During her second year of nursing school, Sanders was invited by an older nurse's aide to a Friday-night dinner party at the Nation of Islam temple in Harlem. "The food was delicious," Shabazz recalled in 1992, "I'd never tasted food like that." After dinner, the woman asked Sanders to come to the Muslims' lecture. Sanders agreed. After the speech, the nurse's aide invited Sanders to join the Nation of Islam; Sanders politely declined. When the woman asked her why she chose not to join the Nation of Islam after visiting, Sanders replied that she did not know she had been brought there to join. "Besides, my mother would kill me, and additionally I don't even understand the philosophy." The Malloys were Methodists, and when she was 13, Sanders had decided she would remain a Methodist for the rest of her life.