Iranian Professor Risks Everything After Publicly Questioning the Quran & Abandoning Islam for Jesus
My name is Resa Farhadi. I was a philosophy professor at a university in Thran.
That sounds simple when I say it now, but back then those words meant everything to me.
They were my identity, my pride, my entire world. I grew up in Thran in a middle-class family.
My father worked for the government. My mother stayed home and raised me and my two sisters.
We were Muslim like everyone around us. We observed Ramadan. We celebrated aid. Religion was something in the background of our lives.
It was there like the mountains around Tran, always present but not always noticed. When I was young, my father made sure I learned to recite portions of the Quran in Arabic.
I spent hours repeating verses after the imam at our local mosque. I memorized the sounds without fully understanding the meaning.
Arabic was not my language. Persian was my language. But this was what good Muslim boys did.
So I did it. I was obedient. I wanted to make my father proud. School came easily to me.
I loved reading, loved ideas, loved the feeling of understanding something complex. When other boys played football in the streets, I was often inside with a book.
My mother worried I spent too much time alone. My father was pleased I was serious about my studies.
By the time I finished secondary school, I knew I wanted to study philosophy. Something about the great questions drew me.
What is truth? What is justice? How should we live? In these questions felt important in a way that other things did not.
I attended university in Thran. The philosophy department was small but well respected. I studied Plato and Aristotle.
I studied Ibanscina and Algazali. I learned about Western philosophy and Islamic philosophy. I wrote papers comparing different systems of thought.
My professors praised my work. They said I had a sharp mind that I could see connections others missed.
This praise fed something in me. I wanted more of it. Uh after completing my doctorate, I was offered a teaching position at the same university.
I was 28 years old. I felt I had arrived at the life I was meant to live.
I had an office with my name on the door. I had students who called me Dr.
Farhadi. I had colleagues who respected my opinions. I taught three courses each semester and spent my free time writing articles for academic journals.
My classroom was on the third floor of the humanities building. It had large windows that looked out over the campus.
In spring, I could see the trees blooming. In winter, I could see snow on the Albor’s mountains in the distance.
I loved that classroom. I loved standing at the front, asking questions, watching my students think.
I was good at making them see things from different angles. I would present one philosophical position, then present the opposite, then ask them to defend or criticize each one.
Critical thinking, I called it, the ability to examine ideas without fear. Most of my students were good young people.
Some were there because they loved ideas like I did. Others were there because their parents wanted them to have a university degree.
A few were lazy and only wanted to pass exams. But many of them truly engaged with the material.
They would stay after class to ask questions. They would come to my office hours to debate points from the lectures.
These were the students who made teaching worthwhile. And I married when I was 31.
Her name was Mina. She was a teacher at a primary school. We met through mutual friends.
She was kind and intelligent, though not particularly interested in philosophy. She thought my work was too abstract, too removed from real life.
But she supported me. We had a comfortable apartment not far from the university. We had dinner with friends on weekends.
We visited our families for holidays. We talked about having children, though we were not in a hurry.
I continued to pray occasionally, mainly on Fridays at the mosque near our apartment. I fasted during Ramadan, though I will be honest and say I did not enjoy it.
I gave to charity when the mosque collected funds. I considered myself a Muslim in the way many educated people in Thran did.
I respected the tradition. I identified with the culture, but I did not spend much time thinking deeply about what I actually believed.
Islam was part of being Iranian, part of the fabric of society. You did not question it any more than you questioned the air you breathed.
There were rules of course, unspoken rules about what you could say and what you could not.
In my field, you could discuss almost any western philosopher. You could critique Kant or Hume or Nietze.
You could debate the existence of objective morality. But you had to be careful when it came to Islam.
You could discuss Islamic philosophy as an intellectual tradition. You could compare Al Gazali with Thomas Aquinas, but you could not question whether the Quran was truly from God.
You could not suggest that Muhammad might have been mistaken about anything. These topics were off limits.
I accepted these boundaries without much thought. They seemed reasonable to me. Every society has its sacred things, I told myself.
In Iran, Islam was sacred. That was simply the reality. I had plenty of other topics to explore.
Why would I need to challenge the one thing that was forbidden? Sometimes late at night and I would have small moments of doubt, not about Islam specifically, but about belief in general.
I would look at the stars from our balcony and wonder if there really was a God watching over everything.
I would think about all the suffering in the world and wonder why God allowed it.
But these thoughts were fleeting. I would push them away and go to bed. Doubt was uncomfortable.