Moisha Krivitsky, Ex-Rabbi,
Today Musa[1] (this
is the name he has adopted when he became a Muslim) lives in a small mosque in
Al-Burikent, a mountain area of Makhachkala, and works as a watchman in the
Central Juma mosque.
Interviewer: Musa, before we
began talking, you asked what we were going to talk about. I said: About
you.
Musa: What’s so
interesting about me? If you wondered. Then I live in the mosque..
Interviewer: How did you come to
live in the mosque?
Musa: Well, I just
dropped in... and stayed.
Interviewer: Did you find the
way easily?
Musa: With great
difficulty. It was hard then, and it isn’t much easier now. When
you go deeply into Islam its inner meaning, you understand that this religion
is very simple, but the way that leads to it may be extremely difficult.
Often, people don’t understand how a person could be converted into Islam from
the other side, as it were.
But there are no other sides
here. Islam is everything there is, both what we imagine and what we don’t
imagine.
Interviewer: Musa, as a matter of fact, we were given
this fact as a certain sensation: a Rabbi has turned Muslim.
Musa: Well, it has been
no sensation for quite a long while already - it’s more than a year that I did
this. It was strange for me at first, too. But it wasn’t an
off-the-cuff decision. When I came into Islam, I had read books about it,
I had been interested.
Interviewer: Did you finish any high school before
coming to the synagogue?
Musa: Yes, I finished a
clerical high school. After graduation, I came to Makhachkala, and became
the local Rabbi.
Interviewer: And where did you come from?
Musa: Oh, from far
away. But I have already become a true Daghestani, I have got a lot of
friends here - both among Muslims and people who are far from Islam.
Interviewer: Let’s return to
your work in the synagogue.
Musa: It was quite a paradoxical situation: there was a
mosque near my synagogue, the town mosque. Sometimes my fiends who were
its parishioners would come to me - just to chat. I sometimes would come
to the mosque myself, to see how the services were carried out. I was
very interested. So we lived like good neighbors. And once, during
Ramadan, a woman came to me - as I now understand, she belonged to a people
that was historically Muslim - and she asked me to comment the Russian
translation of the Quran made by Krachkovsky.
Interviewer: She brought the Quran to you - a Rabbi?!
Musa: Yes, and she asked
me to give her the Torah to read in return. So I tried to read the Quran
- about ten times.
It was really hard, but gradually I
began to understand, and to get a basic notion of Islam. (Here, Musa
looked at my friend’s son, the six-year old Ahmed, who had fallen asleep in the
mosque courtyard. "Should we probably take him inside the
mosque?" asked Musa.) And that woman had brought back the Torah.
It turned out to be very difficult for
her to read and understand it, because religious literature requires extreme
concentration and attention.
Interviewer: Musa, and when you were reading the
translation, you must have begun to compare it with the Torah?
Musa: I had found answers
to many questions in the Quran. Not to all of them, of course, because it
wasn’t the Arabic original, but the translation.
But I had begun to understand things.
Interviewer: Does it mean that you couldn’t find some
answers in Judaism?
Musa: I don’t know,
there’s Allah’s will in everything.
Apparently, those Jews who became
Muslims in the times of the Prophet, couldn’t find some answers in Judaism, but
found them in Islam.
Perhaps, they were attracted by the
personality of the Prophet, his behavior, his way of communicating with
people. Its an important topic.
Interviewer: And what exactly were the questions that
you couldn’t find answers to in Judaism?
Musa: Before I came into
contact with Islam, there were questions which I had never even tried to find
answers to. Probably, an important part here had been played by a book
written by Ahmad Deedat, a South African scholar, comparing the Quran and the
Bible.
There is a key phrase, well-known to
those who are familiar with religious issues: e.g. Follow the Prophet who is
yet to cometh. And when I studied Islam, I understood that the Prophet
Muhammad is the very Prophet to be followed. Both the Bible and the Torah
tell us to do it.
I haven’t invented anything here.
Interviewer: And what does the
Torah say about the Prophet?
Musa: We wont be able to
find this name in the Torah. But we can figure it out using a special
key. For example, we can understand what god this or that particular
person in history worships. The formula describing the last Prophet [may
the mercy and blessings of God be upon him] is that he would worship One God,
the Sole Creator of the world. The Prophet Muhammad matches this
description exactly.
When I read this, I got very
interested. I hadn’t known anything about Islam before that. Then I
decided to look deeper into the matter and see whether there were any miracles
and signs connected with the name of the Prophet.
The Bible tells us that the Lord sends
miracles to the prophets to confirm their special mission in people’s eyes.
I asked the alims (scholars)
about this, and they said: Here’s a collection of true hadeeths which describe
the miracles connected with the Prophet. Then I read that the Prophet had
always said that there had been prophets and messengers before him.
We can find their names both in the
Torah and in the Bible. When I was only starting to get interested, it
sounded somewhat strange for me. And then...
Well, my own actions led to what
happened to me. Sometimes I get to thinking: why did I read all this? Perhaps, I should say the tauba (a prayer of
repenting) right now for having thoughts like that.
.
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