I believed with the full weight of everything I understood about holiness and human limitation that I had pushed too far, that I had spent too long poking at sacred things with the stick of my scholarship, and that the reckoning that arrives for such people had arrived for me, and that I was about to find out very permanently exactly how wrong I had been.

And then something happened that I was not expecting.

The fear did not go away.

But something came into the room alongside the fear that was completely incompatible with judgment.

Completely incompatible with condemnation.

Completely incompatible with the ending I had been bracing for.

something I can only describe as the specific personal devastating tenderness of someone who has been watching you for a very long time and is not surprised by what they see and loves you anyway.

Not despite the things they see, not after a careful weighing of the merits, simply absolutely without condition and without the faintest quality of being earned.

something communicated itself to me.

I will not call it a voice because the word implies a mechanism, sound waves, air, a physical process that was not present.

It was more like a communication that bypassed every conventional channel and arrived directly in the deepest and most honest part of me.

The part that is there before the scholarship and before the reputation and before the identity and before the name.

The part that was there when I was a very small child pressing his face to the floor in prayer for the first time before I had any idea what it was I was pressing my face toward.

And what communicated itself was a question, not an accusation, not a condemnation, not the triumphant confrontation of a debater who has finally caught his opponent.

A question, quiet, specific, personal, something that asked an effect.

You have spent all this time learning my words in order to tear them down.

But something has been happening to you while you were doing that.

Why have you been fighting? What has already begun to change in you? That is the closest I can come in ordinary language to what reached me in that room.

It was more precise than that, more personal than that, more devastating in its specificity than that.

But that is the shape of it.

And the thing that broke me, the thing that dissolved 20 years of fortification in the space of what felt like a single breath was not the power of it.

Though the power was immense, it was the tenderness.

It was the complete and absolute absence of anger or triumph or judgment.

It was the quality of someone who has every right to demand an accounting and has chosen instead to ask a question.

The quality of someone who knows exactly what you have been doing and exactly why and is not waiting for you to explain or justify or defend it.

Who is simply quietly with infinite patience pointing to the thing you have been refusing to look at.

I broke.

I want to use that word precisely.

Not I was moved.

Not I became emotional.

I broke.

The way a dam breaks when the water behind it finally exceeds whatever the dam was built to hold.

All of it.

The scholarship, the reputation, the pride, the identity, the 30 years of certainty, the 10 years of warfare, every argument I had ever made, and every wall I had ever built to keep this specific possibility at a safe and manageable distance.

All of it simultaneously, without ceremony or warning, gave way.

What came out of me was not ordinary weeping.

I have wept in my life at my grandfather’s funeral, at certain moments of prayer that were particularly genuine.

I know what my tears feel like.

This was not that.

This was something that my body did in response to a pressure that had been building inside it for much longer than 14 days.

That had perhaps been building for 30 years, that had always been there underneath the certainty and the arguments and the public performances of unassalability.

Everything that had been sealed in a fist for the whole of my adult life released at once.

And what it felt like was not only grief, but also overwhelmingly something that I can only describe as the specific relief of a person who has been holding a very heavy thing alone for a very long time and has finally been allowed to put it down.

I lay on that prayer mat for a long time, face down, completely dissolved, not thinking, not arguing, not analyzing, not doing anything that Hassan Alamin had ever been trained to do, just present, just there, just real in a way I had not been real in longer than I could calculate.

And in that space, in the rubble of everything I had been, in the complete absence of every defense I’d ever constructed, something quiet and solid was present.

Something I did not have a framework for.

Something that was not Islam and was not Christianity as I had understood it from the outside and was not any theological category I could reach for.

something that was simply overwhelmingly, undeniably alive.

I do not know how long I lay there.

The sounds of the city outside my window had gone from the busy texture of evening to the thin quiet of deep night by the time I began to be aware of the room again.

I sat up slowly.

My face was wet.

The prayer mat was wet.

I was exhausted with a quality of exhaustion that had nothing to do with physical tiredness.

The exhaustion of a fight that has finally ended where the exhaustion is really just relief wearing the face of depletion.

I sat there on the mat in the dark for a long time.

I did not know what language to pray in.

The Arabic of my salah felt not wrong but too small.

Not for the first time in those two weeks, I was aware of reaching for a container that was not quite large enough for what I was trying to put in it.

And I was not yet anything else.

I was not a Christian.

I had made no declaration, said no prayer of conversion, crossed no formal threshold.

I was just a man sitting on a prayer mat in a dark room, utterly demolished, aware of a presence that had not left when the intensity of the encounter receded, but had remained, quieter now, lower, like a fire that has passed its peak, but is still burning.

I got up eventually.

I walked to my desk.

I looked at the Bible sitting there, the one I had placed in a specific position before my prayer, the one that was supposed to go to the balcony afterward and be burned.

I looked at it for a while.

The margin notes on the pages I could see from where I stood, all that careful, systematic scholarly destruction.

I picked it up.

I walked to my bed.

I placed it on the pillow beside me and laid down with it there.

The way you keep something close that you’ve just been given and are not yet sure how to hold.

And for the first time in 14 nights, I slept without dreaming deeply, completely without the ocean of words or the drowning or the hand reaching through the surface.

Just sleep, just silence, just rest.

I woke to an apartment that looked exactly the same as it had the night before.

Same books, same desk, same view of the city from my window, same minouetses of the mosque I could see in the distance, everything the same, except that the man who had gone to sleep in that room was not the man who woke up in it.

And I knew, sitting on the edge of my bed in the early morning light, that everything I had believed about my life, what it was for, where it was going, what it would cost me to be honest about what had happened to me in that room, was about to be tested in ways I could not yet imagine, and was not yet equipped to face.

But underneath that knowledge, underneath the fear of it, and there was genuine fear, there was something that had not been there before, something small and solid and utterly unargumentable, something that no amount of scholarship had ever given me, and that no loss I was beginning to understand would be able to take away.

I had met someone, and knowing someone changes everything.

There is something nobody tells you about the morning after an encounter with God.

They tell you about the encounter.

They tell you about the tears and the surrender and the presence and the way the room feels different afterward.

And all of that is true.

I have just spent an entire act trying to give you the most honest description I am capable of giving.

But what nobody tells you about is the mourning.

the specific ordinary completely unchanged morning that follows the most extraordinary night of your life.

The alarm, or in my case, the adhan still sounds.

The floor is still cold under your feet.

The kettle still has to be filled.

The city outside your window is still doing exactly what it was doing yesterday, completely indifferent to the fact that the entire architecture of one man’s interior world collapsed sometime after midnight.

I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time that morning.

[clears throat] Not in a dramatic way, just sitting.

The kind of sitting that happens when your body knows it needs to move and do the practical things the days require, but some part of you is not yet ready to stand up and re-enter a world that you’re no longer sure you know how to navigate.

Because here is what I understood.

sitting there on the edge of that bed with the early light coming through the curtains and the sound of the city beginning to build outside.

Nothing in my external life had changed.

Everything in my internal life had and those two facts were going to collide and the collision was not going to be gentle and there was no version of what came next that did not involve a cost that I was not sure I was equipped to pay.

I was not in a western country where a man can quietly change his religious affiliation, have some difficult conversations with family, lose some friendships, and rebuild his life in a new community without risking anything more serious than social awkwardness.

I was in a Gulf nation.

I was a public figure in Islamic scholarship with institutional affiliations, a following, a reputation that had been built over a decade of very public, very visible work.

I had students who looked to me, colleagues who respected me, a family whose entire identity was intertwined with faith and with the specific role I played in that faith.

And I had, in a small apartment, in the deep hours of the night, met someone who had demolished every argument I had ever made and every wall I had ever built.

And I believed in him now with a certainty that was completely different from the certainty I had always had before, because my old certainty was built on scholarship and pride and the accumulated weight of everything I had constructed.

And this new certainty was built on nothing I had made myself.

It was built on something that had happened to me.

Something I had not chosen and could not uncheoose.

Something as undeniable as the fact that I was sitting on the edge of a bed in the early morning light breathing.

That is the most terrifying kind of certainty there is because you cannot manage it.

You cannot shape it to fit the circumstances.

You cannot decide strategically how much of it to reveal in when because it is not a position you have adopted.

It is a person you have met and a person is not something you can keep in a compartment.

For several weeks after that night, I lived with this enormous thing entirely alone.

I want to be honest about this because I think it is important that you understand the full picture and not a cleaned up version of it.

I did not immediately go public.

I did not immediately confess to anyone what had happened.

I continued on the surface to appear as I had always appeared.

I showed up where I was expected to show up.

I said what was necessary to say.

I performed the ordinary functions of my external life with the mechanical competence of someone who has been doing them for so long that the body continues even when the person inside has fundamentally changed.

But I had stopped writing the reputation of John’s gospel.

I told my colleagues that the project had taken an unexpected turn and I needed more time.

I avoided the specific conversations that would have required me to produce the work I had promised.

I bought time in small, careful increments, and in private, in the hours that were my own, I was doing something completely different.

I was reading the New Testament with entirely new eyes.

Not the eyes of a critic looking for fault lines.

Not the eyes of a debater cataloging ammunition, the eyes of someone who has just been told that a letter has been written for him personally and is now reading it for the first time, understanding that it is his own name written inside.

I was reading Paul’s letters and finding in them a man whose experience I now recognized from the inside.

A man who had also been stopped violently on a road he was absolutely certain about.

Also dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.

Also forced to take everything he had been trained to be and discover that it was simultaneously less and more than he had understood it to be.

I was reading the Psalms and finding a vocabulary for things I was feeling that I had not known I needed words for.

I was reading the Gospel of Luke and stopping at the story of the prodigal son, the father who sees his returning child from a distance and runs.

Who runs not waits with dignified forgiveness runs.

And I was having to put the text down and sit with the image of that running father for a long time before I could read on.

I began very carefully and through channels I will not detail for the protection of the people involved to make contact with a small number of Christians who had experience walking alongside people in my specific situation.

There are communities of believers who do this quietly, who understand the particular geography of the journey from Islam to Christianity in a conservative Gulf context.

Not just the spiritual geography, but the practical, legal, familial, physical geography.

They were careful people, trustworthy people.

They helped me begin to orient myself in a landscape I had never expected to be standing in.

But I could not maintain the surface forever.

The surface was cracking in ways I could not control.

And I think I knew from the very beginning that I was simply buying time before the inevitable.

My family noticed first.

This is always how it happens, I think.

Not colleagues, not the wider community, family.

Because family watches you with a quality of attention that is completely different from the attention of professional acquaintances or even close friends.

It is the attention of people for whom you are personally irreplaceably important.

People who have been watching your face since before you had opinions or credentials or a public identity.

People who know the specific rhythm of who you are so well that a small change in that rhythm registers before they even have words for it.

My mother noticed that I had become quieter, not withdrawn.

I was still present, still engaged, still the person she knew in every external way.

But there was a quality of stillness in me that was new.

She asked if I was well.

I told her I was working through a demanding period of scholarship and that it was taking more out of me than I had expected.

She looked at me for a moment, just a moment, with the specific look that mothers have when they hear an answer that is technically true and entirely insufficient.

Then she let it go because that is also something mothers do.

They let it go when they sense that the person they love is not yet ready to be caught.

My younger brother noticed that I’d stopped leading the family in mri prayer when I visited home.

This was a role that had always been mine without question.

The eldest son, the scholar, the one with the credentials and the training.

I had led those prayers my entire adult life.

I began making excuses.

I was tired.

My head was hurting.

The excuses were thin.

And I knew they were thin.

And I think my brother knew they were thin.

But for a while the family gave me the grace of not pressing on the tender place.

My father though was different.

My father did not ask about specific prayers or specific silences.

My father watched the overall shape of me, the way a man watches weather, not looking for individual details, but reading the whole pattern of it.

And the pattern had changed.

The particular sharpness that had always been in me when religious matters came up, that clean, eager, absolutely certain quality that had always made me his most theologically reliable son, was no longer consistently there.

In its place was something quieter and more uncertain.

And my father, who had built his whole understanding of me on the foundation of that certainty, felt its absence the way you feel the absence of a sound that has always been present.

He asked to speak with me privately one evening, just the two of us in his study.

I want you to understand what that room meant to me.

That study was where he had taught me to read Arabic when I was four years old.

Where he had sat across from me as a teenager and tested my Quran memorization verse by verse, nodding when I was right and waiting without impatience when I struggled where we had had every significant conversation of my life.

The room still smelled the same.

Old books and the particular incense my father had burned for as long as I could remember.

And underneath both of those, something that was simply him, the smell of a person you have loved your entire life.

The prayer rug in the corner that had been in our family for 30 years had a depression worn into it in the exact shape of my father’s frustration.

We sat across from each other.

He asked me what had happened, not accusingly, not with the particular controlled fury of a man who already knows and is preparing his response.

He asked it the way a doctor asks a patient to describe the symptoms with the focused attention of someone who wants the full picture before drawing any conclusion.

My father was always like that.

He was not a rash man.

He thought before he acted, and he listened before he thought.

It was one of the things about him I had always most respected.

Looked at him across that desk.

I looked at the prayer mark on his forehead.

I looked at his hands, the hands that had held mine when I could not yet walk steadily, that had gestured through a thousand teachings, that had covered his face the night I completed my Quran memorization, and shaken with the tears of a proud father.

I looked at the man
who had given me my name and my faith and my sense of what it meant to be serious about God, and I told him the truth.

I did not do it eloquently.

There was no carefully structured argument, no scholarly framing, no strategic presentation.

I told him as plainly and directly as I could what had happened, the study, the text, the two weeks, the nightmares, the gathering, the carpenter who wept, and the night on the prayer mat when everything I had built came down.

I told him what I now believed and why.

I told him as clearly as I knew how that I was not telling him this because I had been deceived or manipulated or weakened or confused, but because something had happened to me that was more real than anything else I had ever experienced, and I was no longer able to pretend otherwise.

I watched my father’s face as I spoke.

I have been asked many times since what the hardest moment of this entire journey was.

People expect me to say the night of the encounter or the loss of my community or the physical danger of the months that followed.

But the hardest moment, the one that lives in me most permanently, the one I carry in a specific chamber of my heart that I do not open often, was watching my father’s face as I spoke that evening.

There was something in his expression that I’d been looking at my entire life without having a name for it.

Something open in the specific way that the face of a parent is open toward the child they have invested everything in.

Something that was pride and recognition and the particular satisfaction of a man who sees himself in his son and [clears throat] is glad of what he sees.

I had looked at that quality in my father’s face for 30 years without ever thinking about what its absence would look like.

That evening I watched it close slowly.

The way a door closes when it is pushed carefully and deliberately toward its frame.

Not slammed, not violent, just the quiet, inexurable movement of something being shut that will not easily be opened again.

By the time I finished speaking, the openness was gone.

What remained was a face I had never seen on my father before, composed, controlled, and behind the composure, something devastated.

He was quiet for a long time after I finished.

Then he spoke.

Just a few words, words that told me I was no longer his son.

I will not repeat them exactly, not because they were unspeakably cruel.

My father was not a cruel man, but because they were said by a man who was in tremendous pain, and tremendous pain makes people say things that belong to the moment and not to the record.

I understood them for what they were.

I understood that the man sitting across from me had just had something taken from him, that he had built his understanding of his own life around, and that his response to that loss was not something I had the right to judge or record for public consumption.

What I will tell you is that I walked out of that study knowing that I had just lost my father.

Not to death, to something that felt in some ways more final than death.

Because death leaves love intact.

What had just happened between us had placed my father’s love for me behind a wall of incomprehension and grief and betrayal that I did not know how to breach and was not sure could be breached and which I would spend years on the other side of praying and hoping and waiting.

What followed happened over weeks and months, and I will not walk you through every detail of it.

Partly because some of it is not entirely mine to tell, and partly because the people who were involved in certain moments are still living in places where my telling could cause them harm.

[clears throat] What I will tell you is the shape of it.

There was a period of escalating pressure from multiple directions simultaneously.

family, community, colleagues who had heard things and wanted clarification.

There were conversations that were painful in the particular way that conversations are painful when everyone in them loves each other.

But they are speaking from inside completely different understandings of reality and the distance between those understandings cannot be crossed by goodwill alone.

There was a confrontation, more than one, that went beyond conversation.

I was not martyed.

I want to be precise about that because I do not want to over dramatize what I endured relative to what many others in my situation have endured and continue to endure in places far more dangerous than where I was.

But I was hurt physically.

Yes, in one specific incident that I will not describe in detail.

But more significantly and more lastingly, I was hurt in the ways that only the people who have known you your entire life and loved you can hurt you because they know exactly where you are tender and the tenderness does not disappear just because the relationship has ruptured.

I lost my position.

My institutional affiliations dissolved, some formally, some simply, through the particular social mechanism by which communities exclude people who have become incompatible with the community’s understanding of itself.

I lost my income.

I lost my home.

I packed what I could carry in a single bag.

clothes, my notebooks, the annotated Greek New Testament, and a small Quran that had been my father’s, and which I could not bring myself to leave behind, because the object was not the problem, and the object carried his handwriting, and his handwriting carried his hands, and his hands had held mine before I was old enough to know what faith was.

I left with that bag on a night I will not describe in detail for the safety of the people who helped me.

And I did not look back in the cinematic sense of that phrase.

I looked back constantly in the only sense that matters which is the interior sense of a person who is carrying the weight of every face they are leaving behind.

I was helped by people I will not name.

Christians mostly who took genuine risks to help me reach a place where I could begin to reconstruct something resembling a life.

The network that exists for people in my situation operates quietly for obvious reasons and the people who maintain it are among the bravest and most genuinely loving people I have ever met.

They asked nothing from me.

They helped me because they believed they were helping someone their God loved and that was sufficient reason.

[clears throat] The first Easter I spent as a Christian, I spent alone.

I was in a small apartment in a city I will not name.

The apartment was cheap in the specific way that cheap apartments in unfamiliar cities are cheap.

Thin walls through which you hear your neighbors lives.

aay window that looked out on a narrow street that never got direct sun, furniture that had belonged to several previous tenants, and remembered all of them.

It was not a place anyone would choose if they had other options.

I had been connected with a small Christian community in that city.

People who met informally, who knew my situation in broad strokes and had welcomed me into their fellowship with a generosity I found genuinely difficult to receive.

The difficulty of receiving grace I was discovering didn’t end with the initial encounter.

It continued.

It kept presenting itself in new and specific forms, and each form required a new act of humility, of accepting that something was being offered that you did not earn and cannot repay.

On Easter Sunday that year, I could not get to where the community was gathering.

There were practical complications, the kind that follow a person who is navigating a precarious legal situation in a country they arrived in with very little through channels that left no clean paper trail.

So I stayed in the apartment.

I sat on the edge of my bed, the same posture I noticed as the morning after the encounter in my study, and I opened my Bible and I read all four resurrection accounts.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.

in order slowly.

The whole sweep of it, the women going to the tomb in the dark, the stone already moved, the grave clothes lying folded, the angels and the confusion and the fear and the running.

the disciples who didn’t believe the women until they saw for themselves.

the road to Emmus and the stranger who walked with two grieving people and explained things to them along the way and who was recognized only when he broke the bread.

The beach, the charcoal fire, the fish being grilled, the risen Jesus making breakfast for his exhausted, bewildered disciples as if the most natural thing in the world after conquering death was to make sure his friends had eaten.

and Peter.

The conversation on the beach that I’d read before, but that morning landed on me with a weight I was not prepared for.

Three times asked if he loved him.

Once for each denial, not as punishment, not as an accounting, not as a settling of scores, but as restoration, as the deliberate, tender undoing of the specific damage that shame leaves in a person.

three questions that said, “I know what you did.

I know how it felt.

I’m giving you three chances to say something different because I want you to be free of it.

Because I need you to be free of it.

Because what I’m about to ask of you requires a man who has been forgiven, not a man who is still hiding in his shame.

” I sat in that apartment alone on Easter Sunday, and I wept.

Not in the overwhelming structural way I had wept on the prayer mat that night in my study.

This was quieter, more specific, the weeping of a man who has lost the world and is sitting in the particular silence of that loss and who is also simultaneously in possession of something that he cannot explain and cannot quantify and which is making the loss bearable in a way that nothing he could have predicted would have made it bearable.

I had lost my father.

I’d lost my community, my home, my career, my status, the culture that had formed me, the daily rhythms that had told me who I was, the language of prayer that had been my native tongue for 30 years.

I had lost in the most practical and total sense the world.

And sitting in that apartment on that Easter morning, I understood the parable about the pearl in a way I had not understood it before, not as a nice story about commitment, as an accurate description of an actual transaction.

The merchant does not give up everything and gain the pearl and then feel good about it in the warm, uncomplicated way of a man who has made a smart investment.

He gives up everything and gains the pearl and lives possibly in a cheaper apartment than he was accustomed to, with fewer friends than he used to have, with the specific ache of every absence sitting alongside the specific unloable unddeinishable reality of what he found.

The pearl was enough.

That is what I kept coming back to, sitting there alone on that Sunday.

It was enough.

It was more than enough.

It was the kind of enough that does not need anything added to it to be sufficient.

The kind of enough that does not depend on your circumstances being favorable or your losses being compensated or your life being reconstructed into something that looks successful by any conventional measure.

It was enough because it was real.

Because he was real.

Because the person I had met on that prayer mat was not a feeling that would fade when the circumstances changed.

Was not a theology that would be invalidated when the suffering set in.

Was not a community that could be taken away from me when the community dispersed.

He was simply there in the thinwalled apartment at the table where I ate my solitary Easter meal.

Ordinary food left outside my door by the neighbors who knew nothing about what day it was or what it meant to me, who left it simply because they were kind people, and they could see that I was a man with not much, and that was sufficient reason.

He was at that table in that ordinary meal in a way I could not explain and did not need to explain.

I ate.

I sat in the quiet.

I held both things at once, the loss of everything and the presence of the one thing.

And I did not try to resolve the tension between them because I was beginning to understand that the tension was not a problem to be solved.

It was simply the shape of this particular life.

The shape of a life lived on the other side of a real encounter with a real person who demands in his gentle and devastating way everything.

I’m speaking to you now from a location I will not identify.

The room behind me is simple.

A few books on a shelf, a window with the curtains drawn, a table.

This is where I live now.

Quietly, carefully, in the specific way of a person who has learned that the ordinary details of a life can be precious, not in spite of their ordinariness, but because of it.

I do not have the study with the floor to ceiling shelves anymore.

I do not have the institutional position or the following or the reputation that once felt like the essential furniture of my existence.

I have considerably less than I used to have by every measure that the world I grew up in would have applied to a man’s life.

And I have considerably more than I have ever had by the only measure that I now understand to matter.

I have been sharing this testimony for some time now in various forms to various audiences.

I have told it to small gatherings of believers in borrowed rooms.

I have told it to journalists who wanted to write about it.

I have told it to other men and women who are somewhere in the middle of the journey I have described, who are sitting with questions they cannot ask out loud, who are carrying something in their interior that they do not yet have language for, who are perhaps doing what I was doing before the night everything changed, reaching for more arguments, more scholarship, more critical distance, more anything
that will maintain the safe and manageable space between them and the thing they are most afraid to look at directly.

I am telling it again today to you because I believe that stories of this kind are not primarily for the people who are already on the other side of them.

I believe they are primarily for the people who are somewhere in the middle.

The people who are 14 days into studying a text they came to destroy.

The people who are driving home from a gathering unsettled by something they cannot explain.

The people who are waking in the deep hours of the night from dreams they did not ask for.

The people who are feeling underneath everything they have constructed and everything they are certain of the specific and terrifying sensation of the ground beginning to shift.

This is for them mostly.

Though I have things to say to several different groups of people today and I want to say each of them as directly as I can.

I want to speak first to my Muslim brothers and sisters.

I know what at least some of you are feeling as you hear this.

I know it in my body because I felt it for 30 years and I have felt it directed at me by people I love since all of this became public.

You may be feeling anger because this looks from inside the framework of the faith I was raised in like betrayal of the worst kind.

You may be feeling pity because a man who has been deceived does not know he has been deceived.

And from where you are standing this may look like a man who was broken down by emotional manipulation and mistook it for divine encounter.

You may be feeling contempt because I was a scholar and scholars should be immune to this and the fact that I am not looks from a certain angle like weakness.

I understand all of those responses.

I would have had every one of them myself three years ago sitting in the audience of this testimony.

I would have been constructing the counterargument before the first act was finished.

But I want to speak to what else might be there.

The thing underneath those responses, the small, quiet, carefully guarded thing that is there in some of you whether you wanted to be or not.

The thing that made you keep listening past the point where you told yourself you should stop.

the honest curiosity, the genuine question, the part of you that loves God enough to ask in the privacy of your own interior whether you have the full picture.

I am not asking you to convert.

I am not asking you to walk away from everything that has formed you and loved you and given you identity and community and the daily rhythm of a life lived toward God.

I understand the weight of what that would mean because I have carried it and the weight is real and I will not pretend otherwise.

I am asking you to do one thing, one small private unwitnessed thing that requires nothing of you publicly and commits you to nothing institutionally.

Read the angel.

Read the Gospel of John.

Read it in your own language in whatever translation you can access with the full attention of a person who takes the question of God seriously enough to investigate seriously.

Not to be converted, not because a Christian told you to, not as ammunition for a debate.

Read it the way you would want to read any text that claims to carry a message from God with your whole mind and your whole heart and the honest willingness to go wherever the reading takes you.

Sit with the verse where Jesus weeps at Lazarus’s tomb and ask yourself what kind of God weeps.

Sit with the woman in the dust of chapter 8 and ask where the condemnation went.

sit with the upper room discourse in chapters 13-1 17.

Jesus speaking to his disciples on the last night of his life, not with the triumphalism of a conquering king, but with the specific intimate heartbreaking tenderness of someone who loves particular people and is about to undergo something on their behalf that they cannot yet comprehend.

sit with the resurrection.

Morning the folded grave clothes.

The woman in the garden who mistakes him for a gardener until he says her name.

And then alone in the privacy of a room with no one watching and nothing at stake.

Ask God, the God you have loved and served and prostrated yourself before to show you the truth.

Not your truth, not my truth.

the truth.

Just say that.

Just ask for that and mean it.

I was a man who came to that text fully armed and absolutely certain.

I was not open.

I was not searching.

I was not vulnerable.

I was the last person by any reasonable assessment who should have been stopped in his tracks by what he found there.

and even I could not get to the end of it without being confronted by a person I could not explain away.

What might happen to you? If you come with an honest heart, I want to speak to the scholars, the men and women in Islamic academia who are analyzing this testimony right now, identifying its weaknesses, preparing the responses.

I know you.

I was you.

I know the intellectual pleasure of a well- constructed critique.

I know the satisfaction of locating the flaw in an argument that others have found convincing.

I’m not going to debate you.

I have retired from that particular arena not because I ran out of arguments, but because I came to understand that the arena itself was the wrong venue for the question at hand.

Intellectual debate is the right tool for many things.

It is not the right tool for this.

You cannot debate your way into an encounter with a living person.

You cannot argue your way out of one either.

I was changed not by an argument I couldn’t answer.

I was changed by a presence I couldn’t dismiss.

And the distinction between those two things is everything.

If you love God, and I believe you do, I believe the best of you love God with a genuine and serious devotion that I would never diminish.

Then you love him enough to ask whether you have understood him fully.

Whether every room in the house has been opened, whether the God who is, as the Quran says, closer to you than your jugular vein, might have something to say to you that has not yet been said through the channels you have been listening in.

He is close enough to hear a question asked in silence.

Ask the question.

Now, I want to speak to the Christians and I want to say something that I know some of you will find uncomfortable because it runs counter to a significant amount of what the Christian world invests in when it comes to engaging people from other faiths.

Stop making it primarily about the argument.

I mean that with respect, with genuine, deep, affectionate respect for the impulse behind it.

The desire to defend what you love, to equip people to answer difficult questions, to make sure that your faith can hold up under intellectual scrutiny.

I understand that impulse, and I do not dismiss it.

There is a place for serious intellectual engagement with serious questions.

But here is what I know from the inside of my own experience.

I was not reached by the most theologically prepared Christian in any room I ever walked into.

I was not moved by the most carefully argued response to my critiques.

In 10 years of public debate with Christians at every level of training and preparation, I never once walked away from a debate thinking that the Christian position had been made more credible by the exchange.

Not once.

What reached me was a man in the corner of a room who could not answer a single one of my questions and did not try.

What cracked my armor was the specific, undefended, intellectually inexplicable love of a person who wept for someone he had no reason to care about and promised to pray for him without expecting anything in return.

What I could not footnote, could not cross-examine, couldn’t [clears throat] place in a critical apparatus and analyze from a safe distance was not a better argument.

It was love.

Ordinary, personal, costly, completely unreasonable love.

This is what Jesus did throughout the gospel I tried to destroy.

He did not primarily outargue people.

He sat with them.

He ate with them.

He noticed the ones that everyone else had stopped noticing.

He touched the people that the religious community had declared untouchable.

He asked questions instead of making speeches.

He wept with the people who were weeping.

He made breakfast for his disciples on a beach after the most disorienting week of their lives.

He was present in the specific embodied completely attentive way of someone for whom no person is too small or too far gone or too armored to be worth the full weight of his attention.

Be that.

That is the instruction.

[clears throat] It is simpler and harder than any apologetics course.

Stop trying to win the argument and start being willing to weep for the person.

The arguments will not close the distance between you and a man like I was.

Love closes that distance.

Specific, personal, unreasonable, unearned love closes that distance.

It is the only thing I ever encountered that my scholarship had no answer for.

The man in the corner who wept, I have looked for him.

I have tried through the network of people who helped me to find him and tell him that his tears were the first stone to fall from my hand.

I have not found him yet, but I believe he is somewhere.

praying for a scholar he met briefly at a dinner gathering, not knowing whether the prayer ever landed anywhere, not knowing that it was one of the first things that God used to bring a proud and armored man to his knees.

If you are that man, and by any extraordinary grace of God, these words reach you.

Thank you.

You did more that evening than you will ever know this side of eternity.

You did the one thing I could not withstand.

You loved me without needing me to deserve it.

First, I am holding two books right now.

This one is my Quran, my father’s copy.

His handwriting is on the inside cover, a blessing written in his particular script, a father’s prayer over his son at the beginning of a life of faith.

I keep it because it carries his handwriting and his handwriting carries his hands and his hands held mine when I was too small to remember it but old enough to have been shaped by it.

I keep it because the beauty that is genuinely in it is real and the devotion of the man who gave it to me is real and my love for that man has not died because of what has changed between us.

I pray for him every day.

I pray for my mother, for my brothers, for every member of the family that I left behind in that city that I am not allowed to name.

I pray with the specific, patient, entirely unresolved grief of a man who understands that love does not stop when relationships break.

that loving people you have lost is one of the primary forms that faithfulness takes in a life like mine.

That the waiting and the hoping and the praying for people who have shut the door between themselves and you is not a passive thing.

It is one of the most active and costly and faith requiring things a person can do.

I have not heard from my father since the evening I sat across from him in his study and told him the truth.

I do not know if I will hear from him in this life.

I hold that not knowing in the same hand that holds the certainty of what happened to me on that prayer mat.

And I have learned to hold both without letting either one destroy the other.

This other book is my Bible.

the same Greek English delot I spent two weeks annotating with the systematic precision of a man preparing for war.

You can see the margin notes in my handwriting.

All those careful lethal observations, all those arguments that were going to bury this text under the weight of its own contradictions.

Every annotation represents a question I brought to this book as a weapon.

And every single question, even the hardest, even the ones I still do not have a complete scholarly resolution to, became in the hands of a God who is patient enough to let you fight him for a while, a door, a specific personal particular door into the presence of someone who
was not at all what I expected and who is more real than anything else in my experience.

I’m not asking you to switch religions.

I’m not asking you to adopt a new set of propositions or join a new institution or trade one community for another.

I understand that for many of you, particularly my Muslim brothers and sisters, this is how you hear conversion language as a demand to abandon one team and join arrival one.

I am asking you to do something much more specific and much more personal than that.

I am asking you to meet someone.

The person is available.

He has always been available.

He is available to scholars and to carpenters, to the proud and to the broken, to the people who come looking for a fight and to the people who come barely able to stand.

He has never in the entire record of every encounter preserved in the gospels turned away a single person who came to him.

Not the ones who came with questions.

Not the ones who came with anger.

Not the ones who came in the wrong way for the wrong reasons and barely knew why they had come at all.

He is not frightened by your questions.

He invented your intelligence and he can handle everything your intelligence produces.

He is not waiting for you to have the theology sorted out or the doubts resolved or the objections answered before he will receive you.

He received me on a prayer mat in the middle of the night while I was prostrated toward Mecca while I was still formally and publicly a Muslim scholar who had spent a decade trying to discredit his words.

He received me exactly as I was, fully armed, fully proud, fully certain that I was right and completely demolished by the simple overwhelming fact of his presence.

He will receive you exactly as you are.

Wherever you are, whatever you believe, whatever you have done, however high or thick or carefully constructed the walls around the most honest part of you, he’s been waiting behind those walls with a patience that has nothing to do with passivity.

The active, watchful, loving patience of someone who knows that you are coming, who has always known that you are coming and who is not going anywhere.

I want to close with something I’ve been carrying since the first Easter I spent alone in that thinwalled apartment.

Sitting with the resurrection accounts and the ordinary meal and the sense of the presence of the one I had found and the weight of everything I had lost in order to find him.

There is a moment in Luke’s resurrection account, the road to Emmas, where two of Jesus’s followers are walking away from Jerusalem on the day of the resurrection.

They don’t know yet.

They have heard reports, rumors, the confused testimony of the women who went to the tomb that morning.

But they do not understand it.

And the text says they are walking away from the city looking sad, defeated, like people leaving the scene of something that turned out badly.

And Jesus walks up alongside them and they don’t recognize him.

They have been with him for three years.

They have heard every sermon, witnessed every miracle, sat at every meal, and they do not recognize him.

Because grief does something to recognition.

It narrows the aperture through which we see, makes the familiar strange, makes us blind to what is right beside us.

He walks with them for miles.

He listens to them explain why they are sad.

He asks them questions.

And at the end of the road, when they have arrived at the place they were going, and he appears to be continuing on, they ask him to stay.

Something in them, something they cannot fully explain, something that has been building in them during the whole walk, does not want him to leave.

They say that their hearts were burning within them while he talked.

They just didn’t know yet why he stays.

He sits at the table with them.

He takes the bread and he breaks it and their eyes are opened.

That is the moment I come back to over and over.

That ordinary moment at an ordinary table at the end of an ordinary road with two people who thought they were walking away from the worst ending possible and were walking without knowing it toward the most important recognition of their lives.

Maybe you’re on a road like that today.

Maybe you’re walking away from something or towards something or simply walking tired, uncertain, carrying questions that feel heavier than you have the strength for.

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