From Atheism to Surrender: The Story of Jeffrey Lang
Jeffrey Lang
28 years old, from United States
Previous Religion: Atheism
My Life Before Islam
Jeffrey Lang was born on January 30, 1954, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, into a Roman Catholic family, and spent eighteen years in Catholic schools. He was a boy of sharp questions, and neither his teachers nor his parents could satisfy his doubts about God and the meaning of suffering. As the 1960s gave way to a sceptical age, he rejected the faith of his childhood, and by the age of eighteen he had become a convinced atheist. A gifted mathematician, he took refuge in a world of logic and certainty, where the questions of faith had, he believed, no real answers.
The Moment of Guidance
In the early 1980s Lang was a young lecturer in mathematics at the University of San Francisco, and there he met Muslim students who began to answer the very questions he thought he had closed for ever. They responded to his probing with care, patience, and thoughtfulness, and one of them, a Saudi student named Mahmoud Qandeel, eventually gave him a copy of the Qur'an. He began to read it as a sceptic, looking for weaknesses. Instead, he found himself drawn into an argument that was rational and profound, and that took his deepest doubts seriously rather than dismissing them.
Reflections
Lang read the Qur'an again and again, and later wrote that he was conquered by it: the book he had approached as an opponent gradually dismantled every objection he had raised. He found a small prayer room shared by Muslim students in the basement of a church, and after a long inner struggle he entered it one day and declared the shahadah, the testimony that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is His messenger. He was twenty-eight years old and had been an atheist for a decade. It was, he said, the end of a long siege.
Lang became a professor of mathematics at the University of Kansas, where he also served as faculty advisor to the Muslim Student Association. He wrote three widely loved books, Struggling to Surrender, Even Angels Ask, and Losing My Religion, in which he speaks frankly about the questions that trouble converts and the children of Muslim immigrants. His warm, honest voice made him one of the most trusted American writers on Islam, and his lectures have inspired readers across the world to take faith seriously and to ask their questions without fear.