Their journey to Islam

• Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household
• Took the name Rafi Sharif on accepting Islam
• Documented in accounts of American Muslim history

The full story

The shema he had been raised on insisted that God is one. Islam pressed that insistence to its conclusion and attached to it a final prophet in the Abrahamic line. Choosing it meant explaining himself to a community for whom the decision looked like abandonment rather than continuity.