Anisa Kissoon: When a Childhood Question Became a Clear Choice
Anisa Kissoon’s question began before Islam entered her field of vision. Raised in Britain in a Caribbean family, she was five when she could not reconcile the claim that God is one with the explanation of the Trinity offered in Sunday school. She lacked the language for debate, but the question stayed: how could the One also be three?
As a teenager she visited several churches, still looking for a coherent account of belief in one God. Islam did not seem like an option. She had absorbed the idea that it was an Asian religion, tied to a people rather than a message that could address a British-Caribbean girl. That ethnic assumption became one of the veils her journey had to remove.
The first close influence came through her brother. He began learning about Islam while young and, as she later discovered, embraced it quietly. He urged her away from alcohol, drugs and harmful relationships, while reading the Quran and praying. His conduct showed her moral discipline before she understood its theological foundation.
A friend later suggested Hyde Park, where speakers addressed the public. There she heard Abdul Raheem Green describe Muhammad as the final messenger in the line of prophets she already respected. The encounter did not replace years of questioning; it connected her belief in one God with the Quran and the continuity of prophethood.
In her account, the pieces came together that night: God without partners, the Quran as revelation, and Muhammad within the prophetic tradition. Unwilling to remain suspended in hesitation, she went to her friend’s home, where the friend’s brother—himself a convert—was present, and made the shahada. [Source]
Declaration became the beginning of learning, not its end. She attended lessons on the foundations of Islam and tawhid, helped establish a prayer room and discussion circle at school, and began speaking with her family. She remembered the school space as somewhere students could ask questions that their inherited labels had kept closed.
The social cost arrived quickly. She faced pressure over hijab and later objections from Christian relatives during a visit to Jamaica. She did not abandon her love for Jesus; she understood him as a prophet and messenger rather than divine. She defended her choices about worship, dress and social boundaries without turning private relatives into characters for public judgment.
Her story suggests that the first barrier was not always hostility to Islam, but the inability to see it beyond an ethnic stereotype. Once she met its claim about God in its own terms, an old question found a coherent answer. The question left for the reader is equally direct: have you known Islam through the people you associate with it, or through what it says about God, revelation and prophethood?