What brought you to Masjid An-Nur. Valerie Shirley interview

In actuality, I was dissuaded from coming to Masjid An-Nur. I was a very new Muslim and people were trying to teach me information about Islam, and telling me where to go to learn it, and one individual said, “You know, I wouldn’t go to Masjid An-Nur, you probably want to stay away from there,” and I was like, “really, why?” and he used a term that I was unfamiliar with, often Muslims throw out a lot of Arabic terms that for a new Muslim can be confusing, and he was like, “their aqidah is off.” And I was like, “Oh, their aqidah is off,” I was like, “I don’t want my aqidah to be off.” Whatever that was. As I learned more about Islam, I learned that your aqidah is the way you practice this way of life. It’s the way you practice Islam. It’s the way you understand it, the way it’s taught to you, you know, it’s this whole, and now that I understand more about Islam and the world as I’ve matured, everybody’s aqidah is off, you know, everybody has their level of practice and there are some good in the way they do it, and some bad in they way they do it. There’s some right in the way they do it, and there’s some that they’re mistaken about. So eventually I started to learn all the good things they were doing here, they were doing a lot of things that mosques were not, like other mosques were very closed to the community surrounding them, they were not open to the non-Muslim community that surrounded them, just because I don’t know if it was the language barrier or cultural barriers, or what. But this was. They had a food shelf. They had volunteer activities. They had field trips for the youth, they had a youth program. It was just so many things, and they welcomed those who were Muslim and those who were not. And so eventually I just migrated here and I felt more comfortable here than I felt at any other mosque that I went to in the Twin Cities. And so I just kind of eventually - this is where I’ve been ever since then.