From Sunday School to Salah: How a Choir Boy Found Islam

I grew up in a devout Anglican family in Birmingham. Church wasn’t optional — it was the rhythm of our lives. Every Sunday, I’d stand in the choir stall at St. Martin’s, singing hymns I knew by heart before I could read.

By university, I had questions. Not doubts exactly, but a feeling that something was incomplete. The Trinity never sat right with me logically, and I’d push it down every time it surfaced. “Faith isn’t about logic,” my mum would say. But for me, it had to be.

The turning point was absurdly ordinary. A taxi ride home from a night out in 2019. The driver, a Somali man named Abdi, had Quran playing softly on his stereo. I asked what it was. He told me. I asked what it meant. He translated a few verses of Surah Ar-Rahman.

“Which of the favours of your Lord will you deny?”

That line haunted me for weeks. I downloaded an English translation of the Quran the next day. I read it cover to cover in eleven days. Unlike the Bible, which I’d studied academically for years, the Quran felt like it was speaking directly to me — not about history, but about right now.

I took my shahada alone in my flat on a Tuesday morning in March 2020 — two days before lockdown. No witnesses except Allah. I repeated it properly at the mosque three months later when they reopened.

My parents didn’t speak to me for eight months. My mum cried. My dad called it a phase. My sister googled “cult deprogramming.” It was the hardest year of my life.

But five years on, my parents come to my home for Eid dinner. My mum learned to cook lamb biryani from my wife’s YouTube tutorials. My dad still doesn’t fully understand, but he told me recently, “You seem more at peace than you ever were. I can’t argue with that.”

I don’t sing in choirs anymore. But every fajr, I stand in a row with my brothers, and I’ve never felt more part of something.