From the Dreamtime to the Divine

I need to tell you about country first. In Aboriginal culture, the land isn't something you own. It's something you belong to. The Dreamtime stories — the creation narratives of my people — say that ancestor spirits sang the world into existence. Every rock, every waterhole, every red ridge of the MacDonnell Ranges holds a story older than memory.

I grew up with those stories in Mparntwe — the place you call Alice Springs. Arrernte country. My grandmother, my apmereke-artweye, taught me the songlines before I could write my name. She told me the land was watching. She told me to walk softly.

By eighteen, I was in trouble. Not the land's fault — mine. Alcohol, mainly. The same poison that's devastated Aboriginal communities for generations found me too. I dropped out of school. I spent three years doing nothing productive. My grandmother said, 'The land is still singing. You've just stopped listening.'

I met a Sudanese man named Ibrahim at a community centre in Alice Springs. He was a refugee. We had nothing in common except being brown in a town that didn't always want us. We became friends over basketball and instant noodles.

Ibrahim prayed five times a day. On the red dirt, on concrete, on grass — wherever he was when the time came. I watched him put his forehead on the ground and I thought of my grandmother. She had a practice — not prayer exactly, but a daily connection to the sacred. A sitting-down, a being-still, a listening to country. Ibrahim's sujood looked the same.

I asked him about Islam. He gave me a Quran translated into English. I read it over three weeks, sitting on the banks of the Todd River — which is dry most of the year, but the riverbed is alive with stories.

What I found in those pages wasn't foreign. It was familiar. The Quran says the earth is a masjid — the whole earth is a place of worship. My Elders said the land is sacred. Same truth, different tongues. The Quran says every community was sent a messenger. My grandmother's stories — could they be echoes of something sent to my people before the word 'Islam' existed? I don't know. But the thought sits in my chest like a warm coal.

I took my shahada under the ghost gum trees near Anzac Hill. Ibrahim was there. Two Aboriginal brothers from the community were there. We prayed Dhuhr on the red earth and I cried because the ground felt different under my forehead. Not foreign. Familiar. Like coming home to a home I didn't know I had.

I'm still Aboriginal. I still walk country. I still carry the songlines my grandmother taught me. I didn't leave my ancestors behind when I found Islam. I understood them better.

My grandmother hasn't taken shahada. But when I told her about tawhid — the oneness of God, the idea that the Creator is beyond all human comprehension — she smiled and said, 'We've always known that, grandson. We just had different words.'