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Each night before bedtime, like millions of other parents, I gather my kids for story time. Our usual rotation includes the classics: Dr. Seuss, Curious George, Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton, a household favorite. But one night, I felt ready to try something different. I reached for a new book, a gift from their grandfather: My First Book About Allah.
The moment they saw it, both of my kids dropped what they were doing. My 3½-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter walked over curiously, my daughter clutching a stuffed moose nearly as big as she is. They flanked me on the carpet, their fingers gliding along the glossy cover, tracing the vibrant pinks and deep blues of the watercolor illustrations.
“Allah is the One Who everything,” I read aloud, pointing to the words on the page. My son leaned in, intrigued. I softened my voice, making it rhythmic, the way I had with their favorite books, hoping to hold their attention. “He makes the sun go up up in the morning. And He makes it go down at night.”
I expected confusion. This was the first time I had introduced the concept of God to them, and I braced myself for their questions: Who is Allah? What kind of creature can make all of this? But no questions came.
I turned the page. “Allah loves us more than anyone, even our own parents,” I read, showing them an illustration of a father and son in a warm embrace. I hesitated. They know their parents take care of them and love them more than anyone. Would this make sense to them?
I glanced at them, searching for any sign of confusion, but they remained focused on the bright pictures.
Quiet anxiety settled in. I was trying to implant something into their minds, something they had never encountered before, and I could feel myself failing at it. More unsettling was the realization that I wasn’t even sure I agreed with the way God was being framed—this invisible, all-knowing creature pulling the strings from the sky. I had come to understand God as something different, something less literal—an explanation for the unexplainable, an invisible connection between all living things, a name for the relationship we have with existence itself.
That wasn’t how the book described Allah. And yet, I kept reading.
My father-in-law gifted us these books with a purpose. He wanted his grandchildren to grow up with Islam, the way we had it woven into our earliest memories, shaping our sense of self before the outside world could. I understood that. But I also knew our household was different from the ones my wife and I grew up in.
Growing up, Islam was everywhere—the prayers murmured under breath, the rhythm of Arabic words filling our homes, the scent of cardamom and garlic steeped in the air during Ramadan. It wasn’t something we had to carve space for; it was the space itself. Now, though, our kids live in a different world. We speak English at home. Their schools celebrate Christmas and Easter, with Santa Clauses handing out presents and Easter bunnies doling out chocolates. We don’t stand in the way.
Islam, in comparison, felt like something I had to consciously inject into their lives.
And at their age, I wasn’t sure I was doing it right. There are plenty of maxims and guides online for parents who want to raise religious kids, as Muslims or in any other faith, and that’s to say nothing of cultural expectations from certain families and religious leaders. None seemed quite right to me—including, at first, this book. Something about introducing Allah as an unseen force for good, always present but never visible, felt too close to the way superheroes exist in their minds, a mix of fantasy and omnipotence. Would it end up feeling as weightless as the mascots that appear in their classrooms, smiling for photos and handing out gifts?
Though the whole experience felt off, I kept going. I finished the book, tucked my kids into bed, and took it with me to my room, flipping through the pages again in silence. Had they understood anything? Are they even ready to?
Sara Khan, the author of My First Book About Allah, later told me she noticed countless families in the U.K., where she lived, also searching for a way to bring Islam into their children’s lives when she wrote the book. While pursuing a master’s degree in translation studies at the University of Manchester, she realized there were almost no English-language books for Muslim children that introduced Islamic concepts in a way they could grasp. “There were no books for the 0–5 age group,” she said. “It was basically unheard of.”
When her daughter was born a few years later, she decided to write one herself. She took a course on writing picture books at the University of Cambridge and drafted her first book in the series, My First Book About the Quran, using simple, high-frequency words that toddlers could comprehend, intentionally limiting the number of nouns to make it more accessible. My First Book About Allah followed soon after.
Since publishing the book, Khan has heard from many parents like me—Muslims raising children in predominantly non-Muslim environments—who thank her for helping them introduce Islam early. She understands the urgency. “There’s a pressure to compete with Christmas,” she said. “Muslim parents want their kids to feel like Islam has just as much joy and celebration.”
I told her about my own experience reading the book to my children, how I worried that oversimplifying concepts like God might do more harm than good. She, too, hadn’t grown up with books like this, and she worried about how to instill faith without slipping into rigidity. “It’s hard for a child to connect with a long list of things they have to do,” she said. “But even at a young age, when they don’t fully understand, it’s good for them to hear it. They pick up the vocabulary, and as they grow older, it opens up conversations that help them relate to Islamic teachings in a way that makes sense to them.”
Justin Barrett, a cognitive scientist and Christian author who studies how children develop beliefs in God, told me that the first real signs of religious thinking appear at around 3 years old, right around the age of my son. “Three-year-olds are already beginning to wonder: ‘Where did this tree come from? What are trees for? Where did mountains come from? Who made it?’ ” he said. “Unless firmly discouraged otherwise, they will assume that a good answer to those types of questions is that someone is responsible for it.”
At that age, he explained, children can distinguish between reality and imagination, which he says is a major milestone in understanding a high-powered concept like God. “By age 3 or 4, kids are even more able to reason about unseen beings,” he said. “If they can grasp that grandma still has thoughts and feelings even when she’s not physically present, they can extend that kind of thinking to God.”
I’m not sure I quite saw that happened behind my chidren’s eyes as I read to them that first night. But Barrett told me that research overwhelmingly shows that religion, like any other value and worldview, is inherited. “Kids want to be like their parents,” he said. “If they think that their parents are trustworthy, if their parents love them, if they feel that sort of emotional security—in psychological speak, we say that they’ve got a secure attachment—they are much more likely to adopt the faith their parents are modeling.”
“That’s not a cognitive thing. That’s not educational strategy. It’s a relational thing,” he added.
That was both reassuring and unnerving. On the one hand, it suggested my kids would likely absorb some degree of Islam just because my wife and I are Muslim. But that I still needed to contend with the practice and beliefs exhibited in school, like Christmas and Easter. Then again, maybe the key wasn’t about “teaching” Islam to my kids. If I wanted them to grow up with Islam, maybe the most important thing wasn’t drilling it into them. It was making sure they saw it in me.
When I told Barrett about my experience reading the storybook, he wasn’t surprised. “My inclination would not be to read a book like that to a 2- or 3-year-old,” he said. “It feels too young for that. And it also feels artificial.” He pointed to research by psychologists Rebekah Richert and Paul Harris, which suggests that young children are more likely to pick up religious concepts if they are introduced naturally, woven into daily life, rather than presented as something separate and formal.
That shifted something in me. I had been treating faith like an academic subject, something that required structure and explicit instruction. Religious parents of all backgrounds—even if their own faith looks much different, in practical terms, from their parents’ or grandparents’—tend to make the same mistake. Even if I worried that the environment they are growing up in felt “less Islamic” than the one I grew up with—listening to the recitations of the Quran daily my mother played them in our kitchen as she cooked while I, in contrast, am more likely to play the Frozen soundtrack—I had to keep my focus in the right place. If I wanted them to grow up with faith, I had to stop talking about it and start showing it.
Mama didn’t have English-language Islamic baby books around the house because they didn’t exist then. But she didn’t seem to need them. And neither do I, at least not as I imagined it. Still, as Ramadan approached, I reached for My First Book About Allah again. This time, I let go of the expectation that I was going to be teaching them to be Muslim. Instead, I focused on the beautiful illustrations that my children loved and how the book carved space for them to ask questions about Islam in a world where it can often feel like an afterthought, even if they aren’t asking me those questions just yet.
My kids paid dutiful attention—and then immediately argued for more playtime before bed. I obliged, and before long, they had tucked themselves into bed.
The next time an opportunity presented itself, I tried something different. “Let’s say Bismillah before we eat,” I said. My son repeated after me, proud, eager to please. My daughter clapped her hands, excited even though she didn’t understand. This, I accept, is enough for now.
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