THE SAUDI BILLIONAIRE WHO LOST EVERYTHING FOR JESUS: A TESTIMONY THAT WILL SHAKE YOU TO YOUR CORE

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PART 1: THE PERFECT LIFE THAT WAS SLOWLY DYING

My name is Jeremiah now. That wasn’t always my name—it’s the name I carry in exile, in freedom, in truth. But before I was Jeremiah, I was Abdul. I was someone else entirely. Someone successful. Someone respected. Someone who had everything the world tells you to want, and absolutely nothing that actually mattered.

Four years ago, I was worth 60 million Saudi riyals. That’s approximately 16 million US dollars. I had a beautiful wife who made me laugh when we were alone, even though she was quiet in public the way a good Saudi wife should be. I had four children—two boys and two girls—who represented my legacy, my future, my immortality in the traditional sense. I had a business that made me respected everywhere I walked in Riyadh. I had a five-bedroom villa in North Riyadh with marble everywhere, high walls, security gates, a garden my wife loved, a Mercedes for me, a Lexus for her, and a driver who took my family everywhere they needed to go.

On Fridays, the whole extended family would gather at my parents’ house for lunch after prayers. The men would sit in one room discussing business and politics while the women gathered in another with the children running between both worlds. My youngest daughter, the family’s darling, would always sneak into the men’s room and climb into my lap. Nobody minded. She was perfect. They were all perfect. Everything was perfect.

From the outside, everything looked exactly like success should look.

But here’s what nobody tells you about perfect lives: they’re often the loneliest places on earth.

I was born into privilege in Riyadh in the late 1980s. My family wasn’t royal, but we were close enough to taste it. We were the kind of family that got invited to certain weddings, whose business deals got approved without too many questions, whose children went to the best schools. My father built a construction and contracting empire from nothing, and from the time I was a boy, I knew I would join him. That was simply how it was. You didn’t question it any more than you questioned the sun rising in the east.

I was a good son. I memorized portions of the Quran. I prayed five times a day—or at least I was in the mosque five times a day. My mind wandered more than I ever let on, but I learned to hide that. I fasted during Ramadan. I grew up calling myself Abdullah, servant of Allah, and everyone used the shortened version: Abdul. I wore that title with pride, like armor.

When I was 19, my father took me to Mecca for Hajj, and I wept at the Kaaba like you’re supposed to. I thought they were tears of devotion. Looking back now, I wonder if they were tears of desperation—a young man begging for something real to hold onto, something that would finally make sense of all the emptiness I was already starting to feel.

At 23, my family arranged my marriage. That’s still how it works in families like ours. Her family was good, respected, religious. I met her twice before the wedding, both times with family present. She was beautiful and quiet, and I was told she was obedient and educated enough, but not too much. We married in a ceremony that cost more than most Saudis make in five years.

But something surprising happened. I grew to love her. Really love her. She was smart and funny when we were alone. She had a laugh that sounded like music. Over ten years, she gave me four children. Two boys and two girls. I would come home from work and my youngest daughter would run to the door screaming “Baba! Baba!” and launch herself into my arms. My oldest son wanted to be just like me. He started copying the way I walked when he was six years old. My wife would make fun of us, the two of us strutting around the house like peacocks.

We lived in that compound in North Riyadh, the kind with high walls and security gates and marble everywhere. Five bedrooms, a majlis, a garden my wife loved. We had two cars, a Mercedes for me, a Lexus for her, and a driver. On Fridays, the whole extended family would gather at my parents’ house for lunch after prayers. Everything looked perfect from the outside.

And for a long time, I believed it was.

The business grew. My father brought me in as a full partner when I was 27. By 30, I was running most of the operations. We did commercial construction, government contracts, private developments. In Saudi Arabia, if you have the right family connections and you know how to navigate the system, there’s enormous money to be made. I was good at it. I could walk into a room of businessmen and walk out with a deal. People called me Abdul with respect. Wait, it meant something.

I remember sitting in my office one afternoon—I must have been 33 or 34—looking out over Riyadh’s endless construction cranes and thinking, “I’ve made it. Everything my father built, I’ve taken further. I am providing for my family. My children will want for nothing. I’m a good Muslim, a good Saudi, a good man.”

But even then, there were cracks I couldn’t see. Or maybe I could see them, but I’d learned to look away.

PART 2: THE QUESTIONS THAT WOULDN’T STAY BURIED

The doubts started small and early. So early I barely remember when they began. I remember being maybe 12 years old in Quran class, and the sheikh telling us about the punishments of hellfire for unbelievers. He described it in detail—the boiling water, the melting skin, the eternal screaming. And I remember thinking, “But what about the old man who sells fruit near our house? He’s Hindu. He’s kind to everyone. Will he burn forever?”

I raised my hand to ask, and the sheikh’s face went dark. He told me those were Satan’s whispers, that I should seek refuge in Allah from such thoughts. I never asked again. I learned the lesson: some questions are dangerous. Some thoughts are forbidden. Some doubts will get you in trouble.

In university, studying business administration, I took a required course in Islamic studies. We learned about the conquest of Arabia, about the wars of expansion, about taking female captives. The professor presented it all as glorious history. Some of my classmates nodded along enthusiastically. I felt sick and didn’t know why. These were supposed to be heroes of the faith, examples to follow. But something in my chest was saying, “This is wrong.”

I pushed the feeling down. I learned to be two people. The outer Abdul who did everything right, and the inner Abdul who had questions he couldn’t ask anyone. Not my wife, not my brothers, certainly not my father. In Saudi Arabia, doubt isn’t just discouraged. It’s dangerous. So I smiled and prayed and succeeded and kept my questions locked in a place where even I barely acknowledged them.

Then came the internet. That’s what changed everything for so many of us, though few will admit it.

In the early 2010s, as social media exploded and VPNs became easy to use, suddenly the whole world was available behind a phone screen. The Saudi religious establishment tried to control it, but they couldn’t. Not really. Young men like me, educated and wealthy enough to travel, we started seeing things, reading things, questioning things.

Late at night when my wife and children were asleep, I would sit in my home office with the door locked and read philosophy. I started with the Greeks because they felt safe—ancient and dead. But then I moved to the Enlightenment thinkers. Descartes and his methodical doubt: everything can be questioned until you find something certain. Pascal and his wager about God. John Locke on liberty and conscience. These men wrote about faith and reason in ways I’d never heard before, in ways that made my heart race with something between terror and excitement.

I discovered forums where ex-Muslims talked about their journeys away from Islam. I would read their stories at 2:00 in the morning, sweating even though the air conditioning was on, certain that somehow the Mabahith—the secret police—would know what I was looking at. These were people from Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, even Saudi Arabia talking about their doubts, their discoveries, their escapes. Some of them had become atheists. Others had found different religions. I didn’t know what to think, but I couldn’t stop reading.

And then on a business trip to Bahrain, I was flipping through satellite channels in my hotel room and I landed on something called SAT7. It was a Christian channel broadcasting in Arabic. I’d heard about these channels, how they were trying to convert Muslims, how watching them was haram. I should have changed the channel immediately.

Instead, I turned up the volume just slightly and watched.

There was a man on screen, a former sheikh from Egypt, explaining why he’d left Islam and become a Christian. He was calm, articulate, not angry or mocking. He talked about his journey of questioning, about reading the Bible, about finding something he called peace with God. I watched for maybe 10 minutes, then turned it off in a panic.

But the next night, I found the channel again. And the night after that. I started watching whenever I traveled—Dubai, Bahrain, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi. The construction business kept me moving. I would watch these Christian programs with the volume low, always ready to change the channel if anyone knocked on my door.

There was another program called “The Daring Question” with a man named Father Zakaria Botros. He was more confrontational, asking hard questions about Islamic texts and theology. Some of what he said made me angry, but some of it I couldn’t answer.

For months, maybe years, I told myself I was just curious. I was simply educating myself about what Christians believe so I could defend Islam better. That’s what I told myself. But really, I was searching. Searching for something I didn’t have words for yet. Some kind of truth that felt more solid than what I’d been given.

My life in Riyadh continued normally on the surface. The business was doing well. We won a major contract for a government office complex in 2018—30 million riyals. My father was proud. My wife was happy. We were planning to add a swimming pool to our compound. My oldest son was excelling in school.

Everything looked perfect from the outside.

But inside, I was coming apart.

I would sit in Friday prayers at the mosque, surrounded by hundreds of men, listening to the imam preach, and feel utterly alone. I would mouth the words of prayers I’d said 10,000 times, and they felt empty. Not because I didn’t want to believe them, but because I didn’t. Not anymore. And I was terrified.

That’s where I was in early 2019, a few months after my 34th birthday. Successful, wealthy, respected, empty, terrified, searching for something I couldn’t name, didn’t dare hope for, and wasn’t sure existed.

I had no idea that everything was about to change. That a construction project in Dubai was about to lead me to a truth that would cost me everything I thought I was. That the questions I’d been afraid to ask were about to find answers I never imagined. That soon I would have to choose between the life I’d built and a carpenter from Nazareth who died 2,000 years ago.

If someone had told me then what was coming—the loss, the pain, the exile—I don’t know if I would have had the courage to take the first step. But God, or Jesus, or providence, or whatever you want to call it, the journey doesn’t usually show you the whole path at once. You just get the next step. And somehow that’s enough.

The next step for me was a construction project in Dubai and a Filipino worker named Rammon.

That’s where act two of my story begins. That’s where Abdul started dying and Jeremiah started being born.