There is something misleading about the term “Islamic identity”, as if becoming Muslim means you must lose your individuality, your personality, your culture; as if you are somehow reformatted, and take on a sort of ready-made, clone-like “Muslim identity”. Many converts grapple with this; the notion that you have to basically discard everything you’ve ever been, and replace it all with a new set of personality traits, habits, and so on. But this is incorrect. It is useful to mention what Ibn Taymiyyah said here, “Islam did not come to destroy any culture, it came to polish them”; in other words, it purges what is bad, refines what is good, and leaves intact whatever does not contradict the explicit rules and morals and ethics of the religion.