They put a man outside my building to watch who came and went.

And I kept reading my Bible anyway, hidden inside a cookbook on my kitchen shelf where no one who searched my apartment ever thought to look.

My name is Fatima Al-Rashidi.

And I am 34 years old from Riyad, Saudi Arabia.

And I am telling this story from a city where I am finally safe, London, England.

Because telling it from inside the kingdom would mean I do not get to tell it twice.

And Duryat is a city that does not look like what most Americans picture when they imagine the Middle East.

It does not look like sandy dunes and camels.

It looks like Houston and Phoenix got combined.

And then someone turned up the heat and removed the churches and the bars and most of the color.

Glass towers, six lane highways, shopping malls so large they have their own weather systems inside them.

than Starbucks and McDonald’s and H&M and every other international brand you have ever heard of sitting next to Abaya shops and dates vendors and moskies whose speakers push the call to prayer across every neighborhood five times a day without anyone asking if you want to hear it.

I was born in Riyad in 1990 the second daughter of Ibrahim al-Rashidi and his wife Mariam.

My father worked for the Ministry of Interior, which in Saudi Arabia means he worked for the government in the specific part of the government responsible for security and order and the enforcement of the kingdom’s laws.

He was not a man who carried a weapon or patrolled the streets.

He was an administrator, a man who sat behind a desk and processed the paperwork of control, but he believed in the work.

He believed in it the way devout men believe in their prayers.

The kingdom was God’s order made visible on earth and and the ministry of interior was one of the instruments of that order and his desk was one small piece of an instrument that mattered.

My mother Miam came from a family of religious scholars.

Her grandfather had been a prominent shake in the Kasim region.

Her father had taught at the Islamic University of Medina for 20 years.

Her brothers were both imams.

She had been raised in a house where religion was not a compartment of life but the air that filled every room.

Uh she married my father at 19 in an arrangement that both families considered ideal, the union of state authority and religious learning.

And she brought into their home a devotion that was as natural to her as breathing.

I grew up inside the overlap of those two things, authority and devotion.

government and God.

In Saudi Arabia in the 1990s and early 2000s, these two things were not separate.

They held each other up the way two walls hold a corner.

The state enforced the religion because the religion legitimized the state.

And everyone who lived inside that system, which was everyone, navigated both at once.

My father’s connection to the ministry gave our family a specific kind of standing, not wealth exactly, comfort.

A villa in the Malas district of Riyad with a walled garden and two cars and a foreign housekeeper from Indonesia named Shri who had worked for my family since before I was born.

The standing meant that people were careful around us.

But the teachers at school were differential.

Neighbors were respectful.

Trades people were prompt.

And the Mutawa, the religious police, the commission for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice left our family entirely alone.

My father knew them.

They knew him.

Our family was not a family they watched.

I had an older sister, Nora, who was 3 years ahead of me and who was everything the community wanted a girl to be.

Quiet, obedient, beautiful in the specific way that was acceptable, uh, covered and composed in public and decorative in private.

She married at 21 to a man from a good family in the northern region and moved to his family compound and produced two sons who my parents visited proudly every aid.

I was the other kind, not rebellious in the open, obvious way.

I was too smart for that, and I had watched what happened to girls who were obvious about their dissatisfaction.

They got managed.

They got married early and moved away from their dissatisfaction to a husband’s house where a new set of walls replaced the old ones.

I had no intention of being managed.

So I was compliant on the surface and full of questions underneath and I kept the questions for the places they could not be seen.

I was good at school in a way that created a small problem for my family.

The problem was that I was too good in a system where girls education was permitted but girls ambition was not.

I I kept exceeding the levels that were comfortable.

My Arabic language teacher told my mother I had the mind of a scholar.

My mathematics teacher sent a note home saying I was wasting my ability in a standard curriculum.

By the time I was 16, I had read everything in the school library twice and had started asking my father to bring books home from the ministry library, which he did because he was proud of my mind even when he was uncertain about where my mind was going.

I went to Princess Norah Bint Abdul Rahman University in Riyad, the largest women’s university in the world, which is a remarkable distinction that does not quite prepare you for what it is actually like to study there.

It is a campus of 40,000 women in a city where you cannot drive, cannot leave without a male guardian’s permission, cannot take a job without approval, cannot interact with the academic world outside your campus walls.

In the same way your male counterparts at King Saud University can, you are educated within an enclosure.

You are made more capable inside a container that does not expand to hold what you become.

I studied Arabic literature and Islamic studies and I was by every measure an outstanding student.

I graduated in 2012 with honors and was offered a teaching position at a girls secondary school in the Slemania district.

I took it because it was one of the few professional options available to me and because teaching was one of the few places where I was allowed to use the mind I had spent 22 years developing.

I taught Arabic and Islamic studies to girls between the ages of 14 and 18.

I was good at it.

I was the teacher the students remembered not because I was easy but because I was honest.

I did not recite.

I engaged.

So, I asked questions that had more than one answer, and I waited for the students to find their own way to the answers instead of feeding it to them prepackaged.

This made some of my colleagues nervous.

It made the school administration periodically uncomfortable.

It made the girls in my classes more awake than most girls in secondary school in Riyad had reason to be.

I was also through all of this a believing Muslim.

I want to be clear about that.

I I was not a secret skeptic using my classroom as a place to undermine the faith I privately rejected.

I genuinely believed.

I prayed.

I fasted.

I read Quran.

I wore abaya and nikab in public.

Not because armed men would come for me if I did not, but because it was the shape of my identity.

And I had not yet questioned the shape.

My questions were about justice and fairness and opportunity and the specific walls built around women in the kingdom.

They were not yet questions about God.

Others, those questions came later through a student, through a book hidden inside another book, through a dream I had four times in one month, through a night in my apartment in the Soule Mania district when I fell on my face and called a name I had spent my entire life being told was not the right name to call.

But first, I need to tell you about the book.

In January 2016, I found a small New Testament tucked inside the lining of a bag that Shri, our old housekeeper, had left behind when she returned to her home country after my parents retired and downsized to a smaller apartment.

I was helping my parents move and I was sorting through items left in the storage room and I found the bag.

When I picked it up, something shifted inside it.

And I unzipped the inner lining and found a thin Arabic New Testament, soft cover, printed on Bible paper, the kind of thing that weighed almost nothing and could be hidden almost anywhere.

I held it and understood immediately why Shri had kept it hidden in a lining instead of on a shelf.

She had worked in a Saudi home for 20 years.

She had kept her faith alive in a place where it was illegal, carried it in a bag lining, prayed to her Jesus in the room she was given, and never said a word about it to the family she served.

I should have destroyed it.

That was the correct response.

That was what any loyal Saudi woman would do.

Destroy it and say nothing and move on.

I put it in my bag and took it home.

I told myself I was going to read it to understand what Shri had believed.

I told myself it was academic.

I told myself a great many things during the 3 months I read that small Arabic New Testament on my kitchen table after dark with the curtains drawn.

The thing about reading the Gospels when you have studied Islamic texts your entire life is that the stranges hits first.

The Jesus of the Gospels is not the Jesus of the Quran.

The Jesus of the Quran is a respected prophet who performed miracles and will return at the end of days.

The Jesus of the Gospels is something entirely different.

He is intimate.

He is accessible.

He touches people.

He weeps.

He asks questions.

He eats with people who have been thrown away by their society.

He says things that no prophet in the Islamic tradition ever says.

He says, “I am the way and the truth and the life.

” He says before Abraham was, “I am.

” He says the things he says with an authority that is not prophetic authority.

It is something older and stranger and larger than prophetic authority.

I read those words and they disturbed me in a way I could not categorize.

Not the disturbance of offense, the disturbance of contact, the feeling of a text that is reaching toward you rather than presenting information for your consideration.

I was 30 years old and I was disturbed by a book hidden in a kitchen drawer and I did not know yet how much my life was about to change.

In September 2016, a student came to my classroom after hours.

Her name was Ree.

She was 16 years old, the daughter of a religious studies professor at Ariad University, which meant she had grown up with more theological education than most adults had.

She was one of the sharpest students I had taught as the kind of girl who asked the questions no one else in the room was willing to ask and who did it with a precision that reminded me of myself at her age.

She came to my classroom at 4:00 in the afternoon when the school was nearly empty and she stood at the door and looked at me with a specific expression of someone who has decided to trust a person and is not entirely sure the decision is correct.

She said, “Teacher Fatima, can I ask you something that I cannot ask anyone else?” I told her to come in and close the door.

She sat at a desk near the front and folded her hands on the surface the way students do when they are preparing to say something serious.

She said, “I have been reading something and I do not know what to do with what I am reading.

” I asked her what she had been reading.

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she said, “The Gospel of John.

” I did not move.

I kept my face entirely neutral with the professional practice of a teacher who has learned that the first reaction sets the entire tone of what follows.

I said, “Where did you find it?” She said her cousin had come from abroad and left a phone that had a Bible app on it and Ree had found it and started reading and had not been able to stop.

She said the things Jesus says in that book, teacher Fatima, the things he says, I have never read anything like it.

I have read Quran since I was five.

I I know the hadith.

I know the taps and I have never read anything like what this Jesus says.

I sat across from her and my heart was doing something I did not have a name for because I had been reading the same book in my kitchen drawer for 8 months and I had been feeling exactly what she was describing and I had not said it out loud to a single person.

I said very carefully, Ree, I do understand that this is an extremely dangerous thing to have been reading and an extremely dangerous thing to be discussing.

She said, “I know.

That is why I am telling you instead of anyone else.

” I looked at this 16-year-old girl with her hands folded on the desk and her father’s theological precision in her eyes and I made a decision that I have thought about every day since.

I said, “Tell me what specifically you have been reading.

” We talked for an hour.

She asked me questions I had been asking myself in private for months.

questions about the claims Jesus made, about the resurrection, about grace, and what it meant for a faith system built entirely on earned merit, about the specific longing she felt when she read the words, “Come to me, all you who are weary.

” I did not tell her about the New Testament in my kitchen drawer.

I was not ready to do that yet, though.

But I told her that her questions were serious questions and they deserved serious attention and that she should be very careful about who she shared them with.

She said, “You are the only one I trust with them.

” After she left, I sat in my empty classroom for 30 minutes and thought about what I was doing and what I was becoming and whether the two things were going in the same direction.

The next several months changed everything in ways I could not have anticipated.

I began meeting with Ree after school once a week under the cover of academic support sessions that were entirely legitimate.

She was a top student who needed nothing from me academically and we both understood the sessions were something else.

We read together, we talked, I was her teacher and she was teaching me as much as I was teaching her.

specifically that the thing I had been carrying alone in my kitchen was not aberrant and was not weakness.

It was the beginning of something that by early 2017 I had finished the New Testament twice and had started it a third time.

I had also found through a search on a secured VPN I had purchased through a contact who worked in IT at a Riyad technology firm, a community of Arab Christians online, not Saudi, mostly Lebanese, Egyptian, Iraqi people who had grown up Muslim and encountered Jesus and were living with that encounter in various states of openness.

Their testimonies were specific and consistent in ways that matched what I was feeling in my kitchen at my table reading a hidden book.

In March 2, 2017, I had the dream for the first time.

I was standing in a room that was completely white.

Not a hospital, not a mosque, not any room I had ever been in.

A white room with no furniture and no door and no window and a light in the center that was not coming from anything.

I could identify the light had a shape, a person shape, and the person shape was looking at me with the specific attention of someone who has been waiting for you and is not impatient about the wait, but is genuinely glad you arrived.

I woke up with my heart pounding and the warmth of the light still in my chest.

I lay in the dark of my Slemania apartment, and the warmth held for 20 minutes before it faded.

The dream came back three more times over the following month.

Same white room, same light, uh, same person shape, looking at me with that, uh, patient glad attention.

The fourth time I had it, I woke up and sat up in bed and said out loud in the dark the Arabic name for Jesus, Issa.

And then, because the Arabic felt insufficient for what I was trying to say, I said the English one, too.

Jesus.

The warmth came back immediately, not as a dream, as a presence in the room.

Real, physical, uh, beginning in my chest and spreading outward the way warmth spreads from a source that is inside you rather than outside.

Uh I sat in my bed in the dark and the presence was there and I understood with the specific certainty that bypasses argument that the person in the white room and the presence in my bedroom were the same and that they had been the same the whole time and that I had been walking toward this moment from the first day I tucked Shri’s New Testament into my bag instead of destroying it.

I said I believe you are real.

I do not fully understand what that means yet.

But I believe you are real and you are here and I am yours.

The warmth held steady for a long time before it settled into something quieter and permanent.

Not overwhelming.

The opposite of overwhelming.

Settled the way a foundation settles.

The thing underneath everything else that does not move regardless of what happens on top of it.

I fell asleep holding that presence the way you fall asleep holding something you are finally allowed to put down.

3 weeks later the man appeared outside my building.

He was not uniformed.

He never was in my experience.

The Mutawa, the religious police, had changed in form over the years, but their presence had not fully disappeared, and their informal networks of informants and watchers had not disappeared at all.

The man outside my building sat in a car on the street with the specific stillness of someone doing a job rather than waiting for someone.

He was there when I left for school in the morning.

He was there when I came back.

He was there on weekends.

He stayed for 6 days.

I do not know what specifically triggered the watch.

It may have been RE.

It may have been the VPN activity.

It may have been something someone overheard or reported.

In Riyad in 2017, the invisible infrastructure of surveillance was extensive and the specific cause of any given outcome was often impossible to trace.

I went to school every day and came home every day and behaved in every observable way like a woman with nothing to hide.

The New Testament moved from the kitchen drawer to the inside of a large cookbook on the kitchen shelf.

The book tucked against the spine of the cookbook and both standing upright so that a casual search would find a cookbook and a person looking for a specific object might miss it.

On the sixth day, the car was gone.

Giz, I do not know if the watch ended because they found nothing or because they found something insufficient to act on or because my father’s connection to the ministry still carried enough weight to redirect attention elsewhere.

I never found out.

I did not ask.

What I knew was this.

I had been watched while carrying the most dangerous thing a Saudi woman could carry.

Not a weapon, not drugs, but a living, growing personal faith in Jesus Christ.

And the watch had ended and I was still there and the faith was still there and the faith was if anything more settled for having survived the watching.

Re’s story ended before mine did in the sense that her decision came before mine and her consequences came before mine and watching what happened to her was the thing that showed me clearly what following Jesus openly would mean and that I chose it anyway.

In October 2017, Ree told her mother, “I did not know she was going to do it.

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