We Were All 50 IMAMS We all Saw The Same Vision.

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And We Couldn’t Deny It.

We Were All 50 IMAMS We all Saw The Same Vision.

And We Couldn’t Deny It.

– YouTube

Transcripts:
My name is Yusuf Al Rashidi.

I am 54 years old.

I am sitting in a small apartment in Amman, Jordan right now, and my hands are shaking as I type this.

Not because it is cold.

It is actually warm in this room.

My hands are shaking because I am afraid.

I’ve been afraid for 3 years now, every single day.

But I have decided that fear is not a good enough reason to stay quiet anymore.

Some things are bigger than fear.

Some truths are too heavy to carry alone.

I want to tell you something that happened to me, something that changed my life completely, something that made me lose my job, lose my friends, lose my position, and almost lose my family.

But I am going to tell you anyway because I believe you need to hear it.

And honestly, I need to say it out loud.

I have been whispering this story in dark rooms for too long.

Before I tell you what happened, I need you to understand who I was before it happened.

Because if you do not know who I was, you will not understand why what happened was so shocking.

Not just to me, but to everyone who was there.

I was not a simple man with a simple life.

I was Dr.

Yusuf Al Rashidi.

I had two degrees in Islamic law.

I had studied in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, and in Malaysia.

I had written four books.

Two of them were used as textbooks in universities.

I had given lectures in eight countries.

I had appeared on television programs to explain Islamic theology.

I had led Friday prayers at a large mosque in my city for 11 years.

When people had hard questions about religion, they came to me.

When young people were going in the wrong direction, their parents sent them to me.

I was not just an Imam.

I was someone people trusted deeply.

I am telling you all of this not to make myself sound important.

I am telling you because I need you to understand that I was not a confused man.

I was not someone who was easily tricked.

I was not someone who had doubts about what I believed.

I had given my whole life to Islam.

Every morning, every night, every prayer, every fast, every study session.

Islam was not just my religion.

It was my blood.

It was my air.

It was everything.

And then one night in a prayer hall in the city of Mecca, everything I had built my life on was shaken from the ground up.

I still remember the morning I received the letter.

A thick white envelope with an official stamp from a major religious council.

My wife Nadia saw me open it at the breakfast table.

She saw my face change as I read it.

She asked me what was wrong, and I told her nothing was wrong.

Actually, everything was right.

I had been selected to attend a private conference in Mecca.

Only 49 other religious scholars had been chosen from across the Arab world.

This was the kind of invitation that most scholars never receive in a whole lifetime.

Nadia smiled.

She hugged me.

Our children came running because they heard us celebrating.

That morning felt like one of the best mornings of my life.

I had no idea.

I truly had no idea.

We were told the conference would last 1 week.

We would discuss how to help young Muslims stay connected to their faith in a world that was pulling them away.

We would talk about how to respond to criticism of Islam from outside voices.

We would share strategies and ideas.

The location was near the Grand Mosque.

The building was secure and private.

Only the chosen scholars would be inside.

When I arrived and saw the other men who had been invited, I felt something like pride.

Not the bad kind, just the feeling of being in the right place with the right people.

I recognized faces from television, from books I had read, from conferences I had attended over the years.

These were not ordinary men.

These were serious scholars, men who had spent decades studying, men who were careful about everything they said because they knew that millions of people were listening to them.

The first 2 days were normal.

Lectures, discussions, long meals where we talked about theology and shared stories from our different countries.

I made friendships I thought would last forever.

On the third night, after the evening prayer, one of the organizers stood up and made an announcement.

He said that we would gather together at midnight for a special prayer session.

He said praying together in Mecca at that hour would be something we would remember for the rest of our lives.

He had no idea how right he was.

We all gathered in the main prayer hall around midnight, 50 of us, in clean, pressed clothes, facing toward the direction of the Kaaba as we always did when we prayed.

The room was quiet except for the sound of the Imam beginning the recitation.

His voice was beautiful, calm and steady.

I remember thinking how peaceful it all felt.

50 men who had given their lives to God, all praying together in the holiest city in the world.

It felt like a blessing.

We reached the part of the prayer where you bow your head to the floor.

In Islam, this is called sujud.

It is the most humble position you can be in.

Your face is on the ground.

You are completely lowered before God.

I had been in this position thousands of times in my life.

It was normal to me, natural, comfortable even.

But that night, something happened while my face was on the floor.

The room changed.

I felt it before I saw it.

Something shifted in the air, like the whole room suddenly became charged with something I could not name.

My body reacted before my mind understood.

Every hair on my arm stood up.

My heart started beating faster.

And then the light came.

It was not the ceiling lights.

I know this because my eyes were closed and my face was against the floor.

But I could see light through my closed eyes, bright, clean, pure light.

Not harsh, not blinding, just bright in a way that felt alive.

Then I felt the presence.

I do not have the right words for this.

I have tried to find them many times.

The closest I can get is this.

Imagine you have been in a completely empty room your whole life, and then suddenly something walks in.

Something so much bigger than you that the whole room feels different.

The air feels different.

The temperature feels different.

The sound feels different.

That is what it was like, except there was no sound at all.

Just this overwhelming sense that something far beyond anything I had ever known had entered that room.

I lifted my head.

I could not stop myself.

And when I looked up, I saw him, a man, standing in the center of the room, dressed in white, and light was coming from him.

Not from behind him, from him.

From his skin, from his face, from his hands.

He was the source of the light, and he was looking at all of us.

I looked around quickly.

Every single man in that room had lifted his head.

Every one of them was staring at this figure.

Some had their mouths open.

Some were already crying.

A few looked absolutely terrified.

One man near me grabbed my arm without even looking at me, just reaching out for something solid.

I understood that feeling.

Whatever this was, we were all seeing it together.

This was not a dream.

This was not something happening in my head alone.

50 men were seeing the exact same thing at the exact same moment.

That fact alone was enough to make my legs feel like water.

He did not open his mouth.

No words came out.

But something was happening inside me as I looked at him.

It was like information was being placed directly into my heart.

Not into my ears, into my heart, into the deepest part of me.

And the information was clear, so clear that there was no confusion, no possibility of misunderstanding.

I knew who he was.

I did not want to know.

I fought it with everything in me.

But I knew.

This was Jesus.

Not the prophet Jesus that I had studied and taught about.

Not the messenger of God whose story I had read in the Quran many times.

This was someone with authority that went so far beyond a prophet that the word prophet did not even come close to describing what I was feeling from him.

He held out his hands, and I saw the scars, holes in his palms, old wounds that somehow still looked like wounds, wounds that told a story without any words.

He showed us his feet, too, with the same kind of marks.

And we all somehow understood, without a single syllable being spoken, what those wounds meant, what they had cost him, what they had been for.

The message that came into all of our hearts was the same message.

He had died.

He had taken something upon himself that was meant for us.

He was not just a man who had lived and taught and left behind some wisdom.

He was something else entirely.

He was the son of God.

He had died for us.

He had come back from death.

And he was standing in front of 50 Islamic scholars in Mecca telling us, without any words, that everything we had taught our people about who he was had been wrong.

I felt the most complicated thing I have ever felt in my life in that moment.

It was not just shock.

It was not just fear.

It was grief.

Because I understood, as I looked at him, that I had spent 20 years telling people something that was not the whole truth.

I had done it with all my heart, with all my sincerity.

But sincerity does not make something true.

And I had been wrong.

He was not angry at us.

I want to make this very clear.

There was no anger in what came from him.

There was something that I can only call love.

A love so strong and so personal that it felt like he knew every one of us individually.

Every mistake, every prideful moment, every time I had dismissed someone’s question because I thought I already knew the answer.

He knew all of it.

And he was not disgusted.

He was not punishing us.

He was showing us the truth because he wanted us to be free.

Then he was gone.

The light disappeared.

The presence lifted, and we were left in that room.

50 of the most educated Islamic scholars in the world sitting on the floor.

Some shaking, some weeping, some staring at the place where he had been as if waiting for him to come back.

Nobody spoke for a long time.

When someone finally did speak, it was an older man, a scholar in his late 60s who had been teaching Islamic theology longer than some of us had been alive.

He said, in a voice that was barely above a whisper, “What did we just see?” He looked around the room slowly.

“What was that?” That question broke the silence.

And then everyone was talking, voices overlapping.

Some men were saying it must have been some kind of test.

Others said it had to be a trick, some kind of technology or illusion.

Others said it was spiritual deception, that something evil had appeared to mislead us.

But even the men who were saying these things, even the men who were fighting hardest against what had happened, could not explain how 50 people had all seen and felt the exact same thing at exactly the same moment.

I went back to my room that night, and I did not sleep.

I tried to pray, but I could not find the words.

I tried to read, but the words on the page meant nothing.

I just lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling and went over it again and again in my mind.

The light, the presence, the scars on his hands, the message that had gone directly into my heart without any sound at all.

I told myself it was not real.

I told myself there had to be another explanation.

I told myself that 20 years of study could not be wrong.

But I also could not make myself stop seeing those hands.

Two nights later, while I was sitting in my hotel room alone and trying to read, the room filled with that same light again.

And he appeared to me, just me this time.

No one else in the room, just me and him.

I’m not going to pretend I was calm.

I was terrified, but the terror did not last long because of the way he looked at me.

He looked at me the way a father looks at a child who has been lost for a very long time and has finally come home.

Not angry, not disappointed, just so deeply glad to see me.

He communicated with me the same way as before, directly into my heart.

He told me he had not come to destroy me.

He had come to save me.

He told me that the path I had been on, as sincere as I had been walking it, was not leading me where I thought it was leading me.

He told me that he was the way, not one of many ways, the way.

He showed me his hands again, and this time he helped me understand something that I had never been able to understand as a Muslim, no matter how many years I studied.

Forgiveness, real forgiveness.

Not the kind that depends on how many prayers you said or how many good things you did.

Not the kind that hangs over your head as something you might or might not receive at the end of your life.

Forgiveness that was already purchased, already done, already paid for by those scars on his hands.

I fell on my face on the floor of that hotel room, and for the first time in my life, I prayed not toward the Kaaba.

I prayed to Jesus.

I told him I believed.

I told him I was sorry for all the years I had pointed people away from him.

I told him I wanted to follow him, even though I had absolutely no idea what that was going to look like.

When I stood back up, something was different in my chest.

A weight was gone that I had been carrying for so long I had stopped noticing it was there.

A fear was gone, not the fear of being watched or arrested.

That fear was still there and would only grow with time, but a different fear, the fear of never being enough, the fear of the judgment at the end of everything.

That fear was gone.

In its place was something quiet and solid, something I had been looking for my whole life without knowing what I was looking for.

We were all brought back to Mecca a few weeks after the conference ended.

An urgent meeting had been called.

When we gathered in that same room, the atmosphere was completely different from the first time.

It felt tense, heavy, like a storm was coming.

A senior leader stood up and spoke to all of us with a very serious face.

He said that disturbing reports had reached the religious authorities.

He said that some members of our group were claiming to have had some kind of spiritual experience and were now expressing doubts about what Islam taught.

He said that the religious council had investigated the situation and reached a decision.

Whatever had happened in that room had been a deception, a spiritual attack meant to confuse and mislead important religious leaders.

Anyone who continued to say that what they saw was Jesus Christ would be considered to have left Islam.

And leaving Islam had very serious consequences.

He looked around the room as he said this, slowly, making sure everyone understood what he meant by serious consequences.

Some of the scholars immediately agreed with him.

They said, “Yes, of course it had been a test.

Of course they had never really believed it was Jesus.

Of course they remained faithful Muslims.

” I watched their faces as they said these things.

Some of them I believed, but some of them I could see something different behind their eyes, a look that said they were saying what they had to say to stay safe.

But some of us could not say it.

I know it sounds strange.

I know it sounds like the wrong decision.

But when you have seen what we saw, when you have felt what we felt, when you have had that presence enter your heart and change you from the inside, you cannot stand up in a room and say it was not real.

You just cannot.

It would be a lie so big that it would hollow out everything else inside you.

About 20 of us stood up, one by one, and said that we believed what we had seen was real, that Jesus had appeared to us, that we could not deny it.

I was one of them.

Within a few hours, we were arrested.

They took us to a place outside the city.

They took our phones and everything we had with us, and then they began trying to make us change our minds.

First with words, long hours of people shouting at us, calling us traitors and liars and men who had lost their minds, telling us we were bringing shame on our families and our countries and our religion.

Then when the words did not work, they tried other things.

I will not describe everything that happened in that place because some of it is still too difficult to say out loud.

But I will tell you that I watched older men, scholars in their 60s and 70s, suffer things that no human being should suffer for simply telling the truth about what they saw.

None of us changed our story.

We had seen what we saw.

We knew what we knew, and no amount of pressure can make a person unknow something that they know in the deepest part of themselves.

They held us for more than a month.

In the end, I think they realized they had a problem.

We were not unknown people.

We were not people who could simply disappear without anyone asking questions.

So they came up with a different plan.

They told us we would be sent back to our home countries.

We were not allowed to continue working as religious scholars or imams.

We were not allowed to speak publicly about what had happened.

We would be monitored, and if we broke these rules, we would come back and face consequences far worse than what we had already experienced.

I was put on a flight to Amman.

When I walked into my house and saw my wife Nadia and my children waiting for me, I broke down.

I had not cried the whole time I was in that place.

I had refused to, but when I saw their faces, I could not hold it anymore.

Nadia held me for a long time without asking any questions.

She could see that I needed that more than I needed words.

Later that night, when the children were asleep, I sat with her and told her everything.

I started from the beginning, the prayer hall, the light, the figure in white, the scars, the feeling that had gone directly into my heart, my personal encounter in the hotel room, my prayer on the floor, the second meeting, the arrest, everything that had happened in
that facility, everything.

Nadia is not a woman who cries easily.

She is strong in a way that I have always admired.

But as I talked, tears were coming down her face in a steady, quiet way.

When I finished, she sat for a long time without speaking.

Then she told me something that I was completely unprepared to hear.

She said that while I was gone, she had been having dreams.

In these dreams, a man in white appeared to her.

He did not say much.

He mainly just told her not to be afraid, that I was being protected, that something important was happening, even though it looked terrible from the outside.

She said the man in the dream had a kind face and that she always woke up from these dreams feeling calm, even though she was desperately worried about me in her waking hours.

I asked her to describe the man in the dream, Jesus, please.

We went to a quiet corner of the hospital together, and I prayed out loud.

Nadia held my hand, and at the end she whispered her own prayer, simple, from her heart.

“Please heal my daughter.

I believe you can.

I want to trust you.

” We went back to Rana’s room.

Within an hour, the fever broke.

The doctors could not explain it.

By morning, she was sitting up and asking for food.

Nadia looked at me from across that hospital room with our daughter eating breakfast between us, and she said nothing.

She did not need to say anything.

I could see in her eyes that something had settled inside her.

A decision had been made, not out of desperation, out of recognition.

She had seen something that could not be explained away, and she chose to believe.

Our three older children were much harder.

The oldest one, my son Tariq, who was 27 at the time, was furious.

He thought I had lost my mind.

He thought the suffering I had been through had damaged me mentally.

He told me I was putting the whole family in danger and destroying everything we had worked for.

Some of our middle children were confused and quiet, not knowing what to think or say.

But our younger daughter, who was 15, asked me very serious and honest questions and then told me that the Jesus I was describing sounded like someone she wanted to know.

Month by month, through many difficult conversations, through arguments and tears and long silences, through patient prayer and a lot of honest talk, every one of my children came to the same place.

Even Tariq.

He came to me one morning about 6 months after I returned.

He said that he had had a dream.

He described it and my skin went cold with recognition.

He said he did not know what to do with it.

I sat with him for a long time and we talked.

By the end of that conversation, my stubborn, angry oldest son was sitting with his head in his hands, crying.

Not sad crying, a different kind, the kind that happens when something tight inside you finally lets go.

All of us became followers of Jesus.

My wife, all of my children, my mother, who visited us from her city and heard the story and said she had been quietly asking God to show her the truth for years, and she believed this was the answer.

We became something we never expected to be, a family that believed in Jesus living in secret in a country where that was not safe.

Our daily life looks the same from the outside.

We dress the same way.

We speak the same way in public.

But inside our home, things are very different.

We read the Bible together.

We pray together to Jesus.

We talk about what we are learning and how it is changing the way we see things.

There is a warmth in our home now that I am not sure how to describe, kind of openness, a sense that we are all on the same journey together and that the person leading us on that journey can be completely trusted.

But the fear does not go away.

I know I am being watched.

I know my communications are monitored sometimes.

I know that there are people who would be very pleased to have a reason to take me somewhere and make me answer for what I believe.

I have lost my career completely.

I cannot teach.

I cannot lead prayers.

I cannot give lectures or write publicly under my real name.

The income one had for many years is gone.

Supporting my family has required help from other believers who have been generous in ways that humble me deeply.

I have stayed in careful contact with the other scholars who were arrested with me in Mecca.

We are scattered across different countries now.

All of us living in some version of the same reality, believed in secret, but restricted, unable to live openly as what we have become, but all of us still believing, still standing, despite everything that has been done to try to
break us.

Some of their stories are harder than mine.

One man lost his wife who could not accept what he had come to believe and took their children with her.

Another one was imprisoned again after he went home, and he spent another year being held before they finally let him go.

A third had his home burned while he was inside it by people from his own neighborhood who found out he had left Islam.

He survived, but only barely.

And yet every single one of us, as far as I know, has not gone back.

Because you cannot unsee what you have seen.

You cannot unknow what you know.

I think about the other men who were in that room, the ones who said it was not real, the ones who signed papers saying they remained faithful Muslims and were never confused.

I do not judge them.

I truly do not.

I understand the weight of what they would have had to give up.

But I wonder about them sometimes, in the quiet moments.

I wonder if they still think about what they saw.

I wonder if they see those scars when they close their eyes.

I am sharing this story now because I believe people need to hear it.

I know it will be difficult to believe.

I know that people will say I am lying or exaggerating or have been confused by everything I went through.

I understand why someone would think that.

I would have thought that too before that night in Mecca.

But I am asking you to consider something.

What reason would I have to make this up? I have lost my profession.

I have lost my reputation.

I live with constant uncertainty.

My family and I carry this weight every single day.

There is nothing I have gained by believing this.

Everything I have gained, I gained the moment I stopped pretending I did not know what I knew.

Jesus is real.

He is not just a figure in a history book or a name in a religious text.

He is alive.

He can walk into a room filled with 50 men who have spent their whole lives denying who he is, and he can show them the truth in a single moment.

He appeared to us, and if he did it for us, he can do it for anyone.

If you are reading this and you are someone who has been taught that Jesus was only a prophet, I am asking you to simply ask him to show you the truth.

You do not have to abandon everything immediately.

You do not have to have it all figured out.

Just ask, sincerely, with an open heart.

Say to him, “If you are real, show me.

” That is enough to start.

He will answer.

I know this because I have seen it happen.

Not just with me, not just with my family, but with every single person who has genuinely reached out to him with an honest heart.

The truth cannot be buried forever.

No amount of money, no amount of threats, no amount of official statements will keep it buried.

Because the truth is not a document that can be locked in a room somewhere.

The truth walked into that prayer hall in Mecca and stood in front of 50 human beings and showed us his hands.

And that kind of truth does not go away.

My name is Yusuf Al Rashidi.

I was a respected Islamic scholar for more than 20 years, and I am now a follower of Jesus Christ.

This is my story, and I am telling it because I believe it matters.

I believe it matters more than my safety, more than my comfort, more than everything I have already lost.

Because at the end of everything, the truth is the only thing worth standing for.