Mark Twain wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Before I go any further, I want to be clear about what this story is and what it isn’t. This isn’t an attempt to explain Islam, defend it, criticize it, or persuade anyone to see it the way I do. It’s simply the story of what happened when curiosity replaced assumptions and real people replaced headlines. It is the story of my lived experience, of my own observations, my questions, and the feelings that formed as I stepped into a culture and faith I once only knew from a distance…Islam. These are my experiences alone, told as honestly as I can tell them.

A quick note on language: Islam or Islamic refer to the religion and its cultural concepts, while Muslim refers specifically to its followers.

Growing up in Warren, Ohio, you don’t get much exposure to Islam.  As I sat down to write this, I tried to recall the first time I even heard the word Islam or Muslim.  The earliest memory that came to my mind was of Cassius Clay announcing his conversion to the Nation of Islam and taking the name Muhammad Ali.  A quick Google search reminded me that happened in March 1964, when I was not yet two years old. Therefore the memory must be my father’s voice, a boxing fan, explaining that the heavyweight champion I knew as Ali had once been someone else.

For most of my life, Islam felt like something distant, only in headlines from far-off places: Anwar Sadat’s assassination, the PLO and the Camp David Accords, names like Golda Meir and Menachem Begin, the countries of Iraq and Iran, Gaza, Palestine, and the West Bank, the Gulf War, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Sunni and Shiite, and more recently, Hamas. These words, I believed, belonged to the Middle East, not to my Ohio hometown.

My grandmother offered the closest brush with that world. Twice, during my teenage years, she boarded a group tour to “the Holy Land,” traveling alone across cultures she had only read about. She brought back olive-wood carvings and stories of Bethlehem, the Wailing Wall, and floating in the Dead Sea. She spoke of being escorted off a plane in Egypt by armed militia and of walking the Gaza Strip. At the time, the political weight of her journey barely registered. Like many Americans, I remained sheltered, thinking distant conflicts stayed distant.

That illusion cracked in 1991 with the Gulf War and shattered a decade later on September 11, when the unimaginable reached our own soil.

Fast-forward to 2014, when I traded small-town Ohio for Paris, France. I moved into the 18th arrondissement, Montmartre, unaware that La Goutte d’Or, my new neighborhood, held one of the city’s largest Muslim communities. Montmartre quickly became my favorite corner of Paris; I wandered its streets and café-lined squares without giving much thought to the absence of wine glasses in many of the local cafés. I did, however, find myself drawn across the river to the Grande Mosquée de Paris and the Institut du Monde Arabe in the Latin Quarter. This marked my first real visit to a mosque, though I barely understood what I was seeing.

On January 7, 2015, violence shattered that curiosity. Just 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) from my flat, two French-born Algerian brothers stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo during a weekly editorial meeting, killing twelve and wounding eleven. They claimed allegiance to al-Qaeda, avenging a satirical cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. Paris fell silent and defiant at once. The next morning I walked to the site, spoke with a silver-haired journalist, who I later discovered was Anderson Cooper, and listened to the stunned city around us. Four days later I joined nearly two million people and dozens of world leaders in a march of unity, Paris carrying both sorrow and defiance.

Life pulled me east after that. In August 2015 I left for China, and the following summer was a month of travel through Tibet, Nepal, and finally the United Arab Emirates. Dubai was my first step into the Middle East and into an openly Islamic nation. I arrived during Ramadan, curious and respectful, watching a city adjust so visitors like me could eat while the majority fasted. For the first time I listened, really listened, to the Adhan, the call to prayer, its cadence settling over the heat-hazed skyline.

By February 2017 I had moved to the small Chinese town of Dong’e, where I discovered a small Lanzhou noodle shop and fell in love with its hand-pulled lamian. Over time it became clear that the owner was Muslim, part of a centuries-old community in northwest China’s Gansu province, where more than a million Muslims live. My map of Islam kept expanding, Paris, Dubai, Dong’e, each place reshaping what the word meant, each encounter revisiting old assumptions.

While living in Dong’e, I seized the chance to visit Xi’an, now China’s second most popular tourist destination. Once the eastern gateway of the Silk Road and home to the Terracotta Army of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, both UNESCO World Heritage sites, the city is also celebrated for its vibrant Muslim Quarter. Around 65,000 Chinese Muslims live and work there, filling Food Street with the scent of rou jia mo (shredded meat in warm pita), smoky lamb skewers, and sweet persimmon cakes. I wandered the quarter’s narrow lanes, pausing at the Great Mosque of Xi’an, first built in 742 and still serene after more than a millennium. Later, while trailing three women through twisting backstreets, I discovered Daxuexi Lane Mosque and, with their laughter and permission, captured their photo.

In an earlier post I mentioned a Paris friend who had moved to Bali and made me promise that I’d visit. She made good on her plan, and in February 2018 I arrived on the island for the first time. I knew most Balinese were Hindu, but I hadn’t realized that the rest of Indonesia is predominantly Muslim…about 80% nationwide. Because roughly 88% of Bali itself is Hindu, my encounters with the Muslim community were brief, mostly over delicious plates at small warungs or tiny street stalls run by Muslim families.

The following January, still recovering from a broken back, I sought sun and rest in Phuket, Thailand. I chose a guesthouse near Surin Beach, its name a nod to dear friends back in Warren, Ohio.  I found myself in a largely Muslim neighborhood with two mosques nearby. Thailand is overwhelmingly Buddhist, yet about 5.5% of its people are Muslim. I didn’t learn much about the faith, but each dawn and dusk the call to prayer floated through my window, a reminder of the community around me before I wandered off to the beach.

That same injury had forced me to cancel a Paris trip planned for September 2018, but by May 2019 my cousins Bob and Sally and my friend Teri and I finally made it happen. Flying from China to Paris, I spotted a connection through Doha, Qatar, and arranged a day’s stopover. My timing once again coincided with Ramadan. Qatar’s arid desert spills into the blue of the Persian Gulf, and its capital, Doha, is a startling mix of futuristic skyscrapers and Islamic-inspired architecture. I joined a morning city tour, lingered in the bustling Souq Waqif, and admired the Blue Mosque until I accidentally wandered into the men’s prayer room and was gently and kindly redirected. Later I spent the afternoon exploring the city with Karen, a fellow Warrenite I’d met through a friend. I can’t claim deep insight into Islam from a single day, but I left with a feel for the rhythm of life there.

By February 2020 I had relocated to Warsaw, Poland, a country where nearly nine out of ten people identify as Catholic. I didn’t expect much connection with Islam. Then, in June 2021, a new flatmate arrived: Ali, from Iran. Our paths overlapped only briefly. I left for the summer in Bulgaria and he moved on before I returned, but even that fleeting encounter became another paragraph in the story I was living, one that kept nudging me toward places and people connected to Islam. After Bulgaria, before settling back in Warsaw, I traveled on to Egypt and Morocco, beginning a stretch of experiences that would deepen me in ways I couldn’t yet imagine.

What I didn’t realize then was that my curiosity about the world would slowly take me to a faith and culture I barely knew.  It didn’t happen in one defining moment, but in a string of small encounters, unexpected conversations, and people who opened their lives to me with generosity. Each experience nudged me further along a path I didn’t yet understand, but it somehow felt alright, as if the universe kept whispering, keep going. 

That whisper followed me first to Egypt where Islamic Cairo and Coptic Cairo lived side by side in a way that felt both ancient and modern.  Wandering the narrow streets, I could feel the history, mosques and churches, two worlds living together in a way that made me pay attention. It wasn’t my first brush with faith on my travels but it was the first time I stood closely between two spiritual traditions that many feel are worlds apart, yet I could see how deeply they shaped the people around me, and I began to understand that the distance between them was smaller than the world likes to believe.  Just different expressions of a shared faith in something greater.

From Cairo, my journey carried me to my first encounter with Morocco and its people. From the little research I had done, I knew I wanted to visit the Hassan II Mosque.  It is the second-largest functioning mosque in Africa and the seventh-largest in the world. With an estimated four million mosques worldwide (as of 2019), being number seven is no small thing. Inside, it can accommodate 25,000 people, with space for another 80,000 worshipers outside. I was absolutely blown away.

I took a guided tour, but to be perfectly honest, I didn’t learn much about the religion itself. While staying in the medina in Marrakech, I listened to the daily calls to prayer and visited the Saadian Tombs and Bahia Palace, but only on a tourist level, without much thought to Islam.

I took side trips to Essaouira, Casablanca, and the Ourika Valley and noticed women wearing hijabs and niqabs. Something I accepted simply as part of the culture, without questions and without answers.

It wouldn’t be until later, after another short trip to Morocco in 2023, and then what was meant to be a three-month stay that somehow stretched into a year plus, that my understanding of Islam began to take a different shape. I have other stories to tell about the moments and people who expanded my understanding before I returned in December 2024.  But the clearest turning points didn’t come from monuments or call to prayer drifting through a medina. They came from the people themselves. Each encounter adding a little more depth, a little more truth, to what had once been just distant observation.

One of those turning points came several months before Kelaa, through my next flatmate, Zaka. His family was Muslim  They are from Azerbaijan, though he himself wasn’t practicing at the time he became my flatmate. In May 2024, his parents came to visit and stayed with us, and suddenly I found myself welcomed into their world in the most natural, everyday ways. I learned about their culture over shared meals, long conversations translated by Tarlan (another flatmate from Azerbaijan) and Zaka, and time spent in the kitchen with his mother. Who patiently shared her recipes and, more importantly, explained why she chose to wear a hijab. It was the first time I had been able to ask real questions, not as a tourist or an outsider, but as a guest invited to understand.

As she spoke to Zaka, who translated for me, she explained that the reasons women wear a hijab, a scarf that covers the head and hair, can come from many places: personal belief, family tradition, culture, or religion. She wore her hijab whenever men outside her immediate family were present, so when it was just the two of us at home, she often didn’t have it on. But since our other flatmate, Tarlan, wasn’t part of her immediate family, she wore it whenever he was around, even if her husband or Zaka were the only others there.

She told me it was a sign of respect for her husband. Hair, she said, is often seen as something beautiful, something meant only for him to see. She also shared that some women choose to wear a niqab, where only the eyes show, or a burqa, which covers the entire body and face with a mesh screen over the eyes. And she emphasized that in most Islamic communities, what a woman chooses to wear, or not wear, is ultimately her decision. Many Muslim women leave their head and hair uncovered altogether.

Looking back now, I can see that Warsaw was a bridge. My brief friendship with Ali and later the generosity of Zaka’s family didn’t suddenly answer my questions about Islam, but they changed the way I asked them. Somewhere along the way, strangers became friends, and “Muslims” became people with names, families, traditions, laughter, and everyday lives.

Then came Morocco.

When I finally left Morocco after more than a year, I realized the greatest lessons I carried away had very little to do with religion itself. They were about hospitality, generosity, family, patience, and the willingness to open a door to someone who arrived knowing almost nothing. I fasted during Ramadan, celebrated Eid with friends, shared countless meals, asked uncomfortable questions, and was trusted with honest answers. I didn’t leave Morocco as an expert on Islam, far from it. But I left with something much more valuable: the understanding that no faith, culture, or group of people can be understood through headlines, politics, or social media alone.

Today I live in Kenya, where I still hear the call to prayer from time to time and still meet Muslims in my daily life. But Morocco changed the way I see those moments. What once sounded foreign, the call to prayer, now seems as ordinary as the church bells I grew up hearing in small-town Ohio.

If travel has taught me anything, it’s this: people are almost never as simple as the stories we tell about them from a distance. Every country I’ve called home has challenged something I thought I knew. Morocco challenged one of my oldest assumptions. It reminded me that understanding doesn’t always begin with agreement; it begins with listening, asking respectful questions, and allowing people to tell their own stories.

Perhaps that’s what Mark Twain meant all along. Travel doesn’t tell us what to think. It simply reminds us that no headline, no stereotype, and no opinion can ever compete with meeting people face-to-face.