My name is Muhammad Robert Heft. I was bron in Winnipeg in Canada to second generation Canadians, originally German and Irish. I’m from a small town growing up in Milton, Ontario, I call it redneck town or farmer’s town.

I was born into a Lutheran family. We weren’t that practicing… Sunday school was something we did until about six years old.

I don’t consider ourselves overly religious. Probably we went to funerals when somebody died, we went to churches when somebody married, celebrating Christmas which wasn’t a really religious holiday for any of us.

I’m sure to many people I’m the guy that they wish they weren’t and they were glad they weren’t. I mean I wasn’t leading a very healthy lifestyle and I wasn’t going many places with my thinking or my strategies.

Some people would say “O well, you weren’t that bad” but I wasn’t that good. I accepted Islam in July 12, 1998 and I went through quite a bit. I went through gambling, drinking, drugs, womanizing… trying to acquire as much material wealth as possible.

So I hit rock bottom and I started searching and I fell upon Islam when I went to a convenience store… never hearing about it. And after debating with a convenience store owner for about 3 days, by the grace and mercy of Allah, I accepted Islam.

It was very important for me to have Jesus. I love the stories in the Bible, and then when they told me that he’s a Prophet of God, he’s better than us, he’s a perfect human being… that really set proper in my heart.

Then the Quran, being an owner’s manual, a way to live, it was amazing because I was looking for structure.

One of the concerns was that I wouldn’t be able to convince my family that I had made a good decision, but over the years, obviously it wasn’t a phase and they see that from my actions. I was willing to take everything that came with that decision.

The main thing for me, without a doubt, was the oneness of God. I mean I was in mathematics, I was playing the card game euchre in grade 3… I was in special classes of math and the way it works out mathematical, for us as Muslims through theology. I mean believing in God and His attributes and that God exists and exists pre-eternally without a place, without a size, without a shape.

It was amazing that the fact that we’re the only religion that believes that God is not inside of something. We don’t have to put God somewhere to believe in Him. We believe in God out of necessity.

We’ve come to a confident conclusion that God’s existence is out of necessity. And mathematically speaking, that we can say God has to exist because He can not, not be. He’s absolute in His existence because everything in the universe is contingent. It doesn’t have to exist and needs a creator and the creator has to have certain attributes.

I thought that was just amazing. How it just works in and there is nobody who can with a philosophy and try to refute it. Nobody can say the Big Bang… anything they say it always comes down to one of those things that it necessary for there to be an uncreated creator of the entire universe.