The father started to call for Prayer as everyone files into two rows facing east toward Makkah. The room is simply furnished with bare walls, save two plaques with Arabic inscription on the mantle.

"Allahu Akbar" young Moosa repeats and the family begins their rhythmic prostrations. After the Prayer, Amalia rouses the two younger boys, 7-year-old Mikail and 4-year-old Daniel, to ready them for school.

After combing their hair, tying their laces and thwarting the general displeasure toward another school day, Amalia sets off to the Islamic school in North Austin, Texas, where she volunteers as a teacher to cover the cost of tuition for the boys. Ilana attends public school in Leander. Before stepping outside, Amalia covers her hair with a green satin hijab, and covers her clothing with a long black dress.

This may be a typical morning for Muslim families across the United States, but Amalia's story is anything but typical. Now 43 and residing in Leander, Amalia is an Israeli-born Jew who converted to Islam over 20 years ago.

To her, it is not Muslim versus Jew, not Israeli versus Arab and not political. It is a matter of faith. She has had to struggle against her family, against fellow Muslims and against society to practice her religion.

But she says it has all been worth it. "At age 7, I used to pray to God to be the smartest person in the world, to know everything," she says sitting down later that day to an afternoon snack of homemade brownies and diet Coke.

"I can say for the first time in my life, not that I know everything, but that I know the truth." She found her truth in Islam.

Amalia was born to an American Jewish mother from Mattapan, Massachusetts, and an Israeli father. As a teenager, her father, Abraham Zadok, fought with an underground army that aided in the creation of the nation of Israel in 1948.

Now a 70-year-old man of slight stature, Abraham wears a ragged, green conductors hat and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes in his shirt pocket. As he speaks, his wide, bushy moustache dominates his small, timeworn face. "Back then Jerusalem belonged to the Arabians," he says in a raspy Israeli accent.

"We had to caravan food to Jerusalem. The Jews had no food, no water; they were suffering."

Although her parents came from religious families, they raised Amalia and her two brothers as traditional, non-orthodox Jews; they attended synagogue only for the high holidays, and they ate pork.

At age 13, Amalia decided she wanted to be a more religious person. "She was an ambitious child," Abraham says.

"She always liked to be the best, the smartest."

Tenacious in all her endeavors, she set out to learn about Judaism. However, she says she never found the answers she sought.

She attended Hebrew boarding school but felt estranged from Judaism and challenged tenants of the religion. Still seeking a religious connection, she later enrolled in Talmud classes while pursuing a degree in psychology at the University of Chicago. She recalls this as a joyous time in her life, feeling the possibility of true connection to the religion of her ancestors.

Eventually, though, she hit the same walls she first encountered as a teenager. "Jews don't quote the Torah; they follow the rabbis, not the word of God. It was all based on who you thought was right. This was too ambiguous. It wasn't real faith. It wasn't the truth."

To this day, friends and family maintain that she converted to Islam on the suggestion of her current husband, Habib. Amalia, however, begins her story much earlier, just after college when she moved to California to be with her family.

She befriended a group of Arab men who used to visit her father's dried fruit and nut stand at the San Jose Farmer's Market. "I had a very low opinion of Arabs," Amalia says, pouring a glass of milk for her youngest son to wash down his brownies.

"You grow up Jewish, so you have this low opinion. It's like a filmy residue from childhood."

Despite these ingrained feelings, she found herself drawn to them and their faith and began to spend afternoons with them at their apartment.

"One thing I had noticed about the people I had met, even though I had all these prejudices about them in my mind, they were very good to each other — and oh, how much I wanted to be a part of that, a part of this feeling of belonging to something so wonderful."

In her own life, Amalia felt anything but acceptance. The Judaism of her past left her without a deep religious connection, and upon returning from Chicago, relations with her mother were strained.

"People say that I only became Muslim because that was the only place I found any comfort, the only place that was open to me, that everything that was familiar was closed."

Amalia admits to some truth in this, but credits Allah for putting her in a position where she would be open to Islam.

As Amalia and her friends watched television one afternoon, the news reported that a female mule had given birth to a baby mule. "This is a sign of the end times," one man said.

This one statement opened Amalia's mind to an aspect of Islam she had never known — the quest to prove tenants in the Quran as the truth.

Her scholastic fire rekindled and burned once again. "Allah approaches people in the way they need to be approached. Allah approached me in the way I needed to be approached by piquing my curiosity, my hunger for knowledge, my hunger [for] the secrets of life and death and the meaning of life."

One day she uttered the words, "I'm thinking about becoming Muslim."

The amazement and joy on the faces of her Muslim friends sealed her decision. Her family, however, did not share in the joy.

Although her parents may not have fully understood that Amalia had already said the testimony of faith (the oath to become Muslim), they did witness her befriend one particular man. Amalia and the man known to her family as "the Arab" were married for six years and had one daughter together, Ilana.

"I don't like Muslims. They low-class society. They throw rocks at Israelis. They kill the Jews. I don't trust them," Abraham explains in choppy, staccato-toned English.

Amalia says everyone in her life thought she had literally gone crazy. Her mother never spoke to her again and died years later without reconciling.

"Amalia's mother thought of him as an enemy," Abraham says. "She was very Zionistic and really against Islam."

Ascertaining what happened during this period in her life is difficult. Amalia doesn't discuss Ilana's father or what actually occurred in those years. There are only the faintest whispers of abuse.

"She has always been open and outgoing, but she doesn't show her inner sadness. It seems like she doesn't have any worries," says Emma Barron, a close friend from California.

Years later, Amalia met Habib, a Muslim-born Pakistani. "I remember her saying that Habib does seem older [nine years her senior] but that older men treat women better," Barron says.

With the separation in time and space from those early years and with the sanctuary her new marriage provided, Amalia's faith began to blossom.

Familial relationships improved slightly but remained strained; contact with her brothers was kept to a minimum.

"In their minds it's too much of a betrayal; they don't see it as a person of faith. They could probably take me being a nun better than being a Muslim. They see that being a Muslim as being anti-Jewish, anti-Israel."

Abraham took the situation quite personally.

"She is like my enemy. Well, I guess you eat what you cook. I tried the best for my family, but I failed," he says with a sigh.

To be continued…

This article first appeared in http://www.jews-for-allah.org// and was republished with their kind permission.