I felt like I was inside an oven surrounded by flames, but somehow not burning, just suffering the heat without end.

And everywhere in every direction were people, thousands upon thousands of people, maybe millions, all in various states of torment.

Some were wandering aimlessly, their faces twisted in anguish.

Some were on the ground writhing.

Some were reaching upward, crying out for help that did not come.

Some were completely still, frozen in expressions of horror.

I wanted to deny what I was seeing.

I wanted it to be a dream, a hallucination from the explosion, anything but reality.

But I knew deep in whatever I was now, I knew exactly where I was.

This was hell.

Not the metaphorical hell that some modern scholars talked about.

Not a temporary state of purification.

This was the real hell.

The hell that the prophets warned about.

The hell that I had heard about since childhood but never really believed was literal.

And I was there.

The realization hit me like a physical blow.

Terror flooded through me.

pure absolute terror unlike anything I had ever felt in life because I understood what this meant.

This was forever.

This was eternity.

This was where I would stay in this heat and darkness and suffering for all time with no end.

I tried to scream but I could not make a sound come out.

I tried to run but I could not move.

I was frozen there, surrounded by countless others in the same state.

Then I started to recognize faces.

Not far from me, I saw Khaled.

He had been a fighter in Hamas, killed in an Israeli air strike three years before.

We had held a big funeral for him.

The Imam had spoken about him being a martyr, about him being in paradise with the other righteous ones.

We had all believed it.

But he was here, not in paradise.

Here in this place of torment.

His face was twisted in agony.

He was crying out, but no sound reached me.

He looked at me and our eyes met.

The recognition in his eyes was clear.

And there was something else there.

Desperation.

He was trying to tell me something.

I moved toward him.

I do not know how.

I simply moved and the distance between us closed.

When I was near him, I could hear his voice.

It was horsearo and broken like he had been screaming forever.

He said, “We were deceived.

All of us.

We were all deceived.

” I tried to ask him what he meant, but he continued as if he could not hear me.

As if he was simply repeating words he had said countless times before.

He said, “There are no rewards here.

No rivers, no gardens, no virgins, nothing we were promised.

Only this, only suffering, only fire and darkness, and no hope of it ever ending.

” He reached toward me, but could not touch me.

His hand passed through where I was as if I was not solid.

He said, “Tell them.

” You have to tell them.

Tell everyone it’s not too late for them but it is too late for us.

Tell them about Jesus.

Only Jesus.

We were wrong about everything.

I did not understand Jesus.

Why was he talking about Jesus? Jesus was a prophet, a good man, but not the way to salvation.

That was what I had always been taught.

But before I could form a question, Khaled was pulled away.

Something dragged him backward into the darkness, still crying outwards, I could no longer hear, I looked around frantically.

Everywhere I looked, I saw people I recognized, fellow fighters, men I had prayed beside in the mosque, people who had died as martyrs for the cause.

And they were all here, all suffering, all in torment.

I saw Muhammad who had blown himself up at a checkpoint taking three Israeli soldiers with him.

I saw Rashid who had been shot during a raid on a settlement.

I saw Farukq who had spent his whole adult life fighting for Palestinian liberation and died of his wounds in a safe house.

All martyrs, all believers, all here.

I saw clerics too.

Religious men I had respected, shakes who had taught me about Islam, imams who had led prayers and given sermons, men who had spent their lives studying the Quran and hadith.

They were here too.

One of them saw me and rushed toward me with a speed that was unnatural.

It was Sheik Hassan, a man who had been famous throughout Gaza for his knowledge and piety.

He had died two years before I did.

I had attended his funeral.

Thousands had mourned him.

His face was different from the others.

Not just anguish, but something else.

Guilt.

Overwhelming guilt that seemed to radiate from him.

When he reached me, he grabbed at me with hands that passed through my form.

He spoke in a rush, words stumbling over each other in desperate haste.

He said, “I taught thousands.

Thousands.

They listened to me.

They believed me.

And I taught them lies.

Not intentionally.

I believed it too.

But I was wrong.

And now they will all come here because of what I taught them.

” As I see them arriving day after day.

people I taught, people who trusted me and they end up here because of my words.

He was weeping.

Tears ran down his face and evaporated in the heat before they could fall.

He said, “Tell them I was wrong.

Tell them to ignore everything.

” I said, “Tell them about Jesus.

He is the only way, the only truth, the only life.

” We were wrong about him.

So wrong.

Tell them please.

You have to tell them.

Then he too was pulled away.

Still crying out.

I tried to process what I was hearing.

These men, these righteous fighters and scholars, they were all saying the same thing.

They were all talking about Jesus.

They were all saying we had been wrong.

But how could we have been wrong? Islam was the final revelation.

Muhammad was the final prophet.

The Quran was the perfect word of God.

I had built my entire life on these truths.

More souls crowded around me, not touching but near, all trying to speak to me, all trying to give me the same message.

A woman I did not recognize pushed forward.

She was crying hysterically.

She said, “I died last year.

I was devout my whole life.

I prayed, I fasted, I gave charity, I covered myself, I did everything right, everything I was taught.

And I woke up here, here.

And no, no one will tell me why.

No one will explain.

There is just the fire and the screaming and no hope.

No hope at all.

A young man, barely 20, grabbed at me with hands that could not grip.

He said, “I was a suicide boomer.

They told me I would go straight to paradise.

They showed me verses from the Quran.

They promised me everything.

I believed them.

I blew myself up and killed 17 people.

And I open my eyes here.

Not not in paradise.

Here.

And the faces of those 17 people, I see them constantly.

They haunt me.

And there is no forgiveness here.

No second chance, no mercy.

An old man pushed through the crowd.

He said, “I studied religion for 60 years.

” 60 years.

I memorized the entire Quran.

I could recite all the major hadith collections.

I taught at the university.

I wrote books about Islamic Jewish prudence.

And I died and came here and realized I had wasted my entire life.

Worse than wasted it.

I led others astray.

And now they are here too because of me.

The voices over overlapped.

A cacophony of suffering and regret and desperate warnings.

All saying the same thing in different ways.

We were wrong.

We were deceived.

Only Jazz is is the truth.

Tell the living.

Warn them.

It’s not too late for them, but it’s too late for us.

I wanted to shut it out.

I wanted to deny it, but I could not.

because I could see it.

I could see the truth of it in their faces, in their voices, in the very reality of where we were.

I had believed I was serving God by making bombs.

I had believed I would be rewarded for fighting.

I had believed that my devotion and my sacrifices would earn me paradise.

But I was here in hell just like all these others who had believed the same things.

And if we were here, if all our devotion and fighting and religious observance meant nothing, then everything I had believed was a lie.

The weight of that realization crushed me.

I felt myself sinking, being pulled down into the cracked ground beneath my feet.

Chains appeared around me, though I could not see them.

I could only feel them, heavy, tight, binding me.

I understood then this was my place.

This was where I belonged.

I had made bombs that killed people.

I had caused suffering and death.

I had taken lives.

Children had died because of devices I built with my own hands.

And this was my judgment.

This was my eternity.

The heat intensified.

The screaming grew louder.

The darkness pressed in closer and I felt something else.

Memories.

Every bomb I had ever made.

Every operation I had supplied, every death that resulted from my work.

I saw their faces.

Civilians caught in explosions.

children, women, old men, people who were just going about their lives when the devices I created tore them apart.

I saw a little girl, maybe 6 years old, killed when a rocket hit near a bus stop.

I saw a young mother, pregnant, caught in an explosion at a checkpoint.

I saw an elderly couple killed in their home when a wall collapsed from a blast.

And I realized something horrible.

I had told myself I was only targeting soldiers, but that had been a lie.

I told myself to sleep at night.

I knew civilians died.

I had always known.

And I had continued anyway.

The guilt was worse than the heat, worse than the darkness, worse than the chains and the screaming and everything else.

The guilt was a living thing that ate at me from the inside.

I cried out, not words, just a wordless cry of anguish and despair.

I cried out for mercy, for forgiveness, for anything.

But there was no answer, just more heat, more darkness, more suffering.

I thought this is forever.

There is no escape, no relief, no end.

Just this always this for eternity.

And that realization was the worst torture of all.

I do not know how long I stayed like that.

Time had no meaning in that place.

It could have been minutes or years or centuries.

There was just the eternal now of suffering.

But then something changed.

A light appeared in the distance.

Small at first, just a pinpoint in the darkness.

But it grew.

It moved closer.

And as it approached, the heat lessened.

The screaming faded.

The darkness receded.

The light was different from the red and orange glow of the fires beneath the ground.

This light was white, pure, clean.

It hurt to look at, but in a different way than the darkness hurt.

This was the pain of seeing something too beautiful, too perfect for eyes accustomed to hell.

The other souls around me scattered.

They moved away from the light as if it burned them worse than the fire.

They fled into the darkness, crying out, but I could not move.

I was frozen there as the light approached.

And then I saw him, a figure in the light, a man, but more than a man.

He radiated power and authority and something else.

Love, overwhelming, incomprehensible love that poured out from him in waves.

I knew who he was immediately without being told, without any doubt.

It was Jesus, not the prophet Jesus I had learned about in Islam.

This was different.

This was God himself in human form.

I could feel it, could sense it in every part of whatever I was.

He walked toward me through that place of torment and everywhere he stepped, the fire went out.

The ground became solid and whole.

The darkness fled.

He stopped in front of me and he looked at me.

His eyes were kind but also full of sorrow.

He looked at me the way a father looks at a son who has made terrible choices.

disappointed, sad, but still loving.

I wanted to speak, to explain, to defend myself, to ask for mercy, but no words would come.

I just stood there or whatever.

Past for standing in that place and looked back at him.

Then he spoke.

His voice was quiet, but it seemed to fill everything.

It was the most beautiful and the most terrible sound I had ever heard.

He said, “It is not yet your time.

” I did not understand.

What did that mean? He raised his hand and I saw the scars there, scars from nails driven through his flesh.

And I saw the same scars on his feet.

And I knew that he had died too, that he had suffered too.

But he had done it willingly.

done it for people like me.

The understanding flooded into me.

This was God who had become human and died to pay for human sins, to pay for my sins.

And I had rejected him.

I had called him just a prophet.

I had denied his sacrifice.

And that denial had brought me here.

Jesus looked at me with those sad loving eyes and said, “You must choose.

Your time to choose is not yet finished, but it will finish soon.

And then your choice will be final.

Images flashed through my mind.

My life, every moment, every choice, every thought and deed and word.

I saw it all from his perspective.

I saw the times he had tried to reach me.

Dreams I had dismissed.

Encounters with Christians I had ignored.

Moments of doubt I had pushed away.

He had been pursuing me my entire life and I had run from him.

I saw the deaths I had caused through a different lens.

Not as casualties of war or collateral damage.

As people, individuals, each one loved by him.

each one a soul he had died for.

And I had cut short their lives without giving them a chance to find him.

The weight of it broke me.

Whatever I was in that place, it broke.

I collapsed though I had no knees to collapse on.

I cried out though I had no voice to cry with.

I wept though I had no eyes to produce tears.

And I begged.

I begged for forgiveness.

I begged for mercy.

I begged for another chance.

Jesus reached down and touched me.

The moment his hand made contact, everything changed.

The pain stopped.

The guilt lifted.

The darkness vanished.

I was surrounded by light and love and peace.

He said, “I died for you.

I died for all, even for you.

My blood covers every sin for those who truly repent, for those who believe, for those who accept.

He showed me more.

He showed me the truth about everything, about creation, about humanity, about God’s plan, about what was coming, about the urgency of the time we were living in.

He said, “Time is short.

My return is near.

Tell them.

Tell all of them.

Muslims, Jews, atheists, everyone.

Tell them that I am the way and the truth and the life.

Tell them that no one comes to the father except through me.

Tell them that religion cannot save them.

Works cannot save them.

Only faith in my sacrifice can save them.

He showed me people I knew, my family, my friends, other fighters.

All of them walking toward the same place I had been.

All of them deceived just as I had been deceived.

All of them thinking they were righteous when they were lost.

The grief overwhelmed me.

I thought of Aliyah, of Tariq and Leila and Omar.

They were on the same path I had been on.

They would end up here too if nothing changed.

I asked him though not with words what I should do, how I could help them, how I could save them.

He said, “You will return.

You will tell them what you have seen.

Many will not believe.

They will call you a liar.

They will threaten you.

They will hate you.

But some will believe.

And for those who believe, it will be worth everything you suffer.

” He told me more about how to find him.

About how simple it really was.

Not complex religious rules and requirements, just faith, just believing that he was who he said he was and that his death paid for sins and that he rose from the dead and was alive.

He said, “I do not want your religious rituals.

I want your heart.

I want relationship.

I want you to know me and love me and follow me.

That is all.

That is everything.

Then he looked at me with such love that I thought I would shatter from the force of it.

He said, “I am giving you mercy.

I am sending you back.

Do not waste this gift.

Do not waste this second chance.

Go and tell them.

Tell them all.

Time is running out.

The light intensified.

It became so bright I could not see anything else.

I felt myself being lifted, being pulled upward.

The opposite of the falling I had experienced before.

Everything spun and swirled.

I heard sounds muffled and distant at first, then growing clearer.

Voices, machines crying.

I felt pain again.

physical pain different from the pain in hell but still pain.

My chest hurt, my head hurt, everything hurt.

But it was the pain of life.

The pain of having a body again.

I became aware of weight, of lying on something, of air moving in and out of lungs, of a heart beating in my chest.

I tried to open my eyes.

The lids were so heavy, but I forced them open.

Bright lights, white ceiling, faces looking down at me.

A man in a white coat shouting in Arabic, nurses rushing around, machines beeping.

I was in a hospital.

I was alive.

Someone was crying.

A woman.

She grabbed my hand.

Aliyah, my wife, she was saying, “You’re awake.

Thank Allah.

You’re awake.

We thought you were dead.

You were dead.

” No pulse, nothing for several minutes.

But you’re alive.

You’re alive.

But I was not thinking about being alive.

I was thinking about what I had seen, about where I had been, about what Jesus had told me.

I was alive, but everything had changed.

Everything.

The hospital room was small and crowded.

Doctors and nurses moved around me, checking machines, taking my pulse, shining lights in my eyes.

They spoke in rapid Arabic.

Their voices filled with confusion and amazement.

I could not focus on them.

My mind was still in that other place, still seeing the faces of the damned, still hearing Jesus’s voice, still feeling the weight of what I had been shown.

Aliyah held my hand tightly.

She was crying and laughing at the same time.

Relief and joy and disbelief all mixed together on her face.

Behind her, I could see other people in the doorway.

My parents, my brothers, all staring at me like I was a ghost.

The doctor, an older man with gray in his beard, kept shaking his head.

He spoke to another doctor in low tones, but I could hear him.

He said, “There is no medical explanation.

He should be dead.

His companions are dead.

The explosion should have killed him instantly.

Even if it didn’t, he had no pulse for at least 4 minutes.

Brain damage should be severe.

” But look at him.

He’s conscious.

He’s alert.

His vitals are strong.

It’s impossible.

But I knew it was not impossible.

It was a miracle.

Jesus had sent me back just as he said he would.

The doctors eventually cleared most people out of the room.

They wanted to run tests.

They said they needed to understand what had happened.

Aliyah refused to leave.

She sat in a chair beside my bed, still holding my hand, still crying softly.

I looked at her, really looked at her, and I saw her differently now.

I saw her as Jesus saw her, a precious soul, a woman he loved and died for, a woman who was following the wrong path and did not know it.

I wanted to tell her everything right then about hell, about Jesus, about the truth.

But something stopped me.

Maybe it was wisdom from God.

Maybe it was fear.

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