I need to start from the very beginning because the beginning matters more than you might think.

If you do not understand who I was before everything changed.

If you do not understand the full weight of the life I was living and the complete certainty I had about the things I believed, then what happened to me later will sound like an interesting story.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our brother Tariq Muhammadi continues his story, we’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.

Thank you and may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony, but it is not an interesting story.

It is a true one.

And for it to land with its full truth, you need to understand exactly what kind of man received it.

I was born in Mashad in 1971.

If you are not Iranian, Mashad might just be a name to you.

But for Iranians, Mashad is not simply a city.

It is the holiest city in the country.

It is where the shrine of Imam Resa stands, the eighth imam of Shia Islam.

He and every year tens of millions of pilgrims come from all over Iran and from other countries to visit that shrine.

Growing up there meant growing up inside something.

The religion was not separate from the air or the streets or the daily rhythm of life.

It was the structure of everything.

The call to prayer shaped the hours of the day.

The religious calendar shaped the entire year.

The questions people asked, the way they greeted each other, the way they explained suffering or celebrated joy, all of it came from the same deep well of faith that the city had been built on top of.

You did not choose to be religious in Mashhad.

You were religious the way you were Iranian, the way you breathed without deciding to.

My father was a cleric.

He was not famous or powerful in any national sense.

He was a neighborhood cleric, a man the people around us trusted and came to when they needed guidance.

He ran a small mosque near our home where he led the five daily prayers and gave lessons several times a week.

People brought in their problems, marriage conflicts, inheritance disputes, questions about what Islam said about this situation or that one, questions about death and what comes after.

He was the person people called when they needed someone to stand between them and God and translate.

He was serious about this role, deeply, completely serious.

He did not take it as a job or a social function.

He took it as the most important thing a human being could do with his life.

My father passed this seriousness to me before I was old enough to resist it or even evaluate it.

I was the oldest of four children and from my earliest memories and I was treated differently from my siblings in one specific way.

My father included me.

He took me to the mosque before my brothers were awake.

He sat me next to him during his lessons.

He explained things to me and then asked me to explain them back in my own words to make sure I had understood.

By the time I was 8, I had memorized more of the Quran than most adult men in our community.

I was not a prodigy in the way people sometimes use that word.

I was simply a child in whom a great deal of intentional religious education had been deposited very early and that education had found a home in me.

I had a strong memory, a disciplined mind, and an early need to understand things completely, to find the logic in them and follow it all the way through.

The religious tradition I was being raised in was enormously rich intellectually, and that richness fed something in me that wanted feeding.

My mother was a quiet woman.

What I remember most about her was her prayer.

She was always in some state related to prayer, preparing for it, in the middle of it, recovering from it, holding her prayer beads afterward, and sitting in the particular stillness that people have after they have spent time genuinely in the presence of God.

She never complained, not about money, which was never abundant in our home.

Not about the cold, mashed winters.

Not about the long hours my father spent at the mosque and away from us.

Not about the difficulty of raising four children on a cleric’s modest income.

She had a peace that I noticed very early and that I wanted for myself.

I assumed for many years that the peace came from her practice of Islam, that if I practiced correctly and deeply enough, I would eventually have what she had.

That belief drove a lot of my early religious effort.

The Iran Iraq war was a background presence throughout my childhood.

I was 10 when it began and 17 when it ended.

Growing up during wartime leaves marks that are hard to fully describe.

You do not live in fear exactly the way people in the direct path of fighting do, but you live with a particular awareness of the world being dangerous and serious and consequential.

You live with loss around you.

A classmate’s father does not come back.

An uncle is buried in a field somewhere that the family cannot visit.

The news is always serious.

The government is always calling for sacrifice and commitment.

The religious and the political were completely fused during those years.

And the Islamic Republic presented this fusion as not only natural but divinely mandated.

Kmeni had died in 1989 and Kamina had taken his place and my father approved of this transition.

He spoke of Kamina as a genuine scholar, a true religious leader rather than a politician wearing religious clothes.

That assessment shaped how I understood Kamina for the next two decades.

At 16, I was sent to comm and this is where I was made into what I became.

is where Iran’s clerical classes formed.

The seminaries there are old and serious and deeply self-aware of their own importance.

What you learn in comm is not simply Islamic theology in the way a university student might study religion academically.

You learn to be inside Islam.

You learn to inhabit it, to think from within it, to see the world entirely through its categories.

You learn juristprudence, the detailed science of Islamic law.

You learn theology, the systematic defense and elaboration of Islamic doctrine.

You learn the traditions, the vast collections of hadith that record what the prophet and the imam said and did.

And you learn how to weigh and apply them.

You learn rhetoric and argumentation.

You learn how to lead prayer, how to give a sermon, how to counsel the grieving and the confused and the sinning.

It is a total formation.

You go in as a young man with a promising mind and a strong memory and a lot of religious background and after years of this you come out as a cleric.

I spent 11 years in comm.

I was there from 16 to 27 with some periods spent back in Mashad or in Tehran for practical training.

I was good at this life.

I need to say that clearly and without false humility because it matters to understand how completely I had become what the system wanted me to be.

I was not reluctantly going through the motions of a life I had not chosen.

I was genuinely excellent at this and genuinely committed to it.

My teachers recognized early that I had unusual analytical ability and they gave me more harder work, deeper questions, greater attention.

I argued in the late night sessions in the common rooms with real passion, defending positions and attacking others and refining my thinking against the sharpest minds around me.

I loved the intellectual work.

I loved the sense of participating in a tradition that stretched back centuries that was larger than me and would outlast me and that I was responsible to preserve and transmit.

I I also loved the sense of purpose in quorm.

You always know why you were there.

You are there to become someone who can carry God’s guidance to people.

You are there to prepare yourself to stand between confused human beings and divine truth and help them find their way.

There is an enormous satisfaction in having a clear calling and being well suited to it.

And I had that for many years.

I was assigned to a mosque in Thran in my late 20s, a midsized mosque in a solidly middle-class neighborhood.

I gave the five daily prayer sermons.

I taught classes on Thursday evenings.

I counseledled families going through difficulty.

I performed marriages and conducted funerals.

I was what I had been trained to be.

And for a long time, I believed in what I was doing with the same completeness I had believed since childhood.

But there was more to my work than the mosque.

The Islamic Republic needed religious men who could do things that went beyond leading prayers.

A cleric has a kind of authority that a security official does not have.

When a cleric speaks, his words carry the weight of God’s endorsement, or at least the appearance of it.

The regime understood this and used it carefully.

I was called on sometimes to speak at gatherings that were as much political as religious, to give sermons that validated specific government positions, to be present at proceedings that needed religious legitimacy.

I did these things.

I framed them to myself as serving God by serving the system God had established.

The logic was airtight from the inside.

There was no window.

You could not stand within that logic and see its flaws because the logic itself was the window through which you saw everything else.

If the Islamic Republic was God’s system, then serving it was serving God and questioning it was questioning God.

And both conclusions led to the same place, obedience.

I married in my early 30s.

My wife was a woman from a religious family, educated, thoughtful, serious about her faith.

We had two children, a son and a daughter.

My son was born in 2002 and my daughter in 2005.

Those years when my children were small, are the years I returned to most often in my memory.

Not because everything was perfect.

I was already beginning to have doubts I had not yet named, but because my children were there, the daily ordinary thing of being their father.

Breakfast in the morning, helping with homework, their voices in the next room.

I did not know then how soon and how completely I was going to lose all of that.

The first crack in the wall came in 2004.

I have described this moment to many people since and I always come back to the same detail which is that what broke through was not an argument.

It was a presence, a quality in a person, something you cannot debate away.

A man had been arrested in the neighborhood around our mosque.

He was a convert.

Not from a historically Christian family, not from one of Iran’s recognized religious minorities, but a former Muslim who had left Islam and become a follower of Jesus.

This was not a minor infraction.

Under the Islamic Republic, apostasy was a serious offense.

The options for handling it included allowing clerics to attempt to reason the person back to Islam before more severe measures were taken.

I was brought in to speak with him, not to interrogate him in the physical sense, to argue with him, to show him the errors of what he had done, to give him the chance to recant.

This was considered an act of mercy.

The man was perhaps 40 years old.

He was thin and he had clearly been through something before I arrived.

But when I sat across from him, the first thing I noticed was that he was not afraid.

In my work, I had sat with frightened people before, people who knew they were in serious trouble.

And fear is something you recognize without effort.

It has a quality to it that you feel in the room.

This man did not have it.

He was calm.

Not the brittle artificial calm of someone suppressing fear, but a genuine settled calm that had its own source somewhere inside him that I could not locate or explain.

We spoke for a long time.

I made my arguments.

I knew them well.

I had been making these arguments for years at various levels of sophistication, the theological case for Islam, the critique of Christianity, the standard responses to the claims the gospels make about Jesus.

He listened to everything I said without interrupting, without getting defensive.

And then he began asking me questions.

Not aggressive theological challenges, quiet personal questions, questions that kept arriving at places I was not prepared to respond to quickly or easily.

He spoke about Jesus not as a doctrine or a historical claim or a theological position to be defended.

He spoke about him the way you speak about someone you know.

someone real and present and personally known to you.

I left that room unsettled in a way I did not want to name.

I told myself I was irritated, that he was a deluded man who had absorbed some foreign influence and was refusing to be corrected.

But under the irritation was something that was not irritation at all.

Something small had shifted.

And small shifts are the ones that keep moving after you have convinced yourself they have stopped.

I do not know what happened to that man after I reported back that he was firm in his position.

Whatever the system did next with him, I was not informed.

I have prayed for him many times.

I hope that God’s mercies reached him as I now know they are large enough to reach even the most condemned.

After that encounter, I started noticing things I had been successfully not noticing before.

The regime I served had not become more merciful over time.

It had become more precise and more ruthless.

The people it targeted were increasingly ordinary Iranians whose crimes were not espionage or violence, but simply wanting to believe something different or speak something different or simply live.

I had been trained to understand this as necessary protection of the divine order.

But the man in that room had loosened something in my thinking.

And now when the machinery of the system moved around me, I watched it differently.

I could see the machinery now.

Before I had only seen the justification for it.

I did not act on this internal change immediately.

To understand why, you have to understand what everything in my life was built on.

My identity was that of a cleric of the Islamic Republic.

My relationships were built within that world.

My income came from it.

My standing in the community existed because of it.

My connection to my family and mashed was woven through it.

My marriage existed within that framework.

My children were growing up inside it.

To begin questioning the foundation was not like changing a political opinion.

It was like pulling the ground out from under an entire life.

And I had a wife and small children.

The fear of what questioning would cost them kept me very quiet for a long time.

So the doubts lived inside me and I did not let them out.

I managed them.

I kept performing the role.

I gave the sermons and led the prayers and counseledled the families and validated the regime’s positions when asked to.

And underneath all of it, something was growing that I could not stop.

Sometime in 2006, I obtained a Farsy Bible.

I will not detail how because the route it came through involved people who helped others after me and whose safety I will not risk even now.

I began reading it late at night after my family was asleep in a part of the apartment where no light would be seen under the door.

I read it the way I had been trained to read everything analytically, looking for the weaknesses, looking for the contradictions, building the case for why it could be safely dismissed.

I had been taught that the Bible was a corrupted document, that the original message of Jesus had been distorted beyond recognition by his followers, that what remained was an unreliable and internally inconsistent text that had been manipulated for political purposes.

I expected to confirm this as I read.

I expected to come away more confident in my position.

A what I found instead was something I did not have a category for.

The Jesus of the Gospels was not the figure I had been taught about.

I had been taught about a prophet, a messenger, a man of God who had been misunderstood and whose message had been corrupted.

What I encountered in the Gospels was something entirely different.

The figure who spoke in those pages had an authority and equality that I could not explain away.

The things he said about the kingdom of God, the way he treated the people that every other religious system had given up on.

The directness of his claims, the way he spoke about his own relationship to God, all of it had a weight that did not feel like the weight of a prophet delivering a message.

It felt like the weight of the source speaking.

I kept reading.

I read Paul’s letters.

I read the Psalms.

I read Job.

And Job did something to me that I had not expected.

The book of Job is a book about a man who suffers, who argues honestly and even furiously with God about his suffering, who demands to understand, who refuses the easy answers his friends offer him, and who is not punished for any of this.

God does not strike him down for arguing.

God answers him.

And the answer is not a theological explanation but a presence.

God shows up.

The book is not resolved by Job getting an answer to his question.

It is resolved by Job encountering the one he was asking the question of.

I sat with that for a long time.

In the tradition I had been formed in, you did not argue with God.

You submitted.

Suffering was a test that you passed by accepting it without complaint.

But here was this ancient text saying something different.

I saying that honest wrestling was acceptable.

That the one who demands to see God is not destroyed for the demanding.

Something happened to me slowly across months of this reading.

I found myself praying in a new way.

Not the structured prayers I had been performing all my life, but simple, unformulated, direct conversation.

I spoke to Jesus, not knowing exactly what I was doing, not sure I was doing it right, but something in me had shifted to the point where I could not not do it.

I told him that I did not know everything, that I had a lot of questions still, that I was not even certain I was coming to the right place, but that I believed he was real, that I needed him to be real, and that I was coming to him.

When I prayed that prayer, something changed inside me that I cannot fully put into words.

It was not dramatic in any external way.

Nothing in the room changed, but inside my chest, something lifted.

Not everything, not all at once, and not permanently in the sense that it never got heavy again.

But for the first time in years, I felt something I can only describe as clean, like I had put down something I had been carrying so long, I had forgotten I was carrying it.

I tried to continue the double life.

I knew perfectly well what conversion meant in Iran.

I had seen the machinery from the inside.

I had been part of it.

I knew what was done to people who left Islam.

And I knew that a cleric who left Islam was treated as an especially dangerous kind of traitor because a cleric who converted could influence others.

and the regime had a specific practiced response to that kind of influence.

In 2008, I found the underground church.

I will not give details that could compromise anyone.

Continue reading….
Next »