Amanda Florian

Editor's note: The story below was altered to remove a reference to William Rhew's wife.

Corrections and clarifications: A previous version of this article misspelled Nathan Rhew’s name.

“I remember the day I did it. I sat in a Food City parking lot for 45 minutes and contemplated what I had just done and how it was going to affect my life.”

William Rhew, a 21-­year-­old former Pentecostal Christian raised in Johnson City, Tenn., is discussing his conversion to Islam. He says he doesn’t exactly fit the Muslim stereotype.

“I don’t look like what people fear,” Rhew says. “I don’t have a beard, I’m not Arab.”

The senior at Johnson City's East Tennessee State University converted in 2012 during his senior year of high school. Christianity, he says, left him with many questions so he decided to “look for answers” on his own. He first learned about Islam from a high school friend, a Muslim girl named Sophia. She referred him to Taneem Aziz, a founding member of a local mosque in Johnson City.

“(Taneem) is responsible for most of my learning about Islam now because what I didn't learn from him, he gave me the resources to learn from, such as (websites on) and books, and a copy of the Quran,” says Rhew.

He was attracted the religion he says, because of the "simplicity of who is God. I figured out that God is God. ... I found that really beautiful. (Another) thing I find beautiful ... is that Islam encourages you not only to be pure in heart and mind, but to be presentable, to look nice. (And) we have the original Holy book — we can see what was written."



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His decision to convert, which he at first kept a secret from his immediate family and friends, came about two months after he started studying the religion.

“Many of my friends who have converted have spent three or four years studying Islam before they even considered to convert,” Rhew says. “Although it was a bit hasty, I did put a lot of effort into researching the religion before I jumped into it.”

The scariest part, he says, was "realizing that everything you once were religiously is now (thought of) as wrong or partially wrong, and you have to come to terms with the fact that some things have to be relearned.”

One of the hardest things about converting was not knowing how others would react, he says. “I didn’t really come out, so to speak, as Muslim with my friends and even still some of my family don't know." His parents, he explains, discovered his new religion through his actions.

“They had known something was kind of different when I began to not eat pork, (though) I never had a thing for alcohol, I never drank. (But) they noticed my patterns ... were a little different. I was waking up at an odd time early in the morning, doing something they weren’t sure (what it was), which was prayer. And they saw who my (new) friends were.”



Religion, he says, is now a taboo subject at home: "We don’t talk about it because it creates conflict and that’s not what I want. It’s not productive.”

"I want Wil to always make a choice for himself and know it’s the right choice,” says Rhew’s mom, Rebecca Rhew. She and his father, Nathan Rhew, have lived in the area for some 20 years. She supports Wil, she says, and what he “believes in his heart,” because he's her son.

“Wil may believe differently from what we want him to believe, but I would not debate him or put him down,” she says. “It’s hard to know about different cultures. You have to learn and take into consideration what the other person is thinking. I don't put down someone else's religion (even if) I don't accept it myself. It’s not my place to judge them. (And) I think one of the things Wil has showed me is you can't push (religion) down; people have to believe it for themselves."

Rhew, who is president of the Muslim Student Association's ETSU's campus chapter and attends the local mosque at least once a week, says the media doesn't help as it can influence people to perceive all Muslims as extremists. "I wish the voices of normal Muslims would be heard over that of the extremists'," he says, "because, unfortunately, the more extreme voices yell louder.”

He suggests that people take the time to speak with Muslims instead of making generalizations. “Assumptions are very dangerous," Rhew says. "Assumptions are what have us in the state we are in now. ... Don’t prejudge us from what you see or hear."

"Diversity is nature’s beauty," he believes, and when he meets people of different faiths, he wants to know more about them and their religions.

“I’ve always had an interest in religion and culture, and I think in part that attributed to my becoming Muslim — I was willing to learn about it.”



Amanda Florian is a Milligan College student a USA TODAY College correspondent.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.