Qureshi begins with the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, echoing over rooftops at dawn all over the world. Prayer is woven into the Muslim lifestyle from the moment of birth, when the adhan is whispered into a baby’s ear.

Qureshi takes pride in his familial heritage of devotion. On his father’s side, the family claims descent from Muhammad’s own Qureshi clan, and to draw their ancestry from Umar, one of the Prophet’s revered successors. On his mother’s side, Qureshi comes from a proud line of missionary service. Both his mother, whom he calls Ammi, and her mother before her, were the daughters of missionaries, seeking to bring the message of Islam to places like Indonesia and Uganda.

Qureshi describes some of his early years growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, when his father was stationed there with the US navy after having emigrated from Pakistan years earlier. Most of Qureshi’s early memories are with his mother Ammi, who oversaw the home, providing patient, loving care and a rich devotional life for her children.

When he is very young, Qureshi accidentally smashes a window while playing with his toy cars and has to be rushed to the hospital to deal with the lacerations. This moment sticks in Qureshi’s mind not for the trauma of the event, but as a core memory of his faith: Seeing his mother respond with prayer and recitations from the Quran (du’aas), pouring out her devotion to God and her intercession for her son even in front of bewildered hospital workers: “Her resolute du’aas and her steadfast reliance upon Allah, even in the face of a screaming child and judging eyes, was a testimony of her faith that I have never forgotten” (33).

In a flashback, Qureshi uses the experience of packing up to move away from Virginia as an expression of the loneliness he feels as a child—not a loneliness within his family, where he has his sister and parents, but of the persistent sense of otherness he feels in their broader community. Qureshi’s father, whom he calls Abba, is being transferred to a new navy post in Scotland, and the move reinforces Qureshi’s sense that his belonging is bounded by the community of four he has around him: Abba, Ammi, his sister Baji, and himself. This familial sense of belonging, implicit trust, and loving obedience will make his later conversion to Christianity especially painful.

With another story from Qureshi’s childhood, he describes the devotion that Muslims hold toward the Quran—regarding it not only as a book with an inspired message, but as perfect and holy even at the level of its individual letters and sounds.

Qureshi experiences this high devotion as a child, when he completes his basic Arabic studies with his mother, and is awarded with his first copy of a Quran of his very own. Excited, Qureshi brings the Quran over to where his sister Baji is playing on the floor, and in the process of showing her, he sets the Quran down. Their mother screams, chastising Qureshi and reminding him that the Quran is always to be held up in honor, never set on the floor.

As Qureshi becomes more familiar with the Quran, he especially loves Surah 112, which briefly outlines the Muslim rejection of Christianity: “God is not a father, and He has no son” (39).

As he grows up in Scotland, one of the main features of Qureshi’s life is his family’s weekly drive from Dunoon, where they live, to Glasgow, where their masjid (mosque) is located. Often as they drive, Qureshi’s parents quiz him about the life of Muhammad. Muslims regard Muhammad not only as the greatest prophet, but as the greatest man ever to live, the one true exemplar of a godly life.

Qureshi’s father takes special pride in noting Muhammad’s mercy, carefully catechizing his son in the history of the Prophet’s philosophy of fighting only for defense and of extending grace to beaten foes: “Is it any wonder Muhammad is called rehmatullah, the Mercy of Allah?” (45). The questions also reinforce the glory of classical Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages and the Muslim belief that Christian texts have been corrupted. To them, Jesus was part of the great line of faithful human prophets, not the Son of God.

Having narrated his family’s trip to the mosque, Qureshi now shows what the regular worship of the mosque looks like, largely oriented around salaat, the ritual prayers which Muslim congregations undertake. Congregational prayers are a modified form of the daily prayers which all Muslims recite, bowing and facing Mecca. The prayer in the mosque is led by an imam, often one of several men in the congregation—a role in which Qureshi’s father occasionally serves. Aside from a few respected elders toward the front, there is no hierarchy of class among the men at salaat, and Muslims take pride in its egalitarian nature.

It is a solemn event, though, and Qureshi recalls occasional slaps of reprimand he would receive when his boyish energy became distracting. On one occasion he receives a spank from behind, and upon turning around is jokingly told that it was the hand of Allah that struck him. While the prayers are in an unfamiliar form of Arabic, ritualized and not very personal, they are meaningful to Muslims nonetheless: Qureshi’s father describes them as a spiritual bath that keeps them clean before Allah.

While Qureshi and his family are in Scotland, an important event arises: The 100th anniversary of the Ahmadiyya sect, to which they belong. Their congregation joins others at a festival in the English countryside, where special speakers remind the crowd of the distinctive nature of their spiritual heritage.

Qureshi takes this occasion as an opportunity to acquaint the reader with the diversity that exists within Islam. There are two main blocks within global Islam, and a scattering of smaller sects alongside. The largest are the Sunnis, comprising about 80% of Muslims, who accept the traditional succession of leaders after Muhammad: The four great caliphs who were appointed by the Muslim community. The next largest block is Shia Islam, which holds that succession should have passed not to the caliphs, but continued in Muhammad’s family by going to his closest male heir.

Qureshi’s group falls outside of these blocks, and represents one of the smaller sects. Ahmadi Muslims honor their founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who claimed to be a sub-prophet under Muhammad and who preached Islam as a religion of total peace. As such, they are sometimes rejected by fellow Muslims, but the speaker at the festival underscores the Ahmadi argument that according to every traditional mark of Islam, they are Muslim: Holding to the shahada (the recitation of faith), upholding the Five Pillars of Islam (the core pious practices), and keeping the Six Articles of Faith (traditional doctrines).

Once a year, the congregation hosts an ijtema, a tournament. Qureshi competes in the speech contest, while others compete in categories like Quran recitation and general knowledge tests.

Qureshi takes the event as an opportunity to clarify the Muslim conception of sharia. It is not, he notes, a commonly-used concept for most Muslims. At the ijtema, Qureshi listens in on the men’s extemporaneous speech competition, where he hears one of his uncles prompted to give an explanation of sharia. Uncle Faizan handles the topic well, impressing the judges with his knowledge. Sharia means “the path,” and simply refers to the correct way of living according to Islamic tradition and jurisprudence.

The Quran is the fundamental basis of sharia, but since the Quran is not a comprehensive guide to every situation, Muslim legal experts (muftis) will also rely on other sources, like the hadith (traditions about Muhammad’s life) and the ulema (the precedent offered by the interpretations of Muslim scholars). When a mufti gives a decision on a question of Muslim jurisprudence, this decision (a fatwa) is considered a guide to right action along the way of sharia. Differences in the way this jurisprudence is handled explains some of the distinctions between the various sects of Islam.

On driving home from their mosque one night, Abba and Ammi are worried. Qureshi recalls picking up on some whispered tension between his parents as they make their way down darkened Scottish roads. Eventually they turn around, electing not to press on but to go back and spend the night with their friends, the Maliks.

The next day, Qureshi overhears the reason for why they had turned around: His father had had a dream that seemed strangely prophetic and forbode of danger, involving driving on narrow, darkened roads. When the roads he was driving began to look eerily similar to the conditions of his dream, he elected to turn around. Dreams, even prophetic dreams, are a common feature of Muslim spirituality.

Qureshi testifies that his father received several dreams throughout his life that did, in fact, seem oddly prescient. In Abba’s case, though, this was a troubling gift, and he prayed that Allah would stop giving such dreams. This stands in contrast to Qureshi, who later will seek out Allah’s guidance through the agency of dreams.

Qureshi looks back on his boyhood home in Scotland with fondness, but he notes that there was one drawback: The high northerly position of Scotland means that adhering to the Ramadhan fast is that much more difficult. During the month of Ramadhan, Muslims fast from both food and water from sunup to sundown, which can go as long as 18 hours in a Scottish summer.

As difficult as it is, though, Muslims look at Ramadhan as a time of communal joy: “Like a monthlong Christmas, it is an extended time of celebration in Muslim lands around the world” (69). Muslim families end each day with a feast, often shared with friends and neighbors. Often Muslim communities will organize hosted dinners at different houses each night.

Qureshi notes that they aren’t legalists about the fasting rules: Muslim tradition allows for flexibility in the case of the sick, elderly, or those for whom fasting all day would prove a danger or an inordinate hardship. Although Qureshi loves his Scotland home, regular observance of the Ramadhan fast becomes a much larger part of his life after they move, with his father transferred to Connecticut and then back to Virginia.

Now as a seventh grader back in the US, Qureshi begins to feel the outsider nature of his existence, both with regard to American culture and, increasingly, his own family’s culture. Ammi tries to encourage him when he expresses fears about being different, noting that he has the opportunity to show non-Muslims what a real Muslim is like: “This is a good thing. It is a blessing and an opportunity for you to represent Islam and to help people understand its beauty” (75). By exemplifying intelligence, academic excellence, and moral virtue, Ammi counsels Qureshi to embrace his role as a countercultural figure.

Even in his own extended family, though, Qureshi becomes aware of how he doesn’t quite fit in. He and his sister have difficulty navigating expectations in large family gatherings, where the cultural mode of expression is much more traditionally Pakistani than they are familiar with. Abba and Ammi occasionally have to chastise him for his rudeness, even in instances where he had not been aware of it. He gradually develops a sense that he does belong to a culture, but it is his own—a third culture, neither his family’s nor that of an American teenager, but somewhere in between.

Qureshi begins to realize that being caught in between cultures is not unique to himself: It represents the common condition of most children of Muslim immigrants.

He recounts a difficult story of watching his extended family try to talk one of his teenage cousins out of a relationship with a non-Muslim boy. Muslims born in majority-Muslim lands tend to grow up in cultures grounded in a respect for authority, which tends to smooth out the tensions between generations. This is not the case in cultures shaped by individual reasoning, as in the West. Many Western-born Muslims pick up cultural perspectives from their surroundings, but those perspectives naturally raise tensions in their families of origin, since Muslims are taught to believe that American culture is promiscuous, Christian, and hostile to Islam. One of the unfortunate results is that the way that Muslims view Christianity tends to be skewed by the perceived “immorality” of American culture.

Another result, and one that Qureshi feels keenly, is that second-generation Muslims in the West tend to see the world through Western eyes, but still identify with Islamic culture, and that is a difficult balance to maintain.

Qureshi embraces his role as an example of Islam to his classmates, even getting into discussions of Islamic apologetics. While he admits that there are many commonalities between Islam and Christianity, those commonalities only serve to sharpen certain points of difference, such as their views of Muhammad and Jesus. Qureshi enjoys talking about Muhammad with his classmates, focusing especially on the stories of the Prophet’s mercy. He finds that most Americans know little about Muhammad, and many of his classmates are intrigued.

He also engages in conversations about Jesus, sharing traditional Muslim perspectives. During a conversation with his friend Kristen, the topic of Good Friday comes up (the day Jesus was said to have died on the cross). Qureshi shares the common Muslim skepticism toward the event. Instead of dying on the cross, Qureshi argues, it is more likely that Jesus swooned and fainted. Another common Muslim view is that someone else was substituted for Jesus on the cross. In either case, it was thought that Jesus survived the cross, and was either assumed into heaven or lived out the rest of his life traveling across Asia.

Now in 10th grade, Qureshi has grown in confidence, still as a devoted advocate for Islam, while also deepening his ties to his American friends. In high school one day, a Christian classmate named Betsy turns to Qureshi and kindly inquires if she can have a conversation with him. When he agrees, she asks whether he knows about Jesus. Qureshi relishes the opportunity for such conversations, so he eagerly dives into his knowledge, using quotations from the New Testament to call traditional Christian doctrines about Jesus into question. Qureshi makes the case that Jesus never claimed to be God, and that to call him so would be blasphemous against God the Father.

The conversation proceeds on good terms, with Betsy often remarking that she doesn’t know the answers to Qureshi’s arguments, but that she is happy to look into it. In the end, she simply invites him to come to a play at her church.

Qureshi attends the church play with Abba, and both are pleased at the opportunity. The play is a dramatic set of evangelistic sketches, each illustrating how the choice to believe in Jesus determines whether a person will go to heaven or hell. They discuss the play on the car ride home. While it is good to warn people away from hell, they find it misleading to suggest that heaven can be attained by a simple act of faith, entirely apart from a virtuous life. Qureshi sees this as underscoring a belief that it doesn’t matter how you live, so long as you believe in Jesus: “And that’s why America is the way it is. Christians teach that there is no accountability for their deeds” (96).

They surmise that Christians can indeed go to heaven—based on a verse from the Quran—but only if those Christians live good lives and worship only one God. This interpretation is not shared by many other Muslim groups, who believe that the Quranic verse favorable to Christians has been abrogated by other passages that point in the opposite direction. The doctrine of abrogation, wherein the later teachings of Muhammad in the Quran supersede his earlier teachings, is often used to explain apparent variations in Quranic teaching.

In addition to the Quran, another important source of the traditions which guide every part of a Muslim’s life is the hadith, the stories and remembrances of Muhammad’s life and teaching as collected by his early followers. Abba and Ammi quiz Qureshi and his sister on their knowledge of hadith, as is their practice regarding many topics throughout their childhood.

Qureshi correctly names the most important collection of hadith, Sahih Bukhari, considered the most reliable because its compiler applied a thorough and consistent practice of tracking each story’s chain of transmission. These chains of transmission are called isnad, and they are an important guide to assessing the reliability of a particular hadith. Some hadith collections, like Bukhari’s, are considered very reliable, whereas some are used more loosely because of their uncertain provenance. Hadith, while important, are not on the same level as the divinely transmitted Quran.

Qureshi’s family decides to return to the UK for a brief visit, his first time back in eight years. They are going to attend a major gathering of their Ahmadiyya sect. He is nervously excited about the event, hoping to find some of his old friends, like the Malik brothers.

However, it has been so long, and there are so many people, that Qureshi feels overwhelmed, and so he asks God to help him find his friends. This prayer is answered by a miracle, one that confirms his faith in God. When he opens his eyes from praying, he sees gold and silver streaks arcing through the sky, streaks that are only visible to his perception. As he follows the streaks, he walks straight up to two young men, who turn out to be the Malik brothers. “That day,” Qureshi writes, “I no longer just believed that God was real. I knew God was real. And I knew God cared for me” (106). This sustains him as he returns to his studies in the US, including a class called “Theory of Knowledge” that seeks to critically examine the students’ belief-structures.

Together with him in the Theory of Knowledge class is his best friend, David, who has been close to him since seventh grade. David is an agnostic, but is often amenable to having discussions about Islam.

As their friendship grows closer, though, Qureshi also notices cultural perspectives that threaten to divide them. For Westerners, with their focus on individuality, morality is judged by whether one does what one knows to be right. From an Eastern Muslim perspective, however, the moral weight of an action hinges on its relation to authority structures, such that honor and shame become more important categories of experience than do innocence and guilt. A Muslim raised in this perspective may only see something as “wrong” if they are caught and exposed. This results in a sensibility geared toward hiding possible sources of shame, and for a Muslim raised in the West, they feel the pressure of moral guilt as well.

This dynamic leads to the end of his friendship with David. Qureshi has begun a secret romantic relationship with a girl in their class, but does not feel that he can go on with it since it would be against his parents’ wishes. Keeping it secret because of its potential shamefulness, Qureshi never tells David about it, and David ends up dating the same girl. When Qureshi later confesses to him that he still has feelings for David’s girlfriend, David takes it as a betrayal that his best friend had kept all these things secret from him.

With his friendships from high school now painfully severed, Qureshi moves on to college, attending Old Dominion University. It is nearby their home and also where his sister attends.

His first year starts in the fall of 2001, so his freshman experience is interrupted by the events of September 11th. As students gather to watch the coverage of the terrorist attack, Qureshi receives a phone call from Abba telling him to get to safety. They worry—not without cause—that their fellow Americans’ anger might turn against Muslims, and their family has experienced the sting of prejudice before. For Qureshi, though, the concern is not just for personal safety. 9/11 raises serious questions about Islam, matters he has never considered before. His Western-based experience of Ahmadiyya Islam has led him to view it as a religion of peace. Now he is confronted with passionately devoted Muslims who seem to hold the exact opposite view.

Qureshi will eventually come to see his sect’s view as a later interpretation, a development influenced by Western expectations. He believes that the earlier and more orthodox Islamic view, stemming from Muhammad’s later teachings, advised the practice of jihad not just in a spiritual sense against one’s own vices, but against the non-Muslim world that had yet to submit to Islam.