I Was Sentenced To Death For Being A Christian — Then Gave Birth In Chains & Refused To Deny JESUS!
My name is Safiya Dawoud. I am 34 years old. I am a wife, a mother of two children, a follower of Jesus Christ, and I am a woman who was sentenced to death for saying so.
I am here to tell you that he is, not because my life became easy after I chose him, not because the suffering was small or the price was cheap.
I am here to tell you that he is worth it precisely because I paid the full price and found him on the other side of every single thing they took from me.
I paid with my freedom. I paid with my body. I paid with the early months of my daughter’s life spent on a prison floor.
I paid with my husband’s presence, with my son’s childhood, with the safety and the ordinary life that most people take for granted every single day.
I paid all of it, and what I received in exchange was not a comfortable religion or a set of rules or a distant God who watched from far away while I suffered.
What I received was a presence, a companion, a voice in the dark of a prison cell that knew my name and knew my pain and never, not once, not for a single hour of the worst hours, left me alone in it.
That is what I want to tell you about, not just the suffering, though I will not hide the suffering from you.
I will not soften it or make it easier to hear than it actually was, but the presence inside the suffering, the one who was there on the cold floor, the one who was there when they read the sentence, the one who was there when I held my newborn daughter in chains and wondered if she would grow up without her mother.
He was there. He was there for all of it, and by the time I finished telling you this story, I believe you will know, not just in your head, but somewhere deeper than your head, that he will be there for you, too.
My name is Safiya Dawoud, and this is my story. I was born in Khartoum North, in a neighborhood called Hafaya, the second of four children.
My father’s name was Idris. He was a Muslim man, not deeply religious, not a scholar, not someone who prayed his five prayers without fail, but Muslim in the way that identity works in Sudan, where your religion is not just what you believe, but who you are, where it is written into your name and your family and your legal existence before you are old enough to have an opinion about any of it.
My father left when I was 3 years old. I have no memory of him that is not constructed from photographs and the careful edited stories my mother told us.
When we were young enough to need a father to be something other than what he was.
He left and he did not come back and he sent nothing. No money, no letters, no word of any kind.
He simply removed himself from our lives the way you remove a stone from a path, without ceremony, without explanation, without apparent awareness that the path itself might need the stone for something.
My mother’s name was Adisa. She was a Christian woman, a member of the Sudanese Episcopal Church, raised in the faith by her own mother, a woman whose belief was not performance or habit, but the actual living center of who she was.
After my father left, it was her faith that held our family together. Not dramatically, not with grand gestures, but in the daily, quiet, sustaining way that real faith works.
The way she prayed before meals, the way she read her Bible at the kitchen table in the early morning before any of us were awake, the way she spoke about Jesus not as a distant historical figure, but as someone she had actual ongoing dealings with, someone whose opinion she considered and whose presence she relied on.
I grew up inside that faith the way you grow up inside a language, absorbing it before you understand it, speaking it before you can explain it, knowing it in your body before your mind has the vocabulary to describe what you know.
I was baptized at 7. I took my first communion at 9. I knew the stories, the songs, the prayers.
I knew the shape of the faith before I knew its depth, and I loved Jesus the way a child loves the things that are simply part of her world, naturally, without drama, the way you love the smell of your mother’s kitchen or the sound of rain on a metal roof.
He was simply there. He was simply mine. What I did not know in those years of simple, uncomplicated childhood faith was that the father who had left when I was 3 had left something behind.
Not love, not provision, not presence, but a legal designation. In Sudanese law, a child born to a Muslim father is legally Muslim.
It does not matter that the father was absent. It does not matter that the mother is Christian.
It does not matter that the child was raised in a church, baptized, confirmed, and has never in her conscious life identified as anything other than a follower of Jesus.
On paper, in the eyes of the state, in the machinery of a legal system built on a specific interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence, I was Muslim.
I had always been Muslim, and one day, when I was 31 years old and married and pregnant with my second child, the state decided to remind me of this fact.
I met Daniel when I was 24. He was from the Nuba Mountains, a tall, serious, gentle man who worked as a secondary school teacher in Khartoum and who came to my church one Sunday with a colleague and sat three rows behind me and introduced himself afterward at the gate with the particular careful courtesy of a man who does not want to presume, but also does not want to miss his moment.
We courted for 18 months. We married in the church where I had been baptized in a ceremony that my mother wept through from beginning to end, not from sadness, but from the particular joy of a woman watching her daughter step into a life that looked like the answer to prayers she had been praying for years.
We were happy. I want you to know that before I tell you everything else.
We were genuinely, ordinarily, beautifully happy. We had a small apartment in the Bahri district of Khartoum North.
Daniel taught. I worked part-time in a pharmacy. Our son, Ezra, was born 2 years after our wedding, a serious little boy who had his father’s eyes and his grandmother, Adisa’s, habit of observing everything carefully before committing to a response.
Life was not luxurious. Life in Sudan for a Christian family in the years I am describing was not without its pressures and its small daily navigations of a society that did not always make room for you comfortably, but it was life.
It was ours. It was built on something real, and we knew it, and we were grateful for it every day.
Then my father reappeared. Not in person, not with apology or explanation or the 30 years of absence addressed in any meaningful way.
He reappeared as a legal complaint filed by members of his family, relatives I had never met, people who had been strangers to me my entire life, alleging that I, as the daughter of a Muslim man, was living in apostasy, that my Christian marriage was invalid, that my Christian identity was a crime.
In Sudan, apostasy, the leaving of Islam, carries the death penalty. I had never been Muslim in any way that a human being could recognize, but in any way that the law recognized, I had always been Muslim, and the law was not interested in the distinction.
The first time I heard the word apostasy applied to my own name, I was standing in my kitchen making tea.
Daniel took the call and came to find me, and I looked at his face and I knew before he spoke that something had shifted in our world in a way that was not going to shift back easily.
He told me quietly, with Ezra playing on the floor between us, what the complaint said and what it meant, and I stood there with the kettle in my hand, and I felt not fear, not yet.
Fear would come later. I felt a profound and clarifying anger. Not at God, not at my faith, at the idea that a man who had left when I was 3 years old, who had given me nothing, who had been absent for every single day of my formation as a human being, could now reach back across 30 years of absence and use his name to define me, could use a legal system to tell me who I was and who I was not allowed to be.
I put the kettle down. I looked at Daniel and I said, “I am not recanting.
Whatever this becomes, I am not recanting.” He looked at me for a long moment, then he nodded, once, slowly, with the expression of a man who already knew what his wife was going to say and had already decided he was going to stand beside her when she said it.
That decision, that single quiet nod in a kitchen in Bahri, was the beginning of everything that followed.