After I accepted Islam and moved to Turkey I went to a friend's corner store. We were talking, sitting around drinking tea when a friend of my friend's came in to get something. My friend introduced me as a Muslim from America. The man quickly responded by saying, "Alex? He can't be Muslim, Alex is not a Muslim name."
Alex can most certainly be a Muslim name. Islam is, after all, a universal religion. As long as a name is not anti-Islamic and does not carry a bad meaning, any name can be a Muslim's name. Heaven is not some country in the sky that only accepts Turkish and Arab passports- God did not create us all as Arabs, and it's okay if we don't all have Arabic names. Our diversity is a miracle; we are created in many different ways but God is One. This is the beauty of Islam- anyone, no matter where they are from, can find and make peace with the same One God. It is true that our names can influence our worldview and our behavior; at the same time, though, there are plenty of bad people in the world with names like Muhammad, Ali and Bilal. There is such a thing as hypocrisy after all. (And let me admit openly, without going into detail, that I am the biggest sinner of all- I care about Islam, but that doesn't mean I follow all the rules.)
In any case, I figured that since I am both an American and a Muslim, I ought to find a new "Islamic name" that I could use in addition to my given name. I chose to combine one name from among the Prophets that all of the People of the Book accept, and one from the Prophet's family, and came up with Yusuf Hussain. Most people who know me still use Alex, but if someone prefers to call me Yusuf, that's fine too. (The Turkish Ministry of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) has me officially recorded as a convert to Islam with the new name Yusuf Hüseyin.)
The Prophet Yusuf, Joseph in English, was someone I identified with because he was also living in a foreign land and also tried to interpret dreams. Hussain refused to surrender to corruption and died as a martyr at Karbala- for him, death was better than living in a world where his rights were being trampled by those who abuse Islam.
As a former Christian, I was familiar with the story fo Joseph since childhood, but the story of Hussain has a whole other dimension to it. For me, the name Hussain represents transformation from something ugly to something beautiful, the transition from ignorance to understanding. I grew up associating this name with Saddam Hussein, as would most Americans. With time, I realized that it was a common Muslim name; it lost its associations with the Iraqi dicator in my mind but was just another Muslim name. Later, though, I learned about Hussain bin Ali and his death at Karbala, and suddenly it had a deep and beautiful meaning. It went from being the name of an oppressor to the name of someone who gave everything to fight an oppressor.
I would not call myself a Sunni, nor a Shi'a, I try to stay non-sectarian. I will say this, though: the Prophet is reported to have told his daughter Fatima, at Hussain's birth, that her son would die as a martyr one day, but that God would create a nation who would mourn him until the Day of Judgment.
If he did indeed say that, then count me as one of those people.
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