Ask Hadi
John Fontain was seven years old when he wrote a song for Sunday school called "Jesus and God." It was a rap with verses he still remembers. The pastor took his paper, crossed out a word, and handed it back. "Jesus and God" had become "Jesus is God."
He was seven, but he knew that wasn't right. "My concept of Jesus was that he's a man, a prophet of God," he says. He believed in God. One God, beyond comprehension. What he couldn't accept was being told that Jesus was that God.
Senegal
At eighteen, he landed in Senegal for the diamond trade. It's a Muslim-majority country.
He heard the adhan, the call to prayer, for the first time and wanted to understand it. A man at his hotel invited John to stay with his family. He sat on the floor and ate with them, went to a wedding, went to a funeral, watched them pray.
He liked the people, but he wasn't ready to trust the religion. So he started picking apart Islam using Christianity, a faith he already knew wasn't true for him.
Five years of not being ready
John went home. He kept reading about Islam for five years, but he kept resisting. He wasn't willing to give up singing. And he didn't know that becoming a Muslim was even possible. "I thought Islam was something you were born with." It wasn't until he found videos of English-speaking reverts online that he realized the door had always been open.
At twenty-three, in Egypt, he went to a mosque and asked a friend to teach him how to pray. The friend said no. "You're not a Muslim." John told him he believed, that he had fasted Ramadan on his own. The friend said he needed to take his shahada, the declaration that there is no God but God and Muhammad ﷺ is His messenger. So John said it.
After Islam
Back in Manchester, still nervous, he walked into a building he thought was a school. It was a mosque. Behind the reception desk was an Englishman. The man taught him Surah Al-Fatiha and how to pray. John came back every day. They drank coffee. That's how it started.
His family thought it was a phase. Thirteen years later, he is building schools in Africa and writing books on Islamic theology. The hardest part was learning to pray five times a day, but the discipline came slowly.
What convinced him
When John talks about why Islam, he comes back to one idea: the pure oneness of God. The same belief he held as a seven-year-old who refused to write "Jesus is God" never changed. Islam gave it a name.
"You bring the Sharia, the law and the guidance from Allah, and you compare it to any other religion, any philosophy, any other way of life. Islam beats any other religion in its wisdom. And it's also simple to understand."
You bring the Sharia, the law and the guidance from Allah, and you compare it to any other religion, any philosophy, any other way of life. Islam beats any other religion in its wisdom. And it's also simple to understand.
We don't pray to Muhammad ﷺ. We don't pray to saints. We don't pray to anyone. We pray directly to God alone.