Born Cassius Clay, he embraced Islam in 1964 and later mainstream Sunni practice, at enormous cost: his title, his prime years, and public fury over his conscientious objection. He spent his later decades as arguably Islam's most beloved global ambassador, and his 2016 funeral, planned by Ali himself as a teaching moment, opened with a traditional janazah attended by dignitaries of every faith.

His 1964 pilgrimage transformed him. From Makkah he wrote of eating from the same plate and praying shoulder to shoulder with "blue-eyed blonds and black-skinned Africans" in a brotherhood he had never believed possible: "America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem." His Letter from Mecca remains one of the most read conversion documents in American history.

Born Lew Alcindor, he embraced Islam in 1968 during college, studied the religion seriously for years (learning Arabic to read the sources), and has written extensively as an author and cultural critic about how the faith anchored his life and activism.

At the height of pop stardom, a near-drowning and a gifted Quran turned the seeker of his lyrics into a Muslim in 1977. He stepped away from music, built schools and charities for decades, and eventually returned to the stage as Yusuf, still singing Peace Train.

Converted in his twenties and has kept it deliberately low-key ever since: "I don't normally talk about my religion publicly because I don't want people to associate me and my flaws with this beautiful thing."

Found Islam in prison in the 1990s and has described it as the discipline and mercy that reached him at his lowest; he has performed the pilgrimage and speaks openly about the faith's role in his recovery from his own chaos.

Prostrates on the pitch after goals, fasts in training, and became an accidental case study: research around his Liverpool peak found measurable drops in local anti-Muslim hate crime and online abuse, sometimes called "the Salah effect". Visibility, excellence, and evident decency doing quiet dawah.

The first American Olympian to compete in hijab (Rio 2016, bronze). Chose fencing partly because its uniform accommodated her faith, and has become an author and advocate; Mattel modelled a Barbie on her, hijab and all.

Retired undefeated after a promise to his mother, having spent his career visibly practising: no promotional alcohol, Ramadan training camps, and post-fight speeches crediting God. One of the most followed Muslim athletes alive.

Co-architect of electroweak unification and the first Muslim science Nobelist. He accepted the prize quoting the Quran's verses on the study of nature ("you will see no flaw in the Most Merciful's creation... so return your gaze", 67:3-4) and spent his life building science institutions for the developing world.

Shot at fifteen for going to school, she answered from an explicitly Islamic frame: her Nobel lecture invoked the mercy of the Prophet ﷺ and Islam's teaching that education is a duty; "the extremists are afraid of books and pens." She defends girls' education as a Muslim, not despite being one.

The Bangladeshi economist whose Grameen Bank brought collateral-free lending to millions of poor women, work in visible conversation with Islam's hostility to exploitative debt and its insistence on the poor's right in wealth.