If this is your first time visiting this blog or reading this semi-autobiography, I strongly suggest you start from the beginning. Everything thing will make a lot more sense if you do.

I’m not quite sure what I expected at Bethune-Cookman College (BCC). But I didn’t expect what I saw over the next five years.

Let’s put a few things in perspective.

• I was already older than most of the kids at BCC. Most of them were probably 18 and I was now 21.
• For most of them, this was their first time living away from mom and dad. However, I had lived on my own for much of the past six years.
• I had spent the past year around older men at Masjid Khalifah, most of whom were married and had children. Therefore, I had a higher level of maturity and behaved accordingly.
• And most importantly, I was a fairly devout Muslim (I hope). I wasn’t particularly strict, but I did try to act according to the rulings of Allah and His messenger.

So don’t think of me as being arrogant when I say this: I thought most of the kids at BCC acted like maniacs.

They behaved as if they had no sense or reason. I didn’t expect them to hold Muslim morals, but since most of them professed to be Christian, I at least expected them to abide by the basics of their own faith. But they did not.

Keep in mind, I had not been around non-Muslims since I was fifteen. The bizarre behavior I saw at BCC was not something I was used to.

• Casual sex.
• An insane desire to party all the time.
• Extreme materialism.
• Alcohol consumption.
• Casual drug use.
• And a certain behavior that can only be described by one word: Ghetto.

It took me a couple of months to get used to it all. I had to learn not to judge by my own standards and values. I really had to adjust my way of thinking about other people.

As time went on, I learned that though they were seriously misguided, most of them were not really bad people. They just had a different set of morals.

I remember sitting in my first lecture in the Science Hall. It took a while for me to digest the fact that I was actually attending college. I reflected on where I was a few years earlier, struggling and starving in Senegal.

It was just so hard to comprehend that three years earlier I was thousands of miles away, across the ocean, practically in rags, with only a 9th grade education, speaking Wolof, sleeping on rooftops, and eating rice and fish everyday (when it was available).

And now, I was in Daytona Beach, Florida, surrounded by kids who were mostly from the suburbs, listening to a math lecture.

It was truly surreal.

I believe my first year at BCC was the most interesting. Perhaps because I had to get used to my new surroundings.

My roommate that first year was a boy from North Carolina named Phillip. He was attending BCC on a golf scholarship.

There were also two guys from Tallahassee named Nick and Doughboy (I think his real name was Derrick). All they did was joke and play video games, and talk about scoring girls. I don’t know if either of them ever finished college, but if they did it wasn’t at BCC.

They were hilarious jokers though. They couldn’t take two breaths without cracking on someone.

Another guy I hung out with was Christie from the Bahamas. He acted more mature than most of the other kids at BCC, though he had a hidden wild side. He was usually cool, calm, and soft spoken.

There was also a guy named Terrance. He was very spiritual, but in a weird way. He was born Christian, but when I first met him he was Baha’i. Then he became Christian again later on. He was into running and singing. He was a good guy…just weird.

And then there was MJ, who was Muslim also, but a bit of a disappointment. His family was from Africa but did not really practice Islam. And it rubbed off on him. He wasn’t really a bad person at all, just too much into the life of this world.

These were the guys that I met first at BCC. But one of my closer friends that I met at BCC was someone I met a few months later.

BCC is an HBCU, and was established back when African-Americans weren’t allowed to attend most schools in America. Though those days are over now, these schools are still more or less geared towards African-American students and culture.

So a tall Asian guy walking amongst a sea of black people will kind of stick out.

This Asian guy was another friend of mine named Turar. I don’t know when I first saw him, but like I said, he kinda stood out so I knew of him without actually knowing him.

The first time we spoke was in one of the study rooms at BCC. He was studying and I guess I went in there to study also. We eventually started talking. He looked Asian, so I assumed he was Korean or Chinese. But when I asked him where he was from, he said he was from Kazakhstan.

I remembered reading about the breakup of the USSR in a Newsweek article back at Darul Uloom in Trinidad. And I remembered the article stating that Kazakhstan was a mostly Muslim former Soviet republic.

Until this conversation with Turar, that was the one and only time I’d ever heard of Kazakhstan (this was years before Borat). I asked him what religion was practiced over there and he confirmed it was Islam.

One of the first things I figured out when I got to Daytona Beach was how to find the local Masjid. The official name was The Islamic Center of Daytona Beach, but was also called Masjid Al-Mumineen.

And in the beginning, before our college workload got really heavy, Turar and I would walk to the Masjid every night for prayer (this was before either of us got a car). Unfortunately, as our studies got more intense, it became more difficult to go on a regular basis.

The Muslim community of Daytona Beach was very fluid and ever-changing. That was primarily because of the city itself. Daytona Beach is known for Spring Break and Nascar (Daytona 500) and Bike Week.  But it doesn’t have much in the way of industry and job-creation.

Hence, a good portion of the Muslims there are students at one of the biggest college in the city, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU). And many of the Muslims who lived in Daytona Beach only lived there for a few years before moving on.

Though there were other Muslims at BCC (not many, but some) only Turar, myself, and another sister named Fareedah went to the mosque regularly.

And this experience helped destroy another myth I’ve always heard: that black people are more familiar with Islam.

The truth is, outside of the northeast, LA, Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, and a few other cities, most black Americans know little or nothing about Islam or Muslims. Most of the students at BCC were from the south (primarily Georgia and Florida) and all they knew about Islam was the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X (the movie, not the man).

Meanwhile, my friend Yusuf whom I knew from Senegal, was attending Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and a lot of students there were from Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York. And Lincoln University had a Muslim organization and an Arabic club.

That wasn’t happening at Bethune-Cookman.

Furthermore, BCC was affiliated with the Methodist Church. Though anyone of any faith could attend, Christianity was almost everywhere. In fact, many of the students who attended BCC told me they did so partially so they could be in a Christian environment.

And this is where my previous experience with that Christian missionary comic in Trinidad became beneficial. Had I never read that book, I may not have ever got interested in reading Ahmed Deedat’s work. And I may have been caught off guard at BCC.

Alhamdulillah (all praises to Allah), I was ready.

The vast majority of the kids at BCC didn’t care what I believed. Most of them were very respectful and intuitive about Islam.

But there were several missionary types who thought they could challenge me on Islam. There was one guy named Ismail (not Muslim and no relation) whom I would always argue with about Islam and Christianity. I always had one major advantage: I knew more about Christianity than he knew about Islam.

I would point out the flaws and inconsistencies of Christianity which would put him on the defensive. And all he could do was speak on irrelevant things such as “why do Muslims use both the Quran and hadith?” or “You guys have the Quran in English just like the Bible’s in English.” These weak arguments do nothing to prove that Jesus was Allah’s son.

But these interactions with Ismail and other Bible-thumpers at school lead  me to do more research on the internet which led me to discover a whole new world of anti-Islamism.

It was on the internet that I first discovered there were people who considered themselves “homosexual Muslims.”

It was on the internet that I discovered real anti-Islam propaganda by people who did know a good deal about Islam and could convince the ignorant that Islam was not the truth.

It was on the internet that I realized there were entire websites, organizations, ministries and foundations devoted to destroying Islam.

It was on the internet that I discovered the anti-Islam industry.

At first, seeing the things they said about Allah (I got so tired of the phrase “moon god”) and Prophet Muhammad (the things they said about him I can’t even repeat) and Islam (they called Islam a religion and Christianity a relationship) angered me so much. I would sit and write long diatribes against them and spend hours looking up counter arguments against everything they said.

But after several years of this madness, I eventually learned it just wasn’t worth it. That wasn’t the way to protect Islam (not that Islam needs my protection). The best way to defend Islam was to behave righteously and speak the truth.

Not by arguing angrily with Ismail and other Bible-thumpers. But by presenting the beauty of Islam.

Ismail could say that Christians were closer to God, but since he fornicated and drank alcohol, and I did not, I would never take him seriously.

The websites online could say all sorts of crazy things about Islam. But since they had to make up lies and I could speak about Islam from a position of knowledge and truth, their arguments were weak and baseless.

The so-called homosexual Muslims and other miscreants could twist the words of Allah to fit whatever belief they wanted. But I had learned a good deal in Senegal and Trinidad and I knew what Allah said about such sins.

It got to the point where these guys (Ismail included) became no match for me. I really believed (and still do) that I could take on any of them in a debate about Islam or comparative religion.

In the end, I believe all of these challenges were beneficial. I’m not saying I convinced anyone about the validity of Islam with these arguments. But I know many students and teachers at BCC learned more about Islam from me than they ever would have on their own.

But there was one religious challenge that would take me for a loop that I could not beat. I first encountered it in Daytona Beach, though it had nothing to do with Bethune-Cookman or Christians.

Up next: Here come the Salafis…

*The video at the top is Bethune-Cookman’s fight song. The second video takes place inside the LLC (Living Learning Center) at B-CC. This was the dormitory I stayed at during my first year and a half at Bethune.