New Beginnings Blog

My journey to Islam started in a pub on Green Lane, Small Heath, Birmingham. I was seven years old and we lived in a big old Victorian pub that was crumbling even then and eventually knocked down. By the time my family lived there, Small Heath was almost completely a...

I went to the mosque on February 8th 2019, with an inquisitive mind and returned home as a Muslim. As I was about to start a 6 months internship in Nottingham. I reunited with a high school friend, I hadn’t seen for over 4 years after leaving Nairobi, although we were...

Finding Peace in the Holy Land is a perfectly timed memoir told with brisk honesty and sharp humour. Sweeping from the suburbs of North London to the olive groves of Palestine, it explores a life of excess-to-spirituality impacted by the struggle of a distant people....

It is the mid-1970s, Sunday morning, in a comfortable middle-class catholic church in Edgware, halfway through the service, I see a tired, distressed, dirty looking man come up the aisle to the front and try to speak, “Oh father, help ….!” I was born in the early...

For the last 10 years, Islam has been in my peripheral as I explored what I believed; steadily finding the confidence and conviction to admit I believed in a higher power, in God. I still remember being at a friend’s family party and listening to an imam recite the...

For teenagers growing up in the West today, they see and experience things that many people in the Middle East haven’t even heard of. So at age 14, I thought I knew everything, and with this, I felt I had the world on my shoulders. I had an amazing group of friends,...

I took my shahada[1] in September 2010 but my interest in Islam had started about a year before. I always had a connection to God growing up even though neither of my parents followed a religion. I would talk to Him, nothing too deep, it would be more along the lines...

I met my fiancé, Muhammad, four years ago while studying at University, we were both on the same course and got to know each other well. At the time I had very few Muslim friends, I was curious about his religion and we talked about it a lot. Through our...