Presented by Zia H Shah MD

Ingrid Mattson was born on August 24, 1963, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, as the sixth of seven children in a Roman Catholic familyen.wikipedia.orgmeforum.org. She attended Catholic schools during her youth and later reflected that the Catholic women who taught her provided an excellent education and nurtured her early spiritual curiosityen.wikipedia.org. However, by her mid-teens she had become disillusioned with organized religion – at 16 she drifted away from Catholicism and lived as an agnostic, feeling a loss of the faith that had once guided hermeforum.org. In 1982, Mattson enrolled at the University of Waterloo, where she pursued a joint honors Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Fine Arts, immersing herself in the world of ideas and aestheticsen.wikipedia.org. She spent hours studying Western art and philosophy, searching for meaning; yet, philosophical studies led her to existentialist conclusions that felt spiritually barren, and even the beauty of art left her yearning for a deeper, more lasting sense of purposeislamconverts.wordpress.comislamconverts.wordpress.com.

During her undergraduate years, Mattson had a formative international experience. In the summer of 1986, as part of her studies, she went to Paris, France, where she befriended a group of West African students from a Sufi Muslim communityen.wikipedia.orgmeforum.org. She was deeply impressed by their warmth, generosity, and sincere spirituality – qualities that stood in stark contrast to what she felt was missing in her own lifemeforum.org. Out of curiosity and a growing spiritual openness, Mattson began reading the Qur’an during this period. In its pages, she later recounted, she found “an awareness of God, for the first time since I was very young”en.wikipedia.org. This profound experience of reconnection with the divine filled the spiritual void she had felt, and set her on a new path. After returning to Canada, she completed her B.A. at Waterloo and, in 1987 at age 23, Ingrid Mattson converted to Islamen.wikipedia.orgmeforum.org. Unlike some converts, her decision was entirely self-motivated by faith – it was not prompted by marriage or family influence, but rather by an intellectual and spiritual journey that began with that encounter in Parismeforum.org. This conversion would become a pivotal turning point, profoundly shaping both her personal life and professional trajectory in the years to come.

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