"As adults we must each own our own beliefs," said Prof. Fidelma O'Leary, biology, St. Edward's University, to a packed auditorium in Goldwin Smith on Friday night. Her lecture, "An American Woman's Jihad," detailed her spiritual journey as an Irish-American Muslim. "
Islam [is] a development of the faith that I already had..Islam worked for me and I was completely at peace with my religion. [But it was] a long journey filled with jihad [and] a struggle to surrender my will to the will of God," said O'Leary, who was raised as a strict Catholic in Ireland before converting to Islam and moving to the United States. "I was raised in a culture where thinking about religion was taboo. I was a teenager, so naturally I rebelled: I started thinking," she added. She started to have questions about the religious beliefs and practices she was raised on and she began to study religion.
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