For days, no proper sleep, limited food and water, interrogations that circled the same questions over and over again, designed not to gather information, but to wear you down until you said whatever they needed you to say.
The men who questioned me were not monsters in the way that word is usually understood.
They were ordinary men doing what their system had trained them to do.
Men who genuinely believed that what they were doing was righteous.
That breaking a man’s body to save his soul was an act of mercy.
That understanding did not make the pain any less, but it helped me later when I was trying to make sense of everything to remember that cruelty wrapped in conviction is still cruelty.
But it is also a kind of tragedy.
On the second night, alone in that room in the hours that felt like the deepest part of darkness, something happened that I have told very few people about because I know how it sounds and I am not a man who has ever been comfortable with things he cannot explain rationally.
I was lying on the floor, my ribs screaming with every breath, my mind running in terrified circles, and I reached a point that I think some people call the absolute end of yourself.
There was nothing left to hold on to.
Every system I had ever been given to make sense of the world had either failed me or been used against me.
I was empty in a way that went beyond physical exhaustion.
And in that emptiness, in that complete hollowess, something happened.
I did not see a bright light.
I did not hear an audible voice with my physical ears.
What I can tell you is that something entered that room that had no business being there given everything about the circumstances.
It was a presence warm in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.
Calm in a way that made no logical sense given where I was and what was happening to me.
And in that presence, not in words exactly, but in something that communicated itself more clearly than words ever had, he revealed to me that I was known.
Not known in the way your family knows you or your colleagues know you.
The surface version of you that you present to the world.
Known in the deep way.
Known including the notebook under the mattress.
Known including every question I had swallowed.
Known including the hollow feeling during prayer and the silence that greeted me at the end of every reaching.
He let me know that the reaching had not been wasted, that it had been seen, and that the silence I had experienced had not been the silence of absence, but the silence of something waiting for the right moment.
I lay on that floor, and I wept in a way I had not wept since I was a very small child.
Not from pain, though the pain was still there.
I wept because something in me that had been clenched tight for 28 years suddenly released the way a fist releases when it finally stops fighting.
I did not fully understand what was happening to me in that moment.
I did not have the theological framework yet to name it, but I knew with a certainty that sat differently from any certainty I had ever felt before that I was not alone in that room.
And I knew that whatever whoever this presence was, it was the answer to a question I had been asking since I was 8 years old watching my friend Tar cry because I had reported his honest doubt to a system that punished honesty.
When I was released on the fourth day, I was a different man from the one who had been brought in.
On the outside, I looked worse.
Obviously, I was thinner, injured, holloweyed.
My father collected me with a face that communicated that I had disgraced the family and that a certain amount of management would be required going forward.
There were conditions attached to my release.
I was to attend additional religious counseling.
I was to be monitored.
I was to demonstrate through visible and consistent religious practice that I had returned to the correct path.
I agreed to everything they asked.
I nodded at the right moments and said the right words and let them believe that the room had done what it was designed to do.
But inside, in the place where that presence had been, something was quietly and permanently rearranging itself.
In the weeks that followed my release, I moved carefully and deliberately.
I performed everything that was required of me with the precision of a man who has learned that survival sometimes requires patience.
But I was also for the first time in my life not performing for anyone on the inside.
The internal audience that had watched and judged my every thought for as long as I could remember had gone quiet.
In its place was something I can only describe as a gentle, persistent pulling.
The way a current pulls at you in water, not violently, but consistently in a clear direction.
I began to pray, but differently from how I had ever prayed before.
I did not use the formal Arabic words I had memorized.
I spoke in my own language in the language I thought in.
And I spoke honestly the way you speak to someone you have just met but already trust completely.
I told this presence everything.
I told him about the questions and the notebook and the years of emptiness and the broken ribs and my son’s face and Norah’s back turned toward me in the dark.
I poured all of it out.
And every time I did, the warmth I had felt on the floor of that detention room came back quiet and steady and completely unlike anything I had ever encountered inside a mosque.
Escaping a life that has been built around you like a fortress does not happen the way it happens in movies.
There is no single dramatic moment where you stand up, declare your truth, walk out the door, and into the sunlight while music plays in the background.
For almost two years after my release from that detention room, I lived in a careful double existence that made my earlier performances look simple by comparison.
On the surface, I was a man who had been corrected and restored.
I attended the religious counseling sessions I had been assigned to.
I prayed visibly and consistently.
I spoke about Islam in the appropriate tones at family gatherings.
My father slowly, incrementally allowed his shoulders to relax in my presence.
The mosque man who had been involved in reporting me nodded at me with something approaching approval when our paths crossed.
From the outside, the system had worked exactly as intended.
It had taken a wandering man and brought him back into line.
What no one could see was that the man who had been brought back into line was not the same man who had left it and was never going to be again.
During this period, I was doing several things simultaneously that required enormous care and secrecy.
I was continuing to read, having found ways to access material that I needed without leaving traces that could be found.
I had made contact through an extremely careful and indirect chain of communication with a small underground network of people in similar situations, men and women across the Gulf region who were navigating the same impossible territory I was.
We communicated in ways that I will not describe in detail for the safety of people who may still be in those situations.
And what we shared with each other was not just information but something equally vital which was the knowledge that we were not alone and not crazy.
There is a particular kind of sanity that comes from finding out that other people see what you see.
I had been questioning my own mind for so long that having it reflected back by others felt like medicine.
I was also during this time learning more about the faith that had found me on that cold floor.
I approached it the way I approached everything carefully and analytically at first because I was not willing to simply trade one unexamined system for another.
I had too many scars from blind belief to ever be comfortable with it again.
What I found as I read and studied and prayed and listened was something that continued to surprise me with its consistency.
Every time I brought a hard question and I brought many, the answers I found did not require me to stop thinking.
They did not require me to be afraid.
They did not require me to report my neighbors or silence my doubts or perform a version of myself that I did not recognize.
They invited me deeper.
He told me in those quiet moments of prayer that had become the most honest conversations of my life that my questions were not threats to the truth but pathways toward it.
My relationship with Nora during this period was one of the most complicated aspects of everything I was navigating.
After the night she found the book, something between us had shifted in a way that could not be fully shifted back.
We were civil and functional and careful with each other.
The way people are when they are both aware that something fragile is sitting on the table between them and neither one wants to be the person who knocks it over.
I loved her in the way that you love someone you have shared deep difficulty with.
A love made more of respect and shared survival than of the romantic feeling we had never really had the opportunity to develop.
I thought about her constantly in my planning because whatever I decided to do next would affect her and my son in ways I could not fully predict or control.
And that weight sat on me heavily every single day.
The decision to leave Saudi Arabia took shape gradually over about 8 months.
It was not a decision I made alone or quickly.
It involved the network I had connected with.
It involved careful legal and logistical research.
It involved money I had been quietly setting aside and it involved a level of strategic thinking that I had never had to apply to anything before.
I was essentially planning an escape from a country where my own family out of genuine belief and love would have reported me to authorities if they had known what I was planning.
I want you to understand the particular grief of that sentence.
I am not describing villains.
I am describing people who loved me and would have destroyed me in the name of that love because the system they lived inside had taught them that this was the most loving thing they could do.
That is perhaps the deepest tragedy of everything I experienced.
Not the broken ribs, not the detention room, not the years of emptiness, but the fact that the people who hurt me most were the people who loved me most, and they never knew the difference.
I made contact with an organization that helps people in situations like mine.
Through them, I was connected to people who had navigated similar exits and could provide guidance.
I will not give details that could compromise anyone, but I will say that the process was terrifying and took several months to execute properly.
There were moments when I was certain I had been discovered.
There were nights when I lay awake running through every possible outcome and finding very few that ended well.
There were moments of something close to despair when the distance between where I was and where I needed to be seemed impossible to cross.
And in every single one of those moments, without exception, when I was still and quiet enough to listen, that presence I had first encountered on the floor of the detention room was there.
He revealed to me again and again in those frightened nights that the path I was on was not one I was walking alone.
He let me know that what felt like an impossible distance was being covered one step at a time, and that each step, no matter how small, was enough.
The day I left Saudi Arabia, I did not look back at the airport.
I had made a deliberate decision about that, not out of coldness, but out of necessity, because I knew that if I allowed myself to fully feel what I was leaving behind in that moment, I would not be able to keep moving forward.
And keeping moving forward was the only thing that mattered.