Saudi Prince Hunted Christians During Ramadan Then He Collapsed


I was the one who signed the arrest orders.

I was the one who sent men to kick down doors during the holiest month of the year.

And I dragged Christians out of hiding.

My name is Fisal al- Zahani and I am 27 years old, born in Riyad, Saudi Arabia, the son of a prince, the grandson of a man who sat in rooms with kings.

I tell you this not to impress you.

I tell you this so you understand exactly how far God had to reach to pull me out of the darkness I was living in because I was not just a Muslim who didn’t know Jesus.

I was a weapon pointed directly at the people who followed him and I used that weapon with pride.

There is a kind of man who is born already holding the world in his hand and never once questions whether he deserves it.

I was that man.

My father, Prince Wid Al- Zarani, was a senior figure in the Ministry of Interior, the government body that controlled law enforcement, internal security, and religious compliance across the kingdom.

He was not the most famous prince.

He was not the kind whose name appeared in international newspapers or whose face showed up at global summits.

He was the quiet kind.

The kind who worked in rooms without windows and made decisions that nobody outside those rooms ever heard about.

That kind of power, the invisible kind, was the most absolute power of all.

We lived in a compound in the northern district of Riyad.

Not a palace, my father did not like the word palace, but a large world property with three houses inside it.

one for my parents, one for my father’s mother, and one for guests.

There were guards at the gate.

There were Filipino housekeepers who had worked for our family for 15 years.

There were cars in the driveway worth more than most American families earned in 5 years.

I grew up inside those walls believing the world outside them existed primarily to confirm what I already knew that we were important that we were chosen that Allah had placed us above others for a reason.

My father was a deeply religious man not in the soft private way some men are religious where faith is something quiet between them and God.

My father wore his faith like armor like a uniform like a title.

He prayed five times a day without exception.

He fasted Ramadan with a strictness that made the rest of us look lazy.

He funded mosques.

He donated to Islamic scholars.

He quoted Quran in casual conversation the way other men quote football scores.

And he believed with absolute certainty that Islam was not just the right religion but the only real religion and that any deviation from it was not just error but threat.

From the time I could speak, my father taught me that the world was divided into two kinds of people.

Muslims and everyone else.

And the everyone else were not enemies exactly, just irrelevant.

Tolerated but not respected, present but not equal.

The one exception was Christian missionaries.

Those, he said, were not just irrelevant.

They were dangerous wolves.

He called them.

wolves who came into the house of Islam wearing the clothes of kindness and education and medical work and who used that disguise to plant seeds of doubt in the hearts of weak Muslims.

To protect against wolves, you needed hunters and my father was training me to be a hunter.

I was sent to study political science and Islamic law at King Sawud University in Riyad.

I was a serious student, not because I loved learning, but because I understood that credentials were armor.

A man with the right education and the right name and the right connections in Saudi Arabia could do almost anything.

I graduated at 23 with honors and joined a division within the Ministry of Interior that my father quietly arranged for me.

Officially, my title was a special compliance officer, which meant nothing to anyone outside the government.

What it meant in practice was that I was part of a small unit that monitored religious activity across the capital region, specifically looking for unauthorized religious practice, which in Saudi Arabia meant anything that wasn’t a Sunni Islam.

I want you to understand what that job looked like from the inside.

From the perspective of a 23-year-old Saudi man who had been raised to see this work as noble, righteous, protective.

We were not in our own minds persecutors.

We were guardians.

We were the wall between the true faith and the forces that wanted to corrupt it.

When we received a tip that foreign workers were holding a Christian prayer meeting in an apartment in the Bata district, I did not feel like I was going to do something wrong.

I felt like a doctor about to remove a tumor.

The emotion was not cruelty.

It was duty.

But if I am honest, and this testimony has no value unless I am completely honest, there was something else underneath the duty.

Something I did not name at the time, but that I can name now looking back.

It was power.

The feeling of walking into a room and watching people go still with fear.

The feeling of picking up a phone and knowing that one call could end someone’s life in this country.

The feeling of being 23 years old and holding authority that most men twice my age would never touch.

I was addicted to it.

Not the violence.

We did not typically use physical violence, at least not directly, but the authority, the weight of consequence that followed me everywhere I went.

In my first 3 years on the unit, I participated in over 40 raids on illegal religious gatherings.

Most of them were migrant worker communities.

Ethiopians, Iritrians, and other African nationalities meeting in labor camps or in the crammed apartments of the Mfua and Sha districts of Riyad to worship in their own language behind locked doors and drawn curtains.

We would receive a tip, usually from an informant within the community, and we would show up with uniformed officers from the religious compliance division.

We would knock or not knock depending on the situation and we would enter.

We would find these people in the middle of their worship.

They would be sitting on mats on the floor holding Bibles singing quietly or praying with bowed heads.

And every single time, without exception, the look on their faces when we walked in was the same.

Pure terror.

I told myself the terror was guilt.

That they were afraid because they knew they were doing something wrong.

Now I know the truth.

They were afraid because they had seen what happened to people like them when people like me showed up.

Deportation was the best outcome.

Some had been beaten by employers.

Some had lost wages and passports.

Some had simply disappeared into detention and emerged months later with no explanation of where they had been or what had been done to them.

Their terror was not guilt.

It was the reasonable response to real danger.

But at 23 inside the compound of my father’s values, I could not see that.

There was one raid I think about more than all the others.

It happened about 2 years into my work with the unit.

We had received a tip about a small community of East African believers meeting in a basement storage room beneath an apartment building in the Ala district.

It was a Friday night during Ramadan.

We arrived at 11:00 in the evening.

Six officers and me.

We went down the stairs to the basement.

We could hear singing.

It was quiet, almost whispered, but in the silence of that building at that hour, it was unmistakable.

A hymn in a language I didn’t know, but the melody was clearly devotional.

One of the officers unlocked the door with a master key the building manager had given us.

We pushed it open and walked in.

There were about 20 people inside, men and women, I ranging in age from maybe 20 to 60.

They were sitting in a circle on cardboard boxes and plastic crates.

In the center of the circle was a small folding table with two candles burning on it and an open Bible.

When we walked in, the singing stopped instantly.

The candles flickered from the draft of the door opening.

And in the sudden silence, a child started crying.

I hadn’t expected a child.

In my mind, these gatherings were adult affairs.

Workers making a choice that carried consequences.

But there was a little girl, maybe four or 5 years old, sitting in the lap of a woman in the corner.

And when the lights and the uniforms came through the door, she buried her face in her mother’s chest and started sobbing.

The mother wrapped both arms around her and held her tight and looked up at us over the top of her daughter’s head.

And her face was not just afraid.

It was something else.

I did not have the word for it then.

Looking back now, I believe it was grief.

Not for herself, for us.

She was looking at me.

This woman with a crying child in her arms in a basement in Riyad on a Friday night during Ramadan.

and she was looking at me with something close to sorrow, like she felt sorry for me, like I was the one who needed rescuing.

I told myself she was performing.

I told myself the sorrowful expression was a manipulation tactic, a way of making the enforcement officer feel bad enough to let them go.

I hardened my face and gave the order to document everyone present and begin the removal process.

The child cried the entire time.

Her mother never stopped holding her and I walked back up the stairs into the riad night and told myself I had done the right thing.

I was promoted the following year.

I was given a small team of my own to run and a broader jurisdiction that covered not just residential raids but also digital surveillance and monitoring online activity for evidence of Christian procilitizing aimed at Saudi nationals.

My father threw a small dinner to celebrate my promotion.

He put his hand on my shoulder in front of his guests and said, “This son of mine has more of my blood in him than all my others combined.

” Those words were the greatest prize of my life.

I would have done anything to hear them again.

The Ramadan of my 27th year was when everything started to crack.

Ramadan was always a heightened period for our unit.

The reasoning was theological.

The holy month was a time of spiritual intensification for Muslims which made it simultaneously a time of greater vulnerability to outside religious influence and a time when the visibility of any non-Islamic practice was especially offensive to the community.

My supervisor explained it with a phrase I still remember.

He said during Ramadan we are all more awake.

The enemy knows this.

So we must also be more awake.

We launched what my supervisor called an enhanced compliance operation for the Ramadan of that year.

Longer hours, broader surveillance, more informance activated, faster response to tips.

We called it internally the Ramadan Protection Initiative.

The name made it sound almost charitable, like we were doing these communities a favor.

I was put in charge of coordinating the residential component of the operation across three districts in eastern Riyad.

I had a team of 12 officers and a mandate that gave me the significant discretion in how I used them.

In the [clears throat] first two weeks of Ramadan alone, my team conducted 11 operations.

We broke up prayer meetings.

We confiscated Bibles and religious materials.

We initiated deportation proceedings for over 30 foreign workers.

We flagged four Saudi nationals for follow-up investigation based on digital evidence that suggested contact with Christian content online.

I was efficient.

I was effective.

My supervisor praised my work in a memo that was copied to my father.

My father called me on the phone after receiving it and said simply, “Well done.

” Two words.

I felt like I had won a war.

But something started happening to me around the third week of Ramadan that I could not explain and could not control.

It started with a dream.

I was not someone who placed significance on dreams.

I knew that Islamic tradition gave some weight to dreams that the prophet reportedly received divine communication through them.

But in my practical enforcementoriented mind, dreams were just the brain processing the day’s noise.

I had never had a dream that meant anything to me.

But on the 21st night of Ramadan, which is considered one of the holiest nights of the month, the night of power, Leil al-Qad, when Muslims believe the barrier between heaven and earth grows thin.

I had a dream that was unlike anything I had ever experienced.

I was standing in the basement of that apartment building in Al Raar, the one from 2 years before with the candles and the cardboard boxes and the crying child.

Everything was exactly as it had been that night.

The circle of people, the folding table, the open Bible, the two candles.

Except this time, I was not standing at the door with officers behind me.

I was standing in the middle of the circle alone.

And the people around me were not afraid.

They were looking at me with complete calm.

With that expression I had seen on the mother’s face two years before and had called manipulation.

Up close from inside the circle, it did not look like manipulation.

It looked like love.

Then one of the candles on the table went out and the light from the remaining candle stretched and grew until it filled the entire room.

And in the middle of that light standing on the other side of the folding table was a man.

I could not see his face clearly but I could feel his eyes on me and the feeling was impossible to describe with accuracy.

The closest I can come is this.

Imagine every time in your life you have felt completely alone.

And imagine all of that loneliness being removed in one instant, replaced not by company or noise or distraction but by the certain undeniable knowledge that you are known, fully known and fully loved.

Anyway, the man across the table did not speak.

He simply placed his hand on the open Bible and looked at me and I woke up.

I sat up in bed in my apartment in the Sle Mania district of Riyad at 3:00 in the morning during Ramadan and I was shaking, not with fear.

I have been afraid before and I know what fear feels like in my body.

This was different.

I was shaking the way a person shakes when they have been holding something very heavy for a very long time and someone finally takes it from their hands.

Relief.

Physical total relief.

Except I did not know what had been taken from me or who had taken it.

I got up and performed the pre-dawn prayer.

I recited the words I had known since his childhood.

I prostrated toward Maka.

I did everything correctly and the whole time in the back of my mind there was an image I could not shake.

A man standing in candle light with his hand on an open Bible looking at me like I was the most important person in the world.

I told no one about the dream.

I went to work the next morning and did my job and came home and ate my ifar meal alone in my apartment and told no one.

But the dream did not fade the way dreams normally do.

It stayed completely clear in my memory for days.

The light, the circle of faces, the man, his hand on the Bible, his eyes on mine.

Every detail preserved like a photograph.

On the 25th day of Ramadan, my team received a high priority tip from an informant.

There was, according to the report, a gathering of unusual size happening that weekend in an apartment in the Almala district.

Not migrant workers this time.

The informant claimed that at least two Saudi nationals would be present along with a larger group of African and Arab expatriots.

A Saudi national attending a Christian gathering was a very different level of case from a foreign worker meeting.

It triggered a different response protocol, higher authorization, more documentation, involvement of a different set of officers.

I submitted the request for the elevated operation.

It was approved within hours.

My father was briefed as he was on anything involving Saudi nationals.

He called me that evening.

He said, “Handle this personally, Fisal.

I want you at the door.

” I said, “Yes, father.

” The operation was scheduled for the following Friday night.

On Thursday night, I had the dream again, identical in every detail.

The basement, the circle, the candles, the light, the man, his hand on the Bible, his eyes.

that feeling of being fully known and fully loved.

I woke up at 3:00 in the morning again and sat in the dark and this time I did not perform the prayer.

I just sat there.

Something was happening to me that my entire upbringing had given me no tools to process.

I was a trained religious compliance officer.

I could quote Islamic law from memory.

I knew the theological arguments against Christianity in detail.

I had been prepared for every kind of encounter with Christian belief as a form of ideological combat, arguments to defeat, a position to overwhelm with superior knowledge.

But no one had prepared me for a dream.

No one had given me an argument to use against a feeling.

No one had told me what to do.

When the man who spent his days hunting believers started seeing visions of light in his sleep, I went to the operation on Friday night.

I stood at the door of an apartment on the fourth floor of a building in Al-Mala with my team behind me.

I could hear voices inside.

I gave the signal.

The door opened.

There were 31 people in that apartment.

I counted them myself later when I filed the report.

They were sitting on the floor in rows, not a circle this time.

At the front of the room, a man was speaking quietly in Arabic from an open Bible balanced on his knee.

He was Syrian, about 40 years old.

When the door opened and we came in, he did not move.

He did not close the Bible or stand up or run or beg.

He just looked at me with calm, steady eyes and held the book open in his lap like it was the most natural thing in the world.

And then he said something that stopped me completely.

He said in clear Arabic, “We have been expecting you, brother.

We prayed for you this week.

We are glad you came.

” The officers behind me were already moving, already beginning the documentation process, already asking people for identification, but I stood still because this man had just said, “We prayed for you.

Not we feared you.

Not we knew you were coming and tried to hide.

Not we surrender.

We prayed for you.

” Like my coming was something they had asked God for.

Like I was the answer to something.

I completed the operation.

I did my job.

I filed my report.

I submitted the names.

I initiated the proceedings.

But the Syrian man’s faces stayed with me the same way the dream did.

Calm, not performing, not manipulating, just calm.

The way a person is calm when they know something you don’t.

When they have information about the outcome that you are still afraid of.

Two days after that operation on the last Friday of Ramadan, I collapsed.

I was at the mosque for the Friday prayer, the grand mosque in my district, one of the largest in Riyad, a building I had attended hundreds of times since his childhood.

I was in the front rows as I always was.

Men like me, a men from families like mine did not sit in the back.

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