Mohammad Sharif. Not necessarily the name I expected for my Bible-thumping, overly righteous, Catholic school religion teacher. Through 5th grade, we had been taught religion in the most westernized, Californian of ways: reading our cartoon versions of the Bible and learning how Jesus loved everyone. Sure, I knew that other religions existed, but my complete ignorance about everything that’s not Catholicism made them exist to me the same way calculus exists to someone learning basic arithmetic. Honestly, until Mr. Sharif, religion was just another thing that they taught you in school, akin to the fact that 2 + 2 = 4, an ultimate truth of the world. I didn’t particularly like the idea of an omnipotent creator, but in the same way that I wasn’t a fan of cursive. As a result, I listened to my teachers talk about how we would all go to heaven, I managed to usually stay awake through mass, and I simply accepted God as a part of my life, 100%.

Before Mr. Sharif, when I was still in 5th grade, a woman named Ms. Roberts taught middle school religion. She was the quintessential, 80-year-old, morally upstanding religion teacher. Her lectures were ripe with critical comments, warnings of the Hell that awaits those who do not remain chaste until marriage, and the self-proclaimed omniscience that might have fit well in the Spanish Inquisition. However, whether this was her choice or not, she was not to be teaching anymore the year I entered middle school. Looking back, Mr. Sharif is exactly what St. Beatrice’s School needed and still needs, someone to break the silence forced upon the children through years of memorizing Our Fathers and Hail Marys. Someone to completely change the way we children would view religion, not as an answer, but as an unsolvable question.
The first day of class with Mr. Sharif, none of us knew what to expect, and I, with my normal skeptical attitude, was not optimistic. We were just beginning to get a glimpse of the wonders middle school offered, and nothing managed to turn us completely upside down the way religion class did. As we walked into class, nothing could draw our attention away from the extremely peculiar man sitting at the desk, his dark black hair flowing well below his neck, still looking wet even though it was afternoon, and it must have been hours since his morning shower. He displayed an impressive beard, giving a thick, black volume to his face that made him warm and inviting in a Santa Claus kind of way, while also making it very clear that he was not to be trifled with. Mr. Sharif moved smoothly across the classroom, as if he were gliding on ice. We had not even begun to settle down when he began to speak softly and rhythmically, immediately subduing the entire class despite his lack of volume. He wrote on the blackboard his full name, a 9-word sentence in which not one of the characters even closely resembled English. We all thought it was “cool” at the time, albeit insignificant, but it wasn’t until he began to explain our plan for the year that everything truly changed.

“Now, we’re going to start the year off with some simple Bible study, looking at the Old Testament.” Nothing seemed strange so far, exactly what we all expected from middle school religion. Yet, he continued.

“After that, we’re going to look at all the religions of the world: Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and many others. Personally, I’m a Muslim, in a specific sect, with our own beliefs and traditions. We pray five times a day, fast for Ramadan. It’s really quite fascinating, compared to Christianity.” The room became silent. Some kids knew what he was talking about; most didn’t. We all had the same, bigoted, crazy thought in unison. Rambadijinadaban? Other religions? Muslim? Aren’t those the terrorists?

I suppose I was ignorant to it all then, but through the upcoming weeks, I heard hushed conversations from people of all grades discussing Mr. Sharif.

“My mom says that because he isn’t teaching us how to be Catholic, we won’t be able to learn the truth.”

“Really? Well my dad said that if we learn about other religions, they might be teaching us stuff that’s wrong.”

“It’s super weird that he’s Muslim. Like what?”

“I know. We really shouldn’t be talking about this.”

On the day after Martin Luther King Day, we all sat down in class and began to go through our normal routine. Mr. Sharif wasn’t a fan of the traditional way of taking attendance, and instead of calling our name to invoke a simple “here,” he had trained us all to say our names in order, preferably as quickly as possible. After we finished that in record time on this day, without any introduction whatsoever, Mr. Sharif began to speak, completely memorized, saying he was delivering the words of MLK. He talked of civil rights, of transcendence, and threw in catchphrase after catchphrase. I shivered from the power of his speech, embracing the magnitude of what he put behind them, and the importance of what they stood for. When I got home, the first thing I did was look up that speech, and see what Martin Luther King really said. I searched and searched on Google, putting in as many words or combinations of words as I could remember, but all my research confirmed that Martin Luther King never said anything near what Mr. Sharif did.

To most, Mr. Sharif represented the ultimate enigma, a confusion above all others, but now I realize there was truly a method to his madness. When Mr. Sharif lectured us on how many different ways societies looked at issues, he wasn’t indoctrinating us to his viewpoint; he was simply allowing us to think freely. When he would identify the flaws in our argument, he wasn’t belittling us; he was teaching us to think deeper, to understand that there was no certain truth, and we could do no more than dance around the edge. He taught us of the tragedy of the commons, where an entire town destroyed their communal field by abusing it, ruining the beauty for everyone, and how the pencils in the classroom would soon run out for us if we didn’t put them back. I can’t remember much about the religion he taught, but I do remember slowly moving away from my Catholic-centric mindset, and thinking much more freely in all facets of my life.

One day, I walked into class, and something was different. There were computers sitting on every desk, looking quite inviting to us middle school boys. As we all eventually settled down, he began to speak in his usual demanding demeanor, proclaiming: “Today, class, we will do something a bit different. As you can see, there are computers on all your desks. We’re going to take a quiz to see what religion your beliefs place you in.”

Our class buzzed in excitement. We quickly opened up our computers, and got to work. There were multiple-choice questions with up to ten answers, asking everything from how we viewed God to how we should live our lives. As I clicked through my answers, I thought back to how much I had changed over the course of learning with Mr. Sharif. What would have once been my immediate conformance to Catholic scripture was now a defiant certainty of my own uncertainty, answering questions about my supernatural beliefs with “I don’t know” or “don’t care.” I trudged along, question by question, until I eventually reached the final page of the survey, the one that would determine how close my beliefs were to the beliefs of other religions. As I saw the result that appeared on the screen, I realized just how far I’d come since the beginning of middle school, the great leaps and bounds I had made in understanding my own spirituality, just how much I had changed, in my desire for free thought above all else. I began to truly understand the words that flashed up on the screen: “Secular Humanism: 100%.”