“I Am The I AM” – What A Voice Said To A Muslim Scholar At 1AM That Destroyed 37 Years Of Islam
I had spent 15 years praying for princes.
15 years of palace prayer halls and royal households and powerful men who needed God’s ear, my voice, my scholarship, my 37 years of faithful Islamic practice.
These were things people trusted, things people built their spiritual lives around.
And then my 9-year-old daughter was put in an ICU with a disease that was consuming her brain.
And every single thing I had spent 37 years building was not enough.
The prayers went up and came back empty.
The imams I called prayed with everything they had.
The Quran filled that hospital corridor night after night.
And my daughter kept getting worse until the night I finally stopped praying correctly and started praying honestly.
Until the night I told God I was ashamed of him.
Until the night the silence in that prayer room changed and the voice spoke to me that I was not prepared for, that did not come from my tradition, that called itself by a name I had spent years teaching my students to reject.
And my daughter was healed by morning.
And my entire life was never the same again.
They came for me 4 months later.
A friend called with a warning.
We left that same night and I am here today in a country I will not name telling you the story that cost me everything and gave me back something I didn’t know I was missing.
A man on a cold hospital floor, not a palace floor.
A hospital floor, the kind with scuff marks and the smell of disinfectant and fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look like they are already half gone from this world.
A man with his forehead pressed against that floor, with his robes twisted around him, with his hands clutching nothing, with his voice.
The voice that had moved princes to tears reduced to a broken whisper that could not find its way through the ceiling.
A man who had prayed for everyone else’s emergencies for 15 years finally arriving at his own.
And discovering in that arrival that everything he thought he knew about prayer had a flaw and he had found it.
He had found the flaw.
And on the other side of the flaw there was silence.
That man was me.
That flaw was the third floor of King Fahd’s specialist hospital in Riyadh.
And the reason I was on it was 9 years old and her name was Lama.
Lama was my only daughter.
I have two sons, Faris, who was 14 at the time, and little Sami, who was six.
But Lama, Lama was 9 years old and she had her mother’s eyes and she had somehow, despite being the child of a serious man who spent most of his life in scholarship and solemnity, become the most joyful human being I had ever been in close proximity to.
She laughed at things that weren’t funny and made them funny by laughing at them.
She had opinions about everything.
She argued with me about the correct way to eat dates.
She insisted the pit should come out before you bite.
I maintained this was unnecessary.
We had this argument approximately twice a week and she never conceded a single centimeter of ground.
She wanted to be a doctor.
She told me this when she was 6 years old with a completeness of conviction that I found both amusing and entirely believable.
She was going to be a doctor.
It was simply a fact.
She had decided.
She was 9 years old and she was going to be a doctor.
And on a Wednesday evening in February, she came home from school complaining of a headache.
By Thursday morning, she had a fever of 40°.
By Thursday afternoon, she could not turn her head without screaming.
By Thursday evening, she was in the emergency department of King Fahd’s specialist hospital.
And the young doctor with tired eyes was using the words acute bacterial meningitis and the world as I had known it simply stopped.
Meningitis.
If you do not know this disease, let me tell you what the doctors told me in that corridor.