Algerian Pastor Laments Pope’s Mosque Visit After Losing 2 Sons to Islamic Extremists
I want to start from the beginning because if I start from the middle, from the night they broke down my door, from the morning I buried my sons, from the afternoon I sat on the floor and heard that the pope had gone to their mosque and smiled for the cameras.
If I start there, you will think I am just an angry man. And I am not an angry man.
I am a man who has been through fire. There is a difference. An angry man wants to burn things down.
A man who has been through fire just wants to tell you what he saw in the flames because he believes it matters because he believes you need to know.
So I will start from the beginning.
Oran is a city on the northwestern coast of Algeria. It sits right on the Mediterranean Sea.
And if you have never been there, and I want you to picture a city that’s beautiful in a way that almost hurts to look at.
The sea is very blue. The buildings are old, French colonial architecture, mostly white and cream and faded yellow, stacked on hills that roll down towards the water.
There are markets that smell of cumin and grilled meat and diesel. There are children running in the streets in the evenings when the heat breaks.
There are old men playing dominoes in the shade. It is the kind of city that when you are a child growing up inside it, you think is the whole world.
You cannot imagine anything beyond it. It is your world completely. I was born in Iran in 1968.
My father Mustafa Dahmani was not just a Muslim in the way that most people in Algeria are Muslim, which is to say by inheritance, by culture, by default.
My father was a committed man. And he was not an imam in a formal sense.
Not employed by a mosque, but in our neighborhood, he was the man people came to with religious questions.
He knew the Quran. He had memorized large portions of it. And when he recited it, his voice changed.
It became something else, something that commanded silence in a room. When he led prayers in our home, there was a gravity to it that made you feel the weight of the divine or what we believed was the divine.
As a small child, I did not question any of it. Why would I? It was the air I breathed.
My mother, Kadijah, was a quiet and good woman. She fasted during Ramadan without complaint.
She prayed her five prayers. She wore her hijab and kept her home clean and fed her children and did not talk very much about things she was uncertain about.
Uh, which I think was her way of managing a world that was sometimes confusing.
She was not a theologian. She was a mother. She loved us in the practical ways.
Food on the table, clean clothes, a firm hand when we were out of line, a soft voice when we were sick or frightened.
I loved her deeply. I still do. Even now, even after everything that happened between us, I love her.
I had three brothers. Karim, who was the oldest, then me, then Bilal, then Samir, who was the youngest, and who my mother called her heart.
We were a full house, a loud house most of the time. The kind of house that always smells of something cooking and where arguments and laughter happen in the same hour.
And no one thinks that is strange. From the time I was about 6 years old, my father began teaching me the Quran.
This was not unusual. This was what fathers did with their sons in families like ours.
We sat together in the evenings after dinner and he would recite a passage and I would repeat it after him until I had it right.
Not just the words but the pronunciation, the rhythm, the proper inonation. Tajit it is called the rules for reciting the Quran correctly.
My father took it seriously. He was patient with me, more patient than I expected from a man who could be quite strict about other things.
And I think it was because this mattered to him more than almost anything. He wanted his sons to carry the word of God inside them.
That was his greatest ambition for us. By the time I was 10, I had memorized several of the shorter suras and could recite them without error.
By 12, and I was reciting in the mosque during Ramadan, and the older men would nod, and my father would stand a little straighter.
I felt the pride coming off him like warmth from a fire. And I wanted to keep giving him that.
I wanted to be worthy of it. I wanted to be what he had built me to be.
I want to be honest with you about something because honesty is the only thing I have to to offer in this testimony and I refuse to waste your time with anything less.
When I say I was devout, I mean it. I’m not one of those people who converted to Christianity and then looked back at their Muslim years and decided they were never really serious.
Never really sincere. I was serious. I was sincere. I fasted. I prayed. I genuinely feared Allah.
I genuinely believed the Quran was the word of God. I I genuinely believed Muhammad was the seal of the prophets and that Islam was the final and complete truth.
I believed all of it with everything I had. And within that belief, I tried to be good.
I tried to do what was right. I gave money to the poor when I had it.
I was honest in my dealings with people. I respected my parents. I treated my neighbors well.
I was not a man who used religion as a cover for wickedness. I was not performing.
I was as best I knew how to be a true Muslim and I was completely empty.
That is the thing I could not explain to anyone because there is no language for it and no space to say it.
How do you tell your father who has given his life to building your faith that you pray five times a day and you feel nothing?