Introducing New Muslim Companion

When someone becomes Muslim, a lot of information tends to arrive at once: how to pray, what to learn first, which words to use, what to eat, and plenty of well-meant advice from everyone around them. It can be a lot to take in, and it rarely comes in any particular order.

New Muslim Companion is my small attempt to help with that. It gathers the essentials of the faith into a suggested order, one step at a time, so there’s always a clear next thing to learn when you’re ready for it. It’s written for new Muslims first, but anyone who’d like a structured refresher is very welcome.

How it’s arranged

Everything begins with the Shahada: what it means, and the fresh start that comes with it. After that comes a short set of First Steps for roughly the first week. They cover a quick guide to wudu, how to pray a simple prayer on day one while you’re still learning the words, the five daily prayers and their times, some everyday phrases you’ll hear, and some advice about pacing yourself rather than taking on everything at once.

From there, the path opens into five tracks that run alongside each other. Believe covers what Muslims believe, one idea at a time. Practice is built around the Five Pillars. Qur’an starts with al-Fatiha and then suggests an order for learning the short surahs. History begins with the life of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and follows how Islam grew and spread. Life is about living Islam day to day, including practical things like checking sweets for gelatine.

The tracks are drawn down the page like a family tree, so you can see where you are and what comes next. Around seventy lessons are planned. Each is marked as essential, recommended or enrichment, and the essential lessons form a suggested core. It’s a suggested order rather than the only one, and you’re free to wander.

The practical lessons follow the Hanafi school, as it’s the one most UK mosques follow, and the site says so clearly. The other schools are equally valid, and a lesson on why Muslims sometimes differ is part of the plan.

Where it’s up to

The Shahada lesson and the six First Steps lessons are written. The rest are being written slowly, because I’d much rather take my time than get something wrong. Before the site is fully launched, I’d like all of the content reviewed by a qualified scholar, and the front page says that openly. Until then, please treat it as a starting point and check anything important with your local imam.

How it’s built

The site is deliberately simple. It’s a static website hosted for free on GitHub Pages, with no database behind it and nothing you have to log in to.

Each lesson is a plain text file written in Markdown, which is ordinary text with a few symbols for headings and bold. When you open a lesson, the page fetches that file and turns it into a formatted page in your browser. I did it this way so corrections are easy: if an imam or reviewer suggests a change, it can be made by editing a text file without touching any code. GitHub keeps every earlier version, so nothing is lost and every change can be seen.

The pathway itself comes from one ordered list of lessons, so moving a lesson in that list moves it on the site. That makes it easy to adjust the order as I learn more, or as people who know better advise me.

You can tick lessons off as you go. For now those ticks are kept privately in your own browser, so there are no accounts and nothing about you is stored anywhere else. Optional accounts may come later, for anyone who’d like their progress on more than one device.

New Muslim Companion is free at newmuslimcompanion.com. May Allah make the path easy for everyone who is learning, and accept our good deeds.