Young American Muslims in the post-9/11 world are required to learn more about our faith than youth of any other faith. This is a blessing if we do not allow it to always place us on the defensive, a problem we Muslims have often fallen into in the past, as evidenced even by how my conversation with my friend began. It’s a subtle difference, but there is a significant shift if we move from a defensive paradigm to a representative one. Our curiosity is a blessing that should not only be satisfied after having to deal with those who might not understand Islam.

The conversation brought to mind a conference I attended last year, the American Learning Institute for Muslim (ALIM) Winter Conference at New York University. In his closing remarks, Dr. Sherman Jackson blew me away with the following statement: “We don't earn God’s favor only when we are winning. We lose sometimes and that’s how we earn God’s favor. Because if we lose, we lose with dignity. We have to be God-centered people. Most of us, we become so secularized without even realizing it. Martin Luther King, St. Augustine, they said, ‘Lord make me pure,…but not yet.’ We need to decide to be pure right now, this is where divine favor comes from, and that his how we will earn our favor.”

If I operate from a defensive standpoint, it becomes about me (and my ego) winning the argument. If I operate from a representative standpoint, it becomes less about me and more about my role as described in the Qur'an as abd and khalifa (servant and representative) of God. Make no mistake, Muslim communities all over have been increasingly proactive and national organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) are doing great work operating from a representative posture. But certainly a lot of work needs to be done. I’d like to think that my own interaction with Islam has been less about winning.

When I first started engaging Islam intellectually at Georgetown I was entirely uncomfortable. I was involved with my mosque growing up before college, but it was a very limited engagement and existed primarily through my dad. Basically enough to get by. I knew there was something more to appreciating Islam than just committing verses of a foreign language to memory, but a typical Friday khutbah led me only to shrug my shoulders and roll my eyes at clueless Imams whose mindsets were stuck in the motherland. I didn’t know exactly how to counter those mindsets. I had neither the knowhow nor the willingness to develop it.

In college that all changed. Many of my Muslim friends in college had been exposed more to what I call the cooler realer “version” of Islam than the boring ritual Islam I had known for most of my then 18 years. The fact here is that nothing about Islam changed, but that I did. It’s not that I unearthed a new form of Islam, but that I began to see it in a new light and approached it in a better way. This was key in the evolution of my faith. Interacting with Georgetown University scholars like Dr. John Esposito and Muslim Chaplain Imam Yahya Hendi fed my desire to know more about my faith, just as I wanted to learn more about government and international relations. I began to approach Islam with the mindset I approached any other classroom subject, but I took it a step further and frequently engaged in discussions about it outside of the classroom. Once I established that I need to learn more about Islam, I started to incorporate what I learned into my life and couldn’t help but be more involved with the Muslim Students Association. The motions of prayer were given meaning, historical examples were contextualized, and interaction with scripture and with others became more meaningful. My understanding of Islam is nowhere near where I would like it to be, but has thankfully grown exponentially in college.

Having close Muslim friends who love and live their faith was most instrumental in my own love of faith. I began to read Dr. Jackson, Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, and Dr. Mohja Kahf. I incorporated Dr. Tariq Ramadan and Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl into papers for class. I listen to Shaykh Hamza and Imam Khalid Latif podcasts online. I am a big fan of young Muslim activists like Ahmed Younis and Dr. Eboo Patel (Patel's OnFaith page is my favorite). But I certainly don’t accept everything at face value. The above names don’t see eye-to-eye on everything. It’s up to me to understand their work and incorporate it into my own individual understanding of Islam and of me. I am a scholar of my own experience and even the most knowledgeable scholar of Islam cannot prescribe Islam for me.

But if I am to truly become what the Qur'an tells me I am, an abd and khalifa, then I need to know more. I’m certainly a work in progress.

Sometimes, I am at a loss for words when speaking with a Rudy Giuliani Republican or a Muslim who refuses to acknowledge the reality of a distinct American context. But I only lose if my selfish desire to shut down that person outweighs my desire to expand my knowledge of Islam for the sake of God. Even if I get shut down, at the end of the day I still have learned something just from the effort I put into building my base of knowledge. In Islam, everything goes back to intention. If I intend on doing something good, but for whatever reason end up not doing it, I am still rewarded by God. If I end up carrying out my intent, the reward is even greater. This is why Muslims whisper bismillah (in the name of God), before just about everything they do, to reaffirm intention. Whether it’s before sitting down to read Qur'an or playing basketball at the gym, I try my best to make sure that phrase is on my tongue.

Often times you will find scholars who recite a few verses from the Qur'an before taking the podium. These are great verses to keep in mind when involved in discussions about Islam.

They are from Surah Taha, Chapter 20:25-28, when Moses was to go and boldly advise Pharaoh to believe in God: “Moses said: O my Lord! Expand for me my breast, ease my task for me, and remove the impediment from my speech so they may understand what I say.”

The rest is history.