The Princess Who Died and Saw Eternity: A Testimony That Shook the Islamic World

thumbnail

PART 1: THE GOLDEN CAGE

My name is Shika Fajair, and I need to tell you something that changed everything I thought I knew about life, death, and eternity. What I’m about to share with you is true. Every word of it happened to me. I know some of you watching this right now will think I’ve lost my mind. Others will call me a liar. Some will say I’ve been deceived. But I cannot stay silent about what I saw, what I experienced, and who I met on the other side of death.

I’m afraid as I tell you this story—not because I doubt what happened to me, but because I know what it will cost me. In fact, it has already cost me everything: my family, my home, my country, my identity as I knew it. But even with all I’ve lost, I would make the same choice again because what I gained is worth more than everything I left behind.

Before the night that changed everything, I was born into the Kuwaiti royal family. Not one of the prominent princesses you might read about in magazines or see at international events, but still royalty, still part of a world most people will never see or understand. My life was one of extraordinary privilege. We lived in a palace with marble floors so polished you could see your reflection in them. Crystal chandeliers hung from ceilings painted with gold leaf. My bedroom was larger than most people’s entire homes.

I had everything money could buy. Clothes from Paris. Jewelry that could feed a village for years. Cars I never drove because I always had drivers. Servants who anticipated my needs before I even spoke them. I traveled the world. I ate at the finest restaurants. I wanted for nothing material.

But here’s what nobody tells you about living in a golden cage: it’s still a cage.

From the time I was a little girl, I understood that my life wasn’t really mine. It belonged to my family’s reputation, to tradition, to expectations I didn’t choose but had to meet. I learned early to smile at the right times, to say the right things, to never question, never rebel, never bring shame. I was raised as a devoted Muslim. This wasn’t just about religion for us. It was about identity, about honor, about who we were as a family and as a people.

My first memories include my mother teaching me to pray. I remember the feel of the prayer mat under my small knees. The sound of the call to prayer echoing through our home five times a day. The weight of my hijab when I first started wearing it. I loved Allah. Or at least I thought I did. I tried to love him the way I was taught. I prayed faithfully. During Ramadan, I fasted from sunrise to sunset, even when it was difficult. I read the Quran, though I’m ashamed to say I didn’t always understand what I was reading. I just knew I was supposed to read it.

We had imams who came to our home to teach us—respected men with long beards and serious faces who spoke about paradise and hell, about following the straight path, about the importance of good deeds. I listened to them with reverence. These were men who had memorized the entire Quran. Men who led prayers at important mosques. Men who seemed so certain of everything. I believed what they taught me. Why wouldn’t I? They were learned. They were respected. They had dedicated their entire lives to studying Islam. And more than that, this was the faith of my family, my ancestors, my people.

To question it felt like betraying everything I was.

But if I’m honest with you, and I must be honest now, there were always questions hiding in the corners of my heart. Questions I pushed down because I was afraid of them. Questions I never dared to speak out loud. I would pray five times a day, but I never felt like anyone was listening. I would complete my prayers, say all the right words, perform all the right movements. But when I was done, there was only silence. I told myself that was normal, that Allah was distant and unknowable. That feeling close to God was not something I should expect.

I would try to be good, to do good deeds, to follow all the rules, but I never felt like it was enough. There was always something more I should be doing. Some way I was falling short. The fear was always there, lurking underneath everything. What if I don’t make it to paradise? What if my good deeds don’t outweigh my bad ones? What if I’m not enough?

But I buried these feelings. I put on my jewelry, my expensive clothes, my practiced smile. I attended family gatherings and religious celebrations. I said the right things. I played my part. No one knew that inside I felt empty. That at night alone in my enormous bedroom with its silk curtains and designer furniture, I sometimes cried without really knowing why. That I felt like I was living behind glass, watching life happen, but never quite feeling fully alive myself.

The months before my near-death experience were strange. I started having dreams I couldn’t explain. Not every night, but often enough that I began to dread going to sleep. In these dreams, I was always searching for something. I would be walking through dark corridors, opening door after door, but never finding what I was looking for. I would wake up with my heart pounding, feeling like something was trying to get my attention, but I didn’t know what.

I told no one about these dreams. What would I say? That I was unsettled, that I felt like something was coming. They would think I was being dramatic or ungrateful for all I had.

There was also a restlessness in my spirit that I couldn’t shake. I found myself watching my family members and wondering if they ever felt the way I did. Did my mother ever question? Did my sisters ever feel this emptiness? Or was it just me? Was something wrong with me? I started noticing things I had never paid attention to before. The way the imam’s voice sounded almost mechanical when he recited prayers. The way people seemed to go through the motions of religion without any real joy. The way everyone was so concerned with appearing righteous but so little concerned with actually knowing God.

I pushed these thoughts away. They felt dangerous, disloyal.

I remember the last normal day of my life with such clarity. It was an ordinary day. Nothing special about it. I woke up in my comfortable bed. I said my morning prayers. I had breakfast brought to my room on a silver tray. I spent time with my sisters talking about meaningless things, laughing about some gossip we’d heard. We had a family dinner that evening. The dining room was filled with the sound of conversation, the clinking of silverware on fine china.

My father sat at the head of the table, stern as always. My mother fussed over the food, making sure everyone had enough. My siblings joked with each other. Everything was as it had always been. If I had known it was the last time I would sit at that table, would I have said something different? Would I have looked at each face longer, tried to memorize every detail? Would I have told them I love them even though we never really said such things in my family?

But I didn’t know. So I just ate my dinner and listened to the conversation and played my part, same as always.

After dinner, I went to my room. I took off my jewelry and carefully put it away. I removed my abaya and hung it in my closet full of expensive clothes. I washed my face with expensive creams. I said my nighttime prayers—words I had said thousands of times before. Then I climbed into my bed with its silk sheets and soft pillows. I remember thinking how tired I felt, more tired than usual. My chest felt heavy, like there was a weight on it. I told myself it was just stress. Maybe I was coming down with something. I would feel better in the morning.

I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep, completely unaware that I would not wake up in the morning. At least not in the way I expected.

PART 2: THE MOMENT OF DEATH

It was sometime in the middle of the night when I woke up. At first, I thought I had been having another one of those disturbing dreams. But then I realized this was different. This was real. I couldn’t breathe properly. There was a sharp pain in my chest like someone was pressing down on me with both hands. I tried to sit up, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. The room was spinning. I was sweating even though I felt cold.

Fear gripped me. Real primal fear. Something was very wrong.

I managed to reach for the bell we kept beside our beds to call the servants. My hand was shaking so badly I almost couldn’t press it, but I did. I heard it ringing somewhere far away in the servants quarters. Everything after that happened so fast and yet seemed to move in slow motion at the same time. The door burst open. I heard voices—urgent and frightened. Someone was calling my name. Someone else was shouting for help.

I felt hands on me, trying to help me, but I couldn’t focus on what they were saying. The pain in my chest was getting worse. It felt like my heart was being squeezed by an invisible fist. Each breath was a struggle. The room kept spinning and dark spots were dancing at the edges of my vision. I heard my mother’s voice. She must have been woken up. She was crying, saying my name over and over. I wanted to tell her I was okay, but I couldn’t speak. The words wouldn’t come.

Then there were more people. The palace doctor, more servants, everyone moving quickly, their faces blurred above me. I heard someone say they had called for an ambulance. The word seemed strange. Princesses didn’t ride in ambulances. But here I was, being lifted onto a stretcher, being carried out of my beautiful room, down the marble hallways I had walked my entire life. I remember seeing the crystal chandeliers pass overhead as they carried me. I remember the concerned faces of servants lining the halls. I remember the cool night air hitting my face as they brought me outside to the waiting ambulance.

My mother climbed in with me. I could see her face twisted with worry. She was holding my hand, squeezing it tight. Her lips were moving in prayer. She was asking Allah to save me.

The ambulance ride was a blur of sirens and pain and fear. The paramedics were working on me, putting an oxygen mask over my face, checking my vital signs, speaking in urgent tones. I heard words like “heart attack” and “blood pressure” and “unstable.” I was only in my twenties. This couldn’t be happening. Not to me. I was young. I was healthy. This kind of thing happened to old people, not to someone like me. But my body was telling a different story. I could feel myself getting weaker. The pain was overwhelming. Each breath was harder than the last. The darkness at the edges of my vision was growing, creeping inward.

We arrived at the hospital. More rushing, more urgent voices, more bright lights overhead as they wheeled me through corridors. I was moved from the stretcher to a hospital bed. Doctors and nurses surrounded me. There were machines beeping, hands moving over me, voices giving orders. My father arrived. I saw him standing near the doorway, his face pale. My father never looked afraid, but he looked afraid now. My siblings came. The waiting room must have been filling up with my family. A princess was dying. The whole household was in crisis.

The doctors were doing everything they could. I could feel them working on me. Hear them calling out medical terms I didn’t understand. But I was slipping away. I could feel it. Life was draining out of me like water through a sieve. The pain started to fade. At first I thought that was a good sign. Maybe I was getting better. But then I realized it wasn’t that. It was that I was leaving. I was dying.

The last thing I remember before everything went dark was the sound of the heart monitor. That steady beep that had been tracking my heartbeat. And then the beep became one long continuous tone. A flat line.

I was dead.

PART 3: BEYOND THE VEIL

The moment I left my body, everything changed in ways I cannot fully describe to you. One second I was in that hospital bed hearing the frantic voices of doctors and the crying of my mother. The next second I was above it all, looking down. I could see myself lying on that bed. My body looked so small, so still. The doctors were working frantically, pressing on my chest, shouting orders. One of them was preparing the defibrillator paddles. My mother was being held back by a nurse, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror. My father stood frozen, his face like stone. But I could see his hands trembling at his sides.

It was the strangest sensation. I was me, but I wasn’t in my body anymore. I was watching everything from above, near the ceiling. I felt completely calm, which was odd given the chaos below me. There was no pain anymore, no struggle to breathe. I felt light, almost weightless.

I watched them shock my body. My chest lifted off the bed with the jolt of electricity, but nothing happened. The flat line on the monitor continued its long, unbroken tone. They shocked me again. Still nothing. I could hear everything they were saying, even though I was no longer in my body. One of the doctors was saying they were losing me. A nurse was recording the time. My mother was crying out to Allah, begging him to bring me back.

Part of me wanted to tell them I was okay. I was right here. I could see them and hear them, but I couldn’t communicate with them. They couldn’t see me or hear me.

Then something began to pull me. It wasn’t a physical pulling, but I felt it nonetheless. It was like a force—a drawing away from that hospital room, away from my body, away from everything I knew. The hospital room began to fade. The walls became transparent, then disappeared entirely. I was moving, though I had no body to move with. I was being taken somewhere, and I had no control over it.

Darkness surrounded me. Not the darkness of a room with the lights off. This was different. This was a darkness that felt thick, almost solid. A darkness that seemed alive and aware, and I was falling into it. The temperature changed. At first, it was just a subtle warmth. But as I continued to descend through this darkness, it grew hotter, then hot, then unbearably hot. The kind of heat that makes it hard to think about anything else.

I tried to understand what was happening to me. Was this death? Was this what happened to everyone? Where was I going? The calmness I had felt when I first left my body was starting to fade, replaced by a growing sense of dread.

Then I began to hear sounds in the distance. At first, they were faint, like echoes. But as I continued to fall, they grew louder. They were voices. Hundreds, maybe thousands of voices, and they were all screaming. The screaming wasn’t like anything I had ever heard before. It was the sound of absolute agony, of complete despair, of suffering beyond anything that exists in the physical world. It was the sound of people who had lost all hope.

My own fear was rising now. I wanted to stop falling. I wanted to go back. I tried to pray the prayers I had said my entire life. The Arabic words that had always been my refuge, but they felt empty here. They echoed in my mind, but seemed to have no power, no meaning in this place.

The darkness was beginning to break. I could see a red glow in the distance, growing brighter as I approached. The heat was becoming intense. The screaming was getting louder. And then I was no longer falling.

I was standing in hell.

I know some of you watching this don’t believe in hell. You think it’s just a metaphor or a story to scare people or something that religions made up to control others. I used to think maybe that was true, even though I wouldn’t have admitted it out loud. But I’m telling you now: hell is real. It is a real place, and it is worse than anything you can imagine.

The landscape around me was like something from the worst nightmare, except this was no dream. The ground beneath my feet was cracked and dry. In the distance, I could see flames—enormous walls of fire that seemed to have no source. The air itself seemed to burn. The smell was overwhelming: a mixture of sulfur and smoke and something else, something like decay and death. But the worst part wasn’t the physical environment. It was the spiritual oppression, the absolute absence of anything good. No hope, no peace, no love, no light—just endless crushing darkness and despair.

The screaming was coming from everywhere. I could see figures in the distance, shadows moving in torment. And then as my eyes adjusted to this horrible place, I began to see them more clearly. They were people. Souls of people who had died. And they were in agony.

I stood there unable to move, unable to process what I was seeing. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be happening. I was a good person. I had prayed. I had fasted. I had tried to follow the rules. Why was I here?

Then I heard a voice calling my name. A voice I recognized. I turned and saw a man I knew. He had been an imam at one of the mosques our family attended. A respected teacher. A man who had taught me about Islam when I was younger. A man I had looked up to and trusted. But the man I saw now was not the dignified, confident teacher I remembered. He looked broken, destroyed. His face was twisted in anguish. He recognized me immediately. The shock on his face matched my own.

And then he spoke words that I will never forget. He told me to go back. He told me to tell everyone that they were wrong, that he was wrong.

I couldn’t speak. I could only stare at him in horror and confusion.

He wasn’t the only one. As I stood there, I began to recognize other faces. Another religious teacher I had known. A respected scholar who had written books about Islam. An elderly relative who had died when I was a teenager. A man who had been known for his piety and devotion. They were all here in this place of torment.

I started walking. Though I don’t remember deciding to do so, it was like something was guiding me, making me see, making me understand. Everywhere I looked, there were people who had been religious, people who had prayed, people who had done good deeds, people who by all outward appearances should have been in paradise. But they were here. I saw people I had never met but somehow knew who they were. Religious leaders from history. People who had influenced millions. People who had built mosques and started schools and devoted their entire lives to Islamic teaching. All here. All suffering. All in agony.

The questions were screaming in my mind. How could this be? These were good people. These were devoted Muslims. These were the ones who were supposed to make it. If they were here, what hope did anyone have?

I came upon a section where I saw people I had known personally. Not just the imam and the scholar, but others. Family members who had died, friends who had passed away, people I had mourned, people whose funerals I had attended where everyone spoke of how surely they were in paradise now. But they weren’t in paradise. They were here.

One of them was my uncle. He had died when I was fifteen. He had been a religious man, strict in his observance. He had prayed five times a day every day of his adult life. He had gone on Hajj multiple times. He had given to charity. He had memorized large portions of the Quran. When he saw me, his face showed such sorrow. Not just for himself, but for me. Because he knew why I was there.

He knew I was seeing this for a reason.

I wanted to ask him why. Why was he here? What had he done wrong? He had been so devout, so committed. The answer came not in words exactly, but in understanding that flooded my mind. It wasn’t about what he had done. It was about what he had trusted in. He had trusted in his works, in his prayers, in his good deeds, in his religious observance. He had tried to earn his way to paradise, but it wasn’t enough. It could never be enough.

I saw others who had made the same mistake. They had all been trying to earn salvation through their efforts, through being good enough, through doing enough. But none of it was enough.

The weight of what I was seeing was crushing me. If all these religious people, all these devoted Muslims, all these good people were here, then what chance did I have? I was no better than them. In fact, I was probably worse. I had all the privileges they never had. But inside, I had been empty. I had gone through the motions without real devotion.

I realized with horrible clarity that I deserved to be here, that this was my destination too. That I had been heading here my entire life without knowing it. The despair that hit me in that moment was absolute. It was the despair of someone who has just realized they are lost forever. That there is no way out, no second chance, no hope.

I wanted to scream, but no sound came out. I wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go. I wanted to wake up to discover this was just a terrible dream, but it wasn’t a dream. It was more real than anything I had ever experienced.

The heat was becoming unbearable. The screaming was filling my ears. The darkness was pressing in on me from all sides. And I understood that this was forever. This was eternity. This was what awaited me.

I fell to my knees, though I’m not sure how since I had no physical body. I cried out in my mind to anyone who might hear, to anything that might save me. I begged Allah to help me, but the words felt hollow. I begged for mercy. I begged for another chance. I begged to go back, to do better, to try harder. But I knew it was too late. I was dead. My life was over. My chance was gone.

The people around me, the other souls in this place, they looked at me with such pity. They knew what I was feeling because they had felt it too when they first arrived. That moment of realization, that crushing weight of understanding that you are lost forever.

I don’t know how long I was there. Time seemed to have no meaning in that place. It could have been minutes or hours or days. All I knew was the torment, the heat, the screaming, the absolute absence of hope. I was broken, completely and utterly broken.

And then in the midst of that absolute darkness, I saw something impossible.

Light.