My name is Resa Farhadi.

I was a philosophy professor at a university in Thran.

That sounds simple when I say it now, but back then those words meant everything to me.

They were my identity, my pride, my entire world.

I grew up in Thran in a middle-class family.

My father worked for the government.

My mother stayed home and raised me and my two sisters.

We were Muslim like everyone around us.

We observed Ramadan.

We celebrated aid.

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Religion was something in the background of our lives.

It was there like the mountains around Tran, always present but not always noticed.

When I was young, my father made sure I learned to recite portions of the Quran in Arabic.

I spent hours repeating verses after the imam at our local mosque.

I memorized the sounds without fully understanding the meaning.

Arabic was not my language.

Persian was my language.

But this was what good Muslim boys did.

So I did it.

I was obedient.

I wanted to make my father proud.

School came easily to me.

I loved reading, loved ideas, loved the feeling of understanding something complex.

When other boys played football in the streets, I was often inside with a book.

My mother worried I spent too much time alone.

My father was pleased I was serious about my studies.

By the time I finished secondary school, I knew I wanted to study philosophy.

Something about the great questions drew me.

What is truth? What is justice? How should we live? In these questions felt important in a way that other things did not.

I attended university in Thran.

The philosophy department was small but well respected.

I studied Plato and Aristotle.

I studied Ibanscina and Algazali.

I learned about Western philosophy and Islamic philosophy.

I wrote papers comparing different systems of thought.

My professors praised my work.

They said I had a sharp mind that I could see connections others missed.

This praise fed something in me.

I wanted more of it.

Uh after completing my doctorate, I was offered a teaching position at the same university.

I was 28 years old.

I felt I had arrived at the life I was meant to live.

I had an office with my name on the door.

I had students who called me Dr.

Farhadi.

I had colleagues who respected my opinions.

I taught three courses each semester and spent my free time writing articles for academic journals.

My classroom was on the third floor of the humanities building.

It had large windows that looked out over the campus.

In spring, I could see the trees blooming.

In winter, I could see snow on the Albor’s mountains in the distance.

I loved that classroom.

I loved standing at the front, asking questions, watching my students think.

I was good at making them see things from different angles.

I would present one philosophical position, then present the opposite, then ask them to defend or criticize each one.

Critical thinking, I called it, the ability to examine ideas without fear.

Most of my students were good young people.

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Some were there because they loved ideas like I did.

Others were there because their parents wanted them to have a university degree.

A few were lazy and only wanted to pass exams.

But many of them truly engaged with the material.

They would stay after class to ask questions.

They would come to my office hours to debate points from the lectures.

These were the students who made teaching worthwhile.

And I married when I was 31.

Her name was Mina.

She was a teacher at a primary school.

We met through mutual friends.

She was kind and intelligent, though not particularly interested in philosophy.

She thought my work was too abstract, too removed from real life.

But she supported me.

We had a comfortable apartment not far from the university.

We had dinner with friends on weekends.

We visited our families for holidays.

We talked about having children, though we were not in a hurry.

I continued to pray occasionally, mainly on Fridays at the mosque near our apartment.

I fasted during Ramadan, though I will be honest and say I did not enjoy it.

I gave to charity when the mosque collected funds.

I considered myself a Muslim in the way many educated people in Thran did.

I respected the tradition.

I identified with the culture, but I did not spend much time thinking deeply about what I actually believed.

Islam was part of being Iranian, part of the fabric of society.

You did not question it any more than you questioned the air you breathed.

There were rules of course, unspoken rules about what you could say and what you could not.

In my field, you could discuss almost any western philosopher.

You could critique Kant or Hume or Nietze.

You could debate the existence of objective morality.

But you had to be careful when it came to Islam.

You could discuss Islamic philosophy as an intellectual tradition.

You could compare Al Gazali with Thomas Aquinas, but you could not question whether the Quran was truly from God.

You could not suggest that Muhammad might have been mistaken about anything.

These topics were off limits.

I accepted these boundaries without much thought.

They seemed reasonable to me.

Every society has its sacred things, I told myself.

In Iran, Islam was sacred.

That was simply the reality.

I had plenty of other topics to explore.

Why would I need to challenge the one thing that was forbidden? sometimes late at night and I would have small moments of doubt, not about Islam specifically, but about belief in general.

I would look at the stars from our balcony and wonder if there really was a God watching over everything.

I would think about all the suffering in the world and wonder why God allowed it.

But these thoughts were fleeting.

I would push them away and go to bed.

Doubt was uncomfortable.

It was easier not to dwell on it.

In my seventh year of teaching, the department head asked me to develop a new course.

In the university wanted to expand our offerings in world philosophy and comparative studies.

He suggested I create a course on comparative religion and ethics.

The idea was to examine how different religious traditions approached moral questions.

Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism.

We would look at what each tradition taught about right and wrong and compare their approaches.

I agreed to develop the course.

It seemed like an interesting challenge.

I had studied Islamic philosophy extensively but I had only basic knowledge of other religious traditions.

I would need to do significant reading and preparation.

I requested a reduced teaching load for one semester so I could focus on developing the curriculum.

I started with Buddhism.

I read about the four noble truths and the eight-fold path.

I found it interesting but foreign.

Then I moved to Hinduism studying the Bhagavad Gita and the concept of dharma.

Again interesting deep but it felt distant from my own experience.

Then I began preparing the section on Christianity.

I ordered a Bible in Persian translation online.

When it arrived I felt slightly nervous having it in my apartment.

This was foolish, I told myself.

I was a university professor doing academic research.

There was nothing wrong with owning a Bible for scholarly purposes.

Still, I put it on my bookshelf between other books where it would not be immediately visible.

I decided to read the Bible alongside the Quran so I could make proper comparisons.

I wanted to understand what Christians believed and how it differed from what Muslims believed.

I approached it the way I approached any academic project with intellectual curiosity but emotional detachment.

This was research nothing more.

I began with the Gospel of Matthew.

I had certain expectations about what I would find.

I expected to see Jesus portrayed as a prophet as he is in the Quran.

I expected moral teachings similar to what I already knew.

I expected to find some interesting points for comparison and then move on.

What I found surprised me.

The first thing that struck me was how the text presented Jesus not primarily as a teacher of laws but as someone claiming to be the son of God.

This was familiar to me as Islamic criticism of Christianity.

We were taught that Christians had corrupted the original message that they had elevated a prophet to the status of deity.

But reading the text itself, I saw that this claim was there from the beginning.

It was not added later.

The Gospels presented Jesus making claims about himself that were either true or blasphemous.

There was no middle ground.

I read the sermon on the mount.

I read it once, then read it again.

Something about it would not let me go.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are the meek.

This was not what I expected.

Where was the teaching about political power or military conquest? Where was the instruction about religious law and ritual purity? Instead, there was this focus on the heart, on internal transformation, on a kingdom that was not of this world.

Then I came to the teaching about loving your enemies.

I stopped reading.

I went back and read it again.

Love your enemies.

Pray for those who persecute you.

This was completely different from anything in the Quran.

The Quran taught justice.

We taught that you could defend yourself against enemies.

Taught that there were times when fighting was necessary.

But this teaching of Jesus went beyond justice.

It went to something else entirely.

Something that seemed almost impossible.

I thought about my own enemies.

Not that I had many, but there were people I disliked.

a colleague who had criticized my work unfairly.

A neighbor who had complained about noise from our apartment.

Could I love them? Could I pray for them? The idea seemed absurd.

Yet something about it would not leave my mind.

I continued reading over the following weeks.

I read during my lunch breaks in my office.

I read at night after Mina had gone to sleep.

I read in coffee shops on weekends.

I took notes in a separate notebook that I kept in my desk drawer at the university.

I told myself I was being thorough in my research.

I told myself I was simply being a good scholar.

But something was changing and I knew it.

This was no longer purely academic.

The words were reaching someplace inside me that I had not known existed.

I read about Jesus healing the sick.

I read about him eating with tax collectors and sinners.

I read about him touching lepers when everyone else avoided them.

I read about him forgiving a woman caught in adultery when the religious leaders wanted to stone her.

Over and over, I saw the same pattern.

Grace extended to people who did not deserve it.

Love given to those who had no claim to it.

Forgiveness offered before it was even requested.

This was different from the God I had known.

The God I had been taught about was just, and justice meant you received what you earned.

Good deeds were rewarded.

Bad deeds were punished.

There was a scale and your fate depended on which side was heavier.

But this Jesus spoke of a God who was not merely just but extravagantly merciful.

A God who ran to meet the prodigal son.

A God who sought the one lost sheep while 99 were safe.

I found myself comparing passages between the Bible and the Quran.

Both spoke of God’s mercy.

But the nature of that mercy seemed different.

In the Quran, Allah’s mercy was great, but it was conditional.

It was for those who submitted, who followed the straight path, who earned it through obedience.

In the Bible, God’s mercy seemed to overflow boundaries.

It seemed to be given not because people deserved it but simply because God chose to give it.

This troubled me deeply.

If the Christian scriptures were correct, then I had misunderstood the nature of God my entire life.

But if the Quran was correct, then the Bible was teaching something false.

Both could not be fully true.

I had spent years teaching my students to examine claims critically, to follow evidence wherever it led.

Now I was facing a question I had never wanted to ask.

What if I had been wrong? I started having trouble sleeping.

I would lie in bed while Mina slept beside me, staring at the ceiling, my mind racing.

I would think about the passages I had read that day.

I would think about the implications if they were true.

I would think about what it would mean for my life, my work, my family, my country.

I lost my appetite.

Mina noticed and asked if I was feeling unwell.

I told her I was stressed about preparing the new course.

This was true, but not in the way she understood.

I was losing weight.

I was distracted during conversations.

I would be talking to someone and realize I had not heard what they said because my mind was elsewhere.

The course was scheduled to begin the next semester.

I was running out of time to finalize the curriculum, but I could not seem to finish my preparation.

Every time I tried to write lecture notes on Christianity, I would get pulled back into reading more.

I needed to understand.

I needed to know if what I was reading could possibly be true.

I read the Gospel of John.

I read Paul’s letters to the Romans and the Ephesians.

I read the book of Acts.

The early Christians had faced persecution, imprisonment, death.

Yet they had joy.

They had something worth dying for.

What did they have that I did not? The answer kept appearing in the text.

They had Jesus.

Not just knowledge about Jesus, but a relationship with him.

They spoke of him as if he were alive, as if he were present with them.

They prayed to him.

They worshiped him.

They said he had risen from the dead and was seated at the right hand of God.

The resurrection was the claim that challenged everything.

If Jesus had not risen from the dead, then Christianity was false and I could dismiss it.

But if he had risen, then his claims about himself were validated.

Then he truly was who he said he was.

Then everything changed.

I tried to examine the resurrection accounts with the same critical eye I would apply to any historical claim.

I read the different gospel accounts.

I noted the differences in details.

I looked for contradictions that would undermine the credibility.

But what I found was the opposite.

The accounts had the ring of eyewitness testimony.

They included details that would be embarrassing if you were making up a story.

Women were the first witnesses when women’s testimony was not valued in that culture.

The disciples were portrayed as confused and doubting, not as heroes who immediately believed the these were not the marks of legend.

These were the marks of truth.

I did not want to believe it.

believing it would cost me everything.

But the evidence kept pulling me toward a conclusion I was not ready to accept.

One evening, I came home from the university and Mina told me my father had called.

He wanted to know if I would come to the mosque with him on Friday.

It had been several weeks since I had gone.

I told Mina I would call him back.

I sat on our couch and put my head in my hands.

How could I go to the mosque and pray when I was reading the Bible in secret every night? How could I bow toward Mecca when I was beginning to believe that Jesus Christ was Lord? I was living a double life and the strain was becoming unbearable.

At the university, I was Dr.

Farhadi, respected philosophy professor, Muslim, Iranian.

At home in my study late at night, I was a seeker, a doubter, someone standing at a crossroads with no idea which path to take.

The semester began.

I started teaching the comparative religion course.

We covered Buddhism first, then Hinduism.

My lectures were adequate but not inspired.

I was going through the motions, waiting for the section on Christianity, dreading it and longing for it at the same time.

When we finally reached the Christianity section, I felt my hands shaking slightly as I prepared my notes.

I decided to present the material as objectively as possible.

I explained Christian beliefs about the Trinity, the incarnation on the atonement, the resurrection.

I presented Islamic objections to these beliefs.

I tried to be fair to both sides.

During one class session, we were discussing the Christian concept of grace versus the Islamic concept of good works.

A student raised his hand and asked if I thought one approach was better than the other.

I paused.

This was the kind of question I usually deflected.

I would normally say something about how each tradition had its own internal logic and we were here to understand not to judge.

But something in me rebelled against giving that answer.

These students had come to learn to think critically.

They had come to pursue truth.

How could I teach them to pursue truth while I myself was running from it? I looked at the student.

I looked around the classroom at 25 young faces waiting for my response.

And I said something I had not planned to say.

Truth should never fear investigation.

The room went quiet.

I saw some students nodding slowly.

I saw others shift uncomfortably in their seats.

I saw one student in the back row narrow his eyes.

I continued.

I said that if Islam was true, it could withstand any questions we brought to it.

I said that if we were afraid to examine our beliefs, perhaps we did not trust them as much as we claimed.

I said that God, if he exists, is big enough to handle our doubts and our questions.

Even as I spoke, I knew I was crossing a line.

There was a difference between teaching students to think critically about Plato and teaching them to think critically about their own religion.

I could see in some of their faces that they understood what I was really saying.

I was not just talking about abstract truth.

I was talking about the truth of Islam itself.

The class ended.

Students filed out.

Most said nothing.

A few thanked me for an interesting discussion.

One student, the one who had been sitting in the back, remained seated when he looked at me for a long moment, then gathered his things and left without a word.

I stood at the front of the empty classroom and felt a wave of fear wash over me.

What had I done? Why had I said that? I could have deflected the question.

I could have remained safely in the realm of academic neutrality, but I had not.

I had spoken from my heart, from the place where my own questions were tearing me apart.

I packed my lecture notes into my bag and walked to my office.

The hallway seemed longer than usual.

I felt exposed, as if everyone could see the thoughts I was hiding.

I reached my office, closed the door, and sat at my desk.

I pulled out the notebook where I had been writing my reflections on the Bible.

I stared at the pages filled with my handwriting, questions, and observations, and prayers I had not known I was praying.

I thought about my father who prayed five times a day without question.

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