Muslim Imam Starts Speaking in Tongues and Calls on Jesus’ Name While Praying in the Mosque

I have been trying to figure out where to start this story for a long time because there is no clean starting point.

There is no moment I can point to and say here this is where everything began to shift.

What I can tell you is that by the time the collapse happened, something had already been happening inside me for longer than I knew.

I just didn’t have eyes for it yet.

So, let me start with who I was because I think that matters more than anything else.

If you don’t know who I was, you won’t understand what it cost.

And you won’t understand why I am still sometimes sitting with the weight of it even now, years later, in a country that is not mine, in a faith I did not grow up in.

grateful in a way I genuinely did not know was available to a human being.

My name is Mehmed Khalil al-Rashid.

I was born in Istanbul in 1978.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our brother Mehmed Khalil al-Rashid continues his 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.

>> My name is Mehmed Khalil al-Rashid.

I was born in Istanbul in 1978.

My father’s family came originally from Syria from somewhere outside Aleppo and they had been in Turkey for generations by the time I was born.

We were Turkish in every practical way.

language, citizenship, how we move through the world.

But there was a Syrian Arab quality to our home that I grew up inside without fully noticing it until I was older.

My father recited the Quran in a Syrian style, slower and more melodic than the way most Turkish Muslims recite.

And even now when I hear the Quran in my memory and I still hear it, I carry 45 years of it.

It is my father’s voice.

I hear that particular melody, that particular pace.

My father was not a religious scholar by profession.

He was a civil engineer.

But he was a deeply learned man in his faith.

He had studied.

He had memorized the Quran himself on and he raised his children.

I am the eldest of four, two sisters and a brother in a home where Islam was not something you practiced at certain times and set aside the rest of the time.

It was the air we breathed.

Five prayers a day.

No negotiation.

Ramadan kept completely.

Arabic studied from the time we were small.

The Quran read, memorized, discussed.

My father believed that the best thing he could give his children was a solid foundation in their faith and he gave it to us thoroughly.

He was not harsh about it.

I want to be clear about that because people sometimes assume that kind of upbringing was strict in a cold or frightening way.

My father was warm.

He laughed often.

He loved his family with a love you could feel.

But he believed in what he believed and he passed it to us not through force but through the sheer consistency of his own example.

I started memorizing the Quran seriously when I was nine studying under a hai in our neighborhood.

By 13 I had completed it.

I remember the day sitting in our living room doing my final recitation in front of my father and the hes and two other men who had come as witnesses.

When I finished my father put his face in his hands and stayed like that for a moment.

He wasn’t crying from sadness.

It was the way a man cries when something he has prayed for and worked toward with his whole heart finally arrives.

I was 13.

I didn’t fully understand what I was watching, but I understood enough to know it mattered enormously that and I felt in the way a boy feels when he has done something that moves his father that I had become something that I had a shape, an identity, a place in the world.

I was the boy who had memorized the Quran.

I was the one the community pointed to.

That feeling became part of my foundation.

It sat at the bottom of everything I built afterward.

After secondary school, I studied Islamic theology at Marmar University here in Istanbul.

And then I spent 2 years at Alazar in Cairo.

If you are not familiar with Alazar, it is one of the oldest and most respected institutions of Islamic learning in the world going back over a thousand years.

Those two years in Cairo were formative in a way I can’t fully compress into a few sentences.

It wasn’t just education.

It was immersion in a world where Islamic scholarship stretched back across centuries of accumulated thought and debate and transmission.

I sat in lectures where teachers traced chains of knowledge back through generations of scholars back to the companions of the prophet.

I felt in those halls like a man who had just discovered that the tree he was standing in was far deeper and older and more rooted than he had ever understood from ground level.

That feeling was not arrogance.

It was more like belonging, like understanding for the first time the full size of the thing you were part of.

Part of my curriculum at Al Azar was comparative religion, which in practice meant studying other faiths, including Christianity, through the lens of Islamic scholarship.

I want to be honest about what this meant because it matters to what happens later.

We studied Christianity in order to understand how to engage with it from within an Islamic framework.

We learned the historical debates about the Bible, about the Council of Nika, about the different early Christian positions on the nature of Jesus.

We learned the Islamic theological objections to the Trinity, to the crucifixion, to the divine claim that the gospels make for Jesus.

We learned all of this thoroughly and intelligently.

But the orientation of the learning was not neutral.

It was not here is what Christians believe.

Let’s understand it from the inside.

It was here is what Christians believe and here is why from an Islamic scholarly position.

It cannot be what it appears to be.

I became skilled at this.

I could explain clearly and in detail on the Islamic position on the corruption of the Bible, the impossibility of the Trinity from a monotheistic perspective, and the Quranic account of what actually happened to Jesus.

I had taught these things in lectures, in Q&A sessions with young Muslims who came to me with questions in private conversations.

I was not aggressive about it.

I believed I was helping people hold on to the truth by giving them solid ground to stand on when confronted with Christian claims.

But I had never and this is the thing I have to say clearly.

I had never read the Injil the way a person reads something they genuinely want to understand.

I had read parts of it the way a lawyer reads an opposing argument.

Looking for the problems, looking for the inconsistencies that would confirm what I already knew.

That was the only mode in which I had ever approached that text, and I had never once noticed that it was a mode because it had always felt like simply being rigorous.

I returned from Egypt at 24 and was appointed assistant imam at the mosque I had grown up praying in the mosque my father had taken me to since I was small enough to sit beside him on the prayer mat and watch his lips moving.

By 30 I was the head I imam.

My father was still alive then.

He came to the first Friday prayer I led as head I imam.

He sat in the front row where he had always sat.

And after the prayer, after the congregation had filed out, he held my face in both his hands the way he used to when I was small.

He didn’t say much.

He didn’t need to.

Everything passed between us in that gesture.

I knew what it meant to him.

I knew what it meant to me.

He died three years later.

a stroke sudden at 61.

I won’t try to properly describe what that loss was.

I don’t have the words for it and I don’t think words are the right container for it anyway.

What I will say is that it made the mosque more important to me, not less.

Because who I was in that mosque, the imam, the man my father had watched become that felt like a way of keeping him present.

When I stood at the front and led the community in prayer, I felt him somewhere in the room.

I felt that I was continuing something he had started.

That his life’s investment in me was bearing fruit in every prayer I led.

That connection was real and it meant everything.

The community of that mosque was my world.

I had been in it since childhood and I had led it for over 20 years by the time this story reaches its turning point.

I knew these people.

I had prayed alongside them through every season of their lives.

I had sat with families in hospital corridors, buried their parents, performed marriage contracts for their children.

There was an older man named Hassan, a retired school teacher who had prayed in the front row every single day for as long as anyone could remember.

There were young families whose children had grown up in the weekend Islamic school while I was imam.

There were businessmen and university students and elderly women who came to the women’s section and prayed with the intensity of people who have been doing this for 50 or 60 years and are not planning to stop.

These were my people.

I love them.

That is not a complicated statement.

I genuinely deeply love that community and they loved me back.

Dan that mutual love was one of the most solid things in my life.

I married Fatima when I was 27.

She came from a family in Bura.

Her father was a respected scholar there and she was a woman of very steady, very quiet faith.

We had three children.

Tariq, our eldest, was 22 when this story reaches its crisis point.

Then our daughters, Nur, 14, and Zanb, 11.

Fatima managed our home and raised our children and supported my work at the mosque without ever making a production of any of it.

She prayed consistently, reliably, with the kind of faith that doesn’t fluctuate with mood or circumstance.

I respected this about her enormously.

There were periods when my own spiritual life felt dry and mechanical and I would watch Fatima at prayer and feel alongside the respect a mild private shame that the Imam’s wife appeared to have a more living connection to her faith than the imam himself.

I say this because the dryness was real and I want to be honest about it.

It was not constant.

There were genuine seasons of depth and feeling in my spiritual life.

Times when salah felt like what it was supposed to feel like, an actual meeting, an actual presence, something received and not only performed.

But there were also seasons where I was going through the form with great precision and nothing was arriving at the destination.

In Islamic spiritual understanding, this is a known phenomenon and the prescription is more consistency, more Quran, more voluntary prayer.

So during those periods, I did those things and the dryness would lift and I would not examine it further.

But looking back now, I think those periods of dryness were pointing at something I didn’t have the framework to see.

Something that was true about my situation that I had no language for.

Not a flaw in my practice, not a spiritual failure, but a gap, a real gap between the form of what I was doing and something I had not yet encountered that the form was pointing toward.

I didn’t know that at the time.

At the time I only knew the dryness and I managed it and I moved on.

There was a man who came into my life about 8 months before the collapse and I need to tell you about him here because he matters to everything that follows.

His name was Dr.

Ysef Demir.

He was the administrative director of a private hospital near our neighborhood and I met him through a health initiative the mosque had partnered with.

We were helping with community outreach and health screenings for elderly members.

We met in professional meetings several times over several months.

At some point it came up, I don’t even remember exactly how, that he was a Christian, not someone born into a Christian family, a man who had converted from Islam about 12 years earlier.

When I understood this, my reaction was not hostility.

I was not the kind of man who was hostile to people I disagreed with.

But there was something a professional alertness maybe a slight reccalibration of how I was paying attention.

I found myself watching him more carefully after that in the way you watch someone whose situation you are trying to understand.

And what I noticed which I registered and then put away without fully examining was a quality of settled peace in him.

Not performed contentment, not religious satisfaction in the way I had seen some religious people display it, wearing their faith like a badge.

Something quieter than that.

a person who seemed to be living from a place of interior rest, from some internal ground that was stable.

I noticed it and I didn’t know what to do with it.

So, I filed it somewhere in the back of my mind and went on with my days.

But I thought about him more than I would have expected.

In the weeks that followed our meetings, I found myself thinking specifically about what could make a man who was clearly educated and clearly reasonable leave Islam, not leave in a moment of rebellion or crisis of practice, but leave and arrive somewhere that produced that quality of peace.

I couldn’t account for it inside my framework.

I thought he was confused.

I thought somewhere underneath that that his confusion bothered me more than it should have.

In the weeks before the collapse, something was happening to me that I can only describe now from the other side because I didn’t have clear eyes for it while I was in it.

I was tired in a way that sleep wasn’t fixing, not physically worn out.

I knew what that felt like.

I had been physically tired many times in my life.

This was different.

It was as though something inside me had been running for a very long time and was approaching an empty tank.

And I kept trying to refuel with the things that had always worked.

More prayer, more Quran, more service.

and they were not reaching wherever the tank was.

I I had the same dream twice in those weeks.

In the dream, I was in the mosque standing at the front leading the prayer.

Everything looked normal.

The rows of men behind me, the carpet, the familiar walls.

But partway through the prayer, I felt something wrong.

And I turned around and the mosque was empty.

The prayer mats were all there arranged in rows, but there was no one on them.

I was leading a room full of absence.

And the silence in that dream was so complete and so heavy that it stayed with me when I woke up, sitting on me for hours before it slowly lifted.

I didn’t tell anyone about the dreams.

I didn’t have the language for what they might mean, and I wasn’t sure I wanted the language.

The evening of the collapse was a Thursday.

I remember it being the 14th of Rabi Alawal.

We had had a community gathering earlier that day, something connected to the approach of Malid, the celebration of the prophet’s birthday, and the atmosphere in the mosque during the day had been warm and festive in a way that usually lifted me.

That day, it hadn’t touched me.

I had participated.

I had said the right things.

I had been present in every outward sense.

But inside I was behind glass watching it all from somewhere slightly removed.

By the time Aisha prayer came, the final prayer of the night, there were around 200 men in the mosque.

A good number for a weekday night prayer.

I made my woodoo, the ritual washing before prayer.

And I stood at the sink and I looked at my face in the mirror and I had a strange moment, just a few seconds of looking at my own reflection and feeling an unfamiliarity with it that I couldn’t explain.

Like looking at someone I recognized but didn’t quite know.

I pushed it aside.

I dried my hands.

I walked to the front of the mosque.

I gave the call to begin.

And the congregation straightened their rows behind me.

200 men shouldertosh shoulder.

The shuffle of feet finding their position.

The collective exhale of a room full of people settling into worship.

I had experienced this exact thing thousands of times.

I knew every sound of it.

I raised my hands and said Allahu Akbar and the prayer began.

We moved through the first raka.

My recitation was steady and correct.

The fatya came from a place so deep inside me that it needed no conscious thought.

35 years of repetition had put it below the level of effort.

Then the bowing, then the rising, then the first prostration, the sujud, forehead pressed to the carpet.

back up.

Second raka, recitation, bowing, rising, and then the sujud of the second raka, forehead to the ground, the closest position in Islamic prayer to God.

I pressed my forehead to the carpet and something happened.

The best I can describe it, and I have tried to describe this many times, and I always find language inadequate, is that the floor beneath my forehead became infinite.

Not that it disappeared, but that the act of pressing against it opened into something that had no bottom, not a physical sensation, something deeper than physical, a presence enormous and warm and terrifying in its completeness.

Not pain, weight.

The weight of something that was entirely, completely, absolutely itself pressing into me from above and drawing from below at the same time.

The sounds of the mosque went far away.

I was aware at some distance of my name being called.

I was aware of movement around me.

I was aware dimly that my body was going down.

But that awareness was becoming very faint.

And then just before everything went dark, there was something in that weight.

Not a voice.

I want to be precise about this because I know how these things sound.

And I am not going to say more than what is true.

Not a voice exactly.

something more like a conviction being pressed into the center of me, like a seal being pressed into wax.

The shape of it was clear, even if the words were not fully formed.

And then there was darkness, complete darkness.

And the next thing I knew, I was somewhere else, looking at a white ceiling, hearing the sound of a machine near my head, smelling something sharp and antiseptic that had nothing in common with the smell of the mosque.

And I understood before I could think it clearly that I was in a hospital.

And something in me knew without yet being able to say why or how that I was not coming back from what had just happened.

The same man who had gone into it.

I don’t know exactly how long I was unconscious.

The doctors told me later it was roughly 4 minutes before the paramedics arrived and that I had come too briefly in the ambulance before losing consciousness again.

I have no memory of the ambulance.

I have no memory of being moved from the mosque floor.

My first real memory after the sujud is of that white ceiling and the heart monitor sound and the IV in my arm and the particular quality of hospital air that has no warmth in it whatsoever.

But I’m getting ahead of myself because before the hospital there was the darkness.

And the darkness is the part of this story I have told the fewest people because it is the part where I understand most clearly what people will think of me.

I spent 20 years of my life as a religious scholar and I know exactly the category a story like this gets put in.

I know what I would have said about a man in my position describing this kind of experience.

I would have said it was a medical episode producing altered states.

I would have said the brain under oxygen deprivation generates unusual experiences and attaches meaning to them.

I would have said this confidently and I would have believed it.

So I am not asking you to believe me.

I am asking you to simply listen to what I am going to tell you because it is what happened and telling it as accurately as I can is the only honest thing I know how to do with it.

When the darkness came, when the mosque sounds faded and the floor went away and everything went black, I expected nothing.

Not because of any theological reason, but because that is simply what the body expects from unconsciousness.

The blank space between one moment and the next.

That is what I expected.

That is not what I got.

The darkness was not empty.

I have tried many different ways to explain this and I always come back to the same example.

When you walk into a dark room, you can tell immediately whether it is empty or occupied or you can feel the difference in the air in the weight of the space before you see or hear anything.

There is a quality that a room has when another person is in it even in complete darkness.

Something in the air that registers before the other senses can confirm it.

Anyone who has experienced this knows what I mean.

The darkness I entered when I lost consciousness had that quality.

Occupied, full, not with threat or not primarily with presence.

A presence so large and so completely itself that my own smallalness inside it was the first thing I understood.

The word I keep coming back to is holiness.

I know it is a loaded word and that people use it in different ways and for different purposes.

But there is a specific quality I am trying to describe.

And holiness is the closest word I have.

It is what you feel when you are in contact with something that is so purely and completely what it is that your own impurity, your own mixed motives, your own performances, your own accumulated selfdeceptions becomes suddenly visible.

Not because anything is accusing you, but because purity simply by being present makes everything that isn’t pure visible.

By contrast, the way a shaft of sunlight doesn’t accuse the dust particles.

It illuminates.

It simply is what it is.

And the dust becomes visible because of it.

In that darkness, I felt completely known, not judged, not condemned, though I was aware of my own smallness in a way that was sharp and clear.

known the way you feel known by someone who has loved you for a long time and has seen past every performance you have ever given to the actual person underneath and loves that person too.

The real person, not the performance.

I did not see anything, no vision, no light in the dramatic sense people describe.

No tunnel, only the darkness and the presence inside the darkness and something that communicated in a way that was not speech.

What I received in that place and I use the word received deliberately because heard is not accurate was a challenge.

That is the only word I have for it.

a challenge, not harsh, not condemning, but direct, clear, without any of the space I would normally have to deflect or argue.

Something that went directly at the core of what I had spent my adult life being, something that said, in a way that didn’t need sentences.

You have spoken about me for decades without knowing me.

You have argued about me without encountering me.

You have taught others who I am not.

And you have never sat still long enough to find out who I am.

I am being careful here because I cannot give you the exact transcript of what passed in that place.

Language is a translation and what happened in the darkness was not in language.

It was in something older and more direct than language.

What I can tell you is the shape of it, the weight of it, the specific personal direction of it.

And I can tell you that the thing that most undid me then and in the months that followed was not the challenge itself, but the way it was delivered.

Not with anger, not with condemnation, with something that I can only call grief.

The grief of someone who has been studied at arms length for a very long time and has been waiting with extraordinary patience to simply be known.

Then the darkness deepened and the presence was gone and I was somewhere much smaller and much brighter looking at a ceiling.

I also need to say something about the words that came out of my mouth while I was on the mosque floor because they are part of this account and I cannot leave them out.

I know about them only from what people told me afterward.

Multiple people were present.

Men who had rushed to help when I collapsed.

Men who knew me well.

men who had prayed behind me for years.

And they heard me saying things in a disoriented, slurred state that none of them could easily account for.

They heard me calling on Issa, calling on Jesus, repeating the name with the word for mercy, uh for forgiveness, saying something about the way and the truth.

Some of what I said was in Arabic.

Some of it was in a language no one in that mosque recognized.

When my son Tariq told me this in the hospital, his face was the face of a young man trying to hold something together that was threatening to fall apart.

He had framed it carefully.

He said the brothers were saying it was the medical episode, the brain under stress, that there was nothing to worry about.

He was partly telling me and partly convincing himself.

I looked at him while he spoke and I felt tenderness for him and I said what he needed me to say in that moment that the doctors would explain everything.

I did not lie, but I did not tell him what was actually happening inside me because I didn’t yet have the shape of it clearly enough to tell anyone.

There is one more thing from the hospital that I need to mention because it stayed with me in a way that surprised me.

Late in the first night, very late, it must have been past 1:00 in the morning, a nurse came in to check my IV and my monitors.

She was a middle-aged woman, Filipino, I think, with the quiet efficiency of someone who has been doing this work for a long time.

She checked everything, adjusted something near the heart machine, and as she was leaving at the door, she paused for just a moment, and she crossed herself quietly, quickly, without any awareness that I was watching.

Just a small private act of faith before stepping back out into the corridor.

My first response was a trained theological reflex that rose before I could stop it.

The old reflex.

But then before it could fully form, I’d something happened that I had not experienced before in the context of seeing someone make the sign of the cross.

I felt something close to, I don’t have a better word, tenderness toward her, toward the complete naturalness of what she had just done.

She had not done it for anyone’s benefit.

She had not done it as a statement or a performance.

She had simply done it because it was what she did, as ordinary as breathing before going back to her work at 1:00 in the morning in a hospital.

And something about that naturalness, that unself-consciousness, that simplicity opened something in me that I wasn’t prepared for.

I lay in the dark after she left with tears on my face.

I hadn’t cried since my father died.

I was not by temperament or by training a man who cried easily, but in that hospital room when with the heart monitor beeping and the corridor light under the door, I cried not dramatically, just quietly, just tears moving down my face in the dark.

And behind the tears was a question that I had never once seriously asked in 45 years of religious life.

Not a question about God I had never doubted God.

A question about a specific person.

About whether the presence in that darkness was who I was beginning with enormous terror to suspect it might be.

I did not say anything out loud.

I was not ready to say it out loud, but I let the question exist in me without immediately suppressing it, which was itself something new.

I let it sit there full-sized, frightening, without any of the theological apparatus I had always used to keep it safely out of reach.

And then very late in that empty hospital room, I said something barely above a whisper, not a prayer in any formal sense, just words directed toward the dark, toward whatever or whoever might be in it.

I said, “Was that you?”
The room gave me nothing back.

No voice, no light, no sign of any kind.

Just the monitor and the corridor and the dark.

But the silence that followed that question was different from the silence that had been there before.

It had a texture I couldn’t name.

Something in it that was not nothing.

And I lay inside that silence for a long time, too exhausted and too undone to think clearly.

And somewhere before sleep came, I understood that the question I had just asked, the most serious question of my life, asked in the smallest possible voice in an empty hospital room at 2:00 in the morning, was not going to be easy to unask.

I came home from the hospital 4 days after the collapse.

Fatima had prepared the apartment the way she always prepares a space for someone coming home from a hard time.

Clean, aired out, the smell of good food, everything in order.

The children were there.

Zanep held my hand and didn’t let go for most of that first afternoon.

Tariq hovered with the careful, slightly stiff manner of a young man managing emotions he didn’t want to show.

Neighbors came.

People from the mosque sent food and called and visited.

The mosque committee sent a representative with an envelope for medical expenses that I returned.

Everyone said that Allah had preserved me, that this was a mercy, that I should rest and recover and return to my duties when I was ready.

I received all of this with gratitude.

The love in it was real and I felt it.

I but each time someone said that Allah had preserved me and people said it often with complete sincerity something in me went very still because I was sitting in the center of an experience that didn’t fit cleanly inside that framing and the distance between what they were saying and what I actually knew had happened was widening every day and I had no way to close that distance without starting a conversation I wasn’t ready to start.

The doctors had ordered two weeks of rest.

No mosque duties, minimal stress, no public role for a man whose entire identity was organized around public function.

2 weeks of enforced stillness was its own kind of ordeal.

I had nothing to do but be in my own house and think.

And I thought constantly, not calm, organized thinking, the most grueling mental work I have ever done.

And I have done hard intellectual work.

But this was different because the stakes were not academic.

When the question is personal, when the thing being examined is not a theological position but the foundation of your own identity, your own life, everything you are to everyone who knows you, the thinking is a different order of difficult.

The central thing I was trying to figure out was simple to state and almost impossible to answer honestly.

What had I experienced in the darkness? I was a rational man.

I still am.

I didn’t want to be the kind of person who has a frightening medical event and immediately converts it into divine revelation.

I had encountered people like that over the years.

people who went through trauma and came out the other side with dramatic spiritual conclusions that seemed to owe more to the state of their nervous system than to the nature of God.

I was not going to do that.

So I applied to my own experience the same critical scrutiny I would have applied to anyone else’s.

I asked myself whether it could be entirely explained medically.

Honestly, partly the collapse itself, yes, the vasovagal syncopy, the arhythmia, the loss of consciousness, all of that was medically coherent.

The words spoken during the collapse, possibly the brain under oxygen deprivation produces unusual states.

Language centers can fire unpredictably.

I had enough medical literacy to understand this, and I wasn’t going to pretend I didn’t.

I could account for the words medically without too much strain, but the experience of the presence in the darkness, the specific quality of it, the weight of it, the personal direction of it that I could not fit into any medical account that was honest.

I had read enough about hypoxic experiences and near-death states to know that they tend to be chaotic and associative, drawing on the subject’s existing framework and imagery.

A Muslim man’s brain under hypoxic stress would be expected to produce experiences consistent with Islamic imagery.

What I had encountered in that darkness was not consistent with my Islamic framework.

It had cut across my framework.

It had addressed something that my framework specifically taught me not to address.

It was not my own mind playing familiar material back at me in a distorted way.

It was something other than me, operating in a way I would not have chosen and had not constructed.

The more rigorously I examined it, the more it resisted the medical explanation.

And underneath the intellectual resistance was something in my body, something pre-intellectual that simply knew.

the way you know when a room is occupied even in complete darkness.

I had spent 45 years as a man of faith.

I knew what my own interior experience felt like.

The landscape of my own spiritual life with all its seasons and variations.

What had happened in that darkness was not from inside me.

I knew this the way I knew my own name.

And that knowledge was terrifying.

About 10 days into my recovery, I was walking in our neighborhood without any particular destination.

I needed to get out of the apartment.

The stillness inside it was becoming oppressive, and I found myself in front of a small used bookshop that I had passed many hundreds of times without entering.

The door was propped open.

I went in.

I moved along the shelves without looking for anything.

And then my hand stopped at a spine.

I pulled the book out.

It was an Arabic New Testament.

The Inil old with a worn cover and a Turkish introduction.

Someone had owned this book and read it and eventually let it go.

I stood holding it for a long time.

Then I bought it.

I put it inside my jacket on the way home and I carried it like something I didn’t want anyone to see.

I hid it in my study in a drawer under some old papers.

And then I didn’t open it for 3 days.

I would go into the study and sit at my desk knowing it was there and not open the drawer.

The resistance was layered in ways I can now see more clearly than I could then.

There was the theological resistance.

This text is corrupted.

The scholars have established this approaching it with genuine openness is a kind of naivity I had spent my career helping people avoid.

There was the identity resistance.

You are an imam, a hafis, a man of standing.

What are you doing? There was the resistance that came from the faces of the people I loved.

Fatima, Tariq, my mother in Bura, the men who had prayed behind me for 20 years.

All of them somehow present in that drawer.

And underneath all of it, there was the fear not of what the book would say, but of reading it honestly, because I already had enough honesty in me from the experience in the darkness in to know that honest reading might take me somewhere I couldn’t come back from.

I opened it on the fourth day.

The first time I opened it, I did so at random just to break the paralysis of not opening it.

I landed in the Gospel of John, the 14th chapter.

The verse my eyes fell on was one I knew.

I had taught it.

I had explained why it couldn’t mean what Christians claimed it meant.

I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me.

I had handled that verse many times as a theological subject, as a claim to be countered.

But I had heard those words in the darkness, not those exact words, or not in the form of words, but the shape of them, the way and the truth, and reading them now without the apologetic frame, without the immediate counter response rising in me, reading them from inside the experience I had had.

They were different.

They didn’t present themselves as a claim to evaluate.

They presented themselves as a statement made by someone who was entirely what they were saying, someone speaking with the authority of someone for whom no gap exists between what they say and what they are.

I sat with that for a long time.

Over the following days and weeks, I read more.

Not systematically, not the way I had been trained to read religious texts analytically, methodically, noting problems and inconsistencies.

I read the way a thirsty person drinks.

I read all four gospels.

And for the first time in my life, I read them looking not at the problems in the text, but at the person in the text, at Jesus, at the way he moves through these accounts, the quality of his attention to individual people, the authority he speaks with, not an authority he
justifies or defends, just an authority that is simply there.

The way gravity is simply there.

The things he says under pressure.

The things he says when he is alone with the people closest to him.

I had studied Jesus academically for years.

But I had never simply looked at him, not as a subject of study, but as a person.

And what I found when I looked at him, when I set aside every apologetic tool I had ever been given and just read these accounts as accounts of a person, disturbed me in the best possible way.

He was not the Jesus I had taught about.

The Islamic Issa I had presented in lectures was coherent and manageable.

A prophet, a great one, performing miracles by God’s permission, delivering a message or to be superseded by Muhammad, safe, contained, clearly human.

The Jesus of these gospels was not safe.

He forgave sins with personal authority, not saying, “God forgives you, but I forgive you.

” which in the Jewish religious context of his time was not a slight theological difference but a categorical claim since only God could personally forgive sins against God.

He accepted worship from people without correcting them which a prophet who was only a prophet would never do.

He said things that coming from a man who was only a man would be the most alarming arrogance ever recorded.

Before Abraham was I am using the divine name that God had spoken to Moses from the burning bush.

He spoke about his death and resurrection not as something happening to him but as something he was doing on purpose for a reason as a necessity are not martyrdom not an accident of history a plan.

I had the Islamic responses to every one of these points.

I had taught them.

But now reading from within the experience of the darkness, those responses felt different than they had ever felt before.

They felt like defenses, not engagements, like a man who stands outside a house and argues about its floor plan rather than walking in and seeing the rooms.

And the house was standing there in these pages, fully real, and I had spent my entire career standing outside it, telling people what was wrong with it.

I called Dr.

Ysef about 3 weeks after I came home from the hospital.

I went into my study, closed the door, and called him.

He answered quickly and when I identified myself, his voice had the quality of someone who had expected the call.

Eventually, we met at a small cafe in a part of the city where I was unlikely to run into anyone who knew me well.

We sat for 3 hours.

I told him almost everything.

The collapse, the darkness, the presence, the angel in my drawer.

I told him the way you tell a doctor about a symptom you’ve been sitting on for too long with relief at finally saying it out loud mixed with genuine fear about what comes next.

He listened without interrupting.

When I finished he was quiet for a moment and then he talked about his own journey which had been different from mine.

His had begun with intellectual questioning and taken years before anything like an encounter happened.

His story didn’t mirror mine, but there were moments in it that I felt in my chest when he described them, especially the point he described when the intellectual arguments became secondary.

when he stopped trying to reason his way to Jesus and simply met him as a person and found he couldn’t walk away.

He didn’t try to persuade me of anything that day.

He was too intelligent for that and too decent.

What he said at the end of our time together was something I have turned over many times since.

He said that in his experience, truth of this kind doesn’t need to be forced on anyone.

It has its own gravity.

All a person has to do is stop running from it.

I drove home thinking about that.

Somewhere on the bridge over the Bosphorus with the water below and the city spreading out on both sides, I recognized clearly for the first time that a significant portion of my mental energy in the past weeks had been exactly that, running, not running toward Islam with renewed commitment and not running toward Christianity with any
kind of eagerness.

running from the specific personal undeniable thing that had happened to me on the mosque floor because fully accepting it meant accepting the collapse of everything I had spent my life being and the cost of that was almost unimaginable to me.

The pressure from the community during this period came in gentle waves.

The mosque had announced I was on medical leave, which was true, and provided a complete and dignified explanation for my absence, but what had been heard on the mosque floor the night of the collapse had not been entirely contained.

There were careful concerned questions from men I had known for years.

Calls to check on my health that had something extra in their pauses.

Something they were waiting to see confirmed or denied.

I managed these conversations the way I had always managed difficult conversations.

Calmly, warmly, with enough said to reassure and not enough revealed to expose.

And each conversation where I did this left a residue of discomfort that accumulated over the weeks.

My mother called from Bura.

She was 71 and not well.

She had heard about the collapse from my sister.

She called to hear my voice and to be sure I was alive.

And she asked me in the way mothers ask things without quite asking them directly.

Was I all right? Really inside.

Was everything still as it should be? I told her I was all right.

I said it warmly and gently.

And I meant the warmth and I chose not to mean the all right in the way she was hoping I meant it.

She said something about not letting Shayan use weakness to plant doubt.

She said it with love and with the weight of her whole life behind it.

I held the phone to my ear and felt her love and felt the immense sad distance between what she feared was happening to me and what was actually happening.

And I could do nothing about that distance.

I just held it.

The night I stopped fighting was about 6 weeks after the collapse.

I had been lying awake again.

Sleep in those weeks was difficult and often shallow.

And I got up and went to my study and I sat on the floor, not on a prayer mat, not in any formal position, just on the floor.

And I stopped.

I stopped reviewing the arguments.

I stopped running the calculations about what was true and what I could afford for it to be.

I just stopped.

And in that stop be in that particular exhausted silence that comes when a man runs out of the energy to keep resisting.

I did something I had never consciously done in my life.

I spoke to Jesus not as a theological subject, not as the Issa of Islamic belief, as the person whose presence I had felt in the darkness, as the person whose words about being the way and the truth had landed in me differently than anything I had ever read.

I spoke out of the entirety of my situation.

All the confusion and fear and grief about what this was going to cost me.

All the hunger for something I couldn’t fully name.

I said something like, “If you are who that knight is suggesting you are, I cannot keep fighting this.

I need you to be clear in a way I can’t explain away.

Not a sign or a spectacle.

Just the truth.

Whatever the truth is, let me see it.

I sat on that floor for a long time.

Then I went to bed.

The dream that came that night, I have described to very few people because every time I try to describe it, I am aware of how it sounds.

But I am committed to honesty in this account.

So I will tell you in the dream I was back in the mosque, back in the prostration position, and someone put their hand on my shoulder.

I looked up.

I did not see a face I can describe.

I saw light not dramatic, not blinding, not the light of a film or a vision constructed for effect.

Light the way presence is light.

And in that light there was a complete dissolution of the question I had been carrying for 6 weeks.

Not because the question was answered in words, but because the question couldn’t survive contact with what it was being asked about.

It dissolved the way a handful of salt dissolves in water, present and then not.

I woke with tears on my face.

And something had changed.

Not everything.

There was still so much pain ahead and I already knew it.

But the deepest part of the resistance, the part that had been insisting, “This cannot be real.

You cannot afford for this to be real.

” That part had set something down.

Quietly, with no announcement, like a man letting go of a weight he has been holding for so long that the act of letting go is a thing that finally tells him how heavy it was.

I picked up the angel the next morning and I read John 14 again and I received it for the first time, not as a claim to be assessed, but as the truest thing I had ever encountered, not managed, not handled, received.

The war inside was not over.

It would continue in the territory of my actual life in the most practical and painful ways.

But this particular battle, the one between what I had experienced and what I wanted it not to be, had ended, not in defeat, in surrender.

And I was beginning to understand that surrender, real surrender to something real is not the same thing as losing.

It is the beginning of finding.

and I had been lost for a very long time inside the confidence of a man who had always known exactly where he was.

There is a version of stories like mine that skips past the cost.

The person finds the truth.

The truth sets them free.

Things are hard for a while, but in the end everything is better.

And that is true.

The freedom is real.

The better is real.

But the cost is also real and it doesn’t disappear after a chapter.

Ah, it goes on being real alongside everything else.

And I think leaving it out is a disservice to anyone who might be in the middle of their own cost right now and wondering whether anyone understands what it actually feels like.

So I am going to tell you what it actually felt like.

About 3 months after the collapse, I returned to leading the Friday prayer.

The mosque committee had held my position, and the medical explanation had been accepted with genuine care and concern, and there was a real desire among the community to have me back at the front.

My first Friday back was an experience that I cannot reduce to simple description.

I stood at the front and looked out at the faces of men I had led through every season of their lives for over 20 years.

And I felt enormous love for them and enormous grief simultaneously.

I grief for the gap between what they believed about me and what was actually moving inside me.

a gap I was maintaining because I didn’t yet know how to close it without causing damage I wasn’t ready to cause.

I preached on love and forgiveness that Friday.

I had always preached on love and forgiveness.

These themes are as Islamic as they are anything else.

But the love and forgiveness I was drawing on now had a different source than it had before.

And the difference was only visible from the inside.

I was speaking from within the experience of being personally loved and personally forgiven.

Not as an abstraction or a theological principle, but as something that had happened to me, that was still happening to me.

Offered by a presence I was now privately, carefully calling by his name.

Nobody in that mosque could have detected this, but two men, both longstanding members of the mosque board, came to me afterward and stood in the corridor with me, and one of them said my sermon had sounded different.

He said it kindly as an observation, not an accusation.

I said that coming close to death changes how a man thinks about certain things.

He nodded and accepted this, but his eyes on me as he walked away were more careful than they had been before.

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