The men were beheaded, between 600 and 900 of them, their bodies thrown into trenches.

This was in sahi hadiths, authentic according to Islamic standards.

I sat with that story for a long time.

Like I tried to find ways to justify it, to explain it, to make it fit with the image of Muhammad as the perfect example for all humanity.

But I could not.

This was not self-defense.

This was mass execution after surrender.

How was this the example I was supposed to follow?

I read about the night raids Muhammad ordered where Muslim fighters would attack enemies at night.

When companions asked whether it was permissible to kill women and children in these night raids, you know, Muhammad said it was acceptable because they were from the polytheists.

The casualness of that statement shook me.

I read about Safia, a Jewish woman whose husband was tortured and killed by Muslims who was then taken as a war captive and became Muhammad’s wife that same night.

How was that not trauma and coercion?

How was she supposed to genuinely love the man who had destroyed her life?

I read about Aisha who was 6 years old when Muhammad married her nine when the marriage was consummated.

I had always defended this by appealing to cultural norms of the time.

But Muhammad was supposed to be the eternal example for all times and places.

If his example cannot be followed today without being considered abuse, what does that say about his claim to be the perfect model?

These were not attacks from enemies of Islam.

These were our own most authentic sources.

I could not dismiss them.

When I began comparing the life of Muhammad with the life of Jesus as described in the Quran and in history, the contrast was stark and troubling.

Jesus performed miracles of compassion, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, raising the dead.

Muhammad’s miracles were mostly claimed visions, and splitting the moon, which no other civilization recorded.

Jesus spoke of loving enemies and praying for those who persecute you.

Muhammad led armies against enemies and ordered their execution.

Jesus had no political power and did not seek it.

Muhammad became a political and military leader.

Jesus taught forgiveness.

Muhammad taught retaliation.

Even according to the Quran, Jesus was sinless.

The Quran never claims Muhammad was sinless.

In fact, the Quran tells Muhammad to ask forgiveness for his sins multiple times.

I kept asking myself, if I did not know either of these men and just looked at their lives and teachings objectively, which one seemed more like the character of God?

The answer troubled me deeply.

I studied the nature of Allah as described in the Quran.

Allah is described as the best of deceivers.

He is merciful but also the one who leads astray whomever he wills.

He loves believers but not unbelievers.

His mercy is conditional.

I tried to pray to this Allah as I always had but I felt nothing.

The prayers felt hollow like speaking into an empty room.

I would prostrate on my prayer mat and feel only the floor beneath my forehead cold and indifferent.

I began to realize something that frightened me.

I had never known Allah personally.

I had known about Allah.

I had memorized his 99 names.

I had followed the rules.

But I had never had a relationship with him.

How could you have a relationship with someone who was utterly transcendent, completely other, unknowable?

Islam taught that Allah was not like us in any way.

That anthropomorphizing him was sherk, the unforgivable sin.

But this meant that Allah was fundamentally unknowable, distant, separate.

You could submit to him, obey him, fear him, but you could not know him.

The Christian claim that God became man, that you could actually know God personally, had always seemed like blasphemy to me.

But now I began to wonder, what if that is exactly what humans need?

What if we need a God who comes close, who enters our suffering, who makes himself knowable?

I tried to push these thoughts away, but they persisted.

Then I started having more dreams.

Not every night, but several times each week.

Always the same figure in light.

Always extending his hand toward me.

In one dream he spoke.

I heard him say two words clearly.

Follow me.

I woke up trembling.

I knew who this was supposed to be.

My mind knew.

But my heart was resisting with everything it had.

I tried to convince myself these dreams meant nothing, just my subconscious processing my doubts, but they felt different from normal dreams.

They felt real, more real than waking life sometimes, like I became withdrawn.

My wife knew something was seriously wrong now.

She kept asking, kept pressing.

One evening she confronted me directly, asking if I had done something shameful if I was involved in sin.

The irony struck me.

She was worried I might be committing moral sins when the reality was far worse in her eyes.

I was doubting the faith entirely.

I told her I was going through a spiritual trial, that I was struggling with some difficult theological questions.

Uh she seemed relieved it was nothing worse and encouraged me to speak with the senior Ayatollah to seek guidance.

But I knew I could not speak to anyone in the religious community.

If I expressed even a fraction of my doubts, I would be marked as deviant, possibly dangerous.

I felt utterly isolated.

I could not speak to my wife, my colleagues, my friends.

They all assumed I was a devoted believer.

They all saw me as a pillar of the community.

If they knew what was happening inside my mind, they would reject me immediately.

In my desperation, I did something I had never done before.

I decided to read the Bible.

This was a major step.

In Islam, we are taught that the Bible has been corrupted, that it is unreliable, that it has been changed by Jews and Christians to hide prophecies about Muhammad.

I had taught this myself without ever actually reading the Bible to verify it.

But now I wanted to know for myself.

I wanted to read the actual words attributed to Jesus.

In getting a Bible in Iran was not easy, especially for someone in my position.

I could not simply walk into a bookstore and buy one.

That would raise questions.

Finally, I found a way to obtain a Persian translation through a contact who asked no questions.

When the Bible arrived, I hid it in my study, buried under other books.

I felt like I was hiding something evil, even though part of me knew that was absurd.

If Islam was truth, it should not be threatened by me reading another religious text.

Odd.

The first time I opened the Bible, my hands were shaking.

I had no idea where to start.

I decided to read the Gospel of Matthew first to read about Jesus directly.

What I read astonished me.

This was not what I had expected at all.

The Jesus I encountered in the Gospels was nothing like the distant prophet figure described briefly in the Quran.

This Jesus spoke with authority.

He healed the sick not with Allah’s permission as the Quran claimed, but with his own power.

He forgave sins and something only God could do.

He claimed to be one with the father.

He said he was the way, the truth, and the life and that no one could come to the father except through him.

These were not the words of a mere prophet.

These were the claims of someone who believed he was God himself.

I read the sermon on the mount and I wept.

I do not know why exactly.

Something about the words pierced through all my defenses.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are the meek.

Love your enemies.

Do good to those who hate you.

Pray for those who persecute you.

This was a completely different ethic from what I knew.

Islam taught to fight those who fight you.

To not take Jews and Christians as close friends, to be harsh against disbelievers.

But Jesus taught something entirely different.

He taught radical love even for enemies.

I read about the crucifixion.

The account was detailed, brutal, and heartbreaking.

Jesus knew it was coming.

He prayed in agony in the garden.

Yet he was betrayed, arrested, mocked, beaten, crucified.

And on the cross, he prayed for those killing him.

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

I had never encountered anything like this.

What kind of person prays for his executioners while dying?

The resurrection accounts followed the empty tomb, the appearances to disciples, their transformation from terrified, scattered followers into bold proclaimers willing to die for their testimony.

I spent weeks reading and rereading the gospels.

Each time I was struck by the same things, the character of Jesus, his compassion, his authority, his claims, his sacrifice.

I began to compare the Quranic Jesus with the gospel Jesus.

The Quran gave a few brief stories, but no extended teachings from Jesus.

It denied the crucifixion outright.

It denied Jesus was the son of God.

It reduced him to a prophet who announced the coming of Muhammad.

But the Gospels presented Jesus as the centerpiece of all history, the fulfillment of prophecy, God’s ultimate revelation of himself.

The Gospels were written by people who claimed to be eyewitnesses or who had interviewed eyewitnesses.

They were written within decades of Jesus’s life, not six centuries later, like the Quran.

From a historical standpoint, which source about Jesus was more reliable?

The answer seemed obvious.

I studied the crucifixion from historical sources outside the Bible.

In Roman historians like Tacitus confirmed it, Jewish historians like Josephus mentioned it.

There was no credible historical doubt that Jesus was crucified under Ponteus Pilate.

So the Quran was simply wrong about this historical fact.

And if it was wrong about something so central to Christianity, how could it be divine revelation?

I studied the resurrection.

I looked at the evidence, the empty tomb, the transformation of the disciples, the early Christian testimony in the fact that Christianity spread despite intense persecution.

Could this all be explained away as legend or hallucination?

The more I studied, the more compelling the resurrection evidence became.

People do not die for what they know is a lie.

The disciples were willing to be tortured and killed rather than deny they had seen the risen Jesus.

Would they do this for something they made up?

I wrestled with the concept of the Trinity, and this had always been my main objection to Christianity.

How can God be one and three?

It seemed like obvious mathematical impossibility, a corruption of pure monotheism.

But as I studied, I realized I’d been attacking a straw man.

Christians do not believe in three gods.

They believe in one God who exists eternally in three persons.

It is mysterious, yes, but not illogical.

And it actually makes sense of many things.

How God can be love eternally without needing to create beings to love.

Now, how God can be relational within himself.

I studied the claim that the Bible was corrupted.

I looked at the manuscript evidence.

The New Testament has thousands of early manuscripts, far more than any other ancient text.

The varants are minor, mostly spelling differences.

The core message is intact across all manuscripts.

There was no evidence of the kind of wholesale corruption Islam claimed.

If Christians had corrupted the Bible to hide prophecies about Muhammad, and why did they keep all the passages that make them look bad?

Why keep the stories of the disciples failures, the account of Peter denying Jesus?

Why keep teachings that are difficult?

The corruption claim fell apart under examination.

I began to see that many Islamic objections to Christianity were based on misunderstandings or assumptions, not evidence.

But I was still resisting.

Accepting Christianity meant accepting that everything I had built my life on was false.

It meant my father was wrong.

My teachers were wrong.

All the scholars I respected were wrong.

1400 years of Islamic civilization was based on a fundamental error.

It meant I was wrong.

Everything I had taught, everything I had written, everything I had believed with absolute confidence was wrong.

The humiliation of that realization was crushing.

How could I have been so certain about something that was false?

Now, how could I have led others into darkness while thinking I was guiding them to light?

I felt waves of shame, grief, and anger.

Anger at myself for being deceived.

Anger at those who taught me.

anger at Muhammad for making claims he could not substantiate.

But underneath all this turmoil, something else was happening.

A small seed of hope was growing.

Because if Christianity was true, it meant something wonderful.

God was not distant and unknowable.

God had come near.

A God loved humanity enough to become human, to suffer, to die, to conquer death.

It meant salvation was not about my performance, my perfect obedience, my endless striving to please an impossible to please deity.

It meant salvation was a gift offered freely based on what Christ had done, not what I could do.

It meant I could actually know God, could call him father, could have assurance of eternal life rather than uncertainty and fear.

This was good news.

And this was truly good news in a way Islam had never been.

But accepting it still terrified me because I knew what it would cost.

I kept reading, kept studying, kept praying in the only way I knew how, asking for truth.

The dreams continued, “Always the figure in light, always the invitation”.

One night after reading the Gospel of John late into the night, I had the most vivid dream yet.

I was standing in complete darkness.

I could see nothing, feel nothing but fear.

Then a voice spoke, clear and strong.

I am the light of the world.

Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.

I knew these were Jesus’s words from John’s gospel.

But hearing them spoken in the dream, they were not just words.

They were a lifeline thrown to a drowning man.

The figure appeared again, brighter than ever before.

This time I could see his face or thought I could.

It was filled with such love, such compassion, such knowing.

He looked at me as if he saw everything I had ever done, every sin, every failure, every doubt.

And yet he was not disgusted.

He was not angry.

He was looking at me with pure love.

He spoke again.

Come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.

I woke up with tears streaming down my face.

I was weeping uncontrollably.

Deep sobs that I tried to muffle so I would not wake my wife.

Something inside me was breaking.

My resistance was crumbling.

I was exhausted from carrying the burden of doubt, from maintaining the facade, from trying to earn salvation through my own efforts.

I realized in that moment that I could not save myself.

I had spent my entire life trying to be righteous enough, obedient enough, devout enough to earn Allah’s favor.

But I was still empty.

I still had no assurance.

I still lived in fear.

But Jesus offered rest.

Jesus offered to carry my burden.

Jesus offered salvation not as wages earned, but as a gift given.

And I was close to breaking, close to surrender.

But it was not quite there yet.

Fear still held me.

Fear of losing everything.

Fear of being wrong again.

Fear of the consequences.

But I was standing at the edge now and I knew somehow I knew that I could not stay balanced on this edge forever.

Soon I would have to fall one way or the other into the darkness I had always known or into the light that was calling my name.

The weeks after that dream became a blur of internal struggle.

Yo, I moved through my daily responsibilities like a ghost, physically present, but mentally elsewhere.

I taught classes on Islamic juristprudence while internally questioning every word that came from my mouth.

I led prayers while wondering if anyone heard them.

I counseledled students on matters of faith while my own faith was in ruins.

I was living a double life and the strain was destroying me.

I lost weight.

I could not sleep properly.

My wife grew increasingly worried, suggesting I see a doctor, and I assured her I was fine, knowing I was anything but fine.

I kept reading the Bible in secret.

After finishing the Gospels, I moved to Paul’s letters.

What I found there shook me even further.

Paul wrote about justification by faith, not by works of the law.

He wrote that no one could be saved by their own righteousness, that all had sinned and fallen short of God’s glory.

He wrote that salvation was a free gift of grace received through faith in Christ’s finished work on the cross.

And this was revolutionary to me.

My entire life had been about works.

Perform the rituals correctly.

Follow the rules precisely.

Earn your place in paradise through obedience.

Islam offered no assurance of salvation.

Even Muhammad himself was not certain of his fate.

The Quran says Allah forgives whom he wills and punishes whom he wills.

You could do everything right and still end up in hell if Allah decided so.

The anxiety this created was immense.

You never knew if you had done enough.

You lived in perpetual fear of divine displeasure.

But Paul was saying something completely different.

He was saying that Christ had done everything necessary.

His sacrifice was sufficient, complete, final.

Those who trusted in him were declared righteous, not because they earned it, but because Christ’s righteousness was credited to them.

It seemed too good to be true.

But the more I read, the more I saw this message throughout the New Testament.

Jesus himself said it was finished on the cross.

Be ga.

Not I have started something you must complete but it is finished done accomplished.

I began to understand what grace meant.

Not just mercy, not just forgiveness but unmmerited favor.

God giving what we do not deserve and cannot earn.

Islam has no real concept of grace.

Everything is transactional.

You obey, Allah rewards.

You disobey, Allah punishes.

It is a legal system, a contract, a set of scales weighing good deeds against bad deeds.

Uh you never know which side is heavier until judgment day.

But Christianity proclaimed something entirely different.

The scales had already been balanced.

Christ had paid the debt.

Grace meant that God did for us what we could never do for ourselves.

Tears came to my eyes as I read these passages.

Part of me desperately wanted this to be true.

Part of me still resisted, still feared being deceived.

I studied the prophecies about Jesus in the Old Testament, and I had been taught that the Bible’s prophecies about Muhammad had been removed by Jews and Christians.

But when I actually read the Old Testament, I found it full of prophecies about a coming Messiah who would suffer and die for the sins of his people.

Isaiah 53 stunned me.

written 700 years before Christ.

It described in detail someone who would be despised and rejected, wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, whose punishment would bring us peace.

See, it said this person would be like a lamb led to slaughter, that he would die with the wicked but be buried with the rich.

It said through his suffering, many would be justified.

Continue reading….
« Prev Next »