I want to start by telling you something that most people in the Western world will find difficult to understand.
When you are born into Islam, not the kind of Islam that exists on the edges of a secular society where a man can be Muslim on Friday and forget about it by Saturday, but the kind of Islam I was born into, in the hills of northern Yemen, in a small city called Dhamar, you do not choose your faith the way someone picks a shirt to wear.
Islam chooses you.
It enters you before you can think.
It wraps itself around your bones before you are old enough to ask what it is.
By the time you are old enough to have questions, the questions themselves feel sinful, and the guilt of asking them is enough to make you push them back down into a dark place inside you where no one will find them.
That is where I lived for most of my life.
Not in Yemen, not in Saudi Arabia, not in the mosques and seminaries where I spent my years.
I lived inside that dark place where questions went to die.
My name is Ibrahim Al-Rashidi.
I was born in 1974, the second son of Sheikh Yusuf Al-Rashidi, who was the Imam of the central mosque in Dhamar.
My father was not a violent man.
I want to make that clear because when people in the West hear the word Imam, especially today, they picture something dangerous.
My father was gentle in his personal manner.
He loved strong tea with cardamom.
He had a quiet laugh that he kept mostly for the house, away from the congregation, because he believed a man of God should carry weight in public.
He was respected in our community the way a doctor or a judge might be respected somewhere else.
People came to him with their disputes, their marriages, their deaths, their fears.
He settled things.
He interpreted things.
He was the man who stood between the people and God.
And in our community, that made him the most important person in any room he entered.
And growing up as his son meant that my identity was settled before I arrived at it.
I was not going to be a merchant or a soldier or a farmer.
I was going to be a man of God.
That was understood.
It was not a conversation that happened.
It was simply the shape of my future, and I accepted it the way you accept the color of the sky.
You do not argue with the sky.
You live under it.
My mother, Fatima, was a woman of deep and sincere faith.
I say that honestly.
Whatever I have come to believe now, whatever I now know about the difference between the God she prayed to and the God I have found, I will not dishonor her by saying her faith was not real to her.
It was the most real thing in her life.
She prayed five times a day without fail.
She fasted not just in Ramadan, but voluntarily at other times.
She wept during her prayers.
I remember watching her as a small child, watching her press her forehead to the prayer mat, and thinking that she was talking to someone I could not see.
That image stayed with me.
The sincerity of it stayed with me even when everything else fell apart.
My mother was not performing religion.
She believed totally and completely and she passed that sincerity to her children even if the object of that belief, I would later discover, was not who she thought it was.
I was the second of five children.
My older brother, Tariq, was a quiet and obedient boy who eventually followed my father into the mosque without much inner struggle that I could see.
My younger siblings were two sisters and a brother.
We grew up in a house that was modest in its furniture and rich in its religious atmosphere.
There was always the sound of Quran recitation in that house.
My father recited in the mornings.
My mother recited in the afternoons.
By the time I was 4 years old, I could recognize the sound of the Fatiha the way other children recognize the sound of a lullaby.
It was the music of my childhood.
At six, I began formally memorizing the Quran.
This is not unusual in families like mine.
Many Muslim children memorize portions of the Quran, but my father had ambitions for me that went beyond portions.
He wanted me to be a hafiz, someone who has memorized the entire Quran, all 114 suras, all 6,236 verses.
It is considered one of the highest honors a Muslim can achieve.
My father had done it himself as a young man, and he believed I had the mind for it, and I did.
I will not pretend otherwise.
I had a strong memory and a love of language that showed itself early.
I took to the Arabic of the Quran with a kind of natural ease that my teachers noticed and remarked upon.
By the time I was eight, I had memorized more than half the Quran.
By 10, I had completed it.
My father organized a small celebration.
The men of the mosque came.
They prayed together, and there was food, and my father sat with me and told me, with his hand on my shoulder, that I had given him the greatest joy of his life.
I was 10 years old, and I had given the greatest man I knew his greatest joy, and I want you to understand what that does to a child.
It roots you.
It makes you belong.
It makes you certain that you are exactly where you are supposed to be, doing exactly what you are supposed to do, and that God, or whoever is up there, is pleased with you.
That certainty became my foundation.
And for many years, I built everything on top of it without ever checking whether the foundation itself was solid.
After completing the Quran, my education deepened.
My father brought in additional teachers, men who specialized in uh tajweed, the rules of Quran recitation, and men who taught fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence.
I learned the difference between the four major schools of Islamic legal thought.
I learned Hadith, the recorded sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad.
And the science of evaluating the chains of transmission that determine whether a Hadith is authentic or weak.
This is a serious intellectual discipline.
I want people who are reading this to understand that Islamic scholarship is not simple.
It is not just memorizing a book and going to pray.
There is an entire universe of text, commentary, counter commentary, legal opinion, and theological debate that a serious scholar must navigate.
I was trained in that universe from childhood and I became genuinely competent in it.
That competence would later be both the thing that protected me and the thing that undid me.
Because once you are trained to examine texts seriously, you cannot always control what the examination reveals.
At 15, my father sent me to Sana’a, uh the capital, to study at a more advanced Islamic institute.
It was the first time I had lived away from home and I remember the mix of excitement and fear that came with it.
Sana’a was bigger and louder than Dammaj and the institute was full of young men from across Yemen.
All of them serious, all of them ambitious in the particular way that religious ambition works, not ambition for money or status exactly, but ambition for closeness to God, for correctness, for being the one who understands things most purely.
There is a kind of pride in that world that disguises it itself as humility.
It took me years to recognize it.
My years in Sana’a shaped me significantly.
I deepened my Arabic.
I expanded my knowledge of Islamic history, and I began to develop my own voice as a speaker and teacher.
Public speaking, giving khutbahs, said the Friday sermons came naturally to me.
I could hold a room.
I could feel when people were with me and when they were drifting, and I learned to act adjust.
My teachers told me I had a gift.
My fellow students sometimes asked me to practice with them because my explanations were clear.
I was becoming, without quite realizing it, someone who was good at communicating faith, even as the private experience of that faith in my own interior life was something more complicated.
The complication was not dramatic at this stage.
I do not want to overstate it.
There was no great crisis in my teenage years, no shattering event that broke my belief.
It was more like a small, persistent discomfort that I learned to live around.
When I read certain hadiths, particularly the ones dealing with violence, with the treatment of non-believers, if with certain things that the prophet reportedly said or did, I felt a slight unease that I dealt with the way I had been trained to deal with it, by finding the scholarly explanations that made the uncomfortable thing comfortable again.
Every tradition of scholarship has a version of this.
There is always a framework for making the difficult text mean something acceptable.
I was trained in that framework and I used it and most of the time it worked, but there were moments when the explanation felt thin to me.
When I could sense myself choosing to be satisfied rather than actually being satisfied and in those moments I would feel a quick step of something I can only call fear.
Not fear of a person or a situation, but a deeper fear.
The fear that something you have built your life on might not hold.
I pushed those moments away.
I had been trained to push them away.
Doubt in the world I grew up in was not a stage of spiritual growth.
It was a weakness or worse, a temptation from Shaitan, from the devil.
A good Muslim who feels doubt is supposed to immediately seek refuge in Allah and redouble his prayers and his study.
Doubt is the enemy of faith, not a companion to it.
So, I treated my doubts as enemies and fought them the way I had been taught to fight internal enemies.
With more prayer, more study, more commitment.
And most of the time I won those fights.
But fighting something regularly means it keeps coming back and the fact that these doubts kept returning was something I stored in that dark interior place I mentioned at the beginning, the place where things I could not resolve went to wait.
At 19, I was sent to Saudi Arabia.
And this was a significant step.
My father had connections through his religious network.
Yemen and Saudi Arabia have deep religious ties.
And he arranged for me to study at an institute in Medina, the second holiest city in Islam, the city where the prophet Muhammad is buried.
Studying in Medina is for a serious Muslim scholar something like what studying at the most prestigious university in the world might be for an academic.
It carries immense weight.
It signals that you are being taken seriously at the highest level of the tradition.
I arrived in Medina as a 19-year old from the provincial hills of Yemen and the scale of everything there was overwhelming.
The mosque of the prophet, Al-Masjid an-Nabawi, is one of the largest buildings I had ever seen.
The sound of the adhan calling across that city at dawn, when the sky is still dark and you are woken to prayer and the air is cool and hundreds of thousands of people are doing the same thing you are doing, all of them oriented toward the same thing, all of them in motion together.
I will be honest with you.
It is a powerful experience.
There is something in that collective movement, that shared purpose, that touches something very deep in a human being.
I understand why people find it moving.
I found it moving.
And for a while, being in Medina renewed something in me.
The small doubts receded.
The sense of belonging to something immense and ancient and serious came back stronger than it had ever been.
My teachers in Medina were serious scholars.
I do not say that dismissively, that some of them were genuinely learned men who had spent their entire lives in the deep study of Islamic texts and who brought real intellectual rigor to that study.
I learned from them.
I also, for the first time, began to encounter the harder edges of formal Islamic theology in a way that had been somewhat softened in Yemen.
In Medina, the Wahhabi influence, the strict austere version of Sunni Islam that Saudi Arabia had exported across the Muslim world, was very present.
The discussions about takfir, about declaring other Muslims to be apostates or disbelievers, were more open.
The discussions about the application of jihad were more direct.
The contempt for Christians and Jews, which exists in the text of the Quran and the Hadith, but is often softened in the way ordinary Muslims practice their faith, was more openly expressed in some of the settings I was in.
Not by all my teachers, but by some.
And by many of my fellow students.
I absorbed it because that was what you did.
You absorbed what your environment gave you, but something about the open contempt troubled me in a way I could not entirely suppress.
When I heard scholars speak about Christians with a kind of absolute dismissal, not just as people who were wrong, but as people who were beneath serious consideration, as people whose prayers were worthless and whose goodness was irrelevant because they had not submitted to Islam, something in me quietly disagreed.
I did not say so.
I would not have dared.
But I noticed the disagreement in myself and I noticed that I chose not to act on it and I filed that choice away in the dark place.
During my time in Medina, I also had my first serious encounter with what the Quran and Hadith actually say about the nature of Allah, not the popular version, but the scholarly version where the attributes of Allah are carefully laid out and defined.
I studied the 99 names of Allah.
I studied the theological distinction between Allah’s attributes of essence and attributes of action.
I studied the debates between different Islamic theological schools about whether and how Allah can be known.
And in the middle of all this rigorous theology, something quiet began to grow in me.
A sense that the God being described to me was distant.
Not just transcendent in the way that all serious theology acknowledges God to be beyond full human comprehension, but distant in a way that felt like absence.
Allah, in the formal theology I was being taught, does not have a relationship with human beings in the way the word relationship normally means.
Allah commands.
Allah judges.
Allah rewards and punishes.
But the idea of Allah loving human beings in a personal, individual, searching way, the way a father loves a specific child, the way a shepherd goes after a specific lost sheep.
That idea was not part of the theology I was being taught.
In fact, the concept of God having that kind of individual personal love for a specific human being was, in strict Islamic theology, a kind of anthropomorphism, a dangerous humanizing of God that good theology was supposed to avoid.
I did not have the vocabulary at that point to name what was missing.
I did not know what I was looking for.
I just knew that when I finished my hours of prayer and study and lay on my bed in the dormitory at night, there was a silence in me that the prayers had not filled.
I assumed it was my own spiritual inadequacy.
I assumed I was not praying hard enough, not concentrating deeply enough, not submitting fully enough.
The idea that the silence might be the silence of a God who was not there, or not who I had been told he was.
That idea was so far outside the range of thinkable thoughts that it simply did not occur to me.
I was not ready for it.
The mind can only see what it has categories for, and I did not yet have a category for what I was sensing.
I spent 5 years in Medina.
I completed my advanced studies in Quranic sciences, the Hadith methodology, Islamic jurisprudence, and Islamic theology.
I was awarded qualifications that placed me among the formally recognized scholars of the tradition.
I returned to Yemen in 1998 at the age of 24 with a level of religious credentialing that made my father weep with pride.
He had given his second son to God and God, as far as anyone in Dhamar could see, had made something extraordinary out of him.
My father’s standing in the community increased because of me.
People spoke about our family with a particular kind of respect.
I was introduced at gatherings as Sheikh Ibrahim and at 24, being called Sheikh, a title that in Yemen carries enormous religious and social weight, was something that filled me with a sense of arrival.
I had arrived at the life I was made for.
Or so I believed.
See, my father handed me increasing responsibilities at the mosque almost immediately.
He was in his late 50s by then and not in perfect health and there was a clear and unspoken transition taking place.
I began leading the Friday prayers.
I began giving the khutbahs.
I began sitting in on the sessions where community disputes were brought to be resolved.
People came to me with questions about halal and haram, about what was religiously permitted and what was forbidden.
They came with questions about marriage and divorce, about business dealings, about how to handle a neighbor who had wronged them, about whether a certain kind of medicine was permissible to take during Ramadan.
I gave answers.
I had been trained to give answers and I gave them with the confidence that training produces.
Even when somewhere beneath the confidence, there was a man who was not entirely sure.
In 2000, I married.
Her name was Aisha.
She was 21, from a good religious family in Dhamar, selected with the care by our families in the traditional way.
I want to say something here that is difficult to say, but I think important.
Aisha was a good woman.
She was kind and patient, and she believed in me and in the life we were building together.
I cared for her sincerely, but our marriage, like everything else in my life at that time, was structured by a version of Islam that placed the man at the center of almost everything, and the woman in a carefully defined and limited position.
I had been taught that this was the natural and correct order, that it came directly from God, that any questioning of of it was a rejection of divine wisdom.
I accepted it completely in my mind, but I watched Aisha sometimes, the way she moved carefully in my presence, the way she chose her words carefully, the way she held her opinions quietly because expressing them directly was not something the world she lived in had made easy for her.
And something in me felt an unease that I could not name and therefore could not address.
We had a daughter in 2001, and then a son in 2003.
Becoming a father changed something in me that I did not expect.
When I held my daughter, Noor, for the first time, this small, complete, undefended human being who was looking up at me without any knowledge of who I was or what the world was, I felt something so large and so gentle that it frightened me slightly.
It was the closest thing I had felt in years to what I imagined prayer was supposed to feel like.
And in a quiet corner of my mind, a thought formed, “If I can feel this way about this child without her earning it, without her deserving it, simply because she is mine and she exists, why does the God I serve not feel this way about me? Why, in all my years of prayer, in all my study, in all my service, have I never once felt that I am loved the way I love this child?” I pushed the thought away immediately.
It felt like blasphemy and I treated it as such.
I performed extra prayers that night as an act of penance for having thought it.
But the thought had existed.
For just a moment, it had been real and something that has existed cannot be fully unmade.
It goes into the dark place and it waits.
And now the dark place was getting fuller.
By 2005, I was the primary Imam of our mosque following my father’s semi-retirement due to his declining health.
I was also teaching at a local religious school and had developed a reputation as a speaker that extended beyond the Hamar.
I was occasionally invited to speak in Sana’a and in other cities.
People respected me.
My father was proud.
My family was provided for.
By every visible measure, I was living the life that had been designed for me, and I was living it successfully.
But, underneath that visible success, something was happening that I could not stop.
The questions that I had been pushing into the dark place for years were beginning to press back.
The birth of my children had opened something in me, some emotional capacity, some tenderness, that made the harder edges of my faith harder to live with than they had been before.
Even I read certain texts about the treatment of non-believers, texts I had read dozens of times and explained dozens of times, I now read them as a father.
And as a father, they troubled me in a way they had not troubled the younger version of me who had not yet held a child.
I was also seeing things in my community that I had always seen, but was now seeing differently.
I am not going to be vague about this.
There were men in and around my religious circles who used Islamic texts to justify treat treatment of their wives and children that left marks, not always physical marks, but marks.
There were young men who were being taught versions of jihad that pointed outward toward violence with a religious confidence that I had the troning to know was not as textually settled as it was being presented.
I gave my own sermons that were careful and measured that emphasized the legal and regulated aspects of Islamic teachings, that tried to present Islam as a faith of discipline and order rather than of violence.
But I knew what the text actually said, and I knew that the more extreme men in my circles were not inventing things.
They were reading the same texts I was reading and arriving at conclusions that the texts could legitimately support, and the fact that they could legitimately support those conclusions was something I had to work harder and harder not to think about directly.
There was one night in particular, I think it was late 2006, when I was alone in my study after everyone in the house had gone to sleep.
I was preparing material for a class I was teaching on the Hadith, and I came across a collection of narrations that I had read before but that, on this particular night, I could not smoothly move past.
They concerned the treatment of people who left Islam.
The word for it is apostasy, and Islamic law, classical Islamic law, drawn from the Hadith and from the jurisprudence of the major schools, prescribes the death penalty for apostasy.
I had always dealt with this by discussing the scholarly debates about the application and context of this ruling, by emphasizing that in practice most Muslim societies do not implement it, by focusing on the more merciful interpretations.
But on this night, sitting alone with the text in front of me, I let myself read it without reaching for the comforting explanations.
I let myself read it plainly.
And what I found when I read it plainly was that the tradition is clear.
A person who leaves Islam, who decides that they no longer believe, that person, in the classical and most textually supported reading of Islamic law, deserves to die.
I sat with that for a long time that night.
I did not pray.
I just sat with it, and I thought about my daughter Noor, who was 5 years old and asleep down the hall.
I thought, if she grows up and reads and thinks and comes to me one day and tells me she cannot believe in Islam, what does my faith require of me in response to that? And the honest answer, the answer that the texts I had spent my life studying actually gave, was something I could not accept as coming from a God who was good.
I could not fit it into any shape that looked like goodness.
And for the first time in my adult life, instead of pushing that thought into the dark place, I let it sit in the open, in the quiet of my study, in the middle of the night, and I looked at it.
It was the beginning of the end of something.
I did not know it then.
I thought I was having a bad night, a moment of weakness that more prayer would resolve.
I went to bed, and I got up the next morning, and I led the Fajr prayer at dawn, and I stood in front of my congregation, and I was Sheikh Ibrahim Al Rashid, and nothing visible had changed, but something had shifted.
A door had opened just a crack in a place I had kept shut for years and light or air or something was beginning to come through.
Not the light of understanding yet.
That would take years more and a cost I cannot describe in a few words.
Just the beginning of a crack.
Just the first moment when I could not make myself fully close the door again.
That is where Act One ends.
With a man who has everything his tradition considers worth having and who is standing in the dark in his own study unable to pray, unable to stop thinking, beginning just barely beginning to wonder if the life he has built is built on something that will hold.
I did not yet know what I was looking for.
I did not yet know there was a name for what was missing.
I did not yet know that on the other side of the worst years of my life, there was a God who had been looking for me the entire time.
Not the God I had been taught to fear, but a God I had never been introduced to.
A God whose nature was so different from everything I had been taught that when I finally encountered him it took me a long time to accept that this was what God had always been.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
That comes later.
First, the walls had to crack properly and that cracking was not gentle.
The year 2007 was the year I began to understand that the quiet discomfort I had been carrying for most of my adult life was not going to stay quiet much longer.
Things that had been small and manageable began to grow.
Questions I had filed away began to push back with more force than I could easily contain and events happened.
Real things, things in front of me, things I could not explain away with scholarship that began to work on me the way water works on stone.
Stone does not break suddenly, it wears and I was wearing.
Let me tell you about the man named Hassan.
I want to take a moment before I go further into that year to explain something about what life as an Imam actually looks like from the inside because I think people on the outside of it have an incomplete picture and the incomplete picture makes it harder to understand what was happening to me.
Being an Imam, a real Imam, not just a ceremonial one, means you are never fully a private person.
Your life is the community’s business.
People feel they have access to you because your religious authority is in some ways a public trust.
They come to your door at unexpected hours.
They call you into the middle of their worst moments, their deaths, their divorces, their disasters.
You are expected to have the right words for every situation and the right words are expected to come from a place of settled faith.
An Imam who is internally questioning is like a doctor who is secretly afraid of illness.
The job requires a confidence that you perform whether or not it is entirely true.
And after enough years of performing it, you sometimes lose track of where the performance ends and the real thing begins.
By 2007, I had been the primary Imam of our mosque for about 2 years and I had become skilled at that performance.
People who saw me on Fridays, who heard my khutbahs, who came to me for counsel, would have had no idea that there was a man inside the Sheikh who was struggling.
I had become very good at presenting the surface and the surface was polished and calm and authoritative.
I knew which phrases to use to make people feel that God was present and that I had access to God’s wisdom on their behalf.
I said those phrases and I meant them as much as I could, which some weeks was more than others.
The man named Hassan was someone I had known for several years.
He was in his late 50s, a merchant, not highly educated in religious terms, but a sincere and consistent member of the mosque community.
He and his wife had been part of my father’s congregation before they became part of mine.
He was a decent man.
He was one of those people who is not complicated.
You look at him and what you see is what he is.
He feared God and tried to live carefully and was kind to his neighbors and his family.
He did not have the spiritual restlessness that I had.
Or if he did, he did not show it.
In early 2007, Hassan became seriously ill.
It was some kind of cancer.
I was not entirely clear on the medical details.
But it moved quickly and by the time I began visiting him regularly, it was obvious that he was not going to recover.
I visited him at his home many times over the course of several months as his condition declined.
These visits were part of my duty as an Imam to comfort the dying, to pray with them, to help them prepare spiritually for death.
I had done it before and I knew the shape of it, but Hassan’s dying was different from the other deaths I had accompanied.
And the reason it was different was because of the questions he asked me.
Hassan was not a scholar, but he had lived long enough and suffered enough in those final months to arrive at questions that cut through theology and went straight to the center of things.
He was not asking me about jurisprudence.
He was not asking me to settle a dispute or interpret a text.
You He was asking me about what death actually was and whether God actually knew his name and whether anything he had done in his life had mattered to anyone beyond the people immediately around him.
He was asking me, in his plain and unadorned way, whether God loved him.
And I sat beside his bed with my training and my credentials and my ability to recite and explain and I gave him the answers I had been trained to give.
I told him about Allah’s mercy.
I told him about the rewards awaiting the believer.
I told him about the prophet’s promises regarding those who die while holding to the faith.
I was saying the right things.
They were the things I had been trained to say.
The thing the tradition provided for this moment.
But as I said them, watching his face, I could see that they were not reaching him.
Not because he did not believe me.
Oh, he believed me.
The problem was something else.
The problem was that what I was giving him was general.
It was about a category of believer, about the promise extended to those who qualify.
What he was looking for, what his eyes were asking for even when his mouth had stopped asking, was something specific.
He wanted to know that there was a God who knew him, Hassan specifically.
Not Hassan the believing Muslim as a category, but Hassan this particular man who had sold cloth in this particular market in this particular city and had tried to be good in the particular clumsy incomplete way that he had managed.
He wanted personal love from a personal God.
And the God I had been trained to present to him could not give him that.
Not in the way he needed.
At the Allah of formal Islamic theology is not a God who has personal relationships with individual human beings in that sense.
Allah’s mercy is real in Islamic theology, but it is a judicial mercy.
A mercy that considers your accounts, that weighs your deeds, that decides whether you qualify.
It is not the mercy of a father who loves you before you deserve it and after you have failed to deserve deserve it and regardless of whether you ever deserve it.
That kind of love, unconditional, specific, personal, is not a strong theme in classical Islamic theology.
In fact, as I said earlier, suggesting that God loves individuals with that kind of personal attachment can sound to a formally trained Islamic ear uncomfortably close to the Christian idea of a personal God, which Islamic theology has always defined itself in opposition to.
So, I sat beside Hassan and I gave him what I had.
And what I had was not enough for him.
And sitting there watching him receive it and still be hungry, I realized for the first time clearly that it was not enough for me either.
I had never put it to myself that directly before.
I had felt the insufficiency, but I had always blamed myself, blamed my own lack of concentration in prayer, my own spiritual inadequacy, my own failure to submit deeply enough.
But watching Hassan, I saw that the insufficiency was not his.
He was submitting as completely as a dying man can submit.
He was as open and as vulnerable as a human being gets.
And the theological tradition I was offering him was not meeting him there.
Not fully, not in the way a man dying alone in his bedroom at night, afraid and full of questions needed to be met.
Hassan died in the middle of 2007.
I led his funeral prayers.
I said everything that is supposed to be said.
And when it was over and I was walking home, I had a feeling I had not expected and could not immediately account for.
It was not grief exactly, though I was sad for Hassan and for his family.
It was more like a recognition.
Like something I had been half seeing for years had just come into clearer focus.
And now I could not pretend I had not seen it.
Around the same time, I was dealing with something else that was pressing on me from a completely different direction.
In my role as a religious authority, I was sometime consulted on matters that went beyond the purely personal and spiritual.
In Yemen, especially in communities like mine where the formal state institutions were weak, a religious authority and practical community authority overlapped significantly.
I was aware of networks of young men in and around our region who had been radicalized, who had been taught a version of Islam that pointed outward toward violence with great enthusiasm and theological confidence.
These networks were not entirely separate from the mosque world I moved in.
Some of the young men who attended Friday prayers regularly were also involved in discussions and activities that sat at the edge of what I was comfortable with.
I was not naive about this.
I had always known it was there, but in 2007 something happened that made it impossible to maintain the careful distance I had been keeping.
A young man from our community, I will not use his real name, I will call him Khalid, was killed in a situation that I was given vague and deliberately incomplete information about, but which I understood well enough to know involved him acting on the kind of teaching that his radicalized circle had given him.
He was 22 years old.
I had known him since he was a child.
I had watched him grow up in this mosque.
His mother was a woman who cleaned the mosque on certain days.
His death was presented in certain circles as a martyrdom, as something to be honored.
The theological framework was applied immediately and efficiently.
He had died for God.
He was in paradise.
His death was not a tragedy, but a testimony.
I stood up and performed the religious duties required of me.
I said the words that are said, but inside I was in a place that no amount of religious language was reaching.
I was thinking about Khalid as a child running in the mosque courtyard.
I was thinking about his mother, who had now buried her son.
I was thinking about the theological machinery that had taken a 22-year-old boy and turned his life into a tool and his death into a validation of someone else’s agenda and done it all with Quranic verses and Hadith references and the authority of a tradition that I had spent my life serving.
And I was thinking, is this what it is? Is this what the thing I have dedicated my entire life to actually produces when it is followed without compromise to its conclusions? I could not answer that question satisfactorily.
And the fact that I could not answer it satisfactorily using all the scholarship I possessed was more disturbing to me than anything that had happened before.
In the past, uh when I had doubts, the scholarship had always been able to provide at least a workable answer, something I could accept if I was willing to accept it.
Now I was finding situations where the most honest reading of the scholarly tradition let me somewhere I could not go.
And I did not know what to do with that.
The dreams began around this time.
I want to be careful how I describe this because I know how it can sound, and I am not someone who builds theological arguments on dreams, but they happened, and they were part of what was working on me, and leaving them out would be leaving out something real.
The first dream I can clearly remember was in late 2007.
I was in a large open space, not a mosque, not any building I recognized, just a vast lit space, and I was alone in it.
And at the far end of the space, there was a figure.
Yeah, I could not see the figure clearly.
It was not the kind of dream where you see a face, and later remember it precisely.
I saw light and a shape within the light and the shape was moving toward me or perhaps I was moving toward it.
The geometry of the dream was not logical.
What I remember clearly is the feeling the figure produced in me.
It was not the feeling I associated with Islamic religious experience which tended toward awe and submission and a kind of trampling before greatness.
This feeling was something I had no prior category for.
The closest thing I can describe it as is recognition.
Not recognition of a face or a name, but recognition in the way you recognize somewhere deep in your body something you have been missing without knowing you were missing it.
The way thirst recognizes water.
The way cold recognizes warmth.
I woke from that dream more disturbed than rested.
I performed the morning prayer, but I was distracted.
The feeling from the dream was still in my body in a way that prayer was not dissolving and I did not know what to do with a feeling that prayer was not dissolving.
The dream came back.
Not every night, not in a regular pattern.
But it came back several times over the following months, always with the same broad shape and the same feeling.
The figure in the light, the sense of recognition, the feeling of something missing being close.
I never saw a face.
I did not hear a voice in these early dreams.
I just felt the presence and the presence undid me every time in a way I could not fully describe and could not fully suppress.
In Islamic tradition, dreams are taken seriously.
The Prophet Muhammad reportedly received divine communication through dreams, and Islamic scholars recognize categories of dream ranging from divine true dreams to the confused workings of the mind to whispers of the devils.
I tried to fit my dreams into one of these categories.
I was reluctant to categorize them as divine because a divine dream in Islamic theology should be leading me deeper into Islam, not into this borderless, categoryless feeling of something missing.
I tried to categorize them as shaytan’s whispers, but the feeling in the dreams was not fearful or dark.
It was the opposite.
So, I was left with the confused workings of the mind, which was the least interesting and most dismissive category, and I could tell myself that was what they were, but I could not fully believe it.
By 2008, I was quietly, secretly, and with great fear beginning to read outside my tradition.
This is almost incomprehensibly difficult to explain to someone who did not grow up in the world I grew up in.
Reading outside my tradition was not like a Western academic reading a book he had not gotten to yet.
It was a transgression.
Islamic scholarship has a strong tradition of polemics, of producing arguments against other faiths.
So, I had been exposed to Christian theology in that way, in the form of arguments designed to refute it.
I knew the standard Islamic critiques of Christianity very well.
The Trinity is polytheism, the Bible is corrupted, the crucifixion did not happen or did not mean what Christians say it means, Jesus was a prophet and nothing more.
I knew these arguments by heart.
They were the arguments of a tradition defending itself.
And I had always accepted them the way you accept the rules of the world you live in.
But I had never read the New Testament on its own terms.
I had never sat with it the way a reader sits with a text he is genuinely trying to understand rather than a debater sits with the text he is trying to defeat.
And in 2008, driven by a curiosity that I was deeply ashamed of and did not tell anyone about, I obtained a copy of the New Testament in Arabic.
Not difficult in Yemen if you knew where to look, which I did, because part of my training involved knowing where forbidden things were so that I could warn my congregation about them.
And I began to read it at night alone, with the door closed, with the feeling of transgression and fear that was mixed very strangely with something that felt almost like relief.
I started with the Gospel of John because I had always heard my teacher say that John was the most problematic of the four Gospels from an Islamic perspective, the most explicit in its claims about Jesus, the hardest to dismiss.
My teachers had always said this as a kind of warning, but I was a trained scholar and warnings about difficult texts had never frightened me before.
I could handle difficult texts.
I knew how to read critically.
What I was not prepared for was the opening of the Gospel of John.
I read the first 18 verses, the prologue, and I stopped.
I read them again, then I sat still for a long time.
I am not going to quote them to you at length, but if you know your Bible, you know what those verses say.
That in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, and the word became flesh.
I had been told since childhood that this was a human corruption of a simpler truth, that Christians had taken the story of a prophet and dressed it in theological language to make something it was never meant to be.
My teachers had told me this, and I had believed them, and I had not questioned it because I had not read the source with my own eyes.
But sitting with it now, reading it with the tools of a trained textual scholar, I could see that this was not a case of clumsy mythology or pagan accretion built onto an originally pure monotheism.
This was a coherent theological position.
It was internally consistent.
The Logos theology in the opening of John had philosophical depth and internal logic.
You could disagree with it, but you could not honestly dismiss it as simply a corruption, the way my training had taught me to dismiss it uh without doing violence to the text and to intellectual honesty.
And intellectual honesty was something I had been trained in, and I could not easily turn it off.
I kept reading.
The Gospel of John has 21 chapters, and I read all of them over several nights.
I want to tell you what the experience was like because it was unlike anything I expected.
I expected to find a text I could reviewed.
I had the tools for refutation.
I was prepared to engage the arguments and dismantle them.
What I found instead was a person.
That sounds too simple and maybe even sentimental, and I want to be clear that I mean something precise by it.
The Quran presents Jesus Isa as a prophet, and the prophet is a vehicle for the message.
The message is the thing.
It The messenger is important, but the messenger is ultimately replaceable.
What matters is the submission to God that the message calls for.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus is not a vehicle for a message.
Jesus is himself the content.
What is being communicated is not a set of instructions or commands, but a person, a relationship, an invitation into something.
The distinction is hard to explain if you have not felt it, but it is the difference between someone handing you a letter from a person you love and the person themselves being present in the room with you.
I did not become a Christian reading the Gospel of John in secret in my study in Yemen in 2008.
I want to be absolutely clear about that.
What happened was more preliminary and more internal than a conversion.
Uh what happened was that a category of experience that I had not known I was missing began to become thinkable.
The idea that God could be personal, not in the dangerous anthropomorphic sense that Islamic theology warns against, but personal in the sense of actually present, actually engaged, actually searching for specific people, rather than waiting for specific people to find their way through the correct procedures, began to seem, for the first time, like something other than a theological error.
It began to seem like something that might be pointing at something real.
The feeling from the dreams, that sense of recognition of something missing being close, connected in my mind for a brief moment with what I was reading, and then I immediately pulled the connection apart and told myself I was being foolish and went to sleep.
Uh but the thought had existed again, and the dark place inside me where things went to wait was getting very full, and the lid was getting harder to keep on.
There is one more thing from 2008 that I need to tell you about before I get to 2009, which is when everything came apart.
I was invited to speak at a gathering of imams and religious scholars in Sana’a, a conference of sorts, organized around questions of religious education and community guidance.
I went.
It was the kind of event I had been to many times, full of men like me, credentialed, serious, committed, performing confidence.
During one of the sessions, there was a discussion about how to handle members of the community who had been exposed to Christian missionaries or to Christian material, specifically through the internet, which was by then becoming increasingly present even in places like Yemen.
The discussion among the scholars was entirely about containment, about how to detect early signs of contamination, about which arguments to use to re-anchor wavering believers, about what measures the community was authorized to take toward those who had gone too far.
The measures being discussed included social exclusion, family pressure, and spoken about with a kind of careful scholarly circumlocution that I recognized as the language people use when they want to say something without saying it plainly.
Consequences for those who had formally apostatized.
I sat in that discussion and I participated in it at the surface level because not participating would have been noticed and would have raised questions I was not ready to answer, but inside, I was sitting very still and watching myself participate and feeling a distance from myself that was new and frightening.
I was watching Sheikh Ibrahim al-Rashidi, respected scholar, credentialed Imam, speak the right words, and I was beginning to wonder if Sheikh Ibrahim al-Rashidi was a person I still recognized.
I drove home from Sana’a that day with a weight on me that did not lift.
I know something I had not known before, or rather I know something I had previously refused to fully know, that the system I lived inside was not a system that had room for the journey I was beginning.
There was no graceful path through what was happening to me.
There was no procedure for a Sheikh who was questioning, no pastoral care for an Imam who was quietly uncertain, no mercy for a man in my position who could not stop his questions from growing.
And there was only the expectation of certainty, the performance of certainty, and beyond that, nothing good.
I prayed that night.
I prayed the way I had always prayed, the positions, the words, the form, but for the first time at the end of the prayer, I remained kneeling on the mat, and I said something that was not part of any prescribed formula.
I said it silently inside myself, not sure who I was saying it to.
I said, “I’m looking for something.
I do not know what it is.
If you are real, and if you know me, please show me what I am looking for.
” It was a very small prayer.
It was the most honest prayer I had ever prayed.
And nothing happened immediately.
The room was the same.
The night was the same.
I got up and went to bed, but something had shifted in me, and the shifting was permanent.
I had asked the question out loud, even if only to myself.
And a question that is asked out loud cannot be put back in the dark place.
It wants an answer and it will keep wanting one and eventually, this I did not know yet, but eventually an answer will come.
The answer came, but not before things got much, much worse.
I need you to understand something before I tell you about 2009.
I need you to understand what it means in a society like the one I lived in to be a religious scholar who is losing his faith.
In the Western world, people leave religion all the time.
They walk away from churches, they stop identifying with traditions they grew up in.
And while this can be painful and disruptive, the infrastructure of the society around them accommodates it.
There are social spaces for the non-religious person.
There are communities of people who have left faith behind.
The legal system does not threaten your life for your private beliefs.
Your family may be sad or angry, but they are not placed in an impossible position by your decision.
None of that was true for me.
In the world I lived in, being a religious scholar who was questioning was not just a personal crisis.
It was a crisis with legal dimensions.
Islamic law, as applied in the social and religious ecosystem of Yemen, was not merely a private matter.
The community structures that supported my family, my wife’s family, my father’s standing, the network of relationships and obligations that we all lived inside.
All of that was tied to my role as a religious authority.
If I publicly questioned Islam, I was not just making a personal statement.
I was committing what the tradition around me regarded as the most serious possible crime.
And the consequences of that crime were not abstract.
They were specific and they were severe.
I had been at one of the sessions I described in Act 2 where those consequences were discussed calmly and scholars as legitimate tools for managing apostasy.
I knew what I was facing if the questions inside me ever made it to the surface.
This knowledge did not stop the questions, but it gave everything that was happening to me an edge of fear that made it much more difficult to think clearly because fear does not help clear thinking.
Fear makes you want to close things down, to control what is visible, to perform safety.
And for a period of time in 2009, that is what I did.
I performed safety, but I was not safe and eventually that became impossible to hide.
The incident that broke things open happened in the spring of 2009.
The end it happened because of a question from my own congregation which I was not prepared for.
I was giving a Friday khutbah, one of the regular sermons I gave weekly.
I had been preaching for years and I was skilled at it and I could generally manage whatever came up.
On this particular Friday, I was speaking about the nature of divine mercy, about how Allah’s mercy is the foundation of the Muslims’ relationship with God.
It was a topic I had addressed before.
But, on this day, something happened that I had not planned and had not controlled.
I was speaking about mercy, and I said something I do not remember the exact words because the exact words were less important than the turn of thought that touched on the idea of God’s love for the individual believer.
I was trying to bring warmth to the theology or trying to give people something that felt like personal connection to God.
And in doing so, I borrowed a kind of language and a kind of framing that was not strictly within the bounds of classical Islamic theology on the subject.
An older scholar who was present in the congregation, a man who had known me since I was a student, who had high regard for textual precision, came to me after the prayer with questions.
Not aggressive questions, careful scholarly questions, the kind that a tradition uses to self-police.
He wanted to understand what I had meant by certain things.
The conversation was controlled and formal on the surface, but underneath it, I could feel the mechanism of scrutiny activating.
He was not attacking me.
He was checking me the way the system checks itself, looking for deviations from the acceptable range.
I gave him answers that were within the acceptable range.
I reframed what I had said.
I explained that I had been using accessible language for a general audience and that of course too technical theological position was precisely what the tradition held.
He appeared satisfied.
He left and I stood there afterward knowing that I had just spent several minutes explaining myself to the traditions internal checking mechanism and that the fact of needing to explain myself meant something had leaked.
Some of the pressure inside me had escaped.
Not enough to be obvious but enough for someone who was paying attention to notice the temperature was wrong.
Over the following weeks I became aware that conversations were happening around me that were not including me.
The particular texture of community life in a small religious ecosystem means that you develop sensitivity to the social temperature.
You know when people are talking about something you are not supposed to know about.
I could feel it.
Small things.
The way certain conversation paused when I entered a room.
The way a particular colleague who I normally spoke to easily was suddenly slightly formal with me.
Nothing I could point to directly.
Nothing I could address.
Just the feeling of the air changing.
In June of 2009 I was called to a meeting.
It was framed as a collegial consultation.
Senior religious figures in the community wanted to discuss some matters of community guidance.
I went because refusing to go would have been worse than going.
The meeting was held at the home of one of the senior scholars, a man I will not name.
And there were four others present.
It was formal without being hostile, at least at the beginning.
There was tea, there were courtesies.
The substance of the meeting, when it arrived, was direct.
It had been observed, this man told me, that my teaching had shown some unusual tendencies in recent months.
The specific sermon that the older scholar had questioned me about had apparently been discussed more broadly than I knew.
There were also, I was told, questions about some of the material I had apparently been looking into.
I did not ask how they knew this, but in a small religious community, privacy is limited, and someone had apparently seen something or spoken to someone.
I was not accused of anything specific at first.
I was asked questions, careful, courteous, theological questions designed to establish where exactly I stood on certain foundational matters.
I answered carefully.
I tried to answer within the range of what was acceptable.
But here is what I had not anticipated.
I had been questioning long enough and deeply enough that some of what I genuinely believed had moved outside the range of what I could honestly defend as orthodox Islamic theology.
When they asked me about certain things, about the nature of Allah’s relationship with the individual believer about certain Hadiths I had privately come to view as historically or morally problematic.
I found that I could not give the full orthodox answer with the completeness and conviction that my training usually produced.
There were hesitations in me.
There were places where I spoke around rather than directly.
And these were trained scholars sitting across from me and they could hear the hesitations the way a musician hears a note that is slightly off pitch.
The meeting ended without any formal conclusion or judgement.
I was told that we should continue to speak, that the community relied on its scholars being anchored and clear, that in times of external pressure and exposure to outside ideas, it was natural for a man to need to return to the foundational sources and reorient himself.
It was framed as pastoral concern, but I know what it was.
It was a warning.
I had been measured and found to be in an uncertain place and the community’s mechanism for dealing with that was now active.
And the next step, if I could not satisfy them that I was returning to orthodoxy, was not going to be another courteous meeting over tea.
I left that meeting and walked home and my legs were not entirely steady.
The fear that had always been abstract, the fear of what would happen if the questions inside me became visible, had just become concrete.
It was no longer a hypothetical.
I had been seen.
Not fully, not yet, but enough.
And I had two options in front of me.
One was to seal everything back up, to double down on the performance, to pray publicly and frequently and visibly, to give orthodox sermons with maximum confidence, to silence the questions with enough external religious activity that the community’s scrutiny would eventually relax.
This was the option that survival recommended.
The other option was to keep going towards wherever the questions were leading me, which meant that at some point the collision with my community, my family, and my entire social and physical world would become unavoidable.
I tried the first option.
I want to be honest about that.
For several months after that meeting, I tried to lock everything down.
I stopped reading the New Testament.
I stopped sitting with the questions at night.
I threw myself into mosque activity, into visible piety, into the kind of public religious performance that communicates orthodoxy without ambiguity.
I gave sermons that were technically correct and completely impersonal.
The kind of sermons a man gives when he is talking to the tradition rather than to the people in front of him.
I could see in the faces of some of the congregation that something was different, that the warmth and engagement they were used to from me was not quite there, but I could not give them warmth and engagement without giving them some of what was real in me.
And what was real in me was not safe to give.
My wife Aisha felt it.
She was perceptive and she knew me well.
And she knew that something was wrong in a way that my prayers and my performance at the mosque were not fixing.
She asked me more than once what was happening with me.
I told her I was tired, that there were pressures in the community I was managing, that she should not worry.
She did not believe me completely, but she did not press me.
And I think part of her made a choice not to press me because pressing me would mean finding out.
And finding out would mean consequences she was not ready for.
By the end of 2009, I was in a state of internal collapse that I was managing almost entirely through the power of routine and external structure.
The prayers happened because the prayers had always happened.
The sermons happened because the sermons had always happened.
But the interior, the place where faith is either real or it is not, was something I can only describe as desert.
Not the beautiful desert of Islamic poetry, not the desert that the Sufi tradition embraces as the space of divine encounter.
Just empty, dry, silent in a way that was not peace.
The prayers went up and nothing came back.
The words I had known since I was 4 years old left my mouth and disappeared into the air.
And there was nothing on the other side of them.
I had been feeling that absence for years, but before I had always been able to partially explain it away, to to attribute it to my own spiritual inadequacy.
By this point, something had changed in me, and I could no longer fully sustain that explanation.
The absence felt less like my failure and more like the absence of someone who was not there.
The situation with my family reached a crisis point in early 2010.
The senior scholars who had called that meeting had apparently continued their observations and their discussions, and at some point the pressure moved beyond me to my wife.
I do not know exactly what was said to her or by whom, but I know that she came to me one evening with a face that I had never seen on her before.
A combination of fear and grief and a kind of terrible calmness that people have when they have decided something very difficult.
She told me that she had heard things.
I She told me that people were saying things about me that frightened her.
She told me that her father had spoken to her, and that her family was asking her questions she did not know how to answer.
The conversation that followed was the most honest we had ever had in our marriage, and it was also the most devastating.
I told her that I was struggling.
I did not tell her everything.
I did not have words for everything yet, and I was not sure telling her everything would protect her rather than endanger her, but I told her enough that she understood the situation was serious.
She wept.
She asked me what was going to happen to us.
I did not know what to tell her.
I told her I was trying to find my way back to solid ground.
I am not sure she believed me, and honestly, I am not sure I believed myself.
Over the following weeks, and the pressure on Aisha from her family increased.
She was being told, in the careful language that traditional communities use for these things, that her position as my wife, in a situation where my uh reliability as a Muslim was in question, was dangerous for her and for her children.
The children were the lever that was most effective.
When your children’s future in the community depends on your husband’s standing in the community, and your husband’s standing is at risk, the calculus for a woman in that situation is impossible and painful in ways that I could see on Aisha’s face every day.
I made the decision in March 2010 that I had to leave.
Not the decision easily or all at once.
It came over several weeks of increasing clarity that the situation was not going to resolve itself into anything livable, and that the community’s scrutiny was not going to relax, that the pressure on my family was not going to stop, and that if I stayed, the worst would happen in a way I would not be able to control or predict.
If I went, at least I chose the timing and the direction, and at least Aisha and the children would be in the less dangerous position of being the wife and children of someone who had left, rather than the wife and children of someone who was actively being investigated.
Leaving Yemen was not a simple or safe process in my situation.
I had contacts, connections from my years of study and scholarship that reached into networks I will not describe in detail because some of those people are still alive and still in places where naming them would endanger them.
I was helped.
I moved carefully and in stages and there were weeks of uncertainty that I will not dwell on because the details of how you physically escape a situation like that are less important than what the escape costs you.
What it cost me was everything.
I left my wife and my children behind.
Not because I wanted to, but because taking them with me was not possible at that stage and would have made the situation more dangerous for everyone.
I left my father who was elderly and ill.
I left my brother, my community, my mosque.
I left the only world I had ever known.
I left my language, my culture, my identity.
I left the man named Sheikh Ibrahim al-Rashidi because that man could not survive what was coming and I did not yet know what would survive in his place.
I arrived in Germana in the summer of 2010.
He threw a pathway that I will only say involved other human beings who took serious risks on my behalf.
I was 36 years old.
I had a small bag, some money, and nothing else.
I did not speak German.
My English was limited and mostly academic.
I was processed as an asylum seeker, which involved a disorientation that I can barely describe.
The paperwork, the waiting, the temporary housing facilities, the constant state of not knowing what was happening or when things would move forward.
For a man who had been in his previous life someone whose authority meant that things moved when he said they should move, the helplessness of that waiting was its own kind of violence.
The loneliness of those first months in Germany is something I do not have adequate words for.
Loneliness in exile is not the same as loneliness in a crowd.
It is a loneliness that goes all the way down, that touches the part of you that knows who you are.
And it asks, without the context that gave you your identity, who are you? I had been Sheikh Ibrahim al-Rashidi, Imam, scholar, community leader, husband, father, son.
In Germany, in a temporary housing facility in Frankfurt, I was a number on a processing form.
I was a category, asylum seeker, Middle Eastern male, Arabic speaker.
I was not in that I recognized.
I tried to pray every morning, every evening.
I tried to perform the prayers.
The prayers are supposed to be the Muslims’ anchor, the five fixed points of the day around which everything else is organized.
Uh but the prayers felt hollow to me in a way they had never quite fully felt even during my worst doubts in Yemen.
In Yemen, even when the interior was desert, there had been the community around me, the sound of others praying, the shared weight of the ritual that gave it external reality even when the internal reality was thin.
In Germany, in a small room alone, I was just a man on his knees on a hotel towel talking to a silence that gave nothing back.
The form was still there, but the substance was gone, and I could no longer pretend the substance was there by surrounding myself with the form.
I stopped praying.
I do not say that lightly, and I do not say it without understanding what it means in Islamic theology, that stopping the prayer is, in many scholarly opinions, an act of apostasy in itself.
I knew that.
I stopped anyway, because the prayers had become a performance I could not sustain alone, and I would rather have the honest silence than the dishonest form.
The honest silence was terrible.
I had nothing.
I had no god I believed in, no community I belonged to, no family I could reach, no identity that held.
I had books.
I had brought a few books with me, and I had the Arabic of my training in my head, which I could use to read, but not to speak to anyone around me.
I had memories that were mostly painful, and I had the dreams, which had not stopped, but which in this new context, without the framework of Islamic thought to try to categorize them in, felt simply bewildering.
A recurring experience of light and presences and recognition that I had no way to interpret and no one to discuss with.
In the spring of 2011, I hit what I can only call the bottom.
It was not one event.
It was an accumulation.
It was the weight of everything, the exile, the loneliness, the loss of my children whom I had not spoken to in months, the absence of God I could feel was real, the formlessness of my days, the despair that had settled in me so deeply that getting up in the morning required a decision rather than simply happening.
I was not suicidal, let me be clear about that, but I was the kind of not suicidal that is not much better.
I was simply without the energy or the conviction to move in any direction.
I was stopped.
One night, I remember it was raining, one of those Frankfurt rains that goes on for a long time without urgency, I was sitting on the floor of my room, which I did sometimes because chair was uncomfortable, and I was in a state of complete internal emptiness, not peace, emptiness, and I did something I had not done in months.
I spoke out loud, not in the formal language of Islamic prayer, not in Arabic at all, actually.
In my thoughts, which came in Arabic, but I will translate, I said to no one I could name, to whatever was or was not on the other side of the silence, I said, “I do not know who you are.
I do not know if you are there, but I am here, and I have nothing left.
And if you are real, and if you know me, please.
Just, please.
” That was it.
No theology, no form, no credentials, the most unqualified prayer a man can pray.
The prayer of someone who has lost everything, including the correct vocabulary for praying.
And the room was still the same, and the rain was still the same, and nothing visible changed, but I want to tell you something changed, something very quiet, very interior.
I do not know how to describe it without it sounding sentimental or manufactured, but I am trying to tell you what actually happened.
A feeling entered the room, or entered me, or maybe it was already there, and I had just become still enough to feel it.
It was not dramatic, it was not the kind of thing that makes a good scene in a film.
It was more like the difference between a room that is completely empty, and a room that has one other person in it, even if you cannot see them.
A quality of not being alone.
Very quiet, very simple, but unmistakable.
I sat with that feeling for a long time.
I did not know what it was, or who it was, or what to do with it.
I still did not have a name for the presence I had been dreaming about for years, the figure in the light, the sense of recognition.
But on that night, in the rain, in the emptiness, I was one step closer to the name.
I did not know it yet, but the name was coming.
I have to tell you about a woman named Ruth.
She was Nigerian.
She worked in the administrative office of the Refugee Services Organization that was manning my case in Frankfurt.
She was, from what I could tell, somewhere in her mid-40s.
A solid and direct and extremely practical woman who approached her work with a kind of calm efficiency that I noticed before I noticed anything else about her.
In the early months of my dealings with that office, she was simply someone I interacted with around paperwork and appointments.
My German was improving slowly and my English had improved faster than my German, and she spoke English fluently, so we communicated in English.
Which, in itself, was a kind of bridge.
The first person I could actually converse with in many months.
I do not know exactly when I began to notice that she was different in some way from the transactional quality of our interactions.
It was gradual.
She asked me questions that were not on any form.
Not intrusive questions.
She was not the kind of person who pushed, but questions that indicated she was paying attention to me as a person and not just as a case file.
She noticed when I looked worse than usual.
She noticed when I had not eaten, which was visible in ways I could not hide.
Once, when I was waiting for a very long time for something that was not being handled efficiently, and I was visibly frustrated and exhausted, she brought me tea from the back office, just tea, without ceremony or expectation.
It was such a small thing.
Uh but in the context of my life at that point, someone bringing me something because they had simply noticed I might need it was more than small.
It was almost more than I could receive.
I did not know at first that she was a Christian.
She did not present herself as a Christian in any way that was forward or overt.
She did not speak about it, but there were small things, a very simple cross on a chain around her neck, things she occasionally said in the natural way that people say things when their faith is part of how they actually see the world rather than a separate compartment they put on for church.
She had a quality that I am going to try to describe accurately without making it sound like I am constructing a neat story.
She seemed at peace.
Not the peace of a person who had easy circumstances.
Her job was not easy.
She dealt with a great deal of human difficulty every day, and her life was clearly not without its complications, but she seemed settled in a way I had not seen in many people, settled in herself, not performing anything for a man who had spent his entire adult life in the company of very religious people, many of whom were genuinely devout.
This quality she had was something I recognized as related to faith, and some took I also recognized as different from what I had seen in the faith circles I had come from.
People in my world were devout, but they were not in the main at peace.
There was always effort in our religious life.
Effort to submit, effort to comply, effort to manage the requirements of the tradition correctly, effort to keep the doubts at bay.
Root’s faith, from what I could observe from the outside, did not seem like effort.
It seemed like relationship, like she actually knew someone.
I did not say any of this to her for a long time.
Our interactions remained practical and professional, but they became warmer.
By the end of 2011, we had occasional conversations that went beyond my case, that touched on life and difficulty and how a person manages when things are hard.
She spoke about these things with a reference to God that was casual and personal.
The way you speak about a person who is reliably present in your life, not the way you speak about a theological position you have adopted.
I listened to this carefully, with the training of a scholar who has spent years analyzing language for its theological content, and what I heard was not the God of Islamic theology.
It was not the distant, commanding, the account-keeping God of the tradition I knew.
It was a God who, in the way she spoke about the experience of of own life, seemed to be actively present in the specific details of a specific days.
A God who was in the room with her, not a God she was performing compliance for.
I asked her once carefully what she believed about God, not as a scholar testing her, genuinely.
She told me simply, she believed in Jesus Christ, that he was the son of God, that he had died and risen again, and that his spirit was with her.
She did not give me a theology lecture.
She did not defend it or argue for it.
She just said what she believed the way you state a fact about your own life.
I told her equally simply that I had been an Imam.
I had not told many people this, but I told her because she had created a space where honesty felt possible.
The reaction I expected, awkwardness, or the kind of careful neutrality that people in professional context deploy when something unexpected comes up, did not happen.
She looked at me steadily and said something I have turned over in my mind many times since.
She said that God had clearly been working in my life for a long time, and that being here, in this office, in this city, in this particular situation was not an accident.
I did not know what to do with that.
I said something noncommittal, and the conversation moved on, but what she said stayed with me, the way certain things stay with you, not because they make immediate sense, but because some part of you recognizes them as pointing at something true, even when your mind has not caught up with the recognition yet.
Several months into our acquaintance, she gave me a Bible.
Not dramatically, not as a project.
She mentioned that she had a spare one in Arabic.
She had worked with Arabic-speaking clients before and had obtained one for someone who had asked for it.
And that person had not needed it in the end.
She asked if I would want it.
She said it without pressure in the same tone she would have offered me a relevant legal document.
I took it.
I think I surprised her by taking it as readily as I did.
I surprised myself.
I already had some familiarity with the New Testament from my secret reading in Yemen 3 years earlier.
But having a physical copy, a complete Bible in Arabic in my own possession in a country where no one was watching me, this was different.
I began to read seriously, not secretly, in my own room with no one to ex-account to, with no tradition looking over my shoulder.
I read with the tools of a trained textual scholar.
Yes, I could not turn that off, but I was also reading as a man who had nothing left and was looking for something true.
I read the Gospels first, then I read the letters of Paul, which surprised me.
The theological depth in them, the way Paul reasons through the implications of what he believes with the rigor of a trained scholar, was more than I had expected from a text I had been taught to regard as secondary and human-authored rather than divinely significant.
Then I went back and read the Old Testament, large portions of it, and found the thread that runs through it.
The story of a God who is persistent, who keeps returning to people who have left, who pursues rather than simply waiting to be sought.
This was not the God I had been trained to present.
And the God I had been trained to present waited for correct submission.
The God I was reading about in this Bible went looking for people, left 99 to find the one.
And that distinction, which sounds simple, undid me more completely than anything else I had read.
The dreams continued, and now for the first time, they were beginning to include something new.
Before, the dreams had been presences without identification.
Light, recognition, the sense of something close that I could not name.
In late 2011 and early 2012, the figure in the dreams became gradually clearer.
Not in the sense of a photographic image becoming sharp, more in the sense of an identity beginning to make itself known.
Uh and one night, I do not know the exact date, but I know it was winter because the heating in my room was insufficient, and I remember being cold before I fell asleep.
I had a dream that I need to tell you about carefully.
I was in the same vast space that the dreams had always placed me in.
The light was the same.
The figure was there and in this dream for the first time the figure spoke, not words I heard with ears.
You understand this is a dream.
It does not operate by normal sensory rules, but something was communicated that had the quality and function of a name.
And the name was not Allah.
The name was not any of the 99 names I had spent my life memorizing and explicating.
The name that came to me in that dream and I know how this sounds.
I am aware of how it sounds.
And I am telling you anyway because it is what happened.
The name was Yeshua.
Jesus.
I woke up shaking, not with fear, with something much larger than fear.
With the feeling that I can only describe as the feeling of an enormous door opening, a door I had not known was there and on the other side of it was light so large that my first instinct was to cover my eyes.
I sat up in the dark in my cold room and I was shake shaking and I could not stop shaking for a long time and the feeling from the dream was still completely present, not fading the way dream feeling usually fade, but staying, insisting, filling the room.
I did not go back to sleep that night.
I sat with the feeling and I did not try to analyze it or categorize it or fit it into any framework.
For the first time in my life I let an experience be itself without immediately applying the scholarly apparatus to manage it.
I just let it happen and what happened was that I sat in my cold room in Frankfurt at 3:00 in the morning crying.
A man who had not cried properly in years, crying with a feeling in the room that I was not alone, that the silence that had been the silence of absence was now the silence of presence.
And the difference between those two silences is infinite.
In the morning, I called Ruth.
She was not expecting the call.
I told her something had happened and I needed to talk to her.
She asked if I was all right.
I told her I did not know.
She gave me an address.
She attended a small church, a small charismatic Christian fellowship that met in a community hall in her neighborhood.
It was nothing like the grand mosque I had served.
It was a modest hall with folding chairs and a small wooden cross on the wall and a congregation of maybe 50 people from several different countries tied together by what I would later understand was the only thing that can tie that diverse a group together, a shared encounter with the same living person.
Ruth brought me to a Wednesday evening prayer gathering, which is not the main Sunday service, but a smaller gathering for prayer and Bible study.
I want to tell you what I expected and what I found.
I expected a religious service.
I expected the performance of religious ritual with the social dynamics that religious rituals always have.
Hierarchy, correct procedure, the management of acceptable behavior.
I had spent my life inside religious ritual.
I knew what it looked like from the inside and the outside.
I thought I found was something I did not have a category for.
These people were not performing or if they were performing, they were performing something so real to them that the distinction between performance and reality had collapsed.
They prayed and they meant what they said.
I could hear meaning in their prayers in the specific way I had been trained to analyze language.
The way certain words are inhabited by the speaker rather than simply produced.
When they said the name of Jesus, they were not invoking a theological position.
They were speaking to someone they knew.
I could hear it.
I had spent my life listening to prayer and the difference between prayer that is a religious obligation being fulfilled and prayer that is a conversation with someone present.
I could hear that difference and what I was hearing in that room was the second thing.
When they worshipped and they did worship, there was singing.
There was a quality of directed emotional experience that I recognized as the desire to reach God.
I felt something happen in the room that I had never felt in all my years in mosques.
It is difficult to describe.
It was like a frequency change.
Like the room became more real rather than less.
As though something that had been slightly absent became present.
A presence that was warm rather than simply awesome.
I had been in the presence of all my entire life.
The all of great mosques, of collective prayer, of the weight of ancient tradition, but this was different from awe.
Awe keeps you at a distance from the thing that produces it.
This feeling did not keep me at a distance.
It moved toward me.
Or it invited me to move toward it.
And the invitation did not demand that I be qualified to receive it.
It just stood there open in that modest room with the folding chairs and the simple cross.
And it waited.
I wept in that room.
I did not plan to weep.
I was a trained scholar and a grown man and I did not weep easily and had not wept easily for years.
But something in me that had been held closed for a very long time.
Held closed by discipline and fear and the demands of a tradition that did not have room for softness.
Opened in that room and the opening was not comfortable.
It was the opening of something that has been closed too long and it expressed itself as a tears.
I was embarrassed by them.
I tried to manage them.
Ruth sitting next to me did not say anything about them.
Did not draw attention to them.
That did not make them a thing.
She simply remained beside me.
That steadiness was a kindness I will never forget.
After the meeting, I talked with the pastor of this fellowship for a long time.
He was a patient man, a Ghanaian man who had been in Germany for many years and he had worked with people from Muslim backgrounds before.
He did not rush me.
He did not treat my questions as obstacles to convert me past.
He treated them as real questions from a serious person, which is what they were.
We talked about the Gospel of John, which I had read many times by then.
We talked about what the New Testament actually claims about who Jesus is, not in the defensive mode of polemic, but in the exploratory mode of genuine inquiry.
We talked about my dreams.
He listened to the dreams with the full attention of a man who believes that God speaks to people, and he did not explain the dreams away or rationalize them.
He took them at face value as something worth paying attention to.
I did not surrender that night.
What happened was more like the beginning of surrender.
The moment when you stop fighting and start being willing to be honest.
I went home and I read the opening of John again.
And then I kept reading, and what I was reading was no longer a text I was analyzing.
It was an account of someone I was beginning to believe I had met.
Not in that room with the folding chairs, long before.
In dreams, in the space behind the hollow prayers, in the feeling that had entered my cold room on that winter night.
The figure in the light.
The presence that felt like recognition.
The formal moment of what you might call conversion happened a few weeks later, alone in my room, and it was quiet rather than dramatic.
I had been reading, and I had been thinking, and I had been spending time with Roots Fellowship and listening and asking questions and receiving patient and honest answers.
And there came a moment when I realized that I had crossed some internal threshold that I was no longer trying to decide whether to believe.
I was believing.
The decision had been made somewhere below the level of my reasoning mind in that deep interior place where the real things happen.
And what was left was only the acknowledgement.
I said it out loud in that room to the name I now had for the presence that had been in my dreams for years.
I said, “I believe you are who you say you are.
I believe you are real.
I believe you know me.
I am here.
” It was the most honest prayer I had ever prayed.
And this time, the silence answered.
Not in words, but the quality of the silence changed completely and the change was permanent and it has not changed back.
People ask me how I can be sure.
That is the first question always.
“How do you know you did not simply trade one belief system for another because you were broken and alone and you needed something to hold on to.
” It is a fair question.
I asked it to myself many times in the first year after that night in my room.
I had been trained to examine arguments and I examined this one seriously.
Was this crisis conversion? Was this a man reaching for the nearest available comfort and calling it truth? Here is what I kept coming back to.
I was not a simple or uneducated man.
I was a trained scholar with 20 years of serious study in the tradition I was leaving.
I had every reason to stay in that tradition.
My safety, my family, my identity, my community, everything was on the side of staying in it.
I had every social and psychological incentive to find a way back into Islam rather than a way out of it.
If I was looking for comfort, going back to Islam even a private minimal Islam that I performed without believing would have been far more comfortable than what I chose.
What I chose cost me everything that comfort was attached to.
People do not choose the more costly option because they are desperate for comfort.
They choose it because something has convinced them at a level deeper than calculation that it is true.
But I want to go beyond my personal testimony to the theological reality uh because I spent my life in theology and I cannot tell this story without telling the theological part of it.
This is the part that I think is most important for people to hear because it is not just my story.
It is a claim about the nature of things.
The question that is often asked and which I have heard many well-meaning Christian leaders answer evasively because they do not want to create conflict is whether the God of Islam and the God of Christianity are the same God.
Whether Allah and the God of the Bible are the same being referred to by different names in different languages and traditions.
I have heard Christians argue that they are the same in an attempt to be respectful and inclusive.
I have heard Muslims argue that they are the same in the specific sense that they believe Islam is the correction and completion of what Christianity and Judaism started.
I have even heard scholars argue that the question is complicated and cannot be answered simply.
I’m going to answer it simply as someone who was trained in Islamic theology at the highest levels, who has wrote the Quran thousands of times and the Hadith extensively, and who has now spent years inside the New Testament and the Christian theological tradition.
They are not the same God.
I do not say this to create hostility or to dismiss the sincere faith of millions of Muslims.
I say it because it is what the evidence of the actual texts shows, and I was trained to follow the evidence of actual texts.
Let me explain what I mean.
Uh the most fundamental attribute of the God of the Bible, the thing that is present from the first pages of Genesis and reaches its full expression in the New Testament, is love that initiates.
God in the Bible is a God who moves first.
He is not a God who sets up requirements and waits.
He creates, and then when the creation goes wrong, he comes looking.
He does not send only messengers.
Eventually, the The of the New Testament is that he comes himself in the person of Jesus Christ because the distance between God and humanity is something that only God can bridge from his side, not from ours.
The cross is the center of this, not Jesus as a prophet delivering a message and then returning to God, but Jesus taking on the full weight of human failure and death in order to remove what separates human beings from God.
Uh, this is the claim.
It is a specific claim.
It is not a general religious sentiment about divine mercy.
It is a very specific claim about a very specific event that had a specific result.
The Allah of Islamic theology and I want to be precise here.
I am speaking about the theological Allah of formal Islamic doctrine, not about the varying and sometimes warmer popular understandings of Islam that many ordinary Muslims carry, does not do this.
Allah in formal Islamic theology does not initiate love toward individual human beings in the way the God of the Bible does.
Allah commands.
Allah provides guidance.
Allah judges.
The relationship between Allah and the human being in Islamic theology is fundamentally a master-servant relationship.
The Arabic word “abd”, which means servant or slave, is the primary term for the human being’s relationship to Allah and it appears in names like Abdullah, servant of Allah.
This is not incidental.
It is structurally central to Islamic theology.
The human being’s primary task before Allah is submission.
The word Islam itself means submission.
You submit to the master.
You do not have a relationship with the master in the sense of mutual knowing, mutual love, the kind of relationship the New Testament describes between Jesus and his disciples or between the believer and the spirit of God.
These are not the same God because they have a fundamentally different nature.
A God who loves you and comes looking for you is a different kind of being from a God who commands and judges and waits for your correct submission.
Both cannot be right.
Uh either God is the kind of being who initiates love and takes on himself the cost of bridging the gap between himself and humanity, which is the Christian claim, or God is the kind of being who is beyond personal relationship with individual humans and whose mercy is judicial rather than relational, which is the Islamic claim.
These are mutually exclusive theological positions.
You cannot harmonize them without destroying what is essential to both of them.
I also want to say something about Jesus because Jesus is the irreducible difference.
In Islam, Jesus is a prophet, an honored prophet, one of the greatest.
The Quran calls him the Messiah, the word of God, born of a virgin, capable of miracles.
In some ways, the Quran speaks of Jesus with more honor than it extends to most other figures, but he is a prophet, a messenger, a human being who received divine revelation and transmitted it.
His death on the cross is denied in the Quran.
The Quran says it appeared that Jesus was crucified, but he was not, that God protected him from that.
And here is where the the Islamic account becomes theologically incoherent from the inside.
When you examine it with a scholar’s tools, if God went to the trouble of having Jesus born of a virgin, of giving him the ability to perform unprecedented miracles, of calling him the Messiah and the word of God, if all of this was done to make Jesus the vehicle of a message, then what is the message? The message in Islam is submission to Allah, but submission to Allah had been the message of Abraham, of Moses, of every prophet before Jesus.
Why would God send the most supernaturally signposted prophet in history to deliver a message that had already been delivered many times? What is Jesus for in the Islamic account that Moses or Abraham or David was not already for? The Islamic answer that Jesus came to correct the errors that had crept into previous revelations and to point toward the coming of Muhammad is textually very thin.
It requires reading the New Testament as a corrupted text, which is the standard Islamic claim, but if you actually read the New Testament carefully, as I did, you find that the claim about Jesus, his identity, his meaning, the nature of what he was doing is not a late corruption that crept in.
It is the earliest stratum.
It is there in Paul’s letters, which predate the Gospels.
It is there in the oral tradition that Paul explicitly says he received and transmitted.
The claim that Jesus is the son of God, that he died and rose, that his death accomplished something specific for humanity, this claim is not an addition to an original simpler story.
It is the story.
The evidence does not support the Islamic theory of a corrupted text.
It supports the conclusion that the text is saying what it always said.
The God of the Bible, the God of the New Testament, Jesus Christ, is the one true God.
I say this not as a slogan, but as the conclusion of 20 years of study in one tradition and more than a decade now of study in another with the tools of a trained scholar applied to both.
I say it knowing what it cost me to say it, knowing what I gave up to say it, and knowing that there are people who will not accept it, and some who will be angered by it.
I say it anyway because I believe the truth matters more than the cost of saying it.
The cost has been real.
After I left Yemen, the situation for my family was very difficult.
Aisha eventually divorced me formally in the Islamic legal sense, which in our context meant she was given permission to divorce me on grounds of my apostasy, which is one of the grounds that Islamic jurisprudence permits.
I understood why she did it.
I hold no anger towards her.
She was trying to protect herself and our children in the only world she had, and the world she had required her to separate herself from me.
The divorce happened while I was in Germany, and I was not present for it.
I found out through a message delivered through a connection I will not specify.
My children, Noor, who was nine when I left, and my son, Hamid, who was seven, grew up without their father.
I have had limit limited and cautious contact with them over the years since.
Contact that has required care because of the security implications for them.
Noor is now in her mid-20s.
I have spoken to her in recent years.
Those conversations have been some of the most painful and most precious of my life.
She knows what happened to me and why I left.
She is not a Christian.
She is still navigating her own relationship with faith, as I understand it, in her own way.
But she does not hate me.
I did not know for a long time whether she hated me, and the fact that she does not is something I receive with a gratitude I cannot fully express.
Hamid, I have not spoken to directly.
He was too young when I left, and the years have built a distance between us that may take a long time to cross, if it can be crossed.
My father died in 2013.
I was not able to attend his burial.
I learned of his death late.
That loss, the impossibility of being there, of honoring him, of sitting with my brother Tariq, and grieving together in the way that families are supposed to grieve, is something I will carry until I die.
My father was a good man who served a God that I now know was not the God he thought he was serving.
I believe with everything in me that the God who is actually there, the God who came looking for people, the God who is personal and specific and who loves his creatures with the love of a father, I believe that God is merciful toward the sincere heart that was pointing in the wrong direction because it did not know the right direction.
I believe this not because I need to believe it to be comfortable, but because the God I have met in Jesus Christ is the kind of God who this would be true of.
I entrust my father to him.
That is all I can do and it is enough.
There have been threats.
I will not say more than that because I do not want to give specifics that might help anyone locate me or the people around me, and because the details of the threats are less important than the fact that they happened and that I am still here and still speaking.
The threats come because what I am doing, speaking publicly about my experience, about what I believe, about the theological distinctions between Islam and Christianity, is considered by some people to be a serious offense that deserves serious response.
I know this.
I have known it since I sat in that room in a Sana’a listening to scholars discuss what should happen to apostates.
I am not naive about it.
I take precautions.
I live carefully and I keep speaking because I cannot not speak.
When you have seen what I have seen and know what I know, the cost of silence is higher than the cost of speaking.
My life now is different from anything I could have imagined when I was Sheikh Ibrahim al-Rashidi, imam of the central mosque of Dhamar, respected scholar, son of Sheikh Yusuf.
I work with an organization that serves people from Muslim backgrounds who are exploring or have come to the Christian faith.
There are more of these people than most people in the West realize.
The traffic of people moving out of Islam and toward the faith of Jesus Christ is significant and it is growing.
A a particularly in places where Islam holds the social and legal power to punish those who leave.
These are brave people.
They are navigating situations as dangerous as what I navigated and in some case more so.
I do what I can to accompany them, to tell them they are not crazy, to tell them that the questions they are asking are real questions and deserve real answers, to tell them that there is a God who has been looking for them the entire time and that when they find him, when he finds them, it will be the most real thing that has ever happened to them.
I want to say something to the Muslims who may be reading this or hearing this.
I am not your enemy.
I have never been your enemy.
I know your tradition from the inside.
I know the sincerity that is in it, the real love of God that many Muslims carry, uh the genuine desire to honor the creator that has motivated Muslim men and women for centuries.
I do not dismiss that.
I honor it.
And I am telling you that the God you are sincerely trying to honor, the God who is actually there, is not exactly who you have been told he is.
He is more than that.
He is personal.
He is specific.
He is present.
He knows your name.
He has been looking for you, and he sent his son, not just a prophet, but his son himself in human form, to remove everything that kept you from being found by him.
That invitation is open.
It is open to you.
It was open to me when I had nothing left and knew nothing, and it found me on the floor of a cold room in Frankfurt, and it has not let go of me since.
And I want to say something to the Christians.
I know that many of you have prayed for the Muslim world for years.
Many of you have prayed faithfully for people like me, people inside Islam, without knowing their names or their situations.
I want to tell you that your prayers are not disappearing into the air.
God is moving.
He is moving in places you cannot see, in dreams and in midnight moments of honesty, in the cracks of a tradition that has told its people there is no room for questions.
He is finding people.
He has always been the God who finds people and he has not changed.
Keep praying.
What you are doing matters more than you know.
The harvest is real.
I am part of it and I am not alone.
I left everything I had to find what I was looking for.
And what I found was not a religion, not a tradition, not a set of correct theological positions.
What I found, what found me, was a person, a living person, Yeshua, Jesus.
The word that was with God and was God, who became flesh and came looking, who knows the name of every man sitting alone in a cold room with nothing left, and who answers the most unqualified prayer a human being can pray.
I called on Allah for 36 years.
The silence was real and it was deep.
And then, in the ruins of everything I had built, I was found by the God who had been there the whole time.
And the silence broke.
And what replaced it is something I do not have words for in any language I know.
I can only tell you it is real.
I can only tell you it changed everything.
I can only tell you that if you are sitting in your own version of that cold room, in your own silence, with your own questions and your own losses, the same invitation is open to you.
The same God is looking for you.
Uh he has been looking for you longer than you know.
This is my testimony.
Every word of it is true.
