake and every step feels like war to step out of the comfort of disbelief and into the discomfort of Truth.
You came from darkness into light and know what it means to be lost because you were lost.
You searched and alhamdulillah, through Allah ﷻ’s merciful guidance, you found. And now every ray of this deen hits your skin like it's the first sunrise you've ever seen. So of course you appreciate Islam.
In your story, there’s a clear line in the sand. There exists a transformative moment you can point to and say, “There, that's when I chose to submit to One God and leave behind the Trinity / Buddha / atheism etc.”
You remember the cold, the hunger, the hollow and how pitch-black life can be without true illumination from the One and Only. That was what led you to your shahadah and commitment to the Straight Path.
But someone born into the deen grew up with constant access to daylight.
Most of us have no idea what total darkness, disbelief or misguidance, feels like. To us, the sun is just…Tuesday. We’ve become too myopic to see anything special in the warmth of His light.
Why would we?
It's just…there. Always has been. Like the ceiling or the floor or the background hum of the fridge we almost never pay attention to.
The line in the sand is faint at best as it keeps shifting as the waves hit the shore.
The choice was made for us before we could make choices at all, which means we spend our whole lives trying to figure out if we would have chosen it ourselves.
However, most of us born-Muslims aren’t rebels from the get-go.
We're not necessarily storming off into the sunset yelling I’m FREEEEEEEEEEE while tearing off our hijabs in slow motion. (Well, this happens to some of us, undeniably, but it's more common for born-Muslim women to not observe the hijab and then later start).
We've been raised to believe Islam is the only Truth so dramatic rejections of faith are less common for us. But believing something and owning it are two very different things.
So most of us modern born-Muslims start off with just...a slow, quiet drifting.
We fall asleep on a boat (since we can't even read the lines in the sand) until we hardly notice when the shore disappears from our view and we lose our bearings in the middle of the ocean.
No wonder the Prophet ﷺ warned that one day we'd be many but like foam on the water: floating, directionless, pushed by every current except the one that leads home to Allahﷻ. We're everywhere and still somehow lost adrift in a sea as froth that’s visible but weightless, present but powerless, moved by winds of modern ideologies we don't even notice.
The cruel irony of it all?
We can become lost precisely because we've never known what it means to be REALLY lost. Most of us don't know what it means to be without because we've never been without.
The majority of us don't realize we’re just purposelessly floating and stay asleep to the fact.
The deen came with our first breath but iman isn’t something we're given or a birthright.
We either wake up to it or don't.
That's the greatest test of every born Muslim: to not be complacent in the familiarity of our ancestors' religion and to not breed contempt in that same familiarity.
Familiarity is such a slow thief. Even the most grateful hearts can grow numb without noticing.
And for many modern born-Muslims, the familiar light sure can feel stifling, no matter how beautiful Islam really is.
Try imagining living in a house with a gorgeous view of the sunrise over the mountains.
The first week, you stare out the window and marvel at how the light spills over everything.
The first month, you still notice it.
A year later, you forget the view is even there. And you're just trying to find your keys. (Meanwhile you—revert you—you've been sleeping on park benches and suddenly someone hands you the keys to a house and you're like THIS IS EVERYTHING I EVER WANTED!!!!!).
Meanwhile, we forgot we have a view.
Sadly, most of us prefer the 100-inch 8K TV that we mount on the wall facing away from the window with some boring sunrise in our backyard.
We'd rather binge-watch series all day about "easier" lives without Islam.
We get to watch the colorful Christmas trees, the Halloween parties, the dating and drinking as well as the whole culture of YASSSS, YOU DESERVE TO BE HAPPY, GODDESS! JUST DO YOU!
We watch people with sleeve tats, shacking up with no marriage certificates and hardly any kids by choice and they look...free (and supposedly happy, too. Or at least that’s what they say ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).
We watch the pride flags flying from every corporate logo, the preachers of sexual liberation telling women that less fabric means more power and the whole neo-liberal parade chanting, “My body! My choice! My identity! My truth! And most of all, MY HAPPINESS!”
And we wonder with so much awe-doration: “These progressive people are sure thriving, aren't they?”
Just look at them. They're out there having the time of their lives. They're actually LIVING.
Meanwhile, we’re over here with a tradition that calls us to pray, fast, give in charity, lower our gaze, delay gratification, build families, take on responsibilities and control our nafs.
That’s the opposite of living. We're just waiting to DIE…
…of boredom and scarcity.
We think to ourselves, sulkily, “Islam is no fun • ᴖ •”
Never mind that Allahﷻ questioned the Prophet ﷺ :
أَرَءَيْتَ مَنِ ٱتَّخَذَ إِلَـٰهَهُۥ هَوَىٰهُ أَفَأَنتَ تَكُونُ عَلَيْهِ وَكِيلًا(٤٣)
أَمْ تَحْسَبُ أَنَّ أَكْثَرَهُمْ يَسْمَعُونَ أَوْ يَعْقِلُونَ ۚ إِنْ هُمْ إِلَّا كَٱلْأَنْعَـٰمِ ۖ بَلْ هُمْ أَضَلُّ سَبِيلً (٤٤)
Have you seen the one who has taken their own desires as their god? Will you then be responsible for them? Or do you think most of them listen or understand? They are only like cattle— no, more than that, they are astray from the Right Way!
(Surah Al-Furqan 25: 43-44)
But we’re probably just too complacent to even bother reading the Qur’an to engage with our Rabb’s words in the first place.
It doesn’t help that many of us from Muslim-majority nations inherited secularized systems as a parting “gift” from our colonizers: the British, the Dutch, the French and even the Americans.
They designed our education, our laws and our very ambitions to face the West and keep them happy.
So we grow up thinking progressive means copying them, successful means being accepted by them and the only path to surviving this dunya is to mirror the colonizers. And oh, success also means looking over our shoulder at those who once ruled us and asking, “Are we there yet?”
Looking, eventually, isn't enough.
We tell ourselves we'll just take a step closer just to see what we're missing.
Next thing we know, we're trying one small thing. Just once. No big deal.
Right after that, we're going back for more.
And then we end up living a life we once swore we'd never want because Islam prohibited it but hey, everyone’s doing it, life is short, we’re only human and…nobody’s perfect.
So that’s how most of us modern born-Muslims came to be spiritually lukewarm just like a cup of tea that's been sitting out too long. (Technically still drinkable but hey, nobody's excited about it anymore).
Which is unfortunate, considering that to be born into the light is to be spared the agony of searching in darkness.
We don’t have to go through late nights wondering if God exists / having existential dread about what happens after death / wrestling with family rejection / losing our community because we chose a “strange” belief system known as Islam like you probably have.
In some ways, we got the easy route. The path was paved for us from birth.
Yet we’re only Muslim by name, culture and sometimes by, “Yeah, my mom makes me go for tarawih during Ramadan.”
We fast, sure, but our hearts are on the iftar menu we’ve been scrolling through since Asr.
We show up for Eid but it’s about family gatherings, new clothes, good food, awkward small talk with cousins and color-coordinated photoshoots rather than a spiritual homecoming.
We grow up with the adhan waking us until it stops waking us up.
We have the Qur’an on our nightstands but it becomes decoration instead of conversation.
We pray because everyone else is praying until one day we realize we’ve been going through the motions since we were twelve without knowing when those motions stopped meaning anything.
Embarrassing. Honestly. We know.
You didn’t find it in a shop after years of saving or stumble upon it at a flea market, wipe off the dust and gasp at what you’d discovered. You didn’t have that moment where you hold it up to the light and think, “This is mine now. I found it. It’s mine.”
That’s how Islam is for us.
The faith arrived in our hands already worn smooth by the hands that came before us.
While the quest of reverts like you is to search for the treasure, the born Muslim’s task is to see the treasure that’s been in their hands the whole time and to move from inherited faith to chosen faith and make it ours.
Not our grandparents’ or our parents’.
Ours.
Alhamdulillah, some of us do make that journey.
But most of us are still floating as foam in the ocean, sleeping.
So what do we do with each other, reverts?
You, with your burning questions and your fresh grief for a Prophet you just recently came to love?
Us, with our inherited comfort and our complicated relationship with a faith that's been tangled up in culture, family and habit since before we could talk?
I don't know.
But maybe we need each other.
You need us for the things you don't know yet. The things that come with time, repetition and having lived inside a tradition long enough to feel its weight and texture. And we need you to remind us, through your journey—the seeking, the choosing, the conscious yes—that conviction in Islam is real.
And if your fire wakes us up a little and your fresh eyes make us squint at our own viewpoint and the ways we’ve been slacking in practicing the deen?
Maybe that's exactly what's supposed to happen.
And as always, Allahﷻ knows best.
Just don't ever let our lukewarm convince you that the deen itself is room temperature.
A Small Favor (for a Big Journey)
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