- Well I'm just talking to you.
I'm saying: "What do you to be, a Muslim or what mate?"
"I'm wanna be a Muslim."
"What sort of Muslim you want to be?"
"I want to be a tall one."
"Tall one?"
"What? Get outta here, you're crazy, you must be a lunatic!"
My name's Gary Busby, but it's changed to Suleyman
15 years ago when I embraced Islam.
I'm nearly 60 years old now.
I come from London, the east end of London.
Hackney, which makes me a cockney, you know,
that's a real thing.
People will say they are but I actually am,
if you can't tell already.
Like a lot of regular English guys, you might say,
I would have said if there was a box
to tick on a form, what's your religion,
you would tick that box "Christian"
and then someone would say,
"Okay, when did last read the Bible?"
and you'd say, "I don't remember reading it at all",
you know or, "Maybe I did at school."
So you know the Lord's prayer and maybe you went
to church for somebody's wedding or a funeral
and that's about all you know.
That's what most Christians are in UK,
majority so-called Christians.
So I was one of those.
I arrived Bahrain in the first of June, 1984,
which was also the first of Ramadan.
So one of my first experiences was to see people fasting,
but the first thing I really noticed was to hear
the call to prayer coming from a nearby mosque.
I heard this voice singing out over the streets
and I heard another one, it was like in a cannon.
You could hear stereophonic sound as they were picking up.
I asked somebody, "What's that guy saying?"
Actually the guy I asked didn't know,
but after some couple of tries, I found somebody
that told me what the guy was saying.
I said, "Oh, that's interesting.
That's a very straightforward thing to say."
It's not something sort of weird and paretic,
it's just straightforward "Come to the prayer"
you know, that's what it's saying.
Hmm, interesting.
Okay, never mind.
I didn't give it too much more thought,
but I was working with Muslims,
they were fasting in that first month,
and they could see I was interested,
so they started to give me answers to simple questions.
"So you pray, how often do you pray?"
"What do you say when you pray?"
"Okay."
I can't say I was overly excited about that.
I just thought: "That's interesting."
"It's something different."
Jump forward many years I was in Turkey in the mid 90's and
there I saw something else.
There I saw a country full of muslims
living in a secular state.
I realized, particularly, during the Ramadans in Turkey,
Ramazan as they call it there,
the people who were fasting
and the people who were not fasting,
they're co-existing because there's no prohibitions
there on the opening of cafes
and drinking in the streets, smoking, whatever,
so you saw people choosing their fast,
rather than it being an overall cultural blanket.
That's when I perceived something more.
I started to notice there was a link between
the people who I'd got to know and like
and the ones who were fasting.
It was a straight positive correlation,
as a statistician would say, you know.
This is a significant at the 95% level, you know.
I joined in.
I just did that spontaneous thing.
I said: "I'm gonna try this."
"What exactly do you have to do, dawn to dusk?"
"Yeah, yeah, okay fine."
"It's not just a question of ignoring a few cups of tea."
Immediately I found it tough
and immediately "Oh, Respect!" you know, this is not easy.
You have to want to do this.
During that time somebody saw that I was interested
and they gave me my first Quran.
Jumping ahead, I came back to Dubai,
my boss at work, Emarati, gentleman,
had been talking to me about a project
that he had been introduced to him by some guys he'd met.
So we went to dinner with these guys
and we sat down to have dinner
and my boss introduced me with a master stroke.
He said, "Meet Gary Busby, he works for me.
He's the worst sort of kafir,"
and I was shocked.
"What, you know?"
This is like an insult, you know.
"What do you mean by that?"
He had a grin on his face when he said it,
but even so it was still a strong statement.
He said, "The trouble with him is he's read Quran,
he's studied the life of the prophet, Alaihi Salat Wa Sallam,
he knows quite a lot about Islam,
he's asked me a lot of questions about it,
and he still doesn't want to embrace."
He says, "Well, chance to solve it.
Ask the guys these questions you been asking me."
So I started asking them and that was like 7 pm,
8 pm came and went and so did 9, 10, 11, and 12.
Well at 12 o'clock they threw us out the restaurant
and we stood in the street.
We stood in the street for another half an hour
and I kept asking my questions.
It was somewhere between midnight and 1 a.m.,
we're standing in the street here in Garhoud in Dubai,
and I guess it went quiet,
and one of the guys said to me,
"So, have we answered all your questions?"
I said, "Yeah, I guess you have,"
and he said, "Well then why don't you just take
the step you need to take. Step across that bridge
and do what you need to do."
That's what I did.
That was on a Tuesday night, I think
and on that Friday I embraced Islam in a mosque in Dubai.
One my biggest concerns around the time that
I embraced Islam, immediately before,
and still immediately afterwards,
was that I felt I might be getting into something
that was too prescriptive, you know,
that I might find that this new way of life
was going to be like a straight jacket
and it was gonna tell me too much, restrict me too much,
give me no options, no choice, lose freedom of choice.
That turned out to be true and not true at the same time
in a very happy way,
because yes, it does tell you what to do,
but it tells you in the way that your father
tells you what to do if he's a good father.
He's giving you the best advice.
You can sit and choose what you take of it
and how you do it, you know, it's up to you.
You're still a human being,
but now you know you're being good advice
and that's very comforting, isn't it?
I'd actually found the formula.
This was the way to fix myself, you know,
follow what it says in the Quran.
It was like having the most wise dad in the world
who was always hanging around to you to tell you stuff.
"Ah, don't do that, you know."
I thought: "Wow, this is amazing, everything."
It's gonna sound obvious, but just don't be scared.
This isn't as exciting as jumping out of an airplane.
I've done that too and that was a lot more stupid.
This was the smart one, so just do it, trust me.
It's gonna be fine.