Early Life
El-Faisal was born in in Saint James Parish to an evangelical Christian family which belonged to the Salvation Army church, a Christian denomination. He grew up in the small farming village of Point, about 14 miles from the city of Montego Bay, in upper St. James, Jamaica. He attended Springfield All-Age, then Maldon Primary and Junior High. At age 16, he converted to Islam, after being introduced to the religion by a teacher at Maldon High School.
Shortly after graduating Maldon in 1980 he assumed the name Abdullah el-Faisal, and he changed his name legally in 1983. In 1981 he went to Trinidad on a Saudi Arabian government-sponsored six-week crash course in Islamic and Arabic studies, where he was taught the skills of being an imam. He left Jamaica in 1983 for Guyana where he studied Arabic and Islam for a year. He then moved to Saudi Arabia where he studied at Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Muhammad university of Riyadh and then moved to the UK later in the 1980s.
He went to Saudi Arabia on a Saudi government scholarship in November 1984. El-Faisal studied Islam for seven years at the Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
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