Wael Jabi

My earliest memory of faith was the first time I went to Eid [Eid al-Fitr, Festival of Breaking the Fast] prayers when I was young, age 12, I think. I went with my dad. It was the first time I saw my dad praying. My mother prays all the time; my dad doesn’t. I wasn’t connected religiously because my dad wasn’t. The fact that the father in my family wasn’t and my mother was, didn’t really give me much room to be religious. Why? Because you can’t go with your mother to the mosque. This is opposed to Christianity where you can go with her to church. In Islam, the male and female are separated. So the fact that my dad said, ‘C’mon Wael, let’s go for Eid prayers,’ was significant. I had to wake up at 5 in the morning. I thought, ‘Wow, let’s see what this is about.’ I remember it was a huge open space. It was basically like a flat desert and they put out carpets everywhere so it was like an open mosque. There was the imam at the top talking about Islam, and where you should go with your life. And the fact that I saw my dad praying with me was touching because I felt, although he wasn’t very religious, that one moment of my life where I was praying next to him—it was just magical—because we were always together, we were on the same level. It was always the father-son relationship, but just that when I prayed with him, we were on the same level for the first time and it made me connect to both family and religiously to God. It was the first time I got exposed to God in that context. And it was the first time I got exposed to, yes, there’s a being above us looking out for us, and that I should respect and appreciate life because this is what He created, so appreciate what He’s done.

The first time I chose to rely upon God was when I went to university for four years in Canada. My first year, I was out of touch with the religious world because I was very focused on school. I was meeting all these Canadians, and we were partying a lot. I mean, it was fun but there was definitely something missing in my life. Then I came back second year and I met some Muslim friends. And I saw that there was an actual community that went and prayed every Friday in Canada in the university. So I joined them. And then I realized, ‘Oh, you’ve been doing that for the first year; kind of not listening to what God has said.’ I kind of regret what I did the first year of university but when I went back to Islam, it just changed my life again. It’s not that I doubted faith or had no faith in God. I guess I wasn’t concentrating; I just wasn’t focused. A lot of elements changed when I realized that what I did in the first year was wrong. When I started praying, it was like a magical moment where, especially that first time, I went to the prayer room. It was surprising ’cause I was in a huge room and I saw all these other Muslims and I was in a foreign country in North America, in Canada, Montreal, a very French province. And I looked around and my brothers were all over me and it was nice to be together as one. Praying to the same God. Believing in one faith. It was like a warm feeling inside after I got out of the prayers. Everything in my life changed after that day. I’m very grateful for that day. That was the main pillar of my life. It all came out of just one prayer so I was shocked that one prayer would change my life. But it was just one—that one prayer, that one Friday prayer that I went with my friends. And it just changed the way I thought of life. It made me believe that yes there is a God. Don’t drink, be good, you know, do good things. It just changed it.