The Rabbi of Makhachkala synagogue embraced Islam.\u00a0 Every person has a different way of coming to the Truth.\u00a0 For Moisha Krivitsky this way led through a faculty of law, a synagogue and a prison.\u00a0 The lawyer-to-be becomes a Rabbi, then he converts into Islam and finds himself in prison.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Interviewer<\/em>: Musa, before we began talking, you asked what we were going to talk about.\u00a0 I said: About you.<\/p>\n Musa<\/em>: What\u2019s so interesting about me? \u00a0If you wondered.\u00a0 Then I live in the mosque..<\/p>\n Interviewer<\/em>: How did you come to live in the mosque?<\/p>\n Musa<\/em>: Well, I just dropped in… and stayed.<\/p>\n Interviewer<\/em>: Did you find the way easily?<\/p>\n Musa<\/em>: With great difficulty.\u00a0 It was hard then, and it isn\u2019t much easier now.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Often, people don\u2019t understand how a person could be converted into Islam from the other side, as it were.<\/p>\n But there are no other sides here.\u00a0 Islam is everything there is, both what we imagine and what we don\u2019t imagine.<\/p>\n Interviewer<\/em>: Musa, as a matter of fact, we were given this fact as a certain sensation: a Rabbi has turned Muslim.<\/p>\n Musa<\/em>: Well, it has been no sensation for quite a long while already – it\u2019s more than a year that I did this.\u00a0 It was strange for me at first, too.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t an off-the-cuff decision.\u00a0 When I came into Islam, I had read books about it, I had been interested.<\/p>\n Interviewer<\/em>: Did you finish any high school before coming to the synagogue?<\/p>\n Musa<\/em>: Yes, I finished a clerical high school.\u00a0 After graduation, I came to Makhachkala, and became the local Rabbi.<\/p>\n Interviewer<\/em>: And where did you come from?<\/p>\n Musa<\/em>: Oh, from far away.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Interviewer<\/em>: Let\u2019s return to your work in the synagogue.<\/p>\n Musa<\/em>: It was quite a paradoxical situation: there was a mosque near my synagogue, the town mosque.\u00a0 Sometimes my fiends who were its parishioners would come to me – just to chat.\u00a0 I sometimes would come to the mosque myself, to see how the services were carried out.\u00a0 I was very interested.\u00a0 So we lived like good neighbors.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Interviewer<\/em>: She brought the Quran to you – a Rabbi?!<\/p>\n Musa<\/em>: Yes, and she asked me to give her the Torah to read in return.\u00a0 So I tried to read the Quran – about ten times.<\/p>\n It was really hard, but gradually I began to understand, and to get a basic notion of Islam.\u00a0 (Here, Musa looked at my friends son, the six-year old Ahmed, who had fallen asleep in the mosque courtyard.\u00a0 \u201cShould we probably take him inside the mosque?\u201d \u00a0asked Musa.) And that woman had brought back the Torah.<\/p>\n It turned out to be very difficult for her to read and understand it, because religious literature requires extreme concentration and attention.<\/p>\n Interviewer<\/em>: Musa, and when you were reading the translation, you must have begun to compare it with the Torah?<\/p>\n Musa<\/em>: I had found answers to many questions in the Quran.\u00a0 Not to all of them, of course, because it wasn\u2019t the Arabic original, but the translation.<\/p>\n But I had begun to understand things.<\/p>\n Interviewer<\/em>: Does it mean that you couldn\u2019t find some answers in Judaism?<\/p>\n Musa<\/em>: I don\u2019t know, there\u2019s Allah\u2019s will in everything.<\/p>\n Apparently, those Jews who became Muslims in the times of the Prophet, couldn\u2019t find some answers in Judaism, but found them in Islam.<\/p>\n Perhaps, they were attracted by the personality of the Prophet, his behavior, his way of communicating with people.\u00a0 Its an important topic.<\/p>\n Interviewer<\/em>: And what exactly were the questions that you couldn\u2019t find answers to in Judaism?<\/p>\n Musa<\/em>: Before I came into contact with Islam, there were questions which I had never even tried to find answers to.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 And when I studied Islam, I understood that the Prophet Muhammad is the very Prophet to be followed.\u00a0 Both the Bible and the Torah tell us to do it.<\/p>\n I haven\u2019t invented anything here.<\/p>\n Interviewer<\/em>: And what does the Torah say about the Prophet?<\/p>\n Musa<\/em>: We wont be able to find this name in the Torah.\u00a0 But we can figure it out using a special key.\u00a0 For example, we can understand what god this or that particular person in history worships.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The Prophet Muhammad matches this description exactly.<\/p>\n When I read this, I got very interested.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t known anything about Islam before that.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n The Bible tells us that the Lord sends miracles to the prophets to confirm their special mission in peoples eyes.<\/p>\n I asked the\u00a0alims<\/em> (scholars)about this, and they said: Here\u2019s a collection of true hadeeths which describe the miracles connected with the Prophet.\u00a0 Then I read that the Prophet had always said that there had been prophets and messengers before him.<\/p>\n We can find their names both in the Torah and in the Bible.\u00a0 When I was only starting to get interested, it sounded somewhat strange for me.\u00a0 And then…<\/p>\n Well, my own actions led to what happened to me.\u00a0 Sometimes I get to thinking: why did I read all this? \u00a0Perhaps, I should say the\u00a0tauba<\/em> (a prayer of repenting) right now for having thoughts like that.<\/p>\n Footnotes:<\/p>\n [1] Musa is Arabic name of Moses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Rabbi of Makhachkala synagogue embraced Islam.\u00a0 Every person has a different way of coming to the Truth.\u00a0 For Moisha Krivitsky this way led through a faculty of law, a synagogue and a prison.\u00a0 The lawyer-to-be becomes a Rabbi, then … Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whoismohamed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whoismohamed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whoismohamed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whoismohamed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whoismohamed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.whoismohamed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":250,"href":"https:\/\/www.whoismohamed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions\/250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whoismohamed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whoismohamed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whoismohamed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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