We stood in the front rows because that was our place.

The Imam began the sermon.

It was a Ramadan sermon about the reward of righteous men, about the favor of Allah on those who defend the faith, about the importance of purifying the community from corrupting influences in the holy month.

He could have been describing my job.

He was in a sense this was the theological framework that gave my work its meaning.

And somewhere in the middle of that sermon, in the middle of a sentence about the defenders of the faith, I felt something happen in my chest.

Not pain, not the sharp stabbing pain you might expect from a cardiac event.

It was more like something releasing like a rope that had been pulled tight for years suddenly going to slack.

My vision went white, not dark white, flooded with brightness from the inside out.

My legs stopped holding me.

I went down.

I did not fall forward or backward.

I simply folded, dropped to my knees on the prayer rug in the front row of the Grand Mosque in Riyad in the middle of the Friday sermon on the last Friday of Ramadan in front of 200 men who knew exactly who I was.

I heard shouting.

I heard my name.

I felt hands on my arms pulling me upright.

And then I was outside in the courtyard sitting on the steps with my back against a pillar.

And a man was holding a phone to his ear, calling for an ambulance.

And another man was holding a bottle of water to my lips.

And the sky above the courtyard was a white so bright it hurt my closed eyes through my eyelids.

The doctors at the hospital found no physical cause.

My heart was fine.

My blood pressure was normal.

My brain scans showed nothing.

The attending physician, a Saudi man about my father’s age with careful eyes, sat across from me in the examination room and said, “Sometimes the body responds to stress in ways we don’t fully understand.

” He said, “Rest and reduced workload.

” He said, “Lay off the fasting intensity for the remaining days of Ramadan.

” He said, “These things happen.

” But I knew even lying in that hospital bed, even before I had the language to describe what was happening to me, I knew that what had happened in that mosque was not medical.

It was the continuation of something that had started on the 21st night of Ramadan when a man stood in candle light and put his hand on an open Bible and looked at me with eyes that knew everything I had ever done and loved me anyway.

My father came to the hospital.

He sat in the chair beside my bed and held my hand.

A gesture so unusual from him that it frightened me more than the collapse.

My father was not a handholding man.

He was a straightbacked measured controlled man who expressed love through provision and approval and never through touch.

His hand around mine felt like an earthquake warning.

He said, “How are you, Fisal?” I said, “I am fine, father.

” It was nothing.

He looked at me for a long time.

He said, “You have been working too hard.

” I said, “Yes.

” He said, “After Eid, take some time.

” I said, “Thank you, father.

” He squeezed my hand once and let go and stood up and straightened his throbe and left.

I lay in the hospital bed alone after he left and stared at the ceiling tiles and thought about the Syrian man in al- Mala with his Bible open on his knee.

“We prayed for you this week.

We are glad you came.

” They had prayed for me.

The people I was arresting had prayed for the man who was arresting them.

That was either the most absurd thing I had ever heard or the most powerful thing I had ever heard.

And lying in a hospital bed where I had been admitted for collapsing in a mosque with no medical explanation, I was beginning to suspect it was the latter.

I was discharged the next morning.

I went home to my apartment and I did something I had never done before.

I locked the door and sat down on my prayer rug.

And instead of reciting the prescribed prayers I had known since his childhood, I sat in silence.

Total silence.

No Arabic verses, no memorized supplications, no ritual movements, unjust in me and the silence and the question that had been building inside me since the 21st night of Ramadan.

Who are you? I was not asking Allah.

I had been asking Allah my entire life and what I got back was silence and a feeling of performance.

I was not asking the man in the dream.

I didn’t know how to address him.

Didn’t have a name.

I was just asking.

The question thrown into the silence without a specific address.

Who are you? What is happening to me? Why do the people I have been hunting look more at peace than I have ever felt in my entire life? The silence lasted a long time and then not in an audible voice, not in a vision, but in the clear, unmistakable language of knowing.

A knowing that landed on my chest with the weight of certainty.

One word came back.

Look, I sat there.

Look at what? Look where.

I had nothing in my apartment that could help me.

No Bible.

Owning a Bible as a Saudi national was more than a legal risk.

It was a social catastrophe.

I had a Quran.

I had Islamic books.

I had the religious materials of a man who had spent his adult life defending a faith he was now quietly, terrifyingly beginning to question.

Look, I opened my laptop.

I had used it for surveillance work.

It was equipped with a VPN that I had been issued for professional purposes to access blocked foreign websites.

As part of my monitoring work, I had the tools to see what I had spent years preventing others from seeing.

I typed three words into the search bar.

Who is Jesus? What I found in the weeks that followed broke me open in the best possible way.

I read for hours every night.

I found testimonies from Arab Christians, from men and women born into Islam across the Middle East who described encounters with Jesus that matched my dream in specific detail.

The light, the eyes, the sense of being completely known, the peace that replaced a lifetime of striving.

Story after story from Egypt, from Syria, from across the Gulf, from Arab communities in the United States and Europe and Australia, people who had walked the same road I was walking.

I found a website that offered a free Arabic New Testament through a digital download.

I downloaded it at 2:00 in the morning and read through the Gospel of Matthew in one sitting.

I had been trained to argue against the New Testament, trained to point to what Islamic scholars called its corruptions and contradictions.

But reading it without the armor of argument, reading it just as a man in the dark who needed to know if the person in his dream was real, I found something I had not expected.

I found a man who went looking for the people everyone else was hunting.

In every story I read, Jesus was not sitting in a palace sending out compliance officers.

He was walking toward the people who had been pushed to the outside.

He was eating with them.

He was touching them.

He was calling them by name.

He was looking at them with the same eyes that had looked at me from across a folding table in a dream.

Not judging, knowing, not condemning, calling.

I read the account of the woman caught in the act of wrongdoing.

dragged in front of a crowd by the religious authorities of her day, men with the power to punish an illegal mandate to do so.

And Jesus knelt in the dirt and wrote something in the ground, and said, “Let the one who has no sin, throw the first stone.

” And one by one they left.

And he looked at her, this woman who everyone else had already convicted, and said, “Does no one condemn you?” She said, “No one.

” And he said, “Neither do I condemn you.

Go and leave your life of sin.

” I had to put the laptop down and sit with that for a very long time because I understood in a way that no theological argument could reach that I had been one of the men holding a stone.

I had been in the crowd with the legal mandate.

I had been the one with the authority to condemn and Jesus had been kneeling in the dirt on behalf of every person I had dragged into the fluorescent light of a government processing room.

I thought about the little girl in the basement in Alraa, four or 5 years old, crying into her mother’s chest and her mother looking at me over the top of that small head with sorrow in her eyes, not fear, sorrow for me.

I understood now what she had been sorrowful about.

I reached out to a man I had encountered through my research online.

He was a Lebanese American pastor based in Michigan who ran an Arabic language ministry for people from Muslim backgrounds navigating exactly what I was navigating.

His name was Pastor Ilas Corey.

His ministry operated through encrypted channels because many of the people he worked with were in precisely my situation, living in countries where their faith could cost them everything.

I sent him a message through a secure contact form on his website at 4 in the morning.

I did not tell him my name or my job title.

I just told him the truth.

I told him I had spent 3 years arresting Christians.

I told him about the dream.

I told him about the collapse.

I told him about reading Matthew at 2:00 in the morning and not being able to stop crying.

I asked him if there was any possibility that Jesus would want anything to do with a man like me.

He responded within 12 hours.

His message was three sentences.

He said of Tarsus held the coats of the men who stoned the first Christian martyr and spent years hunting and imprisoning believers across the Roman world.

Then Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus and he became the greatest carrier of the gospel who ever lived.

There is no such thing as too far gone.

I read those three sentences and wept at my kitchen table in my apartment in Riyad in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday.

Wept like I had not wept since I was a small boy.

Full body was uncontrolled, complete weeping.

Every raid I had ever conducted, every terrified face, every child who cried, every person I had handed to the system, every Bible I had confiscated, every moment of satisfaction I had felt when my father praised my work.

All of it came out of me in that apartment in Riyad on a Tuesday afternoon with my laptop open and a Lebanese American pastor’s three sentences on my screen.

And into the space it left behind came the warmth.

The same warmth from the dream.

Basai starting in my chest spreading through my body.

And this time I was not asleep.

I was wide awake at my kitchen table in my apartment in Riyad, Saudi Arabia.

And I felt the presence of Jesus the way you feel the sun on your face when you walk out of a dark room.

Unmistakable, physical, completely real.

I said out loud in Arabic in my empty apartment with the windows closed and the curtains drawn.

I believe you are who you say you are.

I believe you died for the things I have done.

I believe you rose.

I believe the dream was real.

Forgive me.

Forgive me for every person I hurt in the name of a religion I was using as a weapon.

Forgive me for the little girl in the basement.

Forgive me for the Syrian man with his Bible on his knee who prayed for me before I came to arrest him.

Forgive me for my pride and my father’s praise and the stone I have been holding my entire life.

I am putting it down.

I am putting everything down.

I give you all of it.

The presence filled the room.

I cannot describe it more precisely than that.

The room filled the way a glass fills with water from the bottom up and when it reached the top, it overflowed.

I sat at my kitchen table for two hours and did not move.

When I finally stood up, something was permanently different in my body.

The tension that I had carried in my chest and the shoulders.

Since I was old enough to understand what my family expected of me, that constant clenched readiness, the hunter’s posture, it was gone like a fist slowly opening.

In the weeks that followed, I made contact through Pastor Elas’s network with an underground fellowship in Riyad.

They met in different locations each week, rotating through apartments and sometimes a private office building whose owner was a secret believer from Egypt.

There were Saudi nationals in this group.

Not many, maybe four or five, but they were there sitting in circles with Ethiopians and Syrians and Lebanese and Egyptians reading from Bibles that had been smuggled through the same port I had monitored, worshiping a god that my office building existed to suppress.

When I walked into that first meeting, the fellowship leader, a tall Egyptian man named Brother Marcus, looked at me and then looked at the message.

Pastor Elas had sent him about my coming and then looked back at me and he smiled so wide it changed his entire face.

He pulled me into a hug that was so complete and so unguarded that I stood there with my arms at my sides for a moment just completely unprepared to be embraced.

In Saudi Arabia men did not hug like that not with that kind of openness.

It was the hug of a person who has no performance left in them, who is simply and entirely glad you are here.

He said, “Welcome, brother.

We have been praying for you.

” Those words again, “We have been praying for you.

” And now I knew they were not absurd.

They were the most powerful words in the world.

Somewhere in this city, people who had every reason to fear me had been asking the God of the universe to reach me.

And he had listened.

He had sent me a dream on the holiest night of the Islamic calendar.

He had caused me to collapse in the front row of a mosque in front of 200 men who knew my name.

He had put a Lebanese American pastor in Michigan in front of a secure contact form at 4 in the morning.

He had built a road to exactly this room, exactly this circle, exactly this embrace.

He had come for me.

I handed in my resignation from the Ministry of Interior 4 months after the night of my conversion.

I wrote it as a medical resignation, citing the collapse and ongoing health concerns, which was not entirely untrue.

The real reason was that I could not do the job anymore.

I could not be the man who kicked down the door.

I could not file another arrest report for a mother holding her child while hims played quietly in a basement.

My father called me the day the resignation was processed.

He asked me what was going on.

I told him I was not well that the work had affected me more than I realized that I needed time.

He was silent for a moment and then he said faizal is there something you are not telling me.

I said there is something I am not ready to tell you yet father but I promise that when I am ready I will tell you the truth.

He was silent again, a long silence.

And then he said, “I will pray for you.

” And I said, “Please do.

” I left Sudi Arabia eight months after my conversion.

I had planned it carefully with brother Marcus and through the network Pastor Elas had connected me to.

I had a legitimate business reason for traveling, a consulting engagement that took me first to Bahrain and then to the United Kingdom.

I traveled legally with my own passport.

I passed through customs at King Khaled International Airport in Riyad with everything I owned in two bags and a heart that was simultaneously breaking a more whole than it had ever been.

I did not know if I would ever come back.

I knew that if I came back openly as what I now was, the consequences would be severe.

The kingdom did not offer gentle transitions for men like me.

I am writing this from a city in the north of England where I have been living for the past several months.

I have asylum status.

I have a small apartment.

I have a community of believers from a dozen different countries.

I have a Bible that I can read in daylight with the curtains open.

I have phone calls with Pastor Elas once a week and messages from brother Marcus almost every day.

I have for the first time in my life almost nothing by the standards of the world I came from.

and I have everything by the standards of the kingdom I now belong to.

My father and I speak by phone occasionally.

The conversations are short and careful.

He knows something changed in me.

He does not yet know what I pray for the day when I can tell him.

I pray that when I do, he will hear what I heard in that dream, in that candle lit room, in the eyes of a man whose face I could not look at directly because the love in it was too bright.

I pray for the day when my father who taught me to hunt will meet the shepherd.

I think about the Syrian man from al- Mala often.

I never got his name.

He was in the system as a case number, a deportation order, a file, but his face has never left me.

The way he sat with his Bible on his knee and said, “We are glad you came.

” I have asked Pastor Elias’s network to try to find out what happened to him after the operation that night.

The search is still going.

If he is out there, if he is reading this or if anyone who knows him is reading this, I want him to know something.

He was right to pray for me.

It worked.

And I am sorry for what I did to him and to everyone in that room.

I am sorry for every room.

And I spend every day now trying to use whatever I have, the language, the knowledge of how the system works, the connections I still have in the Gulf to protect the people I once hunted.

Every rail I have left goes toward organizations that support persecuted believers in the Gulf region.

Every contact I have who is sympathetic, I have quietly pointed toward resources for believers in danger.

The man who signed the arrest orders is dead.

The man writing this is someone different.

Someone who collapsed on a prayer rug in a mosque in Riyad and got up off the floor not as a hunter but as a son.

A son of the one who made him.

a son who finally came home.

I want to end by speaking to two groups of people.

To anyone in law enforcement or government religious compliance, work in any Muslim majority country.

To anyone whose job it is to monitor or restrict or punish religious belief, whether in the Gulf or elsewhere, I want to say this.

I know you believe you are protecting something.

I know you have been told that what you are doing is righteous.

I know the framework you were given makes the people you pursue look like threats.

I want you to know that I sat exactly where you are sitting.

I held exactly what you are holding.

And I want you to know that the people you are hunting are praying for you right now by name if they know it, by title if they don’t.

They are on their knees in basement and labor camps and crammed apartments asking the God of the universe to reach you the way he reached me.

That prayer is not weak.

It is the most powerful force in the world.

I am the evidence to every Muslim watching this who recognizes the emptiness I described in the first part of my story.

Who performs the prayers and the fasting and the compliance and lies awake at night wondering if God has heard even one word.

I want you to know the answer is yes.

He has heard every word.

He was there before you prayed.

His name is Jesus.

He is not waiting for you to be worthy.

He came for the unworthy.

He crossed every barrier to reach the people behind the closed doors.

He appeared in a dream to a man who was paid to hunt his people.

And he said, “Look.

” And the man looked and the world changed.

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