Saudi Prince Confesses Live on TV Jesus Appeared to Me in Mecca
I stood inside the holiest place in Islam and ordered the execution of Christians who dared to preach there.
But Jesus himself walked into my prison cell and told me I had been wrong about everything.
Three men died because of my orders.
I carried that with me for 20 years.
What happened next will shake everything you thought you knew about who God is.
My name is Faisal Al Saud.
I was born into the royal family of Saudi Arabia.
There is a world inside Saudi Arabia that outsiders never see.
Not the world of the desert or the oil fields or the grand mosques that appear in travel photographs.
I am talking about the world of the royal family, the inner world, the one with no cameras and no journalists and no accountability to anyone on earth except the king himself.
I grew up in that world.
My father was a senior prince in the house of Al Saud.
He was a brother to the king which made him one of the most powerful men in the country.
We lived in a palace in Riyadh that had more rooms than I ever bothered to count as a child.
We had servants for everything.
Men to drive our cars, women to cook our food, guards to stand at every gate and every door at every hour of the day and night.
I never open my own front door as a child.
I never carried my own bags.
I never waited in a line for anything in my entire life because princes do not wait in lines.
The world arranged itself around us.
People moved out of our way.
Doors opened before we reached them.
Problems disappeared before we even knew they existed.
I was the third son of my father.
My older brothers were named Khalid and Mansour.
Khalid was serious and quiet and spent most of his time in religious study.
Mansour was loud and charming and loved fast cars and expensive watches and making people laugh at his jokes.
I was somewhere between the two of them.
Serious when it mattered, comfortable in a crowd when it suited me, able to read the room and understand exactly what was needed from me in any given moment.
My father raised us with two absolute certainties.
The first certainty was that we were chosen by God.
Not just chosen as individuals, chosen as a family.
The Al Saud family had been entrusted by Allah with the guardianship of the two holiest sites in all of Islam, Mecca and Medina, the grand mosque and the prophet’s mosque.
These were the most sacred places on the entire surface of the earth and our family was responsible for protecting them.
My father said this was not just a political role.
It was a divine appointment.
God himself had placed the Al Saud family in this position and it was our duty to honor that trust with our lives.
The second certainty was that Islam was the final and complete truth.
Every other religion was either a distortion of an earlier message or an outright fabrication invented by men who did not want to submit to God.
Christianity especially was a religion built on lies.
The Christians had changed their holy book.
They had invented the idea that God had a son which was the worst possible form of blasphemy.
They worshipped Jesus as God when Jesus himself had been a prophet who submitted to Allah just like every other prophet before him.
The Christian missionaries who came to Muslim countries were not spreading love or truth.
They were spreading poison.
They were trying to steal Muslim souls away from the true faith and send them to hell.
These two certainties shaped everything about who I became.
I was educated in Riyadh at a school that served only the children of the royal family and the highest elite.
My teachers were the best in the country.
My religious education was handled by senior Islamic scholars who taught us the Quran in its original Arabic and explained every verse with careful precision.
I memorized large portions of the holy book by the time I was 12 years old.
I understood Islamic law at a level that most adults never reached.
I was proud of this knowledge.
I wore it like armor.
When I was 17, my father arranged for me to study at Oxford University in England.
This was common practice in our family.
The princes were educated in the West because we needed to understand how the modern world worked.
We needed to understand business and economics and international relations and diplomacy.
We needed to be able to sit across a table from American senators and British prime ministers and know exactly what they were saying and what they wanted and how to give them just enough of it to protect Saudi interests while protecting our own.
I spent three years in England studying politics and international relations.
It was the first time in my life I had ever lived outside of Saudi Arabia.
I found England cold and gray and confusing in many ways.
The culture was nothing like what I had grown up with.
People drank alcohol in public.
Men and women mixed freely in ways that would have been scandalous at home.
Nobody prayed five times a day.
Nobody seemed to think about God at all.
They were kind enough to me personally, but I watched the society around me and I felt nothing but pity.
These people had everything.
Money and freedom and education and opportunity and they used it to run as far from God as they possibly could.
I came back to Saudi Arabia after Oxford feeling more certain about Islam than ever before.
If the West was the alternative, I wanted no part of it.
When I returned home, my father began preparing me for a role in the government.
Not the highest roles.
Those went to the senior princes closer to the throne.
But my father had a specific position in mind for me that suited my combination of religious knowledge and Western education and ability to read people and situations quickly.