Muslim Imam Starts Speaking in Tongues and Calls o...

Muslim Imam Starts Speaking in Tongues and Calls on Jesus’ Name While Praying in the Mosque

I have been trying to figure out where to start this story for a long time because there is no clean starting point.

There is no moment I can point to and say here this is where everything began to shift.

What I can tell you is that by the time the collapse happened, something had already been happening inside me for longer than I knew.

I just didn’t have eyes for it yet.

So, let me start with who I was because I think that matters more than anything else.

If you don’t know who I was, you won’t understand what it cost.

And you won’t understand why I am still sometimes sitting with the weight of it even now, years later, in a country that is not mine, in a faith I did not grow up in.

grateful in a way I genuinely did not know was available to a human being.

My name is Mehmed Khalil al-Rashid.

I was born in Istanbul in 1978.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our brother Mehmed Khalil al-Rashid continues his story, we’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.

Thank you.

And may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony.

My name is Mehmed Khalil al-Rashid.

I was born in Istanbul in 1978.

My father’s family came originally from Syria from somewhere outside Aleppo and they had been in Turkey for generations by the time I was born.

We were Turkish in every practical way.

language, citizenship, how we move through the world.

But there was a Syrian Arab quality to our home that I grew up inside without fully noticing it until I was older.

My father recited the Quran in a Syrian style, slower and more melodic than the way most Turkish Muslims recite.

And even now when I hear the Quran in my memory and I still hear it, I carry 45 years of it.

It is my father’s voice.

I hear that particular melody, that particular pace.

My father was not a religious scholar by profession.

He was a civil engineer.

But he was a deeply learned man in his faith.

He had studied.

He had memorized the Quran himself on and he raised his children.

I am the eldest of four, two sisters and a brother in a home where Islam was not something you practiced at certain times and set aside the rest of the time.

It was the air we breathed.

Five prayers a day.

No negotiation.

Ramadan kept completely.

Arabic studied from the time we were small.

The Quran read, memorized, discussed.

My father believed that the best thing he could give his children was a solid foundation in their faith and he gave it to us thoroughly.

He was not harsh about it.

I want to be clear about that because people sometimes assume that kind of upbringing was strict in a cold or frightening way.

My father was warm.

He laughed often.

He loved his family with a love you could feel.

But he believed in what he believed and he passed it to us not through force but through the sheer consistency of his own example.

I started memorizing the Quran seriously when I was nine studying under a hai in our neighborhood.

By 13 I had completed it.

I remember the day sitting in our living room doing my final recitation in front of my father and the hes and two other men who had come as witnesses.

When I finished my father put his face in his hands and stayed like that for a moment.

He wasn’t crying from sadness.

It was the way a man cries when something he has prayed for and worked toward with his whole heart finally arrives.

I was 13.

I didn’t fully understand what I was watching, but I understood enough to know it mattered enormously that and I felt in the way a boy feels when he has done something that moves his father that I had become something that I had a shape, an identity, a place in the world.

I was the boy who had memorized the Quran.

I was the one the community pointed to.

That feeling became part of my foundation.

It sat at the bottom of everything I built afterward.

After secondary school, I studied Islamic theology at Marmar University here in Istanbul.

And then I spent 2 years at Alazar in Cairo.

If you are not familiar with Alazar, it is one of the oldest and most respected institutions of Islamic learning in the world going back over a thousand years.

Those two years in Cairo were formative in a way I can’t fully compress into a few sentences.

It wasn’t just education.

It was immersion in a world where Islamic scholarship stretched back across centuries of accumulated thought and debate and transmission.

I sat in lectures where teachers traced chains of knowledge back through generations of scholars back to the companions of the prophet.

I felt in those halls like a man who had just discovered that the tree he was standing in was far deeper and older and more rooted than he had ever understood from ground level.

That feeling was not arrogance.

It was more like belonging, like understanding for the first time the full size of the thing you were part of.

Part of my curriculum at Al Azar was comparative religion, which in practice meant studying other faiths, including Christianity, through the lens of Islamic scholarship.

I want to be honest about what this meant because it matters to what happens later.

We studied Christianity in order to understand how to engage with it from within an Islamic framework.

We learned the historical debates about the Bible, about the Council of Nika, about the different early Christian positions on the nature of Jesus.

We learned the Islamic theological objections to the Trinity, to the crucifixion, to the divine claim that the gospels make for Jesus.

We learned all of this thoroughly and intelligently.

But the orientation of the learning was not neutral.

It was not here is what Christians believe.

Let’s understand it from the inside.

It was here is what Christians believe and here is why from an Islamic scholarly position.

It cannot be what it appears to be.

I became skilled at this.

I could explain clearly and in detail on the Islamic position on the corruption of the Bible, the impossibility of the Trinity from a monotheistic perspective, and the Quranic account of what actually happened to Jesus.

I had taught these things in lectures, in Q&A sessions with young Muslims who came to me with questions in private conversations.

I was not aggressive about it.

I believed I was helping people hold on to the truth by giving them solid ground to stand on when confronted with Christian claims.

But I had never and this is the thing I have to say clearly.

I had never read the Injil the way a person reads something they genuinely want to understand.

I had read parts of it the way a lawyer reads an opposing argument.

Looking for the problems, looking for the inconsistencies that would confirm what I already knew.

That was the only mode in which I had ever approached that text, and I had never once noticed that it was a mode because it had always felt like simply being rigorous.

I returned from Egypt at 24 and was appointed assistant imam at the mosque I had grown up praying in the mosque my father had taken me to since I was small enough to sit beside him on the prayer mat and watch his lips moving.

By 30 I was the head I imam.

My father was still alive then.

He came to the first Friday prayer I led as head I imam.

He sat in the front row where he had always sat.

And after the prayer, after the congregation had filed out, he held my face in both his hands the way he used to when I was small.

He didn’t say much.

He didn’t need to.

Everything passed between us in that gesture.

I knew what it meant to him.

I knew what it meant to me.

He died three years later.

a stroke sudden at 61.

I won’t try to properly describe what that loss was.

I don’t have the words for it and I don’t think words are the right container for it anyway.

What I will say is that it made the mosque more important to me, not less.

Because who I was in that mosque, the imam, the man my father had watched become that felt like a way of keeping him present.

When I stood at the front and led the community in prayer, I felt him somewhere in the room.

I felt that I was continuing something he had started.

That his life’s investment in me was bearing fruit in every prayer I led.

That connection was real and it meant everything.

The community of that mosque was my world.

I had been in it since childhood and I had led it for over 20 years by the time this story reaches its turning point.

I knew these people.

I had prayed alongside them through every season of their lives.

I had sat with families in hospital corridors, buried their parents, performed marriage contracts for their children.

There was an older man named Hassan, a retired school teacher who had prayed in the front row every single day for as long as anyone could remember.

There were young families whose children had grown up in the weekend Islamic school while I was imam.

There were businessmen and university students and elderly women who came to the women’s section and prayed with the intensity of people who have been doing this for 50 or 60 years and are not planning to stop.

These were my people.

I love them.

That is not a complicated statement.

I genuinely deeply love that community and they loved me back.

Dan that mutual love was one of the most solid things in my life.

I married Fatima when I was 27.

She came from a family in Bura.

Her father was a respected scholar there and she was a woman of very steady, very quiet faith.

We had three children.

Tariq, our eldest, was 22 when this story reaches its crisis point.

Then our daughters, Nur, 14, and Zanb, 11.

Fatima managed our home and raised our children and supported my work at the mosque without ever making a production of any of it.

She prayed consistently, reliably, with the kind of faith that doesn’t fluctuate with mood or circumstance.

I respected this about her enormously.

There were periods when my own spiritual life felt dry and mechanical and I would watch Fatima at prayer and feel alongside the respect a mild private shame that the Imam’s wife appeared to have a more living connection to her faith than the imam himself.

I say this because the dryness was real and I want to be honest about it.

It was not constant.

There were genuine seasons of depth and feeling in my spiritual life.

Times when salah felt like what it was supposed to feel like, an actual meeting, an actual presence, something received and not only performed.

But there were also seasons where I was going through the form with great precision and nothing was arriving at the destination.

In Islamic spiritual understanding, this is a known phenomenon and the prescription is more consistency, more Quran, more voluntary prayer.

So during those periods, I did those things and the dryness would lift and I would not examine it further.

But looking back now, I think those periods of dryness were pointing at something I didn’t have the framework to see.

Something that was true about my situation that I had no language for.

Not a flaw in my practice, not a spiritual failure, but a gap, a real gap between the form of what I was doing and something I had not yet encountered that the form was pointing toward.

I didn’t know that at the time.

At the time I only knew the dryness and I managed it and I moved on.

There was a man who came into my life about 8 months before the collapse and I need to tell you about him here because he matters to everything that follows.

His name was Dr.

Ysef Demir.

He was the administrative director of a private hospital near our neighborhood and I met him through a health initiative the mosque had partnered with.

We were helping with community outreach and health screenings for elderly members.

We met in professional meetings several times over several months.

At some point it came up, I don’t even remember exactly how, that he was a Christian, not someone born into a Christian family, a man who had converted from Islam about 12 years earlier.

When I understood this, my reaction was not hostility.

I was not the kind of man who was hostile to people I disagreed with.

But there was something a professional alertness maybe a slight reccalibration of how I was paying attention.

I found myself watching him more carefully after that in the way you watch someone whose situation you are trying to understand.

And what I noticed which I registered and then put away without fully examining was a quality of settled peace in him.

Not performed contentment, not religious satisfaction in the way I had seen some religious people display it, wearing their faith like a badge.

Something quieter than that.

a person who seemed to be living from a place of interior rest, from some internal ground that was stable.

I noticed it and I didn’t know what to do with it.

So, I filed it somewhere in the back of my mind and went on with my days.

But I thought about him more than I would have expected.

In the weeks that followed our meetings, I found myself thinking specifically about what could make a man who was clearly educated and clearly reasonable leave Islam, not leave in a moment of rebellion or crisis of practice, but leave and arrive somewhere that produced that quality of peace.

I couldn’t account for it inside my framework.

I thought he was confused.

I thought somewhere underneath that that his confusion bothered me more than it should have.

In the weeks before the collapse, something was happening to me that I can only describe now from the other side because I didn’t have clear eyes for it while I was in it.

I was tired in a way that sleep wasn’t fixing, not physically worn out.

I knew what that felt like.

I had been physically tired many times in my life.

This was different.

It was as though something inside me had been running for a very long time and was approaching an empty tank.

And I kept trying to refuel with the things that had always worked.

More prayer, more Quran, more service.

and they were not reaching wherever the tank was.

I I had the same dream twice in those weeks.

In the dream, I was in the mosque standing at the front leading the prayer.

Everything looked normal.

The rows of men behind me, the carpet, the familiar walls.

But partway through the prayer, I felt something wrong.

And I turned around and the mosque was empty.

The prayer mats were all there arranged in rows, but there was no one on them.

I was leading a room full of absence.

And the silence in that dream was so complete and so heavy that it stayed with me when I woke up, sitting on me for hours before it slowly lifted.

I didn’t tell anyone about the dreams.

I didn’t have the language for what they might mean, and I wasn’t sure I wanted the language.

The evening of the collapse was a Thursday.

I remember it being the 14th of Rabi Alawal.

We had had a community gathering earlier that day, something connected to the approach of Malid, the celebration of the prophet’s birthday, and the atmosphere in the mosque during the day had been warm and festive in a way that usually lifted me.

That day, it hadn’t touched me.

I had participated.

I had said the right things.

I had been present in every outward sense.

But inside I was behind glass watching it all from somewhere slightly removed.

By the time Aisha prayer came, the final prayer of the night, there were around 200 men in the mosque.

A good number for a weekday night prayer.

I made my woodoo, the ritual washing before prayer.

And I stood at the sink and I looked at my face in the mirror and I had a strange moment, just a few seconds of looking at my own reflection and feeling an unfamiliarity with it that I couldn’t explain.

Like looking at someone I recognized but didn’t quite know.

I pushed it aside.

I dried my hands.

I walked to the front of the mosque.

I gave the call to begin.

And the congregation straightened their rows behind me.

200 men shouldertosh shoulder.

The shuffle of feet finding their position.

The collective exhale of a room full of people settling into worship.

I had experienced this exact thing thousands of times.

I knew every sound of it.

I raised my hands and said Allahu Akbar and the prayer began.

We moved through the first raka.

My recitation was steady and correct.

The fatya came from a place so deep inside me that it needed no conscious thought.

35 years of repetition had put it below the level of effort.

Then the bowing, then the rising, then the first prostration, the sujud, forehead pressed to the carpet.

back up.

Second raka, recitation, bowing, rising, and then the sujud of the second raka, forehead to the ground, the closest position in Islamic prayer to God.

I pressed my forehead to the carpet and something happened.

The best I can describe it, and I have tried to describe this many times, and I always find language inadequate, is that the floor beneath my forehead became infinite.

Not that it disappeared, but that the act of pressing against it opened into something that had no bottom, not a physical sensation, something deeper than physical, a presence enormous and warm and terrifying in its completeness.

Not pain, weight.

The weight of something that was entirely, completely, absolutely itself pressing into me from above and drawing from below at the same time.

The sounds of the mosque went far away.

I was aware at some distance of my name being called.

I was aware of movement around me.

I was aware dimly that my body was going down.

But that awareness was becoming very faint.

And then just before everything went dark, there was something in that weight.

Not a voice.

I want to be precise about this because I know how these things sound.

And I am not going to say more than what is true.

Not a voice exactly.

something more like a conviction being pressed into the center of me, like a seal being pressed into wax.

The shape of it was clear, even if the words were not fully formed.

And then there was darkness, complete darkness.

And the next thing I knew, I was somewhere else, looking at a white ceiling, hearing the sound of a machine near my head, smelling something sharp and antiseptic that had nothing in common with the smell of the mosque.

And I understood before I could think it clearly that I was in a hospital.

And something in me knew without yet being able to say why or how that I was not coming back from what had just happened.

The same man who had gone into it.

I don’t know exactly how long I was unconscious.

The doctors told me later it was roughly 4 minutes before the paramedics arrived and that I had come too briefly in the ambulance before losing consciousness again.

I have no memory of the ambulance.

I have no memory of being moved from the mosque floor.

My first real memory after the sujud is of that white ceiling and the heart monitor sound and the IV in my arm and the particular quality of hospital air that has no warmth in it whatsoever.

But I’m getting ahead of myself because before the hospital there was the darkness.

And the darkness is the part of this story I have told the fewest people because it is the part where I understand most clearly what people will think of me.

I spent 20 years of my life as a religious scholar and I know exactly the category a story like this gets put in.

I know what I would have said about a man in my position describing this kind of experience.

I would have said it was a medical episode producing altered states.

I would have said the brain under oxygen deprivation generates unusual experiences and attaches meaning to them.

I would have said this confidently and I would have believed it.

So I am not asking you to believe me.

I am asking you to simply listen to what I am going to tell you because it is what happened and telling it as accurately as I can is the only honest thing I know how to do with it.

When the darkness came, when the mosque sounds faded and the floor went away and everything went black, I expected nothing.

Not because of any theological reason, but because that is simply what the body expects from unconsciousness.

The blank space between one moment and the next.

That is what I expected.

That is not what I got.

The darkness was not empty.

I have tried many different ways to explain this and I always come back to the same example.

When you walk into a dark room, you can tell immediately whether it is empty or occupied or you can feel the difference in the air in the weight of the space before you see or hear anything.

There is a quality that a room has when another person is in it even in complete darkness.

Something in the air that registers before the other senses can confirm it.

Anyone who has experienced this knows what I mean.

The darkness I entered when I lost consciousness had that quality.

Occupied, full, not with threat or not primarily with presence.

A presence so large and so completely itself that my own smallalness inside it was the first thing I understood.

The word I keep coming back to is holiness.

I know it is a loaded word and that people use it in different ways and for different purposes.

But there is a specific quality I am trying to describe.

And holiness is the closest word I have.

It is what you feel when you are in contact with something that is so purely and completely what it is that your own impurity, your own mixed motives, your own performances, your own accumulated selfdeceptions becomes suddenly visible.

Not because anything is accusing you, but because purity simply by being present makes everything that isn’t pure visible.

By contrast, the way a shaft of sunlight doesn’t accuse the dust particles.

It illuminates.

It simply is what it is.

And the dust becomes visible because of it.

In that darkness, I felt completely known, not judged, not condemned, though I was aware of my own smallness in a way that was sharp and clear.

known the way you feel known by someone who has loved you for a long time and has seen past every performance you have ever given to the actual person underneath and loves that person too.

The real person, not the performance.

I did not see anything, no vision, no light in the dramatic sense people describe.

No tunnel, only the darkness and the presence inside the darkness and something that communicated in a way that was not speech.

What I received in that place and I use the word received deliberately because heard is not accurate was a challenge.

That is the only word I have for it.

a challenge, not harsh, not condemning, but direct, clear, without any of the space I would normally have to deflect or argue.

Something that went directly at the core of what I had spent my adult life being, something that said, in a way that didn’t need sentences.

You have spoken about me for decades without knowing me.

You have argued about me without encountering me.

You have taught others who I am not.

And you have never sat still long enough to find out who I am.

I am being careful here because I cannot give you the exact transcript of what passed in that place.

Language is a translation and what happened in the darkness was not in language.

It was in something older and more direct than language.

What I can tell you is the shape of it, the weight of it, the specific personal direction of it.

And I can tell you that the thing that most undid me then and in the months that followed was not the challenge itself, but the way it was delivered.

Not with anger, not with condemnation, with something that I can only call grief.

The grief of someone who has been studied at arms length for a very long time and has been waiting with extraordinary patience to simply be known.

Then the darkness deepened and the presence was gone and I was somewhere much smaller and much brighter looking at a ceiling.

I also need to say something about the words that came out of my mouth while I was on the mosque floor because they are part of this account and I cannot leave them out.

I know about them only from what people told me afterward.

Multiple people were present.

Men who had rushed to help when I collapsed.

Men who knew me well.

men who had prayed behind me for years.

And they heard me saying things in a disoriented, slurred state that none of them could easily account for.

They heard me calling on Issa, calling on Jesus, repeating the name with the word for mercy, uh for forgiveness, saying something about the way and the truth.

Some of what I said was in Arabic.

Some of it was in a language no one in that mosque recognized.

When my son Tariq told me this in the hospital, his face was the face of a young man trying to hold something together that was threatening to fall apart.

He had framed it carefully.

He said the brothers were saying it was the medical episode, the brain under stress, that there was nothing to worry about.

He was partly telling me and partly convincing himself.

I looked at him while he spoke and I felt tenderness for him and I said what he needed me to say in that moment that the doctors would explain everything.

I did not lie, but I did not tell him what was actually happening inside me because I didn’t yet have the shape of it clearly enough to tell anyone.

There is one more thing from the hospital that I need to mention because it stayed with me in a way that surprised me.

Late in the first night, very late, it must have been past 1:00 in the morning, a nurse came in to check my IV and my monitors.

She was a middle-aged woman, Filipino, I think, with the quiet efficiency of someone who has been doing this work for a long time.

She checked everything, adjusted something near the heart machine, and as she was leaving at the door, she paused for just a moment, and she crossed herself quietly, quickly, without any awareness that I was watching.

Just a small private act of faith before stepping back out into the corridor.

My first response was a trained theological reflex that rose before I could stop it.

The old reflex.

But then before it could fully form, I’d something happened that I had not experienced before in the context of seeing someone make the sign of the cross.

I felt something close to, I don’t have a better word, tenderness toward her, toward the complete naturalness of what she had just done.

She had not done it for anyone’s benefit.

She had not done it as a statement or a performance.

She had simply done it because it was what she did, as ordinary as breathing before going back to her work at 1:00 in the morning in a hospital.

And something about that naturalness, that unself-consciousness, that simplicity opened something in me that I wasn’t prepared for.

I lay in the dark after she left with tears on my face.

I hadn’t cried since my father died.

I was not by temperament or by training a man who cried easily, but in that hospital room when with the heart monitor beeping and the corridor light under the door, I cried not dramatically, just quietly, just tears moving down my face in the dark.

And behind the tears was a question that I had never once seriously asked in 45 years of religious life.

Not a question about God I had never doubted God.

A question about a specific person.

About whether the presence in that darkness was who I was beginning with enormous terror to suspect it might be.

I did not say anything out loud.

I was not ready to say it out loud, but I let the question exist in me without immediately suppressing it, which was itself something new.

I let it sit there full-sized, frightening, without any of the theological apparatus I had always used to keep it safely out of reach.

And then very late in that empty hospital room, I said something barely above a whisper, not a prayer in any formal sense, just words directed toward the dark, toward whatever or whoever might be in it.

I said, “Was that you?” The room gave me nothing back.

No voice, no light, no sign of any kind.

Just the monitor and the corridor and the dark.

But the silence that followed that question was different from the silence that had been there before.

It had a texture I couldn’t name.

Something in it that was not nothing.

And I lay inside that silence for a long time, too exhausted and too undone to think clearly.

And somewhere before sleep came, I understood that the question I had just asked, the most serious question of my life, asked in the smallest possible voice in an empty hospital room at 2:00 in the morning, was not going to be easy to unask.

I came home from the hospital 4 days after the collapse.

Fatima had prepared the apartment the way she always prepares a space for someone coming home from a hard time.

Clean, aired out, the smell of good food, everything in order.

The children were there.

Zanep held my hand and didn’t let go for most of that first afternoon.

Tariq hovered with the careful, slightly stiff manner of a young man managing emotions he didn’t want to show.

Neighbors came.

People from the mosque sent food and called and visited.

The mosque committee sent a representative with an envelope for medical expenses that I returned.

Everyone said that Allah had preserved me, that this was a mercy, that I should rest and recover and return to my duties when I was ready.

I received all of this with gratitude.

The love in it was real and I felt it.

I but each time someone said that Allah had preserved me and people said it often with complete sincerity something in me went very still because I was sitting in the center of an experience that didn’t fit cleanly inside that framing and the distance between what they were saying and what I actually knew had happened was widening every day and I had no way to close that distance without starting a conversation I wasn’t ready to start.

The doctors had ordered two weeks of rest.

No mosque duties, minimal stress, no public role for a man whose entire identity was organized around public function.

2 weeks of enforced stillness was its own kind of ordeal.

I had nothing to do but be in my own house and think.

And I thought constantly, not calm, organized thinking, the most grueling mental work I have ever done.

And I have done hard intellectual work.

But this was different because the stakes were not academic.

When the question is personal, when the thing being examined is not a theological position but the foundation of your own identity, your own life, everything you are to everyone who knows you, the thinking is a different order of difficult.

The central thing I was trying to figure out was simple to state and almost impossible to answer honestly.

What had I experienced in the darkness? I was a rational man.

I still am.

I didn’t want to be the kind of person who has a frightening medical event and immediately converts it into divine revelation.

I had encountered people like that over the years.

people who went through trauma and came out the other side with dramatic spiritual conclusions that seemed to owe more to the state of their nervous system than to the nature of God.

I was not going to do that.

So I applied to my own experience the same critical scrutiny I would have applied to anyone else’s.

I asked myself whether it could be entirely explained medically.

Honestly, partly the collapse itself, yes, the vasovagal syncopy, the arhythmia, the loss of consciousness, all of that was medically coherent.

The words spoken during the collapse, possibly the brain under oxygen deprivation produces unusual states.

Language centers can fire unpredictably.

I had enough medical literacy to understand this, and I wasn’t going to pretend I didn’t.

I could account for the words medically without too much strain, but the experience of the presence in the darkness, the specific quality of it, the weight of it, the personal direction of it that I could not fit into any medical account that was honest.

I had read enough about hypoxic experiences and near-death states to know that they tend to be chaotic and associative, drawing on the subject’s existing framework and imagery.

A Muslim man’s brain under hypoxic stress would be expected to produce experiences consistent with Islamic imagery.

What I had encountered in that darkness was not consistent with my Islamic framework.

It had cut across my framework.

It had addressed something that my framework specifically taught me not to address.

It was not my own mind playing familiar material back at me in a distorted way.

It was something other than me, operating in a way I would not have chosen and had not constructed.

The more rigorously I examined it, the more it resisted the medical explanation.

And underneath the intellectual resistance was something in my body, something pre-intellectual that simply knew.

the way you know when a room is occupied even in complete darkness.

I had spent 45 years as a man of faith.

I knew what my own interior experience felt like.

The landscape of my own spiritual life with all its seasons and variations.

What had happened in that darkness was not from inside me.

I knew this the way I knew my own name.

And that knowledge was terrifying.

About 10 days into my recovery, I was walking in our neighborhood without any particular destination.

I needed to get out of the apartment.

The stillness inside it was becoming oppressive, and I found myself in front of a small used bookshop that I had passed many hundreds of times without entering.

The door was propped open.

I went in.

I moved along the shelves without looking for anything.

And then my hand stopped at a spine.

I pulled the book out.

It was an Arabic New Testament.

The Inil old with a worn cover and a Turkish introduction.

Someone had owned this book and read it and eventually let it go.

I stood holding it for a long time.

Then I bought it.

I put it inside my jacket on the way home and I carried it like something I didn’t want anyone to see.

I hid it in my study in a drawer under some old papers.

And then I didn’t open it for 3 days.

I would go into the study and sit at my desk knowing it was there and not open the drawer.

The resistance was layered in ways I can now see more clearly than I could then.

There was the theological resistance.

This text is corrupted.

The scholars have established this approaching it with genuine openness is a kind of naivity I had spent my career helping people avoid.

There was the identity resistance.

You are an imam, a hafis, a man of standing.

What are you doing? There was the resistance that came from the faces of the people I loved.

Fatima, Tariq, my mother in Bura, the men who had prayed behind me for 20 years.

All of them somehow present in that drawer.

And underneath all of it, there was the fear not of what the book would say, but of reading it honestly, because I already had enough honesty in me from the experience in the darkness in to know that honest reading might take me somewhere I couldn’t come back from.

I opened it on the fourth day.

The first time I opened it, I did so at random just to break the paralysis of not opening it.

I landed in the Gospel of John, the 14th chapter.

The verse my eyes fell on was one I knew.

I had taught it.

I had explained why it couldn’t mean what Christians claimed it meant.

I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me.

I had handled that verse many times as a theological subject, as a claim to be countered.

But I had heard those words in the darkness, not those exact words, or not in the form of words, but the shape of them, the way and the truth, and reading them now without the apologetic frame, without the immediate counter response rising in me, reading them from inside the experience I had had.

They were different.

They didn’t present themselves as a claim to evaluate.

They presented themselves as a statement made by someone who was entirely what they were saying, someone speaking with the authority of someone for whom no gap exists between what they say and what they are.

I sat with that for a long time.

Over the following days and weeks, I read more.

Not systematically, not the way I had been trained to read religious texts analytically, methodically, noting problems and inconsistencies.

I read the way a thirsty person drinks.

I read all four gospels.

And for the first time in my life, I read them looking not at the problems in the text, but at the person in the text, at Jesus, at the way he moves through these accounts, the quality of his attention to individual people, the authority he speaks with, not an authority he justifies or defends, just an authority that is simply there.

The way gravity is simply there.

The things he says under pressure.

The things he says when he is alone with the people closest to him.

I had studied Jesus academically for years.

But I had never simply looked at him, not as a subject of study, but as a person.

And what I found when I looked at him, when I set aside every apologetic tool I had ever been given and just read these accounts as accounts of a person, disturbed me in the best possible way.

He was not the Jesus I had taught about.

The Islamic Issa I had presented in lectures was coherent and manageable.

A prophet, a great one, performing miracles by God’s permission, delivering a message or to be superseded by Muhammad, safe, contained, clearly human.

The Jesus of these gospels was not safe.

He forgave sins with personal authority, not saying, “God forgives you, but I forgive you.

” which in the Jewish religious context of his time was not a slight theological difference but a categorical claim since only God could personally forgive sins against God.

He accepted worship from people without correcting them which a prophet who was only a prophet would never do.

He said things that coming from a man who was only a man would be the most alarming arrogance ever recorded.

Before Abraham was I am using the divine name that God had spoken to Moses from the burning bush.

He spoke about his death and resurrection not as something happening to him but as something he was doing on purpose for a reason as a necessity are not martyrdom not an accident of history a plan.

I had the Islamic responses to every one of these points.

I had taught them.

But now reading from within the experience of the darkness, those responses felt different than they had ever felt before.

They felt like defenses, not engagements, like a man who stands outside a house and argues about its floor plan rather than walking in and seeing the rooms.

And the house was standing there in these pages, fully real, and I had spent my entire career standing outside it, telling people what was wrong with it.

I called Dr.

Ysef about 3 weeks after I came home from the hospital.

I went into my study, closed the door, and called him.

He answered quickly and when I identified myself, his voice had the quality of someone who had expected the call.

Eventually, we met at a small cafe in a part of the city where I was unlikely to run into anyone who knew me well.

We sat for 3 hours.

I told him almost everything.

The collapse, the darkness, the presence, the angel in my drawer.

I told him the way you tell a doctor about a symptom you’ve been sitting on for too long with relief at finally saying it out loud mixed with genuine fear about what comes next.

He listened without interrupting.

When I finished he was quiet for a moment and then he talked about his own journey which had been different from mine.

His had begun with intellectual questioning and taken years before anything like an encounter happened.

His story didn’t mirror mine, but there were moments in it that I felt in my chest when he described them, especially the point he described when the intellectual arguments became secondary.

when he stopped trying to reason his way to Jesus and simply met him as a person and found he couldn’t walk away.

He didn’t try to persuade me of anything that day.

He was too intelligent for that and too decent.

What he said at the end of our time together was something I have turned over many times since.

He said that in his experience, truth of this kind doesn’t need to be forced on anyone.

It has its own gravity.

All a person has to do is stop running from it.

I drove home thinking about that.

Somewhere on the bridge over the Bosphorus with the water below and the city spreading out on both sides, I recognized clearly for the first time that a significant portion of my mental energy in the past weeks had been exactly that, running, not running toward Islam with renewed commitment and not running toward Christianity with any kind of eagerness.

running from the specific personal undeniable thing that had happened to me on the mosque floor because fully accepting it meant accepting the collapse of everything I had spent my life being and the cost of that was almost unimaginable to me.

The pressure from the community during this period came in gentle waves.

The mosque had announced I was on medical leave, which was true, and provided a complete and dignified explanation for my absence, but what had been heard on the mosque floor the night of the collapse had not been entirely contained.

There were careful concerned questions from men I had known for years.

Calls to check on my health that had something extra in their pauses.

Something they were waiting to see confirmed or denied.

I managed these conversations the way I had always managed difficult conversations.

Calmly, warmly, with enough said to reassure and not enough revealed to expose.

And each conversation where I did this left a residue of discomfort that accumulated over the weeks.

My mother called from Bura.

She was 71 and not well.

She had heard about the collapse from my sister.

She called to hear my voice and to be sure I was alive.

And she asked me in the way mothers ask things without quite asking them directly.

Was I all right? Really inside.

Was everything still as it should be? I told her I was all right.

I said it warmly and gently.

And I meant the warmth and I chose not to mean the all right in the way she was hoping I meant it.

She said something about not letting Shayan use weakness to plant doubt.

She said it with love and with the weight of her whole life behind it.

I held the phone to my ear and felt her love and felt the immense sad distance between what she feared was happening to me and what was actually happening.

And I could do nothing about that distance.

I just held it.

The night I stopped fighting was about 6 weeks after the collapse.

I had been lying awake again.

Sleep in those weeks was difficult and often shallow.

And I got up and went to my study and I sat on the floor, not on a prayer mat, not in any formal position, just on the floor.

And I stopped.

I stopped reviewing the arguments.

I stopped running the calculations about what was true and what I could afford for it to be.

I just stopped.

And in that stop be in that particular exhausted silence that comes when a man runs out of the energy to keep resisting.

I did something I had never consciously done in my life.

I spoke to Jesus not as a theological subject, not as the Issa of Islamic belief, as the person whose presence I had felt in the darkness, as the person whose words about being the way and the truth had landed in me differently than anything I had ever read.

I spoke out of the entirety of my situation.

All the confusion and fear and grief about what this was going to cost me.

All the hunger for something I couldn’t fully name.

I said something like, “If you are who that knight is suggesting you are, I cannot keep fighting this.

I need you to be clear in a way I can’t explain away.

Not a sign or a spectacle.

Just the truth.

Whatever the truth is, let me see it.

I sat on that floor for a long time.

Then I went to bed.

The dream that came that night, I have described to very few people because every time I try to describe it, I am aware of how it sounds.

But I am committed to honesty in this account.

So I will tell you in the dream I was back in the mosque, back in the prostration position, and someone put their hand on my shoulder.

I looked up.

I did not see a face I can describe.

I saw light not dramatic, not blinding, not the light of a film or a vision constructed for effect.

Light the way presence is light.

And in that light there was a complete dissolution of the question I had been carrying for 6 weeks.

Not because the question was answered in words, but because the question couldn’t survive contact with what it was being asked about.

It dissolved the way a handful of salt dissolves in water, present and then not.

I woke with tears on my face.

And something had changed.

Not everything.

There was still so much pain ahead and I already knew it.

But the deepest part of the resistance, the part that had been insisting, “This cannot be real.

You cannot afford for this to be real.

” That part had set something down.

Quietly, with no announcement, like a man letting go of a weight he has been holding for so long that the act of letting go is a thing that finally tells him how heavy it was.

I picked up the angel the next morning and I read John 14 again and I received it for the first time, not as a claim to be assessed, but as the truest thing I had ever encountered, not managed, not handled, received.

The war inside was not over.

It would continue in the territory of my actual life in the most practical and painful ways.

But this particular battle, the one between what I had experienced and what I wanted it not to be, had ended, not in defeat, in surrender.

And I was beginning to understand that surrender, real surrender to something real is not the same thing as losing.

It is the beginning of finding.

and I had been lost for a very long time inside the confidence of a man who had always known exactly where he was.

There is a version of stories like mine that skips past the cost.

The person finds the truth.

The truth sets them free.

Things are hard for a while, but in the end everything is better.

And that is true.

The freedom is real.

The better is real.

But the cost is also real and it doesn’t disappear after a chapter.

Ah, it goes on being real alongside everything else.

And I think leaving it out is a disservice to anyone who might be in the middle of their own cost right now and wondering whether anyone understands what it actually feels like.

So I am going to tell you what it actually felt like.

About 3 months after the collapse, I returned to leading the Friday prayer.

The mosque committee had held my position, and the medical explanation had been accepted with genuine care and concern, and there was a real desire among the community to have me back at the front.

My first Friday back was an experience that I cannot reduce to simple description.

I stood at the front and looked out at the faces of men I had led through every season of their lives for over 20 years.

And I felt enormous love for them and enormous grief simultaneously.

I grief for the gap between what they believed about me and what was actually moving inside me.

a gap I was maintaining because I didn’t yet know how to close it without causing damage I wasn’t ready to cause.

I preached on love and forgiveness that Friday.

I had always preached on love and forgiveness.

These themes are as Islamic as they are anything else.

But the love and forgiveness I was drawing on now had a different source than it had before.

And the difference was only visible from the inside.

I was speaking from within the experience of being personally loved and personally forgiven.

Not as an abstraction or a theological principle, but as something that had happened to me, that was still happening to me.

Offered by a presence I was now privately, carefully calling by his name.

Nobody in that mosque could have detected this, but two men, both longstanding members of the mosque board, came to me afterward and stood in the corridor with me, and one of them said my sermon had sounded different.

He said it kindly as an observation, not an accusation.

I said that coming close to death changes how a man thinks about certain things.

He nodded and accepted this, but his eyes on me as he walked away were more careful than they had been before.

The formal confrontation from the board came about a month after my return.

A closed meeting, four of them and me in the small office at the back of the mosque.

Men I respected, men I had worked alongside, shared meals with, prayed with, trusted.

The meeting was conducted with care, and I want to be fair about that.

These were not hostile or unjust men, but someone had heard to from one of the worshippers who was present during the collapse, a more detailed account than the one that had been officially circulating.

Questions were being raised in the community.

They needed clarity.

I sat in that room for over 2 hours.

I was as honest as I could be without being more honest than I yet had the courage or the clarity to be.

I told them the experience had shaken me deeply and I was still processing it.

I told them I was reading widely, thinking carefully.

When they pressed about the words people had heard during the collapse, I gave them the medical explanation, the neurological effects of the arhythmia, the disorienting effect of oxygen deprivation on language and cognition.

This explanation was not false, but it was incomplete.

and sitting in that room using a true but incomplete explanation to protect myself all with four men watching me carefully who had trusted me for years.

That was one of the most uncomfortable hours I have spent in my life.

Not because they were doing anything wrong, because I was not being fully honest with men who deserved my honesty.

And I knew it.

and I could not see yet how to do differently.

The outcome of the meeting was that I would step back from leading the daily prayers for health reasons, they said, and they genuinely meant it as care for me.

The Friday sermon I could still do for now, but the five daily prayers would be led by the assistant imam.

It was presented gently and I received it gently.

It was also a removal from the center of my role and everyone in the room understood this even if no one said it plainly.

The first day I sat in the congregation for the afternoon prayer instead of standing at the front was the day the reality of it became fully physical.

I sat among the men I had led for 23 years, and I listened to another man’s voice fill the space I had filled for two decades.

And the absence of my own voice in that room was something I felt.

The way you feel a missing limb, not just as a loss of function, but as a wound in your own sense of what you are.

20 years.

My voice in that space five times a day.

The silence of it now was a kind of grief I had not anticipated and was not prepared for.

I sat in my car afterward in the car park and I put my forehead on the steering wheel and I cried.

the way I had cried when my father died from somewhere deep and old and not manageable.

I cried for the mosque, for the community.

I for my father who had sat in the front row and watched me lead and felt that his life had become something.

I cried for the 24year-old who had stood at that front for the first time with everything ahead of him.

I cried for all of it.

And then I sat up and I drove home.

And inside the grief there was I need to say this truthfully.

There was a quality of peace that I did not expect and could not account for.

Not comfort, not the absence of pain.

peace as if something was holding the pain rather than denying it.

Telling Fatima was what I had been most afraid of.

I had been circling that conversation for months, approaching it and retreating.

In the end, it happened simply the way the most important things often do.

We were in the kitchen.

It was late.

The girls were in bed and Tariq was out.

or she was making tea and she turned around and looked at me with the eyes that have never been able to be deceived by anything I have ever presented to them.

And she said she needed to know what was happening inside me.

She said she had been feeling something she couldn’t see and she needed to see it.

So I told her, not all at once, not with a full accounting of every internal movement of the past months, but the essential truth, the darkness and the presence in it, the reading of the injil, the meeting with Dr.

Ysef, the fact that I could not in honesty return to where I had been.

I told her these things, and I watched her face contain what it was hearing.

She was very still.

She is always very still when she is managing something large.

She didn’t speak for a long time when I stopped.

She stood with both hands flat on the kitchen counter and she looked at something internal, some landscape she was navigating quietly without any map.

And then she asked me one question.

She asked whether I was sure, not whether I had lost my mind, not whether I had been deceived, not whether I was ill, just was I sure.

And the way she asked it, the specificity of that question, the way she didn’t reach for the easier questions, told me that something in her was receiving this with a seriousness I hadn’t fully anticipated.

I told her I was sure, that I wished in some ways that I wasn’t, that I would have given a great deal to have gone back to our life and found it as whole as it used to feel, but that I was sure.

She went to bed without saying more.

What followed were days of a silence that was not hostile but was full.

Full of something she was processing privately that she was not ready to share.

I did not push her.

I had learned over 20 years of marriage that Fatima processes in her own interior and arrives when she arrives and any pressure from outside only slows the process.

I waited.

Tariq came to me about two weeks later.

He had clearly spoken with Fatima, though she and I didn’t discuss this.

He came to my study and closed the door and stood with his arms folded and asked me directly what was happening.

He was 22 and trying to hold himself in one piece and the effort of it was visible in his face and in the set of his shoulders.

I told him the core of it.

And watching his face while I told him was one of the hardest experiences of my life as a father because in his face I could see everything moving at once.

love for me and fear for me and anger and confusion and grief and underneath all of it a kind of destabilizing disbelief that the man who had been the foundation of his understanding of the world was standing in front of him saying what he was saying.

He asked me how I could do this to the family.

His voice broke slightly when he said it.

He was not cruel.

He was frightened and he was hurt.

And he was asking the most reasonable question a son in his position could ask.

I told him I wasn’t choosing to do something to anyone.

I was telling the truth about what had happened to me, and the truth was not something I had chosen or arranged.

That it was costly did not make it less true.

He left without another word, and I heard the front door close, and I sat in the silence of the study, and held the specific grief of a father who has hurt his son by being honest, and cannot undo the hurt without being dishonest.

That grief sat in me for a long time.

Through Dr.

Ysef’s connection I had by this point.

He made quiet contact with a small group of people from Muslim backgrounds who had come to faith in Jesus and were meeting regularly in someone’s home in one of the outer neighborhoods of Istanbul.

These were ordinary people.

A former academic, a young woman from a conservative family, a retired teacher, a businessman, a few others.

They had each come through their own journey.

And they gathered to read the Bible and pray together in a context where they didn’t have to conceal what they believed.

They were not dramatic or sectarian.

They were simply people trying to live honestly inside something that had found them in a context where that honesty required some care.

The first time I sat with them, I said almost nothing.

I mostly listened.

when they read from Luke and they talked about it the way people talk about something that is alive to them and connected to how they actually live.

Not performing scholarship, not demonstrating theological precision, but genuinely working out what this meant for their real lives.

A woman talked about forgiving someone who had deeply wronged her.

An older man talked about the difference between religious correctness and the peace he had found since he stopped performing and simply rested in what Jesus had done.

I sat there and felt for the first time since the collapse that I was in a room where the gap between my interior truth and what I was allowed to say simply did not exist.

The first time I took communion in that room, months later, after long private wrestling with what it meant, I was not prepared for what happened to me.

As a former Islamic scholar, I understood the Eucharist academically.

I had studied the debates about it, the theological positions, the history.

I understood it analytically.

But kneeling there in that ordinary room, taking that bread and that cup, understanding for the first time from the inside what was being remembered and proclaimed, the weight of it was something no analysis had prepared me for.

that God had not only sent messages or prophets, but had come in person, had entered the full reality of human experience without protecting himself from the worst of it, had taken onto himself personally at real cost.

What separated human beings from God, not as a legal transaction managed from a distance, but as something he chose to bear from the inside.

The cross received not as a theological claim, but as a truth pressing itself into my actual chest, was unlike anything I had encountered in 45 years of religious life.

I wept in that room.

I didn’t try to stop it.

Someone put a hand on my shoulder and nobody said anything.

And we sat in a silence that was the kindest silence I have ever been held inside.

The decision to leave Turkey did not come as a single dramatic moment.

It assembled itself over several months from a series of smaller recognitions.

A letter arrived at the mosque, unsigned, not to my home address, that I will not describe in detail, except to say its tone made the situation feel no longer only personal and theological, but also practical and physical in a new way.

My position at the mosque had become untenable in an unspoken way.

I was technically still associated but functionally removed from everything and the situation was stable only because nothing had been said publicly and that silence felt increasingly temporary.

My daughters were beginning to experience social friction in a community that was however gently beginning to talk.

And Fatima, whose suggestions I had learned over 20 years to take seriously precisely, because she does not make them lightly, said one evening that perhaps it was time to think about what came next.

There was a network through Dr.

Ysef of people who worked with former Muslims from Muslim majority countries who face difficulty because of their faith.

There was a community in Germany in a city with a significant Turkish diaspora and that had helped others in situations like ours and had extended an offer of support.

The practical path existed.

Walking it meant leaving everything.

We sat together over several evenings and talked about it honestly.

And in those evenings something became clear to me about where Fatima was in her own journey.

She had been reading quietly in her own time without telling me since our kitchen conversation.

She had been praying and she told me one evening with the same quiet precision she brings to everything that she had been praying to Jesus.

Just like that.

No drama, no announcement.

A woman reporting a fact.

She said it and I looked at her and she looked at me and we were on the same side of something enormous.

whatever it had cost us to get to that place and whatever it was going to cost us to keep walking forward.

Ah, we were going to walk it together.

Tariq would not come.

This was the fact I held hardest.

He was 22 and in his studies and in his faith and in his community and he was not at a place where any of this made sense to him and his staying was both completely understandable and completely devastating.

I sat with him alone one evening before we left.

I told him that nothing that had happened changed what I felt for him.

that wherever he was and whatever he believed, he was my son and I was his father, and that distance was practical, not relational.

I told him I would always be reachable.

He was very controlled and quiet, and I could see the effort it cost him.

He said he hoped I knew what I was doing.

I told him honestly that I wasn’t entirely sure, but that I knew I could not stay somewhere being something I wasn’t.

He nodded a one slow nod and I received that nod as the grace it was.

We left Istanbul on a March morning.

I looked at the Bosphorus from the road to the airport, gray and vast in the early light.

I looked at the skyline, at the minouetses, at the city my family had lived in for generations, the city where my father was buried, the city where I had grown into everything I had been for 45 years.

I was leaving it not as a man who had lost his faith, but as a man who had found something he had not been looking for, something that had found him first on a mosque floor and had not released him.

I was afraid.

I was grieving.

And I was underneath both of those things, more at peace than I had been in years.

Those three things were all simultaneously true.

And that simultaneous truth, the fear and the grief and the peace all present at the same time, all real at the same time, is the most honest thing I can tell you about what following Jesus has actually looked like in my life.

It is not one thing.

It is never just one thing.

But the peace does not cancel the grief.

It holds it.

And being held is not nothing.

Being held is everything.

Germany received us the way northern European cities received strangers in early spring with gray sky and clean streets and a complete absence of personal interest in who we were or where we had come from.

after Istanbul, which is a city that is always aware of you, always in some kind of relationship with you, always warm and involved and in your business in the way that cities built on relationship and history always are.

The German indifference was the strangest thing, but it was also unexpectedly a gift.

To be anonymous, to be no one in particular, to walk down a street and be simply a middle-aged Turkish man with his wife, not an imam, not a figure, not a man whose recent history was the subject of any conversation anywhere.

We had arrived with what we could carry, and the contact information Dr.

Ysef had given us.

The community that had offered support was small and modest, mostly Turkish and Arabic-speaking people, meeting in a rented hall in a workingclass neighborhood with a significant immigrant population.

They were not wealthy.

The hall had plastic chairs and a simple table at the front with a cross on it.

And the first time I walked in, I had the strange double experience of feeling the warmth of gathered people in worship which was familiar to every bone in my body and feeling completely disoriented by the form of everything around me.

No adhan, no prayer mats, no rows of men in the particular shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity of salah.

Men and women together, no partition, someone playing a quiet guitar in the corner, a Bible on the table.

I sat in one of those plastic chairs and I held myself very still because everything in me that had been formed by 23 years of being the one who stood at the front, the one whose presence organized the space had to learn something entirely new.

How to simply be a person among other persons.

This was its own kind of lesson and not an easy one.

Not because the people were anything but welcoming.

They were extraordinarily warm with the specific warmth of people who have been through hard things and recognize hard things in others.

but because of what I had to release in order to be there as a learner rather than a teacher.

Identity holds on.

Even when you are willing to let it go, it holds on.

You have to coax it open gently over a long time.

The first months were months of learning to be a different version of myself in a place that didn’t know the previous version.

And this was disorienting and exhausting and occasionally unexpectedly freeing.

Fatima and I were alone together in a way we hadn’t been since the very early years of our marriage before the community and the role and the decades of structured life had built scaffolding around us.

We had to talk to each other about everything because there was no one else.

We had to figure out who we were without any of the external structures we had always lived inside.

This was hard.

There were many difficult conversations between us during those months that I won’t detail here because they are ours, not public property.

What I will say is that we came through them.

And what was between us at the end of those months was different from what had been there before.

Less assumed, more chosen, a love that had been tested and that was still present and had become through the testing something more deliberately itself.

I began attending the community meetings regularly.

I began reading the Bible all the way through for the first time.

Not skipping around, but starting at the beginning and moving forward.

Everything I read, I read through the double lens of someone with decades of Islamic theological training and someone who had been met in a darkness by the person this book was describing.

The double lens was sometimes dizzying.

There were passages that contradicted things I had held as certain for my entire life.

There were passages I had to sit with for days.

There were passages that opened something in me I had no previous language for.

The feeling of a truth that lands not in the thinking part of you, but in the part that is below thought, the part where you actually live.

I was reading the eighth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans one evening alone at the small table in our apartment and I came to the passage about nothing being able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.

nothing, not death, not life, not present things, and not things to come.

I put the Bible down on the table, and I just sat there.

I was a man who had left his country, his community, his mosque, his role, his eldest son’s daily presence, his mother’s understanding, everything he had built, and everything he had been known as.

and sitting in a plain apartment in Germany with a secondhand Bible.

This text was telling me not as a comfort slogan but as a stated fact that none of that loss had separated me from anything that ultimately mattered.

That the thing that had found me on a mosque floor was not put off by the distance I had traveled or the things I had lost along the way.

Nothing.

Nothing shall separate.

I cannot tell you what that was like to receive without sounding like I am performing emotion.

I am not performing.

Oh, I will just say it was one of the moments in my life I would least want to have missed.

Reading the New Testament systematically from inside the experience I had had and with eyes I had not had before showed me things about Jesus that I had not allowed myself to see during all the years I had studied him as a subject.

The Jesus of these pages, not only in the Gospels, but in Paul’s letters and the letters of John and in the entire frame of the New Testament, was not the Jesus I had been arguing about.

He was larger.

He was more personal.

He was more costly in the precise sense that what he chose to do had real cost attached to it.

Cost that he bore and did not distribute.

He was not a figure at a safe theological distance.

He was in these pages someone who had entered human experience without protecting himself from the worst of it, from betrayal, from suffering, from death, and who had done so not as a demonstration of power, but as an expression of love.

Love that did not remain at a distance and send representatives.

love that came in person.

The question of the cross, the central theological objection of my Islamic training, rooted in the Quranic verse that says they did not truly crucify him, was the question I sat with longest and most carefully.

I am not going to tell you I resolved it through a clever argument because I didn’t.

What happened was something different.

Reading the crucifixion accounts in all four gospels, I found details I had not allowed myself to notice before.

Details of the kind that embarrass rather than glorify.

Uh the kind of detail that people inventing a story for its effect don’t include because they diminish rather than enhance the confusion and fear of the disciples.

the undignified physical reality of what was described, the specific strange detail included by eyewitnesses who were clearly recording what they had seen and not what they had hoped to have seen.

And then the historical corroboration, Roman and Jewish sources with no stake in a Christian narrative who nevertheless recorded the execution of Jesus under Pontius Pilate as a historical fact.

But more than the historical case and more than any argument was the theological meaning of it.

And this is where the question stopped being historical and became the most personal thing I had ever encountered.

If the cross is real, it means that God did not respond to the human problem of separation and failure by sending a message or by sending a prophet or by issuing a command.

It means God came himself in person and took unto himself the cost of everything that separates human beings from God.

Not managed from a distance, not delegated personally in a body at real cost.

Cost that he chose, cost that he bore, cost that he did not require anyone else to pay.

There is nothing else like this in any religious tradition.

I had studied nothing.

Not the Islamic God who is merciful and forgiving but who forgives by decision from above.

Not any other framework I knew.

Only here only in the cross is there a God who enters the place of maximum human cost and bears it from the inside.

And that that quality, that specific shocking, unprecedented quality was exactly the quality of the presence I had felt in the darkness of the mosque.

Not a power that commanded from outside, something that had come into the dark place, something that was willing to be where I was.

The pieces were not separate pieces.

They were the same thing seen from different angles.

I was baptized the following spring, 7 months after we arrived in Germany.

It happened in the community hall with about 30 people present, members of the community and a few others who had heard of our situation.

The pastor was a patient German man who had spent months answering my questions without impatience or pressure.

He said the words in German and then in Turkish and I went into the water.

I cannot tell you what baptism felt like for a man who had performed Islamic ritual purification thousands of times who had understood water in worship always within the frame of woodoo.

The washing that prepares a Muslim to approach God.

Going into this water was not preparation to approach.

It was the thing itself.

A going under into the death Jesus died.

a coming up into the life that followed.

Every layer of it as an act was loaded with meaning for a man with my specific history in a way it might not be for someone who had grown up in a Christian household and been baptized in childhood.

Every layer landed.

And when I came up out of that water with the pastor’s hand on my head and people around me in tears and water running down my face, I felt something that I will not try to fully describe because I don’t think description can reach it.

I will only say that it was clean.

Clean in the way holiness is clean.

Clean from the inside.

I called Tariq that evening.

He picked up.

I told him what I had done.

There was a silence and then a conversation that was long and honest and painful and that belongs to us.

At the end of it, he said he didn’t understand it and didn’t know if he ever would, but that I was his father.

He said it simply as a statement and it cost him something to say it and I received it as the gift it was.

We have spoken regularly since then.

The distance between us is not gone.

It is real and it matters and I carry it.

But the relationship is still there, still alive, still his and mine.

I am grateful for that with a depth I don’t have easy words for.

I Fatima’s coming to faith was quiet as everything in her life is quiet.

She had been reading and sitting and praying in her own interior process for months and she arrived when she arrived without announcement or drama.

She simply told me one evening that she believed it was true.

Not a conversion experience with a clear narrative, just a woman who had taken something seriously for long enough that it had become in the way of deep things simply part of what she knew.

She was baptized 2 months after I was I was in the room.

I watched my wife go into the water in the name of Jesus.

And what I felt watching that is not something I will try to put into words because words are not the right container.

I will only say that it was more than I had thought to hope for.

I work now with an organization that supports people from Muslim majority contexts who are navigating what I navigated the faith journey, the family difficulty, the practical realities of leaving a community that formed you.

I do this work in Turkish and Arabic, occasionally in my improving German.

I am not an imam.

I do not stand at the front of any room.

I sit beside people who are in the hardest part of something very hard and I tell them what I know that the truth is worth the cost.

That the cost is real and does not disappear.

That they will not be alone in it.

This is the most useful work I have ever done.

And I say that having spent 23 years as a community imam in work I loved and believed in.

For the difference is that this work comes from a place I could not have reached without everything that happened to me.

Without the collapse, without the darkness, without the months of war, without the losses, nothing I went through was waste.

Not one day of it.

Not the 23 years of Islamic scholarship which gave me the tools to understand what I was reading when I finally read it honestly.

Not the grief of leaving Turkey.

Not the long nights on the floor of my study in Istanbul.

None of it was waste.

I want to say something to my Muslim brothers and sisters.

If any of them are reading this, I want to say it carefully and I want to say it with the full awareness that I come from where they come from that I was as inside that tradition as any person can be.

I am not saying that Muslims do not love God.

I am not saying that everything in Islam is wrong or that the sincere faith of a sincere Muslim is worthless.

I am saying that I spent 45 years studying and teaching and leading and praying.

And in all of that time, I never actually encountered Jesus.

I encountered a theological description of him.

I encountered arguments about him.

I never simply sat still and looked at him in the gospel accounts without any defensive frame around my looking.

I am asking you to do that one thing.

Read the inil without the apologetic lens.

Read it the way a thirsty person drinks.

Following what seems most alive.

And when you have read it, ask honestly what you see, not what your training says you should see, what you actually see.

And if you have had an experience, a dream, a vision, something in prayer, a something in a dark night that didn’t fit your framework, don’t push it away.

Don’t explain it away with the first available explanation.

Sit with it honestly.

The truth, if it is real, can survive honest examination.

I examined mine for 6 months with everything I had.

It survived.

It was still standing on the other side of everything I could throw at it.

That is not nothing.

To my Christian brothers and sisters, please hold what you have with more awareness of what it cost to get to you.

I am not saying this as a criticism.

I am saying it as someone who paid a price for it that I am still accounting.

The freedom to open a Bible without hiding it.

The freedom to walk into a church building.

The freedom to say the name of Jesus without calculating the consequences.

These are not small things.

They are extraordinary things that you may have grown up inside without fully feeling their weight.

Hold them accordingly and pray for the people in the world for whom these freedoms do not exist.

not as a category but as specific human beings who are navigating this exact thing right now in Muslim majority countries in conservative families in communities where the cost of following Jesus is very concrete and very present and please be Dr.

Ysef Demir to someone, you may never know you’re doing it.

He never preached at me.

He never argued.

He simply lived with consistency and peace from a place that I noticed and could not account for.

And that noticing planted something in me over the months before the collapse that made the ground a little softer when everything cracked open.

You don’t know who is watching you.

When you don’t know what your peace is doing in the people who see it and haven’t told you they see it, live it anyway.

Trust the gravity of the truth to do what argument cannot do.

Let me go back one last time to that night.

I want to go back to the sujud, to the forehead on the carpet, to the position I had been in 10,000 times across 45 years of life.

The lowest position, the position of complete submission, forehead pressed to the floor before God.

I have thought many times about the fact that it was precisely there.

Not while I was teaching, not while I was leading, not while I was constructing arguments or performing my competence or being who the community needed me to be.

But in the moment of maximum leeness, maximum submission that it happened.

I don’t think that was an accident.

I I think God who is extraordinarily precise, who knows every person from the inside, who knew me better than I knew myself, chose that moment and that position to introduce himself to me in a way I could not dismiss.

He chose my mosque.

He chose my sujud.

He chose a Muslim imam in the act of Islamic prostration and met him there in that act in that position because that position was the most honest thing I was doing in everything else I was performing in some measure in the sujud.

I was simply down, simply small, simply a man pressing his forehead to the ground in front of whatever was true.

And what was true showed up.

I said, “Ya Issa” on that mosque floor without choosing to say it.

My body said it or something passing through my body said it before my conscious mind had any say in the matter.

I understand now that this was not an accident either.

The name that came out of me was the name that belonged in that moment.

Not because my theology had arrived there, but because something in me that was deeper than my theology already knew.

I say it now consciously and fully and freely.

Ya Issa every morning before the day begins.

Not as a ritual replacing an old ritual as the address of the realest thing I know.

The person who was in the darkness before I got there.

The person who did not wait for me to finish my arguments or resolve my doubts or make myself worthy of being found.

The person who found me in the position of submission and took the challenge seriously and said yes come and know me.

Come and really know me.

I am still coming.

I will be coming for the rest of my life.

The knowing gets deeper and it does not get finished.

And this is not a frustration.

It is the best thing I have ever found.

A depth that does not run out.

a person who cannot be exhausted.

I am a man who led Islamic prayer for 23 years and was met by Jesus on the floor of a mosque.

I am a man who lost his country and his position and his son’s daily company and his mother’s understanding and who would do it again without hesitation.

And who is not saying that lightly because none of those losses were light.

I am a man who found on the other side of everything it cost not a religion or a system or a new community identity but a person living present knowable who knew my name before I knew his.

His name is Issa.

His name is Jesus.

And he is not who I taught that he was for 45 years.

He is who he says he is.

And that changes everything.