Grand Imam of Mecca Confesses Live on TV Jesus Appeared to Me

Grand Imam of Mecca Confesses Live on TV Jesus Appeared to Me 

I stood at the holiest microphone in Islam and called millions to prayer five times a day for 30 years.

Then Jesus appeared to me in the middle of the night and everything I thought I knew about God collapsed at my feet.

The men who gave me that microphone are now calling for my death.

But I am still standing because the one who saved me is stronger than any court, any crowd or any fatwa they can issue against me.

My name is Faris Alzahani.

I was born in the city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holiest city in the entire Muslim world.

I am telling this story from an undisclosed location somewhere in Europe.

And I am telling it because Jesus told me to.

There is a kind of man in Saudi Arabia that the outside world rarely sees or understands.

He is not a prince.

He is not a businessman with oil contracts or a general with an army behind him.

He is something older and more powerful than any of those things.

He is a man of God or at least he believes he is.

I was raised to be that man.

My father, Sheikh Hamdan al- Zaharani was a respected scholar at the Grand Mosque in Mecca.

He had memorized the entire Quran by the age of 12.

He could recite Islamic law from memory for hours without stopping.

He smelled of rose water and old books.

and he walked through the streets of Mecca with a quiet dignity that made strangers step aside without knowing why.

Everyone who saw him knew that he carried something serious inside him, something heavy and holy.

My mother Fatima came from a family of scholars as well.

Her grandfather had been a judge in the Islamic courts during the time of King Abdulaziz.

She prayed every prayer on time without exception.

She fasted not just during Ramadan but on many extra days throughout the year.

She spoke softly and rarely.

But when she did speak, everyone in the room listened.

She told me from the time I could understand words that I had been born with a special purpose.

She told me that God had chosen our family to serve him and that I was the one who would carry that calling furthest.

I believed her completely.

Growing up in Mecca is unlike growing up anywhere else on earth.

The city exists for one reason and one reason only.

It is the center of the Muslim world.

It is the direction that over a billion people face when they pray.

It is the destination of millions of pilgrims every year who travel from every country on the planet to walk around the Cabba and ask God for mercy.

The streets of Mecca are filled with the sound of prayer 24 hours a day.

The call to prayer echoes off the mountains surrounding the city five times every single day without fail.

I grew up breathing that atmosphere.

I grew up feeling chosen by it.

By the time I was 10 years old, I had memorized the entire Quran.

My father stood me up in front of the scholars at the mosque and had me recite from memory while they listened with serious faces and nodding heads.

When I finished, they praised my father and told him that his son was going to be someone special.

My father placed his hand on my head and I felt the weight of expectation settle onto my shoulders like a heavy robe.

I did not mind it.

I wanted it.

I had been trained to want it.

My education was rigorous in ways that would be difficult to explain to someone who grew up in America or Europe.

I was studying Islamic Jewish prudence at an age when most boys in other countries were playing video games.

I was studying Arabic grammar and classical poetry and the history of the early Muslim community.

At the same time, I was learning mathematics.

My teachers were old men with long beards and sharp eyes who did not believe in wasting a single hour of a young scholar’s time on anything that was not directly connected to God and his law.

I loved it.

I want you to understand that I was not a reluctant student forced into religion by a demanding family.

I genuinely loved the learning.

I loved the beauty of the Arabic language.

I loved the structure and certainty of Islamic law.

I loved the feeling of walking into the Grand Mosque and knowing that I belong there in a way that most people never get to belong anywhere.

At the age of 22, I was accepted into the most prestigious Islamic university in Saudi Arabia.

I studied there for six years under scholars who were considered among the finest Islamic minds in the world.

I studied the Quran and its interpretation.

I studied the hadith, the recorded sayings and actions of the prophet Muhammad.

I studied Islamic history and theology and comparative religion.

I graduated with honors and received my degree with a ceremony attended by senior religious officials who shook my hand and told me that my father’s prayers had been answered.

My career inside the religious establishment of Saudi Arabia moved quickly after that.

I became a teacher at one of the major Islamic institutes in Mecca.

Then I was appointed as a prayer leader at a mosque in the northern district of the city.

Then I was promoted to a senior position within the administration of the grand mosque itself.

Each step felt like the natural unfolding of the destiny my mother had told me about since childhood.

By the time I was 40 years old, I had been appointed as one of the senior imams of the Grand Mosque in Mecca.

One of the men whose voice goes out over the speakers and fills the holiest space in Islam five time every day.

one of the men who leads the prayer for the millions of pilgrims who pour through those doors every year from every corner of the earth.

I want you to understand what that position means.

In the Muslim world, being an imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca is not just a job.

It is a statement about who you are before God and before the entire community of believers.

It carries a weight of a spiritual authority that is almost impossible to describe.

When I stood at that microphone and my voice went out across the mosque and through the speakers that carried it to every corner of the city, I felt like I was exactly where God had always intended me to be.

I had no doubts.

I had no questions.

I had only certainty.

That certainty would be the most dangerous thing I ever possessed.

You cannot understand what happened to me later without understanding what I was preaching in those years.

You cannot understand the distance I traveled unless you know where I started.

I was not a gentle imam who spoke only about love and mercy.

I was a serious man who believed that Islam was the final and complete revelation of God to humanity.

I believed that the Quran was the literal word of God, perfect and unchangeable.

I believe that the prophet Muhammad was the seal of all the prophets and that no messenger from God would ever come after him.

I believe that Christianity had been corrupted from its original form and that the Bible as it existed today was a distorted version of the original message that Jesus had brought.

I preached these things clearly and without apology because I believed them with my entire heart.

I preached that the concept of the trinity was a form of idolatry.

I preached that calling Jesus the son of God was one of the most serious theological errors a human being could make.

I preached that the crucifixion as Christians understood it had not happened the way they said.

I cited the verse from the Quran that says the enemies of Jesus only thought they had killed him.

I use this verse in sermon after sermon to argue that the foundation of Christian faith was built on a misunderstanding.

I was not violent in my preaching.

I want to make that clear.

I never called for harm against Christians or Jews or anyone else.

The religious establishment I was part of had rules about such things and I followed those rules carefully.

But I was a sharp I was intellectually aggressive.

I used my knowledge of comparative religion to systematically dismantle what I saw as the errors of other faiths.

I believed I was doing a service to truth.

I believed I was protecting the people who listen to me from dangerous theological mistakes.

I also preached about the importance of Islamic governance.

I was not a political radical in the way that word is usually used in the west.

I did not support terrorism or violence.

But I did believe that Islamic law was the ideal system for ordering human society and that the secular western model of governance was fundamentally flawed because it left God out of the equation.

I preached that Muslims had an obligation to support the establishment of societies governed by the principles of the Quran.

These ideas were not considered extreme within the circles I moved in.

They were mainstream.

They were what serious religious scholars believed and taught.

The men who appointed me to my position agreed with everything I preached.

The religious establishment of Saudi Arabia nodded along with my sermons.

I was praised for my clarity and my thoroughess and my willingness to address difficult topics without shying away from them.

I was 45 years old when I was appointed to a position that I can only describe as the peak of everything I had worked toward my entire life.

I was made the grandm of the grand mosque, the lead prayer leader, the senior religious voice at the center of the Muslim world.

It is a position with no direct equivalent in any other religion.

If you want an imperfect comparison for a western audience, imagine combining the pope of the Catholic Church with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the chief rabbi of Israel and then placing that person at the most sacred site of all three religions combined.

That is something like what it meant to be the Grandm of Mecca.

My face appeared on television screens across the Muslim world during Ramadan when the prayers from the Grand Mosque were broadcast live to every country on earth.

Letters arrived at the mosque from Muslims in America, Europe, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, telling me how much my voice meant to them.

How hearing me lead the prayer connected them to God in ways they could not describe.

how my sermons had strengthened their faith and helped them through the hardest moments of their lives.

I read those letters and I felt the weight of what I was carrying.

Millions of people were listening to my voice.

Millions of people were being shaped by what I said.

I believed that every word I spoke from that position was in direct service to God.

I believe that my appointment to this role was the fulfillment of the destiny my mother had spoken over me as a child.

I was wrong about so many things, but I did not know it yet.

The doubts when they came came slowly.

They did not announce themselves.

They crept in through the back door of my mind during quiet moments when I was alone.

They came when I was reading late at night in my private study.

They came when I was sitting in the early morning hours before the first call to prayer.

in that strange silence between darkness and light when a man’s thoughts go places they would not normally go.

They started as small questions.

Questions I would push away quickly because I did not want to examine them too closely.

Questions like why despite all my prayer and all my study and all my years of sincere devotion, did I sometimes feel like I was talking to a ceiling rather than to God? Why did I sometimes stand at the most sacred microphone in Islam and feel completely empty inside? Why did the certainty that I preached to others so confidently sometimes feel thinner and more fragile when I was alone with my own thoughts? I told myself these were
tests from God.

I told myself that doubt was a weapon of the enemy and that the right response was to push harder into study on prayer and service.

I told myself that feelings were unreliable and that faith was not supposed to be based on feelings.

Anyway, I doubled my prayer.

I fasted more.

I studied more.

The questions did not go away.

They just got quieter for a while and then louder again.

It happened in the month of Ramadan, which is deeply significant to me because Ramadan is supposed to be the holiest month of the Islamic year.

It is the month when the Quran was revealed.

It is the month of fasting and prayer and extra devotion.

It is the month when Muslims believe the gates of heaven are open and the gates of hell are locked.

It is the month when a sincere believer is supposed to feel closest to God.

I had been feeling the opposite.

That year’s Ramadan had been brutal for me internally even though nothing on the outside showed it.

I had led the nightly prayers at the Grand Mosque with my usual precision and power.

Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims packed the mosque every night during that month to hear the long Quran recitations that are a tradition of Ramadan prayers.

My voice carried through the speakers and out across the courtyard and into the streets beyond.

People wept when I recited.

They raised their hands.

They called out to God.

Everything looked exactly the way it was supposed to look.

But inside me, something was dying.

I could not explain it then and I can barely explain it now.

It was like watching a fire go out.

Not all at once, one call at a time, one ember at a time until you look at the place where the fire used to be and all you see is cold gray ash.

On the 27th night of Ramadan, which is considered the holiest night of the year, the night when Muslims believe the Quran was first revealed to the prophet Muhammad, I finished leading the night prayer and returned to my private chamber inside the mosque complex.

My assistants prepared tea for me and I dismissed them early because I wanted to be alone.

I sat in my chair and I opened the Quran intending to read and meditate as I always did on that holy night but I could not read.

I stared at the page and the words blurred before my eyes not because of any physical problem with my vision because something else was happening inside me that was making it impossible to focus on anything else.

I closed the Quran and I placed it carefully on the table in front of me.

I sat in the silence of that room.

And for the first time in my life, I allowed the questions I had been suppressing for years to rise all the way to the surface.

I did not push them back down.

I let them come.

Is any of this real? Is God actually there? Or have I been speaking into empty air my entire life? Have I been serving truth or have I been serving an institution? The questions felt like a collapse happening inside my chest.

61 years of certainty crumbling
all at once under the weight of their own honesty.

I got up from my chair and I walked to the window and I looked out over the courtyard of the grand mosque.

The cabba was there in the center wrapped in its black cloth lit by the lights of the mosque surrounding it.

Pilgrims were still circling it even at that late hour moving in slow steady circles the way they always moved the way they had been moving for 14 centuries.

And I looked at that scene which should have filled me with awe and peace and I felt absolutely nothing.

I went back to my chair and I sat down and I did something I had never done before in my life.

I prayed a prayer that was not Islamic in its structure.

It was not a formal prayer with the correct Arabic words and the proper physical positions.

It was just a man talking.

I said out loud in that empty room speaking to whoever might be listening.

I said, “If you are real, show yourself to me.

I have given my entire life to serving you, and I do not know if you are there.

If you are real, please let me know.

” Then I sat in the silence and waited.

I do not know how long I sat there.

The tea went cold in front of me.

The sounds from the courtyard faded as the night grew later, and the pilgrims began to leave.

At some point, my head fell forward and I slipped into sleep in my chair without intending to.

And that is when it happened.

I became aware that I was standing somewhere, not sitting in my chair, standing.

The ground beneath my feet was solid, but I could not tell what it was made of.

There was light everywhere, but it did not come from any source I could identify.

It was not the light of the sun or of electric bulbs.

It was more like the air itself was made of light.

The kind of light that warms you all the way through.

Not just on the surface of your skin, but down into your bones and into the parts of yourself that have no physical location.

I was not afraid.

That is the first thing I need to say.

I was not afraid at all, which was strange because what I was seeing and experiencing should have been terrifying.

Instead, I felt a peace so deep that it made me realize I had never actually experienced peace before in my entire life.

Everything I had called peace before that moment was just the temporary absence of anxiety.

This was something else entirely.

This was the real thing, the original, the source.

A figure was walking toward me from within the light.

He was dressed simply, white robes that caught the light and held it.

He walked with a calm and deliberate pace.

The walk of someone who is never rushed because they exist outside of time.

As he came closer, I could see his face and I cannot describe it in a way that will satisfy you because the human language does not have adequate words for what I saw.

It was a face filled with love of a quality that has no earthly parallel.

Not sentimental love, not affectionate love, a love that was structural like gravity, a love that was simply the nature of the universe itself.

He stopped a few feet in front of me and I knew who he was.

I do not know how I knew.

There was no announcement, no sign in the sky, no voice from heaven declaring his name.

I simply looked at him and knew with every cell of my body that I was standing in front of Jesus.

The one I had preached about for 30 years as a prophet and nothing more.

The one I had told millions of people was not divine.

The one whose followers I had told with certainty were mistaken in their deepest beliefs.

He looked at me.

He said my name.

He said fairies.

He said it quietly, the way a father says the name of a child who has been away for a very long time and has finally come home.

I fell to my knees, not because I decided to.

My legs simply gave way beneath me, the way legs give way when they encounter something their muscles were never designed to support.

I was on my knees on the ground before him, and I was shaking.

He reached out and placed his hand on my head.

And the warmth that moved through me from that touch was the warmth of the sun after a long winter multiplied by a thousand.

Then he began to show me things.

He showed me the sermons I had preached.

He did not show them to me the way I remembered them through my own eyes.

Feeling the power of my own voice and the response of the crowd.

He showed them to me through the eyes of people who had been listening.

He showed me a young man in London who had come to Islam sincerely and who had heard one of my sermons about Christians being misguided and had used that sermon to justify cutting off his relationship with his Christian mother who had loved him his whole life.

I saw that woman sitting alone at a kitchen table in an apartment somewhere in England looking at a photograph of her son are crying silently because he would no longer return her calls.

Jesus showed me a woman in Detroit, Michigan, who had been quietly reading a Bible in secret for 2 years, drawn to something in the story of Jesus that she could not explain.

She had come across one of my lectures online about why the Christian understanding of Jesus was a theological error.

She had watched the entire lecture and by the end she had closed her Bible and put it in a box and placed the box at the back of her closet.

She walked away from the door she had been standing at for 2 years.

I watched her do it.

I watched the door close.

He showed me face after face after face.

People I had never met in countries I had never visited.

People whose spiritual journeys had been blocked or redirected or shut down because of my words, my very confident, very sincere, very wrong words.

I want to be careful here.

Jesus did not show me these things to torture me.

He showed them to me with the same love in his eyes that had been there from the beginning.

He was not condemning me.

He was helping me see clearly.

Perhaps for the first time in my life, he was showing me the difference between certainty and truth, between sincerity and accuracy.

Then he spoke.

He said, “Feris, you have been guarding a door and telling people it leads nowhere.

But I am the door.

I am the way and the truth and the life.

No one comes to the father except through me.

I recognized those words.

I had studied them as a Christian text many times.

Always through the lens of reputation, always looking for the flaw in the argument.

And now the person who who had spoken those words was standing in front of me, saying them again.

And I had absolutely no reputation left in me.

I looked at his hands.

I saw the scars on his wrists.

Two marks, one on each wrist, perfectly symmetrical.

The kind of marks that are made by nails driven through flesh and bone.

The marks of the crucifixion that I had preached had not happened the way Christians said.

I looked at those scars and I understood something in a way that bypassed every argument I had ever made or heard.

Those scars were real.

They were the signature of a love there.

They were the signature of a love so incomprehensible that a God had chosen to die so that a sinner like me would not have to.

I broke completely.

I wept with a violence that I had never allowed myself in 61 years of carefully controlled public dignity.

I was not the grandm anymore.

I was not a scholar or a preacher or a senior religious official.

I was a man on his knees before the truth he had been running from his whole life.

Completely undone and completely held at the same time.

I told Jesus I was sorry.

I told him I was sorry for every sermon I had preached against him.

I told him I was sorry for every door I had helped close.

I told him I was sorry for 30 years of speaking with confidence about things I did not actually understand.

He looked at me with those eyes full of that love and he said something I will carry until the day I leave this earth for good.

He said, “Faris, I know and I forgive you.

Now stand up and tell the truth.

” Then the light began to shift.

The warmth began to slowly fade like the last minutes of sunset.

I could feel myself being pulled back toward the world I had come from, back toward the chair in the chamber and the cold cup of tea and the closed Quran on the table.

I opened my eyes.

The room was exactly the way I had left it.

The tea was cold.

The Quran was on the table.

Through the window, I could see the first gray light of the pre-dawn appearing above the rooftops of Mecca.

It was almost time for the morning call to prayer.

The call to prayer that I was supposed to give in less than an hour.

I sat in that chair for a long time without moving.

My hands were shaking in my lap.

My face was wet.

I looked around the room that I had sat in for over 15 years.

The private chamber of the Grand Imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and I felt like a complete stranger inside it.

Everything had changed in the space of a dream that was not a dream.

I stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the cabba one more time.

Then I did something that was probably visible on the security cameras that covered the courtyard.

I bowed my head and I said quietly for the first time in my life a prayer in the name of Jesus.

Then I went and gave the morning call to prayer.

Nobody knew that the man calling them to prayer that morning was a different man from the one who had given the call the night before.

I lived with the secret for four months.

Four months of giving the call to prayer five times a day while carrying the knowledge that something fundamental had shifted inside me.

That was four months of leading Friday sermons while secretly reading a Bible that a trusted Christian contact had obtained for me at enormous personal risk.

4 months of being publicly the most visible Muslim religious figure in the world while privately sitting with Christians that would destroy that identity completely if they ever came to light.

The Bible changed everything further.

I read it with the same rigorous attention I had given to Islamic scholarship my whole life.

I was not a naive man encountering scripture for the first time.

I was a trained religious scholar with decades of experience studying sacred texts.

And what I found in the Bible was not what I had preached about for 30 years.

I had told people the Bible was corrupted.

That the original message of Jesus had been distorted beyond recognition.

But as I read, what I found was a coherent and internally consistent account of a man who claimed to be the son of God and who backed that claim up with a life and a death and a resurrection that changed the history of the world.

I found the sermon on the mount and felt the words landing in me like something I had been hungry for without knowing it.

I found the story of the prodigal son and wept for an hour alone in my study because I understood exactly who the prodigal son was.

I found the account of the resurrection and I thought about the scars on the wrists I had seen in my dream.

I contacted an underground Christian pastor in Riyad through a chain of intermediaries so careful and so cautious that it took nearly 3 weeks to complete.

His name is one I will not share because his safety depends on his anonymity.

He was an Egyptian man who had converted to Christianity 15 years earlier and had been quietly and secretly serving a small house church ever since.

When he was first approached about my situation, he thought it was a government trap, a test set up by the intelligence services to catch underground Christians.

The idea that the Grandm of Mecca was secretly seeking the gospel seemed impossible to him.

But he agreed to meet me.

We met at a private location.

I came alone and in ordinary clothes with my face covered.

He opened the door and looked at me for a long moment and then he did something that I did not expect.

He embraced me.

This man who had every reason to be terrified of me embraced me like a brother.

I told him everything, my entire story from the beginning.

The dream, the vision, the face of Jesus, the scars, the words, the forgiveness.

He listened without interrupting until I had finished.

Then he told me that his house church had been praying every week for years, specifically for the senior religious leaders of Saudi Arabia.

He told me they had prayed that God would break through into the highest levels of the Islamic establishment.

He told me that my standing in front of him was the direct answer to years of faithful prayer.

He gave me a full Bible and began meeting with me regularly.

He taught me the foundations of the Christian faith from a believer’s perspective rather than from a scholar’s reputation.

He helped me understand grace in a way that my entire religious background had never equipped me to grasp.

In Islam, you earn God’s approval.

You earn paradise through a lifetime of obedience and good deeds.

The concept that God’s love is not something you earn, but something you receive, that salvation is a gift and not a wage was the most revolutionary idea I had ever encountered.

It was also the most beautiful.

During those four months, I began to quietly and carefully do two things.

First, I began making practical preparations for what I knew was coming.

I contacted a lawyer in the United Kingdom.

Through a series of carefully managed intermediaries and began the process of establishing a legal claim for asylum on grounds of religious persecution, I began moving small amounts of money to accounts outside of Saudi Arabia, converting assets quietly so that I would not be completely destitute when the moment came to leave.

I connected with Christian organizations that specialized in helping persecuted believers escape dangerous situations.

Second, I began saying goodbye to my life even though no one around me knew it.

I walked through the Grand Mosque one last time on a quiet morning when few people were present.

I touched the walls that I had touched every day for over 15 years.

I looked at the Cabba from a distance and I thought about all the millions of sincere people who came to this place every year looking for God and I prayed for every one of them.

I prayed that Jesus would find them the way he found me.

I did not pray it with anger or contempt.

I prayed it with the love of someone who has found the thing he was looking for and desperately wants everyone else to find it, too.

I left Saudi Arabia on a Tuesday morning in the early spring.

I told my staff that I had a private medical appointment in London, which was not entirely a lie since I had scheduled a genuine cardiology checkup as part of my cover.

I said goodbye to my adult son, Salem, who had come to drive me to the airport.

He embraced me and told me to take care of my health and to come back soon.

I held on to him for a moment longer than usual.

He noticed and looked at me with a slight question in his eyes, but I smiled and told him I was fine, just tired.

I walked through the departure gate and did not look back.

When the plane lifted off the ground and I watched the lights of Mecca disappear below the clouds, I felt something I have no adequate word for.

It was grief and relief and terror and freedom all at the same time.

A door closing behind me that would never open again.

a door ahead of me that had just swung wide.

I arrived in London and did not go to the hotel where my staff had made a reservation under my name.

Instead, I went to a pre-arranged safe location where a team from a Christian mission organization was waiting for me.

They processed my asylum application.

They connected me with legal representation.

They arranged for me to be moved to a secure location outside the United Kingdom where I could live and begin building a new life away from the reach of those who would harm me.

When my disappearance became known in Saudi Arabia, the reaction was exactly what I had expected and also somehow worse.

The official statement from the Saudi religious authorities was initially that I had suffered a medical emergency and was receiving treatment abroad.

But the truth leaked out within days as it always does.

Someone in the network of intermediaries I had used to contact the Christian pastor talking to someone who talked to someone else.

Someone in the British immigration system was less discreet than they should have been.

The information was spread in fragments and pieces until enough of the picture was visible that the conclusion was unavoidable.

The Grand Imam of Mecca had converted to Christianity.

The reaction across the Muslim world was explosive.

Protesters broke out in Mecca and Riyad within 48 hours of the news breaking.

Crowds gathered outside the Grand Mosque carrying signs and shouting slogans.

Religious scholars issued statements expressing shock and outrage.

A fatwa was issued declaring that I had committed apostasy which under the strictest interpretation of Islamic law is punishable by death.

My name was denounced from pulpits in mosques across Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and other countries.

Social media in Arabic erupted with a combination of anger, disbelief and in some corners I am told quiet questions from people who wanted to know more about what I had experienced.

My family in Saudi Arabia was called in for questioning by the government.

My son Salem released a public statement distancing himself from me and declaring that his father had lost his mind.

I understood why he did it.

He was protecting himself and his family.

I do not blame him.

I pray for him every day.

The intelligence services of Saudi Arabia began an active effort to locate me.

I received multiple warnings through secure channels that agents had been dispatched with instructions to bring me back to the kingdom by any means necessary.

The implications of that phrase were not subtle.

I changed locations three times in the first month after my disappearance for this reason.

But here is the thing about facing that kind of danger.

When you have encountered the person I encountered on the 27th night of Ramadan, the fear does not disappear.

I want to be honest about that.

I was frightened.

There were nights when I lay awake in my safe house, listening to every sound outside the window and wondering if this was the night they found me.

There were mornings when the weight of everything I had left behind.

My son, my country, my entire identity pressed down on me so heavily that I could barely get out of bed.

But underneath all of that, there was something else.

Something that had not been there before.

a bedrock, a foundation that none of the fear and grief and uncertainty could reach no matter how hard they tried.

It was the memory of those eyes looking at me with that love.

It was the warmth of that hand on my head.

It was the sound of my name said by the only voice in the universe that can say a person’s name and make them feel truly known.

Jesus had told me to stand up and tell the truth and that is what I was going to do.

The Christian network that had helped me escape connected me with a satellite broadcasting ministry that reaches millions of viewers across the Middle East and North Africa.

They broadcast in Arabic and infarzi and they reach into countries where Christian testimony is suppressed and banned.

People in Iran and Saudi Arabia and Syria and other restricted countries watch their broadcasts in secret on satellite dishes hidden from government eyes.

When the producer first suggested that I share my full story on a live broadcast, I sat with the idea for 3 weeks before agreeing.

The security concerns alone were enormous.

A live broadcast meant that sophisticated tracking equipment might be able to narrow down my location regardless of the technical precautions taken.

It meant that every intelligence agency in the Middle East would be analyzing the footage within minutes of it airing.

It meant that my faith already known across the Muslim world would be attached permanently to a public declaration of Christian faith that could never be taken back.

I prayed about it every day for those 3 weeks.

And every time I prayed that was the answer that came back to me was the same.

Stand up and tell the truth.

So I told them yes.

The preparations were careful and thorough.

The broadcast team set up a studio at a location I will not describe.

Precautions were taken to prevent signal tracking.

I was given guidance on how to present myself and on what the format of the interview would look like.

I spent several days simply praying and reading the Bible and the sitting with the weight of what I was about to do.

On the morning of the broadcast, I put on a simple shirt, not religious robes, not the formal garments of the grand imam, just the clothes of an ordinary man, which is what I now was and what I should probably have been all along.

I sat down in the chair.

The camera operator counted down.

The red light came on.

I looked into the lens and I began to speak.

I told them about my father and the grand mosque and the years of scholarship.

I told them about the certainty I had carried like a weapon for 30 years.

I told them about the sermons I had preached, pushing people away from the truth I did not yet know myself.

I told them about the night in Ramadan when the fire inside me finally went out and I asked God to show himself to me if he was real.

I told them about Jesus.

I told them about the light and the peace and the love that had no human equivalent.

I told them about the scars on his wrists that I had seen with my own spiritual eyes.

I told them about the people he had shown me whose doors I had helped close.

And I looked into that camera and I said to every single one of them, wherever they were, that I was sorry.

I said it plainly and without qualification, I was wrong and I am sorry.

I told them that Jesus had forgiven me.

that the same man who died on that cross with those nail scarred wrists had looked at me and said I was forgiven.

That the God I had spent my entire life trying to reach through performance and ritual and scholarly achievement had come to me in a moment of complete emptiness and failure and offered me something I could never earn.

Grace.

Real grace.

Free grace.

The kind that costs you nothing because it already cost him everything.

I wept on that broadcast.

I did not try to control it or manage it.

The Grand Imam of Mecca sitting in a plain shirt in an undisclosed location weeping openly on Christian satellite television.

I did not care what it looked like.

It looked like the truth.

I looked into the camera and I spoke directly to the Muslims watching across the Middle East.

I told them that I understood their faith because it had been my faith for 61 years.

I told them that I knew the sincerity and the beauty and the depth of devotion that Islam asks of its followers.

I told them that everything I had done in my religious life had been done in genuine sincerity.

And I told them that sincerity was not the same as truth.

I told them that Jesus was not who I had told them he was.

He was not merely a prophet in a long line of prophets.

He was the one the prophets were pointing toward.

He was the answer that the entire human story had been building to.

He was the one who had come not to give us more rules to follow but to do for us what we could never do for ourselves.

I told them about grace.

I explained it the way my Egyptian pastor had explained it to me.

That we do not earn God’s love.

We receive it.

That salvation is not a wage paid for a life of good deeds.

It is a gift given freely to people who do not deserve it.

I told them that I knew this was a difficult concept because it had been difficult for me because my entire religious framework had been built on the assumption that you earn your way to God.

And the gospel of Jesus says that God came all the way to you precisely because you never could have made it to him on your own.

Then I spoke to my son Salee.

I told him that I knew he had publicly distanced himself from me.

And I told him that I understood.

I told him that I bore him no resentment and that I loved him as deeply as a father can love a child.

But I told him that the last hug he had given me at the airport in Mecca was one I had been holding on to every day since.

I told him that I was praying for him every morning and every evening and that I would not stop.

I told him that if he ever wanted to know the truth of what had happened to me, I would tell him everything, every detail without shame and without holding anything back because he deserved the truth even if it was hard.

I spoke to the religious scholars across the Muslim world who were calling for my death.

I told them that I did not hate them.

I told them that 6 months ago I would have been standing exactly where they were standing, saying exactly what they were saying.

I told them that the certainty that made them feel righteous in condemning me was the same certainty I had carried for 30 years.

And I told them that certainty was not a substitute for an encounter with the living God.

I told them that if they would set aside their certainty for one honest moment and do what I had done in that chamber on the 27th night of Ramadan, just ask God to show himself if he was real.

They might be surprised by who showed up.

Finally, I looked into that camera one last time and I said this.

I am Faris Al- Zarani.

I was the grandm of the Grand Mosque in Mecca.

I called over a billion people toward God five times a day for 30 years.

And I never actually met him until the night I stopped performing and started asking.

He showed up as Jesus.

He showed up with nails scarred hands and a love that broke 61 years of religious certainty in a single moment.

He offered me forgiveness I did not deserve.

He sent me back to tell the truth.

I am telling you the truth right now.

If this testimony has reached something inside you, write in the comments.

He showed up.

Let it be your beginning.

Let it be the moment you stop performing and start asking because I promise you based on everything I have experience it he will show up for you