My parents have never fully relayed to me how they accepted Islam. But the pieces & hints that they’ve dropped are always surrounded by trauma & sadness. Which looking back, may be why they clung to such rigidness & strictness in religion in a way that turned their children off.

You can’t blame people for their trauma. But it does spill onto others. While they may have needed that unmoving rigidness to cope, their way of life traumatized us.

So as their children, we had to find another way to seek spirituality and practice our deen.

I try to stress to people, (my younger siblings) that even though we speak of straight paths, everyone’s route is not the same. And it doesn’t have to be. It’s important to remember that when you’re walking around saying people aren’t Muslim for practicing differently than you.