Muslim Pilot Shocks Jeddah Airport Live After Jesus Appeared to Him
My name is Faris Al-Zahrani and I am from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. I now live in the United States.
I was born into a family that took Islam seriously, not in the way that some families do where religion is just something you do on Fridays and forget about the rest of the week.
My father, Nasser Al-Zahrani, was a deeply devout man who prayed five times a day without exception and expected the same from every member of his household.
We lived in a clean, comfortable neighborhood in the north of Jeddah, close to the sea.
My father worked as a civil engineer for a government construction company and had built a decent life for our family through discipline and hard work.
We were not rich by Jeddah standards, but we never lacked for anything important. My mother, Hessa, was the heart of our home.
She was a quiet woman with his strong opinions that she expressed gently but firmly.
She taught me how to read the Quran before I started school. She sat with me every evening after dinner and listened to me recite the verses she had already taught me.
She corrected my pronunciation with patience and praised me when I got it right. She told me that the Quran was the direct word of God and that a man who carried it in his heart would never lose his way in life.
I believed her completely because she was the most trustworthy person I had ever known.
Growing up in Jeddah in the 1980s and 1990s, aviation was everywhere around you. The city had one of the busiest airports in the Arab world.
You could stand on the rooftop of almost any building in certain neighborhoods and watch the planes coming in low over the Red Sea before they touched down.
I became fascinated with flying from the time I was very young. I built model airplanes from kits I bought in the market.
I checked out every library book I could find that had pictures of cockpits and jet engines.
I told anyone who would listen that I was going to be a pilot when I grew up.
My father smiled when I said this and told me that ambition was a gift from God, but that I needed to study hard and pray harder if I wanted to turn ambition into achievement.
I studied hard. I prayed hard. I was serious in school in a way that my friends sometimes found irritating.
I was not interested in wasting time on things that did not move me toward my goal.
While other boys were playing games in the street after school, I was studying mathematics and physics because I knew those were the foundations of aviation.
My teachers noticed my focus and encouraged it. By the time I finished secondary school, I had grades good enough to qualify for the Saudi Aviation Academy in Riyadh.
Getting accepted to the academy was one of the proudest moments of my life up to that point.
My father gathered the extended family for a celebration dinner and made a speech about how his son was going to serve the kingdom by keeping its skies connected to the rest of the world.
My mother cried quietly in the corner and then wiped her tears and smiled at me with a look that I have never forgotten.
I left for Riyadh feeling like a man who had been chosen by God for something especial.
The training was the hardest thing I had ever done. The academy was demanding in ways I had not fully anticipated.
The physical requirements, the mental pressure, the constant evaluations, the instructors who seemed to take personal pleasure in finding every weakness and pressing on it until you either fixed it or broke.
Many candidates dropped out in the first few months. I refused to be one of them.
I pushed through exhaustion and self-doubt and the occasional genuine terror of early solo flights by reminding myself of why I was there and what I wanted to become.
I graduated from the academy with a strong marks and was picked up by a regional Saudi airline as a junior first officer on domestic routes.
I was 24 years old and I was finally doing what I had spent my entire life preparing to do.
The first time I sat in the right seat of a commercial aircraft with passengers behind me and a captain beside me and a runway stretching out ahead of us, I felt something so close to joy that I could not find another word for it.
I prayed silently before every flight. I thanked Allah for giving me this gift. I asked him to protect the passengers in my care and to guide the aircraft safely to its destination.
Prayer and flying were woven together in my mind from the very beginning of my career.
Over the following years, I moved up steadily through the ranks. I accumulated flight hours and experience and ratings.
I moved from domestic routes to regional routes. I earned my captain certification and took command of my own aircraft for the first time at the age of 34.
I remember the weight of that moment, the extra stripe on my uniform, the way the crew looked at me differently from the day I put it on, the responsibility that settled onto my shoulders like something physical and permanent.
I was now the final authority on a metal tube carrying hundreds of human beings through the sky at 500 mph.
The weight of that responsibility never left me, not for a single flight in the 18 years I spent doing this job.
By my early 40s, I was one of the senior captains at my airline. I flew wide-body aircraft on long-haul international routes.
I had logged in tens of thousands of hours in the air. I had flown through weather systems that would make most people never want to board a plane again.
I had handled emergencies that tested every skill I had ever developed. I had landed safely in crosswinds and lightning storms and heavy fog.
I had diverted flights when medical emergencies required immediate attention. I had dealt with engine anomalies and pressurization issues and hydraulic warnings.
Through all of it, I maintained the calm and controlled exterior that a captain must maintain when everyone around him is looking to him for reassurance.
But behind that exterior, something was quietly building that I did not fully understand for a very long time.
I need to be honest with you about the kind of man I was during those years because the testimony I am about to share will not make sense unless you understand who I was before everything changed.
I was a proud man, not in the small personal way that most people use that word.
I was proud in a deep structural way that shaped how I saw everything around me.
I was proud of my faith. I was proud of my profession. I was proud of my reputation as one of the most skilled and experienced pilots in the airline.
I was proud of the life I had built and the family I had raised.
I wore my Islam like a suit of armor, polished and visible, something that announced it to the world that I was a righteous man.
But armor can hide as much as it protects and mine was hiding something that I did not want to look at directly.
I had developed, over years of professional success and religious observance, a particular kind of contempt for people who did not meet my standards.
Not an angry, shouting contempt, a quiet, cold kind. The kind that lives in the way you look at someone who you have already decided is beneath you.
I had it toward colleagues I considered less competent. I had it toward passengers who caused trouble on my flights.
I had it toward neighbors who did not practice Islam the way I thought it should be practiced and I had a specific contempt that I need to confess directly because it is relevant to everything that happened afterward.
I had contempt for Christians. Not the loud, aggressive contempt of someone who has been personally hurt by Christians, just the quiet, dismissive superiority of a man who has been taught since childhood that his religion is the final and complete revelation of God and that all others are either outdated or corrupted versions of the truth.
I had been taught that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was polytheism dressed up in philosophical language.
I had been taught that the Bible had been changed and corrupted by human hands and could not be trusted.
I had been taught that Jesus was a prophet, a noble prophet, one of the greatest, but nothing more than a man who had been elevated by his misguided followers to a status that God never intended for him.
I looked at Christians with the polite, gentle pity of a man who believes he has the correct answer to a problem that others have solved incorrectly.
I never argued with Christians aggressively. I was too well-mannered for that, but inwardly I was certain they were wrong in a way that mattered eternally and that certainty gave me a quiet sense of superiority that I confused for religious confidence.
I prayed five times a day. I fasted during Ramadan. I made Haj twice. I gave to charity and tried to be a good husband and a good father to my three children.
By every external measure that my community used it to evaluate a man’s standing before God, I was doing well.
I felt secure in my relationship with Allah. I felt certain that I was on the right path.
But there was something underneath all of that certainty that I had never examined closely.