Most accounts of becoming Muslim stop at the shahada, which is roughly like a wedding guide that stops at the ceremony. The year after is the part people actually find hard, and it is the part they are least warned about.
The welcome fades, and that is not about you
In the first weeks a lot of people will be pleased to see you. Numbers get exchanged, invitations happen, someone gives you a Qur’an. Then it thins out. Not because anyone decided anything, but because the novelty passes and everyone goes back to their own lives.
This catches almost every convert off guard, and many read it as a judgement on them. It is worth knowing in advance that it is the normal shape of it. The people who stay are usually one or two, found slowly, rather than the crowd from the first month.
The practical version of that advice: while the attention is there, use it to get one or two actual friendships rather than twenty numbers. Ask someone to teach you to pray properly. A standing arrangement with one person outlasts a warm reception from fifty.
What you actually have to learn
Roughly in this order, and over months rather than weeks.
The prayer: the positions, then al-Fatiha, then the shorter phrases.
This is the one that matters most and the one most worth learning beside a person. Salah (prayer) sets out the form.
Washing before prayer, and what breaks it.
Quick to learn, awkward to ask about later.
Reading enough Arabic script to follow along.
Not fluency. Most converts never become fluent and it does not stop them.
Food.
Less complicated than it looks in the first week and more complicated than it looks in the first month, because the schools differ on meat that was not slaughtered by a Muslim.
What to do when you miss prayers, which you will.
Nobody expects the whole of it at once. Islam covers prayer, food, money and family, so the learning goes on for years. The obligations start from where you are, and the tradition is unusually clear that a small amount done consistently is worth more than a burst that stops.
Your first Ramadan
A month of no food or drink between dawn and sunset, including water. Depending on where you live and the time of year, that is anywhere from about eleven hours to over eighteen.
The first one is genuinely hard, and harder if the people around you are not doing it.
Three things converts consistently say afterwards.
- Eat properly before dawn rather than skipping it.
- The first week is the worst and it does get easier.
- And the social half — eating with people at sunset — is most of what makes it bearable, so arrange that in advance rather than assuming it will happen.
If you are ill or travelling you may leave the fast and make the days up later. Women do not fast during their period, and make those days up. Pregnant and breastfeeding women who fear for themselves or the baby may leave it too, and someone who can never fast, through old age or lasting illness, feeds a poor person for each day instead. Fasting is not meant to damage you, and a doctor’s view on your own health takes precedence over your enthusiasm.
Family
This site will never advise you to distance yourself from your family. If someone tells you that is required, they are wrong, and it is worth being careful about whatever else they tell you.
Reactions vary enormously and are hard to predict. Some families are fine. Some are hurt and get over it. Some do not. The tradition is emphatic about the duty owed to parents, and it does not make that duty conditional on their agreeing with you. The command to be good to them arrives in the same breath as the command to worship God (﷾) alone.
Two practical things. There is no obligation to announce it, to anyone, on any timetable. And a change that is visible in how you treat them tends to land better than one announced and then argued about.
Things nobody tells you
- You do not have to change your name. Many converts do not. The ones who do are usually asked to by nobody.
- Culture and religion get mixed together constantly, including by people who should know better. If something feels like someone’s grandmother’s rule rather than a religious one, it often is, and asking which it is is a fair question.
- You will get contradictory answers to simple questions. That is usually the four schools of law disagreeing, which is normal and old, not people making things up.
- Mosques have cultures, and if the first one does not fit you, another one nearby may. This is not a spiritual failing.
- There are legal questions worth getting proper advice on rather than asking at the mosque: marriage recognition, wills and inheritance, and in some countries the effect on immigration status.
If the doubts come back
They do for a lot of people, often around six months in, and having them is not a sign that something went wrong. The Qur’an and the other texts on this site are here to read, and every source is quoted from a text you can check for yourself.
Take it at your own pace, and come back to these pages whenever you need them.