Transitioning

While making the change to practicing Islam, there were a few things I had to get rid of, gradually. Music was one of them. In my office environment, one co-worker insisted on playing his music for all to hear.

Another co-worker of mine, a Christian lay-preacher and I decided we had to do something about it so we bought him a nice set of headphones as a gift. We were talking one day and we both realized that we were unconsciously memorizing the words of the songs he was listening to , even when he had the speakers turned down. We discovered that we would both be humming these songs to ourselves at home, and were amazed that we had the same issues.

I then realized that I could practically recall word-for-word dancehall and other songs from the 90's when I was a teen, even some from the 80's. I was like if I can keep that nonsense in my head then surely its affecting me subconsciously, and then decided to totally break away from music.

I now play surahs from the Quran in my car, and Alhamdullilah I have been able to memorize quite a few. So it can be done, I listen to lectures and quran on my headphones at work now and find it quite fulfilling. All this from a former music junkie, trust me I had like 10G of music in mp3 format on my PC at home , all genres, filed by artist name, filed by year, you name it. I was hooked. I got rid of ALL of it, I'm not saying it was easy to do but I think it was worth it.