Royal Heir Burned Bibles During Ramadan and Woke Up to a Voice He Feared –

I threw three Bibles into a fire in the courtyard of our palace during Ramadan while my father’s guards watched and nobody stopped me because nobody ever stopped me.

But what woke me up the next morning at 4:00 was not a sound from outside.

And I need to ask you this.

What do you do when the god you have been burning book about decides to speak to you directly in the dark? My name is Zed and I am 26 years old from London, England.

I was born in a private hospital in Mayfair and brought home to a townhouse in Kensington that had 14 rooms and a staff of six.

My father is a prince from a Gulf royal family with oil interests across three continents and a name that opens doors in every capital city on earth.

My mother was a British woman from a good family in Oxfordshire who converted to Islam before their marriage and raised me and my two younger brothers inside the faith with a thoroughess that I think surprised even my father.

She wanted us to have no confusion about who we were.

We were Muslim.

We were heirs.

We carried a name that meant something and we were to live accordingly.

I grew up between London and the Gulf.

school terms in England and long summers in the palace compound where my grandfather had been born and where my father’s generation had learned to ride and shoot and recite Quran in the same week.

The palace was not a storybook palace.

It was large and bald and practical.

Built for a family that had been wealthy for three generations but is still remembered when the land had been hard and the water had been scarce.

Bash my grandfather prayed five times a day without missing once in the last 40 years of his life.

He died with his forehead on a prayer rug and my father said that was the best death a man could ask for.

I attended a private school in West London from age seven.

Every boy there was either titled connected or both.

I learned early that our world had a floor and a ceiling and that most people lived somewhere in between and that I did not.

I was not arrogant about it.

At least I did not think I was.

I simply understood that certain rules apply to other people and not entirely to me.

And I moved through my education with that understanding, operating quietly in the background of everything.

My Islamic education ran parallel to my school education.

A tutor named Sheik Hammed came to our Kensington house three evenings a week and on Saturday mornings.

He was a small serious man from a scholarly family who wore the same two suits on a rotation and carried a briefcase with a combination look.

He taught me Arabic with precision, Quran with rigor and Islamic theology with the confidence of a man who had never once encountered a question he could not answer.

I respected him.

He was one of the few people in my life who treated my attention as something I owed rather than something he had to earn.

By the time I was 16, I had memorized 62 chapters of the Quran.

Shikh Hammad told my father that among all the students he had taught in 30 years, I had the most natural retention.

My father gave him a bonus and told me in the car on the way to a dinner that night that a man who knows the word of God has a foundation that money cannot buy and enemies cannot take.

He said it once, looking straight ahead through the windcreen.

I held on to it.

I went to Oxford for politics and economics.

The life there was what you would expect for someone with my background.

Good rooms, good dinners, the right people.

I was wellliked because I was interested in people and because I had enough money to be generous without thinking about it and because I had been trained since a childhood to enter any room and make the people in it feel that I was glad they were there.

That is a skill the wealthy learn early and it is more useful than almost anything they teach you in a classroom.

But Oxford also had people I had never encountered in my particular version of the world.

Not by background or wealth but by type.

People who believed things with a different quality than the people I grew up around.

I met evangelicals there.

Christians of a kind I had not seen up close.

Not the Church of England variety my English school friends came from where faith was a tradition you inherited and carried lightly.

These were people for whom Jesus was a present reality.

Someone they spoke about in the present tense.

Someone they expected to hear from on a given Tuesday morning.

I found them odd and faintly irritating in the way you find odd and irritating something you cannot fully account for.

Sheikhhammed had prepared me for Christianity in the way he prepared me for everything thoroughly and with a clear conclusion built in.

He explained that Christianity was a noble tradition that had drifted from its original message.

He explained the trinity as a philosophical addition that the early church had imposed on the simpler monotheism of Jesus himself.

He explained that the Bible in its current form was a document that had passed through too many hands and too many translations to be trusted as the original word of God.

These were not presented as opinions.

They were presented as historical facts that only the poorly educated or the intellectually dishonest would dispute.

I brought these arguments to Oxford debates and they performed well.

I was articulate and I had been trained to defend the positions and I carried an authority in the room that came partly from my ability and partly from something harder to name.

When I spoke, people listened with a certain attention that I was accustomed to receiving and that I did not think much about.

The Christian students I debated were mostly goodnatured about it.

There was one exception, a man named Thomas, a final year student from a farming family in Wales, who had apparently been a Christian since he was eight years old and who debated the way farmers work steadily and without drama and without any apparent concern for how he looked doing it.

He never raised his voice.

He never tried to win the crowd.

He just kept asking one question that I kept answering and that he kept finding insufficient.

The question was this.

Have you read the gospels yourself from beginning to end? Not for debate preparation but just to find out what they actually say.

I told him I had read extensively about the gospels.

He said that was not what he asked.

I dismissed this as a rhetorical trick and moved on.

But I thought about that question for 3 years afterward.

That is the thing about a question that is actually right.

It does not go away just because you refuse to answer it.

After Oxford, I went to work for one of my father’s investment firms in London.

I had an office in the city with a view of the temps.

I had a flat in Chelsea.

I wore good suits and ate at good restaurants and flew to Dubai and Riyad and New York for meetings that mattered.

And I was 24 years old.

And I felt like the ground was solid under every step.

It was during Ramadan that year that the Bibles were brought to the palace compound during our summer visit.

A domestic worker, a Filipino woman named Kora, who had worked for our household for 11 years, had left three Bibles in a storage room.

Someone found them.

My father’s household manager brought the matter to my father quietly.

My father was occupied with other things.

The manager brought it to me instead.

I was 24.

I was fasting.

I was in the second week of Ramadan, which for me always produced a particular quality of a feeling, sharp and righteous and certain like the fast was burning away impurities and leaving something clean behind.

I told the manager to bring the Bibles to the courtyard.

I told him to bring a firepot.

I want to tell you exactly what I felt standing in that courtyard in the evening.

Heat with three Bibles in my hands and a fire burning in the iron pot in front of me.

I felt completely right.

I felt like I was doing something that God would be pleased by.

I felt like I was defending what the palace stood for and what our family stood for and what Ramadan was for.

I dropped the first Bible into the fire and watched the cover curl and the pages brown and I felt nothing that resembled doubt.

I dropped the second one and the third.

The household manager stood nearby.

Two guards stood at the courtyard entrance.

Nobody said anything.

Nobody ever said anything to me that I did not want to hear.

That was the most dangerous thing about my life.

Though I could not have told you that then.

I went inside.

I prayed the Tarawi prayer, the long Ramadan night prayer with my father and brothers.

I went to bed at 11:30 feeling clean and settled and certain.

I woke up at 4 in the morning and the room was completely dark and completely silent and I was more awake than I had ever been in my life.

Not anxious, not from a nightmare, just awake with a clarity that had no source I could identify and a presence in the room that I can only describe as the most real thing I had ever been in the same space with.

And then the question came, not in a voice exactly, but in a way that was not only my own thought, clear and direct and completely without aggression.

Why are you burning books you have never read? I lay in that dark room for 2 hours.

The presence did not leave.

The question did not leave.

and something I had been carrying since Thomas asked me his question at Oxford.

Something I had refused to examine for 3 years cracked open in the dark like a seed that has been waiting for the right conditions.

I did not sleep again that night.

By the time the sun came up over the palace walls, I was a different person than the one who had stood at the firepot 8 hours earlier.

not yet a Christian, but no longer entirely certain of anything I had built my certainty on.

That was the morning that shocked the palace.

Not because anyone else knew what had happened, but because I came down to the fajger prayer and my father looked at my face and asked me what was wrong and I told him nothing.

and he looked at me for three more seconds with the eyes of a man who had survived enough in his life to know when something fundamental had shifted in someone he loved.

He did not ask again, but he watched me for the rest of that summer with the attention I had not felt from him since I was a child.

I went back to London in September and I bought a Bible the first week, not from a Christian bookshop, from a secondhand bookstore on the South Bank where nobody knew me and nobody would think anything of a man in a good coat picking up a plain paperback New Testament from a box outside a stall on a Tuesday afternoon.

I bought it and put it in my coat pocket and carried it home on that tube and felt like it weighed more than it did.

Not from guilt.

Exactly.

From something more complicated.

I was a prince from a Muslim royal family who had burned three Bibles during Ramadan 8 weeks earlier and now I was carrying one home in my coat.

The gap between those two facts was enormous and I was standing in the middle of it with no map.

I read the Gospel of Mark first because I had read somewhere that it was the earliest and most despair.

I read it in one sitting on a Wednesday evening in my Chelsea flat with a glass of water I did not drink and my phone face down on the table because I did not want to be interrupted.

Mark’s Jesus moved fast.

The word immediately appeared constantly.

He healed people immediately.

He called followers and they left immediately.

There was no ceremony and no long preparation.

Things happened because Jesus was there.

And when Jesus was present, things could not stay the way they were.

I read the moment in chapter 2 where Jesus told a paralyzed man that his sins were forgiven.

And the religious teachers in the room thought to themselves that only God could forgive sins.

And Jesus looked at them and said, “Which is easier? To say your sins are forgiven or to tell a man to get up and walk?” And then he told the man to get up and walk.

And the man got up and walked.

I put the book down and looked at my ceiling for a long time.

I had argued in Oxford debates that Jesus never claimed to be God.

That this claim was a later invention by Paul and the institutional church.

I had said it with Sheikh’s authority behind me and I had never once checked whether it was true in the source material.

But the man in Mark chapter 2 who looked at the religious experts and said, “Watch this.

” and then did the thing that proved the forgiveness was real.

That man was not avoiding the claim.

He was making it in the most direct way possible, not with words, with action that only God could perform.

I read Matthew and Luke over the next two weeks.

Then John, which was different from the others in a way I felt before I could explain.

John’s Jesus spoke in longer passages.

He said things like before Abraham was I am.

He said I and the father are one.

He said whoever has seen me has seen the father.

These were not the words of a prophet being careful about his claims.

These were the words of a man who had decided that the people he was talking to needed to know exactly who he was and he was going to tell them with no softening.

I had been told these passages were later additions, theological inventions written long after Jesus died to support a position the early church had decided to hold.

But I was reading a scholarship now as well as the text itself.

I was reading a secular historians and textual critics.

None of them dated the Gospel of John as late as my training had implied.

Most placed it within living memory of the events it described.

The manuscript evidence was earlier and more consistent than almost any other document from the ancient world.

The argument that it was a corrupted or fabricated text was not the scholarly consensus.

It was a position that required dismissing a substantial amount of historical evidence.

I had been misinformed, not maliciously.

Sheik Hammad believed what he taught me.

But he had been taught a version of Christian history that selected certain facts and omitted others and I had taken it as the complete picture because I had no reason to check and no one who loved me enough to tell me that I should.

The feeling that came with this understanding was not triumph.

It was closer to vertigo.

When you discover that a foundation you built on is not as solid as you thought.

The first sensation is not freedom.

It is the dizzying awareness of how high up you are.

I called Thomas in October.

I had not spoken to him since Oxford.

I found him through a mutual connection on LinkedIn of all places.

He was teaching a secondary school in Cardiff.

I sent a message that said only I read them.

Can we talk? He called me within the hour.

We tal it for 2 hours that first evening.

He was exactly as I remembered him.

Steady, unhurried, no drama.

He asked what I had found in the gospels and I told him and he listened to all of it and when I finished he said what do you think now? I told him I did not know.

I told him I had questions that seem to have answers and I did not know what to do with answers that pointed where they were pointing.

He said that’s the most honest thing a person can say.

What are the specific questions? We met in person the following Saturday.

He drove up from Cardiff on a Friday night and we had breakfast at a cafe near my flat on Saturday morning.

He was wearing a wax jacket that had seen better days and he looked like a man who was entirely comfortable in his own life.

That comfort was notable to me.

I had grown up around people with every material advantage and comfort was not something I associated with them.

It was associated with Thomas who taught in school in Cardiff and drove a 10-year-old Vauhall and seemed to want nothing that he did not have.

I asked him my questions in order from the list I had kept in my phone, the Trinity, the nature of Jesus, the atonement, why a good God would require a blood sacrifice, what happened to people who never heard the gospel.

Thomas answered us each one carefully and honestly.

He said when he did not know.

He said when the question had been debated for centuries without resolution but he kept returning to the same foundation that Harold had kept returning to for Samir.

Not doctrine not institution the person of Jesus.

He said to me at one point zed you can argue about the trinity and the atonement theory and all of it indefinitely.

Smart people have done that for 2,000 years.

But at some point the question is simpler than all of that.

Was Jesus who he said he was? Because if he was, everything else follows.

And if he wasn’t, then Christianity is just a very sophisticated mistake.

You can’t hold a middle position forever.

The claims are too specific.

I had heard that logic before in my head.

Hearing it from Thomas made it land differently because I had watched Thomas live inside that claim for the 3 years I knew him at Oxford and the life it produced in him was not the life of a man who had made a mistake.

I went home that Saturday afternoon and sat in my flat for a long time.

My father had called that morning and I had not called back yet.

My life in London was unchanged on the surface.

the office, the flat, the suits, the meetings.

But underneath the surface, something was moving that I could not stop and was beginning not to want to stop.

That night, I opened the Gospel of John 2, chapter 1, and read the first verse.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

Then I read verse 14.

The word became flesh and made his home among us.

I sat with those two sentences for an hour.

The God who was in the beginning did not stay at a distance.

He came into the specific weight and texture of human life into hunger and exhaustion and grief and the smell of fish and the feel of wood under a carpenter’s hands.

He came all the way in.

That idea had terrified me when I encountered it in Islamic apologetics training because it seemed to reduce God to something small.

But sitting with it in my flat in Chelsea on a Saturday night in October, it did not seem to reduce God.

It seemed to reveal something about what God is actually like.

A God who would do that is not a God who is protecting his dignity at a distance.

He is a God who loves with a completeness that does not stop at inconvenience or cost.

I did not pray to Jesus that night, but I kept the book opened on the table when I went to bed.

That was new.

every night before I had closed it and put it in the drawer where I kept things I was not ready to explain.

Leaving it open felt like the beginning of something.

Thomas introduced me to a pastor in London named Pastor Simon who led a small church in Burmany south of the river in a converted warehouse with exposed brick walls and wooden chairs and a worship team that practiced on Thursday evenings with a volume that the neighbors had
apparently gotten used to.

Continue reading….
Next »