How Jesus Found Me Right There In Mecca.

The Holiest Place Of Islam.

How Jesus Found Me Right There In Mecca.

The Holiest Place Of Islam.

 

My name is Fatima Karimi.

I am 45 years old and I want to tell you something that I still find hard to put into words even today, even after everything that happened.

I have been trying to write this down for months now.

I start and then I stop because I do not know how to explain it without sounding like a crazy person, but I’m not crazy.

And my daughter Nadia is not crazy either.

What happened to us was real.

Every single part of it was real.

And I believe with everything inside me that I am supposed to share it, even though it scares me to do so.

I grew up in a small city in Iran.

My family was not very strict about religion, but we were Muslim the way most people around us were Muslim.

We prayed.

We fasted during Ramadan.

We believed in God and in the prophet Muhammad.

It was just the life we knew.

When I was 20 years old, I got married to a man named Ysef.

He was a good man, a quiet man.

He worked hard and he loved our children.

We had two daughters together.

The oldest one is Nadia and the younger one is Sa.

For many years, our life was ordinary.

Not perfect, but ordinary.

We had enough.

We had each other.

We had our faith.

I thought that was everything a person needed.

Then about 3 years ago, Yousef got sick.

It started slowly and we did not realize how serious it was at first.

By the time the doctors told us the truth, there was not much they could do.

He passed away 14 months after his diagnosis.

He was 49 years old.

Our daughters were 17 and 13 at the time.

Nadia, the older one, held herself together during the funeral.

She stood beside me and she did not cry in front of people.

But at night, alone in her room, I could hear her.

I would stand outside her door and I would listen to her crying and I did not know what to do.

There are moments in a mother’s life when you feel completely helpless.

You want to fix everything for your child and you cannot fix any of it.

That is one of the worst feelings in the world.

After Yousef died, I made a decision.

I decided that I was going to do something big, something that would bring us healing.

I had always wanted to go to Mecca.

It is something almost every Muslim dreams about.

Going to the holy city, walking around the Cabba, drinking from the Zam Zam well.

I believed that if I could take my daughters there, especially Nadia, who was hurting so badly, that God would heal our hearts.

I believed the trip would change something deep inside us.

My sister helped me arrange everything.

She had contacts in Saudi Arabia and she helped with the visas and the hotel booking.

It took almost 8 months of planning and saving, but finally everything was ready.

We were going to Mecca.

Nadia was 18 by the time we traveled.

SA was 14.

I remember the morning we left.

I woke up very early and I stood in our kitchen making tea and I felt something I had not felt in a long time.

I felt hopeful.

I thought maybe this is the beginning of something good.

Maybe God is going to meet us there and give us back the peace we lost when Ysef died.

The flight to Jedha was long.

We arrived tired but excited.

From Jedha, we took a bus to Mecca.

And when we got there, when I first saw the Grand Mosque, I genuinely felt moved.

It is hard to describe.

Millions of people, all coming from different countries, different languages, different backgrounds, all coming to the same place.

There is something powerful about that.

The hotel was close to the mosque.

From our window on the 12th floor, we could see the Cabba in the distance.

That black cube that Muslims all over the world turn toward five times a day when they pray.

Seeing it with my own eyes made me feel like something sacred was very close.

The first three days were good.

We did the Taw, which is walking around the Cabba seven times.

We prayed in the mosque.

We drank from the Zamzam.

Well, Nadia seemed lighter somehow, less heavy in her spirit.

She smiled more than she had since her father died.

I thought, “Yes, this is working.

This is what we needed.

” But on the fourth night, something happened that I did not expect at all.

I woke up around 2:00 in the morning.

The room was quiet and dark.

At first, I did not know what had woken me.

Then, I heard Nadia.

She was in the bed next to mine, and she was making a sound, a low, broken sound like she was trying to speak, but could not get the words out.

I sat up and looked at her.

She was asleep, but her body was moving.

Her hands were gripping the sheets, and her face looked like she was either frightened or in pain.

I went to her and touched her shoulder and said her name.

She woke up gasping like someone coming up out of water.

She looked at me and for a moment, she did not seem to know where she was.

I asked her what was wrong.

She said she had been dreaming.

I asked her about what and she shook her head and said she did not want to talk about it.

I thought it was a nightmare about her father.

That happens sometimes.

I held her hand until she calmed down and eventually she went back to sleep, but I stayed awake for a long time after that.

The same thing happened the next night and the night after that.

By the fifth night, I was worried enough that I sat Nadia down during the day and told her she had to talk to me.

I told her she was scaring me and that I needed to know what was happening in these dreams.

She looked at her hands for a long time.

She did not want to tell me.

I could see that clearly.

And that worried me even more because Nadia had always been the kind of child who told me things.

Even as a teenager, she came to me with her problems.

For her to sit there looking like she was afraid of my reaction, that was not normal.

Finally, she told me.

She said a man had been coming to her in the dreams every single night since we arrived in Mecca.

She said he wore white and there was light around him.

Not like sunlight, she said.

Different, softer, but stronger at the same time.

She said he was kind.

She said he told her his name was Isa, which is what we call Jesus in our tradition.

I felt my whole body go cold when she said that name.

She kept talking.

She said this man, this Isa told her that he loved her, that God loved her, that she was not forgotten and not alone.

even though she felt alone since her father died.

She said he showed her things, beautiful places, and told her that her father was at peace.

She said he talked to her about forgiveness and about how a person can be close to God, not through doing everything right, but through believing in him.

I did not know what to say.

I sat there for a long time just looking at my daughter.

She was watching me carefully, waiting to see how I would react.

I could tell she was afraid I would be angry or frightened.

And honestly, I was both.

I was frightened not of Nadia, but of what this could mean.

We were in Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, and Jesus was appearing to my daughter in her dreams.

In our Islamic belief, we respect Jesus.

He is a prophet.

He is called Isa in the Quran, and he is mentioned many times.

But we do not believe he is the son of God.

We do not believe he died for anyone’s sins.

We believe he was a great prophet and nothing more.

So for him to be appearing to my daughter and saying the things Nadia described, that was something that made no sense to me.

It went against everything I had been taught.

I asked Nadia if he had said anything else.

She hesitated.

Then she told me that he had shown her his hands.

There were marks on them.

Old scars, she said, but they looked like wounds that had not fully healed.

He told her those scars were from dying for her.

He said that because he had done that, she could be forgiven for everything wrong she had ever done.

He said that peace with God was not something she had to earn.

It was something he wanted to give her freely.

I stayed very calm on the outside, but on the inside, I was not calm at all.

I told Nadia that I thought the dreams might be from evil spirits.

In Islam, we believe that bad spirits called jin can attack people, especially when they are grieving or emotionally weak.

I told her that being in a spiritually powerful place like Mecca sometimes made people more vulnerable to these kinds of attacks.

I told her we would find someone with religious knowledge to help us.

That night I heard Nadia whispering in her sleep again.

I got up and stood close to her.

She was saying a name over and over quietly almost like she was praying.

She was saying Jesus just that name over and over.

Her lips moved and her face was completely peaceful.

Whatever she was experiencing in that dream, she did not look afraid.

She looked like someone who was resting.

I could not sleep for the rest of that night.

The next morning, I went to the mosque and asked to speak with one of the religious teachers who were available for pilgrims with questions.

A man came out and spoke with me in a small room.

I told him carefully that my daughter was having troubling dreams.

I said a figure was appearing to her and claiming to be Essie.

I said things were being told to her in these dreams that confused and upset me.

I did not tell him everything.

I did not tell him she was saying the name Jesus in her sleep.

I was already afraid of how he was looking at me.

The teacher told me very seriously that my daughter was being attacked by evil spirits.

He said that Jyn sometimes used the appearance of respected prophets to confuse and mislead people, especially young people who were emotionally vulnerable.

He said this was a serious situation.

He told me to bring Nadia to him that evening so he and some other religious men could pray over her and drive out whatever was tormenting her.

I did not have a good feeling about it, but I also did not know what else to do.

I was in a foreign country.

I had no family there.

My sister was back home.

I was alone with my two daughters in the middle of Mecca and my older child was having dreams about Jesus every single night.

What options did I have? I thought these men knew more than I did.

I thought they could help.

That evening, I brought Nadia to a small room in the mosque building.

There were four men waiting, including the teacher I had spoken to.

SA stayed back at the hotel.

I had told her Nadia was just going for some special prayers and that she should not worry.

The men began praying over Nadia.

They recited verses from the Quran loudly.

They blew over her.

They made gestures and spoke commands, telling any evil spirit to leave.

Nadia sat very still.

She looked uncomfortable, but she was not fighting them.

I sat in the corner watching, feeling more and more uneasy, but telling myself this was the right thing to do.

When they finished, they told me the prayers were complete and that I should take Nadia back to the hotel and that the dreams would stop.

They seemed confident.

But that night, the dreams came again.

Nadia woke up in the middle of the night.

She looked at me and before I could even ask, she just said, “He came again, mama.

He told me not to be afraid.

” In the morning, I went back to the mosque.

I told the teacher that nothing had changed.

His expression changed when I said that.

He became more serious and more quiet.

He said that if the prayers had not worked, then the situation was more serious than he had first thought.

He said my daughter needed more intensive treatment.

He said I should leave her with them for a full day and come back the following evening.

I did not want to do it.

Every part of me said no, but he spoke with so much authority and certainty.

He made me feel like if I refused, I was putting Nadia in spiritual danger.

He said this was a serious attack and required serious intervention.

He used words I did not fully understand.

Words about levels of possession and degrees of spiritual contamination.

He made me feel like I was out of my depth and that only they could handle this.

God forgive me.

I left my daughter there.

I walked back to the hotel with SA and I tried to act normal.

I made us lunch.

I watched SA do her prayers.

I told her Nadia was receiving special spiritual help and would be back tomorrow.

I kept my voice steady, but inside I was falling apart.

I kept praying, keep asking God to protect Nadia, keep asking him to forgive me for leaving her.

That night was the longest night of my life.

I did not sleep at all.

I lay in the dark and I talked to God and I asked him what I was supposed to do.

I got no answer.

I felt nothing.

I felt empty in a way that I had not felt even when Yousef died.

The next evening, I went to collect Nadia.

When they brought her out to me, I almost fell down.

Her face was puffy and bruised.

Her lip was split.

Her wrists had deep red marks on them from being tied.

She was walking slowly like every step hurt.

When she saw me, she made a sound I will never forget.

It was not a word.

It was just this broken sound that came out of her.

like something inside her finally let go.

She fell against me and I held her and I could feel how thin she felt like she had not eaten.

Her body was shaking.

I turned to the men and I asked them what they had done to my daughter.

One of the older men spoke calmly.

He told me that Nadia had been resisting the prayers.

He said the spirit inside her was strong and had been fighting them.

He said they had needed to restrain her for her own safety.

He said they had also struck her a few times because sometimes physical shock was necessary to drive out stubborn spirits.

I cannot fully describe what I felt in that moment.

My hands were shaking.

I wanted to scream.

I wanted to take my daughter and run.

I reached for Nadia’s arm to walk out with her and one of the men stepped in front of me.

He told me that the treatment was not finished.

He said the spirit had not fully left yet.

He said that if I took Nadia away now, she would be in worse danger than before.

He said she needed to stay at least two or three more days.

I said no.

I said I was taking my daughter.

I said what they had done to her was wrong and I was not leaving her there for another minute.

Two of the men moved to block the door.

Not violently but firmly.

One of them spoke to me in a tone that people use when they want you to know they are in control and you are not.

He said I was being emotional.

He said, “As a woman and as a foreigner, I did not understand the spiritual realities of what was happening.

” He said, “I needed to trust the religious authorities and step aside.

” They pushed me out of the room.

The door closed and I heard Nadia on the other side calling for me.

I stood in that hallway and I heard my daughter calling my name and I could not get to her.

Went to the police the next morning.

They listened politely and told me it was a religious matter.

They said the mosque authorities had full rights to conduct spiritual treatments on pilgrims who requested help.

I tried to explain that I had not fully understood what I was agreeing to.

They were not interested in hearing more.

I tried to reach my sister back home.

The call kept dropping.

When I finally got through, she was scared and did not know what to tell me.

She said she would make calls, but she did not know who to call or what could be done from that distance.

I tried going back to the mosque and asking again.

The guards would not let me through.

For 3 days, I walked around that city in a kind of fog.

I prayed.

I cried.

I sat by the Zamzam well and I drank water and I asked God to tell me what to do.

I read my Quran.

I recited every protection verse I knew.

I did everything I had been taught to do when you are in trouble.

Nothing changed.

On the third night, I went back to our hotel room.

SA was asleep.

I knelt down on the floor next to the bed and I started talking, not praying in the formal way, not reciting anything, just talking.

I spoke out loud to God in a way I had never spoken before.

I said I did not know what was true anymore.

I said I was a 45year-old woman who had lost her husband and now I was losing her daughter and I could not carry this alone.

I said if Jesus was real, if the things Nadia was seeing in her dreams were real, then I needed to know.

I said I was asking him Jesus if he was there to please show me something, to help me, to save my daughter.

I said his name out loud.

In Mecca in a hotel room 300 m from the Cabba.

I said it quietly, but I said it clearly.

Then I just sat there on the floor.

And after a while, I fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes, the room was bright.

not from the window.

It was early morning and the curtains were closed.

The brightness was coming from somewhere I could not point to.

It was everywhere in the room at the same time.

I blinked and sat up.

I thought maybe I was still asleep, but I was not asleep.

I know the difference.

I was awake.

There was a man standing at the foot of the bed.

He was wearing white.

The brightness was coming from around him or maybe from him.

I was not afraid.

That is the thing I keep coming back to when I tell the story.

I should have been terrified.

A person standing in my hotel room in the middle of the night should have terrified me.

But I was not afraid at all.

I felt the opposite of afraid.

I felt like whatever fear I had been carrying for the past 3 days had been lifted off me.

He looked at me.

His face was calm.

His eyes were kind in a way I had never seen on a person’s face before.

not just nice, kind in a deep way, like he could see everything about me and was not bothered by any of it.

He told me he was Jesus.

He said it simply like it was just a fact.

He said he had heard me asking for help.

He said he had been with Nadia from the beginning, that he had been calling her because he wanted both of us to know the truth about who he was.

He talked to me for a while.

I cannot remember every word.

I wish I could, but I remember the feeling more than the specific sentences.

He talked about how people spend their whole lives trying to be good enough for God and never feel sure that they have made it.

He said that was never what God intended.

He said he had come so that people could actually know God, not just know about him, but know him personally like you know someone you love.

He showed me his hands.

I saw the scars there and I do not know how to explain this but when I saw them I started crying not because I was sad.

I cried because something in me understood without being told the full story that those marks were from something he had done for me personally for me.

For Fatima Karimi, a middle-aged widow from Iran who was kneeling on a hotel room floor in the middle of the night.

He told me to go to the mosque in the morning and ask for my daughter.

He told me to go with confidence, not with fear.

He said Nadia would be returned to me.

He said to trust him.

Then he was gone.

The brightness faded slowly.

The room went back to normal.

SA was still asleep.

The curtains were still closed.

Everything looked exactly the same as before.

But I was completely different.

I sat on the floor for a long time after that.

Not crying anymore, just sitting and breathing.

The peace I felt was not a feeling I had words for.

It was heavier and more solid than any feeling I could remember having.

Like something had been put back in its right place inside me.

In the morning, I put on my Abbya.

I told SA to stay in the room and that I would be back soon.

I walked to the mosque.

When I got to the building where they had been keeping Nadia, the same guard was there.

He started to tell me I could not go in and something happened inside me that I still cannot fully explain.

I looked at him and I was not afraid.

I told him I was there for my daughter and I was not leaving without her.

I told him to go get whoever was in charge because I needed to speak with him right now.

I said it calmly, but I said it in a way that made him look uncertain.

He went inside.

A few minutes later, the older man who had spoken to me before came out.

He looked at me and I could tell he expected me to be crying or begging the way I had been the last few days.

I was not crying.

I told him that I wanted my daughter back immediately.

I told him that what they had done to her was not spiritual healing.

It was abuse.

I told him I was going to speak to every authority I could find inside the mosque and outside of it.

I told him that I had also seen Jesus and that I knew now that my daughter was not possessed.

She had been visited by the same person I had been visited by.

I said all of this clearly and without yelling.

He was angry.

He told me I was confused.

He told me I was spiritually compromised and possibly mentally unstable.

He used words designed to make me feel small and foolish.

But I noticed something.

He was also nervous.

His eyes moved around.

He was checking to see if anyone was nearby listening.

He knew that a story about a child being beaten in the holy city would be a problem if it got out.

After a long back and forth with some other men coming out and joining the conversation, they brought Nadia out.

She looked worse than the first time.

She had lost weight.

Her eyes were red and tired.

There were more bruises than before.

When she saw me, she did not run.

She just walked slowly toward me and leaned against me.

I put my arm around her and I held her as tightly as I could without hurting her.

The older man told me that officially my daughter had shown signs of mental instability and that I had ignored proper religious guidance.

He said if I left Mecca right away and kept quiet about all of this, he would not pursue the matter.

He made it sound like he was doing me a favor.

I said yes to everything he said.

I just wanted my daughter out of there.

We went back to the hotel.

I helped Nadia sit down and I got her water and food.

Sa came and sat with us and held Nadia’s hand and did not say much, which was the right thing to do.

We stayed in that room for 2 days.

I cleaned Nadia’s injuries.

I fed her.

I let her sleep.

And when she woke up, we talked.

I told her what had happened to me on the third night.

I told her about the light and the figure standing in the room.

I told her about the peace I had felt.

Her face changed completely as I talked.

She started crying but not from sadness.

She said she had known she had felt something shift.

She said Jesus had told her in her dreams during those three days that I was coming for her and that everything was going to be okay.

She said something I will never forget.

She said that even while the men were hurting her, she had not been completely alone.

She said she could feel a presence with her, something steady and warm that did not leave.

She said she had been afraid.

Of course, she had been afraid.

But underneath the fear, there had been this solid thing that the fear could not touch.

On the second day, there was a knock at our door.

I was cautious.

I opened it a small amount and looked out.

A woman was standing in the hall.

She was not Arab.

She introduced herself and said she was a journalist.

She said she was in Mecca for work and had picked up a rumor about a girl who had been hurt by religious authorities for having dreams about Jesus.

I looked at her for a long moment.

Then I let her in.

She sat with us and I told her the whole story.

Nadia sat beside me and sometimes added things or nodded.

When I finished, the woman had tears on her face.

She told me she was a Christian.

She said she believed everything I had told her.

She said that across the Muslim world, more and more people were having exactly this kind of experience, seeing Jesus in dreams, coming to believe in him, and then facing serious opposition from their families and communities.

She said she was connected to a group that helped people in situations exactly like ours.

People who had come to faith in Jesus and were now in danger because of it.

She said they could help us leave Saudi Arabia safely and find a place where we could live and practice our new faith without fear.

I was quiet for a while after she said that.

I thought about everything that had happened since we arrived in Mecca.

I thought about why we had come, how I had believed this trip would bring us healing and peace.

And I thought about how the healing and peace I had been looking for had come, just not in the way I had expected.

Not through walking around the Cabba or drinking from the Zam Zam well.

It had come through a man who stood in my hotel room in the middle of the night and looked at me with eyes that saw everything and still had nothing but kindness in them.

I told the journalist we would accept her help.

Within a week, she and the people she worked with had arranged for us to leave.

I am not going to say where we went or how the arrangements were made.

I made a promise to keep those details private and I am going to keep that promise.

What I can tell you is that we are safe.

We are in a good place.

We are surrounded by people who have treated us with more genuine kindness than I have experienced in a long time.

Nadia is healing slowly, but she is healing.

The physical injuries are gone now.

The emotional ones take longer, and I know that there are nights when she has trouble sleeping.

There are moments when something small will remind her of those three days and she will go quiet.

I hold her when that happens and I tell her that she is safe and that we are together and that Jesus has not left us.

And I believe that.

I believe it because I have felt it.

We have been learning together, Nadia and SA and I about who Jesus actually is about what he taught and what he did and why he came.

It is different from anything I grew up learning.

In what I grew up with, God was far away and powerful and you worked your whole life hoping you had done enough for him.

What I’m learning now is different.

It is about a God who came close, who came all the way down to earth because he wanted to be near the people he made.

That is a different picture of God than the one I had for 45 years.

SA is doing well.

She is young and she adapts to things faster than I do.

She has been asking many questions, good questions, and the people around us are patient with her and take the time to answer properly.

I think about Yousef sometimes, and I wonder what he would think about all of this.

I think he would have wanted us to be okay.

I think he would have wanted us to find peace.

I hope I will see him again one day.

I do not know all the answers about what happens after this life.

But I trust the one who told me that the people we love are not lost forever.

I am sharing this story because I believe I am supposed to.

There is someone reading this right now who is having dreams they cannot explain.

There is someone who has been hearing a name in their heart that they do not know what to do with.

There is a mother somewhere who is watching her child and she does not understand what her child is going through.

I want to say to all of those people that what you are experiencing is real.

Do not push it away.

Do not let anyone make you feel crazy for it.

I was a faithful Muslim woman for 45 years.

I did everything I was taught to do.

I was not unhappy with my life.

I was not looking for a new religion.

I was not searching for Jesus.

He found me.

He found my daughter first and then he found me.

And he did it in the last place anyone would expect.

He did it right in the middle of Mecca, in the holiest place in Islam, in a hotel room where a desperate mother was sitting on the floor asking for help.

That is the truth of what happened to me and to Nadia.

My name is Fatima Karimi.

My daughters are Nadia and SA.

We are together and we are safe and we are following Jesus.

That is all I have to