11 Year Old Muslim Girl Leads Her Whole Family to Christianity

My name is Amamira Hassan.

I am 13 years old.

I was born in Columbus, Ohio, and I have lived here my whole life.

I go to a regular middle school.

I like math.

I love drawing.

And my favorite food is my mom’s chicken and rice, which she makes with this spice mix she brought from Jordan and refuses to share the recipe for even with her closest friends.

I tell you these small things first because I want you to know that I am a normal girl.

I am not a special person.

I did not grow up in a church.

Nobody came to my house with a Bible when I was little.

No missionary knocked on our door.

Nothing dramatic happened to start any of this.

At least not in the way most people would expect dramatic things to happen.

I was just a little girl growing up in a regular house with a regular family.

And then something happened to me that I still cannot fully explain with my own words.

But I am going to try.

I am going to try my best to tell you everything.

But first, I have to tell you about the house I was born into.

Because to understand what happened to me and what happened to my family, you have to understand where we started.

You have to understand what our life looked like before everything changed.

And I think once you hear it, you will understand why what happened to us was not a small thing.

It was not a simple or easy thing.

It cost us something.

And what came out on the other side of that cost is the whole reason I am sitting here telling you this story today.

My father’s name is Tariq Hassan.

>> Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our sister Amamira Hassan continues her 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.

>> He was born in Ammon, Jordan.

He came to America when he was 24 years old with two suitcases, a little bit of money, and a strong belief that if he worked hard enough, he could build a life here.

He had a degree in engineering from a university in Jordan.

But when he first got to America, that degree did not immediately open the doors he thought it would.

So, he worked wherever he could while he figured things out.

He worked in a warehouse.

He drove for a delivery company for a while.

He learned the way America worked from the inside out, from the ground up.

And slowly over time, things got better for him.

He got a job in his actual field.

He started building the life he had imagined.

He met my mother Nadia through family connections.

She was also Jordanian and she had come to America with her parents when she was a teenager.

My mother grew up here in Columbus, went to school here, and by the time she met my father, she was already comfortable moving between two worlds in a way my father was still learning.

She spoke English without any accent.

She knew American culture, but she also knew who she was.

She had not lost that.

Her family had made sure of that.

They got married and then after a few years they had me and then two years later my brother Yousef was born.

The house I grew up in was warm.

I want to make sure I say that clearly.

We were not an unhappy family.

My parents loved each other and they loved us.

There was always food.

There was always noise and movement and life in our home.

My mother was the kind of woman who could have 10 people over for dinner without any warning and somehow there would be enough food for everyone.

My father worked very hard, sometimes very long hours.

But when he was home, he was present.

He would sit with us.

He would ask about school.

He would tell us stories about Jordan, about his childhood, about his parents and his brothers.

He wanted us to know where we came from.

Even though we were growing up somewhere else, but our home was also clearly and without any confusion, a Muslim home, there was a framed Arabic calligraphy on the wall near the front door.

It said bismillah, which means in the name of God, and it was the first thing you saw when you walked in.

There were prayer rugs folded in the corner of my parents’ room.

My father prayed five times a day and when he was home he did not miss those prayers.

He would stop whatever he was doing, go get the rug, face the direction of Mecca and pray.

As a small child, I used to sometimes sit near the door of the room and watch him.

There was something serious about it, something that felt important and heavy.

Even as a four or 5year-old, I could feel that this was not just a routine to him.

This was real.

This mattered to him deeply.

My mother prayed too, though perhaps not always with the same strict regularity as my father.

But her faith was just as real.

She fasted during Ramadan every year without complaint.

She taught me and my brother how to read the Arabic letters from the Quran.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table with her in the evenings, sounding out the letters, trying to get the pronunciation right, and she would gently correct me without ever making me feel bad for getting it wrong.

She used to say that the words of the Quran were like medicine.

That they were good for the soul.

Even when you did not understand every single word of what you were reading, we were not expected to just recite the words.

We were supposed to feel them.

Ramadan was the biggest part of our year.

Looking back now, I think Ramadan was when our family felt most like itself.

My father would come home early from work during that month.

The house smelled like cooking from the afternoon onwards because my mother would be preparing the food we would eat at sunset when the fast broke.

We would all sit together at the table and my father would make a small prayer and then we would eat.

There was something about that moment breaking the fast together after a whole day of nothing that felt sacred even to me as a child.

I did not have the words for it then.

I just knew that those evenings felt different.

They felt connected.

They felt like we were all holding on to something together.

There was also the community aspect of our faith.

We were not the only Muslim family in Columbus, not by a long way.

There was a mosque about 20 minutes from our house and my father went there for Friday prayers every week.

On aid we would go together as a family all dressed up and there would be hundreds of people there.

Families from Pakistan, from Egypt, from Somalia, from all over all gathered in one place.

As a small child, those aid gatherings were exciting.

There was color and food and people hugging each other and children running around.

I remember feeling proud in those moments.

Proud to belong to something large.

Proud to be part of something that stretched across so many countries and so many faces.

So I want to be honest about something.

I was not unhappy in my faith.

I was not suffering.

I was not secretly miserable and looking for a way out.

I think sometimes when people hear conversion stories, they assume the person must have been in pain or lost or mistreated and that they found something because they needed something to fill a wound.

That was not my story.

My story is different.

And I think that is part of why it is hard to explain and also part of why I believe so strongly that what happened to me was a real and not just emotional.

I was a happy child in a good home.

I had faith.

I had a family.

I had a community.

And still something found me.

Something reached me.

And it was not because I was empty.

It was because I was curious.

And because God, I believe, put that curiosity in me before I was old enough to understand what I was curious about.

I should tell you about school because school is where this whole story really begins to move.

I started kindergarten at a public school near our house.

It was a regular American public school, the kind where the classrooms have alphabet charts on the walls and there are cubbies for your backpack and your teacher is always trying to get you to sit still during carpet time.

I loved school from the very beginning.

I was a social child.

I liked people.

I liked talking.

I liked learning.

I did not experience kindergarten as strange or difficult.

Even though our home life was different from many of my classmates homes, but I noticed things even at 5 years old.

I noticed that some of the things my classmates talked about were things I had no knowledge of.

Christmas was the biggest example.

In December, the whole school changed.

There were decorations.

There was Christmas music playing.

The teachers were excited in a different way.

My classmates talked about what they were going to get for Christmas, what they wanted, what their families did.

I would come home and ask my mother about Christmas, and she would explain to me calmly that we did not celebrate Christmas because we were Muslim, that we had our own holidays, and that our holidays were just as special.

And I accepted that.

It made sense to me as a young child.

I had aid.

My classmates had Christmas.

We had different things.

But even in accepting it, I was curious.

What was the story behind Christmas? Why did it make people so happy? I asked my mother about Jesus because I had heard his name in December.

Conversations at school.

She told me in the way that Muslims tell the story that Jesus was a prophet, a good man, an important prophet actually, one of the most important, but a prophet, a human being, not the son of God, the way Christians believed because God, she
explained, does not have a son.

That is not how we understood God.

God was one.

God was alone.

God had no partners and no children.

That was the foundation of what we believed.

I accepted that too.

I was a child.

You accept what your parents tell you about these things when you are small.

But I kept wondering.

I kept watching.

I kept noticing the way Christmas made people feel and Easter.

And even just the way some of my classmates talked about going to church with their families on Sundays, there was something in how they talked about it.

Not all of them.

Some of them talked about church the way you talk about something boring you have to do.

But a few of them talked about it differently.

A few of them talked about it like it was something they actually looked forward to, something that was part of the best parts of their week.

I filed that away somewhere in my brain without knowing that I was filing it away.

As I got older and moved through elementary school, the differences became more textured and complex, but also more normal to me.

I was used to being slightly on the outside of certain conversations.

Whenever the school had a holiday concert in December, I would participate because it was a school event, but I was aware that the songs being sung were not my songs.

I was aware that the story being told in December was not my story.

I did not feel bad about that.

I just noticed it.

I also noticed something else as I got older.

I noticed that some people looked at me differently when they found out I was Muslim.

After a certain age, there was sometimes a pause, a very brief pause.

When I told someone my name or when they found out about my family, nothing anyone ever said to me was cruel, at least not when I was in elementary school.

But I could feel the pause.

I could feel the moment of adjustment and I understood even as a young child that there were ideas about Muslims in the world.

Ideas that were not always kind and that I was going to have to live inside those ideas without having created them.

My father talked to me and my brother about this.

He sat us down at different points in our childhood and explained that we were going to encounter people who did not understand us.

People who had been told wrong things about who we were and what we believed.

He told us that the best thing we could do was live our lives with honesty and integrity and let our character speak for itself.

He was not bitter when he said these things.

He was practical.

He was preparing us and I appreciated that even though at the time I did not fully understand how complicated that navigation was going to become.

Let me tell you about who I was as a child because I think it matters.

I was a uh talker.

I still am.

I have always been the kind of person who wants to understand things.

Who asks questions when something does not make sense, who is not satisfied with a surface answer when I can tell there is more underneath it.

This is part of my personality that I believe God put in me specifically because it was that particular quality and that restlessness about wanting to understand, wanting to go deeper that ended up being the thing that cracked everything open.

I also had a very active interior life.

I know that sounds like a strange thing for a child to say about herself, but it is true.

From a fairly young age, I spent a lot of time inside my own head.

I thought about big questions.

I thought about why things were the way they were.

I thought about God.

Even when I did not have the language for what I was thinking, I used to lie in bed at night as a seven or 8year-old and think about what God was like.

Not the rules, not the prayers, not the fasting, but the actual being of God.

What God actually was.

Whether God knew me specifically, whether God thought about me the way I thought about things that mattered to me.

In the version of God I had grown up with, God was very large, very powerful, very present in the sense that everything came from God and everything returned to God.

but also in some ways very distant.

In the way I had been taught to relate to God, there was always a sense of enormous distance.

God was above everything, separate from everything, incomprehensibly greater than everything.

You prayed to God.

You submitted to God.

You obeyed God’s laws because they were good laws and because obedience was the correct response to someone.

so much greater than you.

I did not doubt that God existed.

I never doubted that.

From the time I was old enough to understand the idea of God, I was certain that God was real.

That certainty never wavered.

But something else was growing in me alongside that certainty, something I could not name.

For a long time, it was like a question that did not have words yet.

It was somewhere in my chest, not in my head.

It was a feeling more than a thought.

A feeling like, is this it? Is this everything? Is the whole story of what God is and how God relates to me just this? Just rules and prayers and submission.

Is there not something more personal than this? Is there not something that reaches closer? I feel strange saying that because I know it might sound like I am criticizing the faith I grew up in and I do not mean it as a criticism.

I know there are Muslims who have a very deep and personal relationship with God within Islam.

My own parents, especially my father, had something real and genuine in his faith.

I could see it.

What I am describing is something that was specific to me, specific to how I was wired, specific to the kind of person I was.

I was a child who needed to feel personally known by God.

I was a child who needed relationship more than religion, though I did not know that was what I needed.

I just felt the lack of something without being able to describe the shape of what was missing.

And that lack, that quiet interior hunger was what God was going to use.

Not my suffering, not a crisis, not even a dramatic event.

Just a quiet, persistent question in a little girl’s chest.

Just a heart that was already leaning toward something before it knew what it was leaning toward.

There is one more thing I want to tell you about in this first part of my story and it is something that I have thought about many times since everything happened.

There was a period when I was about 8 years old where I was very sick.

It was nothing lifethreatening but at the time it felt enormous to me.

I had a bad infection in my lungs and I had to stay home from school for almost three weeks.

I was feverish and uncomfortable and I spent most of those weeks in my bed.

My mother took care of me.

She barely left my side during the worst of it.

She would sit next to me and read to me or just be there.

And during the nights when the fever was high and I was scared and unable to sleep, I would call out for her and she would come.

There was one particular night where I remember feeling very frightened.

Not about dying because I did not really think I was dying, but frightened in that formless way that sick children feel frightened in the middle of the night.

frightened of the darkness and the feeling of my body not being right and the distance between me and normal.

And I remember lying there and saying something in my head that I am not sure was a proper prayer.

It was not in Arabic.

It was not in any formal prayer language.

It was just me in my head talking to God the way you talk to someone in the room with you.

I said something like, “Please, I need you to be here right now.

” And something happened.

I cannot prove it.

I cannot explain it scientifically.

But something in the room changed or something in me changed.

There was a warmth that came that was not from my blankets.

There was a quiet that came into my chest that was not from the medicine.

And I felt very clearly not alone.

I felt heard.

I felt close to something bigger than me in a way that was not frightening, but was actually the most comforting thing I had ever experienced up to that point in my 8 years of life.

I did not tell anyone about that night for a very long time.

Not my mother, not my father.

I kept it inside.

But I thought about it often.

I thought about it because it did not match the version of God I had been taught in a precise way.

In the version I had been taught, God was great and God was merciful.

Yes.

But what I felt that night was something even more intimate than mercy from a great distance.

What I felt that night was presence.

Close, warm, personal presence.

I did not know then what to call that or who that presence was.

I just knew it was real.

I knew it happened and I carried that knowledge with me through the next couple of years as I kept growing.

I kept wondering and kept being the curious, interior, questionfilled little girl that I was.

Looking back now, I believe that night was not random.

I believe something was already at work in my life long before I ever opened a Bible or stepped inside a church or heard a proper sermon about Jesus.

I believe the God who is close was already reaching toward me when I was 8 years old in a sick bed in Columbus, Ohio.

I believe he answered a prayer I prayed to him without even knowing his full name yet.

And I believe that the warmth I felt that night was the same presence that would later show itself to me so clearly and completely that I would not be able to walk away from it.

Not even if I wanted to.

I did not want to.

That is the thing.

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