Ryan Harris: When a Question of Faith Became a Free Search at Fourteen

Ryan Harris grew up in a non-Muslim family and attended a Unitarian Universalist congregation. At thirteen or fourteen, he was asked to write a declaration of what he believed. He treated the assignment as more than a school paper: it opened a comparative search into what different traditions said about God and human life. He studied Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism and Islam, while the Christian doctrine of the Trinity remained among the questions he could not settle.

In eighth-grade social studies, a presentation on world religions brought Islam into focus. Its affirmation of one God, together with belief in Jesus, Moses and Abraham and in Muhammad as the final messenger, held his attention. He broadened the comparison. In a Notre Dame profile published in 2006, Harris said he read the Torah, the Bible and the Qur’an, and that his family allowed him to choose. His parents were not Muslim, so the decision did not continue an inherited Muslim identity.

Harris described the decisive recognition with an emotional metaphor in his recorded account. To avoid turning metaphor into a supernatural claim, the careful conclusion is simply that what he read about Islam answered the search he had begun. At fourteen, he called two non-Muslim friends on a three-way call and recited the shahada before them. The sources do not establish a particular day or year. Using his documented birth date, the safe boundary is 11 March 1999 through 10 March 2000.

A practical problem followed: how could he learn when he did not know a Muslim nearby? At an interracial conference, he met a Muslim teacher named Abdul Wahid, whom he later remembered as a continuing guide. He then entered a small mosque in St Paul and encountered a congregation of many ethnic backgrounds. He saw an older man learning to read Arabic from another Muslim, and he stood shoulder to shoulder with others in prayer. The community he had read about became something visible and shared.

In his dated accounts, Harris linked Islam with discipline and sacrifice and said that connection supported his education and athletics. He later studied at Catholic institutions, including Notre Dame, and spoke in 2006 and again in 2026 about room to practise and about the value of learning face to face. This story stops with those dated testimonies and draws no conclusion about his religious state today.

Sources

1. Ryan Harris’s recorded testimony and transcript — 17 December 2016
2. Direct interview with CBS Minnesota — 19 March 2026
3. University of Notre Dame Athletics profile containing his direct statements — 29 September 2006
4. Denver Broncos — community-service interview, 23 June 2015
5. Denver Broncos 2015 Media Guide — birth date, p. 115