I spent 3 days in the hospital.

My family came to visit.

My wife and daughters, my brothers, friends from the mosque.

Everyone was celebrating, thanking Allah for sparing my life, calling it a sign of his favor.

They brought me cards and flowers and said prayers over me.

But I couldn’t join in their celebration.

I lay in that hospital bed staring at the ceiling, wrestling with what I had experienced.

Was it real?

Could it have been real?

Everything in my Islamic training told me it was impossible.

Jesus was not God.

He was not the son of God.

He did not die on the cross.

The whole foundation of Christianity was based on errors and corruptions.

I had spent years studying this, teaching this, believing this with absolute certainty.

But what I had seen, what I had experienced was so vivid, so real, so powerful that I couldn’t dismiss it as a hallucination or a dream.

I had seen Jesus.

I had seen his wounded hands.

I had seen hell and heaven.

I had heard him speak.

How could all of that be just neurons misfiring in a dying brain?

It was too detailed, too coherent, too meaningful, and the feeling of it, the love radiating from Christ, the peace of heaven, the horror of hell, those weren’t things my brain could have manufactured.

They were too foreign to anything I had ever experienced or even imagined.

But if it was real, then everything changed.

everything.

My entire world view would have to be dismantled.

My identity as a Muslim scholar would be destroyed.

My life as I knew it would end.

The thought terrified me almost as much as the darkness I had experienced after death.

How could I possibly tell anyone about this?

Who would believe me?

What would happen to me if I did?

I went home after 3 days, still weak and shaken.

My wife fussed over me, making sure I rested, bringing me food, keeping the children quiet.

But she noticed something was wrong.

I wasn’t myself.

I was distant, distracted, troubled.

She asked me multiple times what was bothering me, but I couldn’t tell her.

Not yet.

I didn’t know how.

Nights were the worst.

I would lie awake in the darkness.

And all I could see were the faces of those scholars in hell crying out to me, begging me to warn others.

I could hear Jesus’s voice telling me to go back and tell people the truth.

The weight of it pressed down on me like a physical burden.

I had been given a message, a mission, and I was terrified to fulfill it.

Two weeks passed, then three.

The pressure inside me was building.

I knew I couldn’t keep silent forever.

Jesus had sent me back for a purpose, and that purpose was to tell others what I had seen.

But the cost would be enormous.

I would lose everything.

My job, my reputation, my place in the community, possibly even my family.

Finally, I couldn’t bear it anymore.

One night about a month after my heart attack, I told my wife.

We were alone in our bedroom.

The girls were asleep.

I sat on the edge of the bed and told her everything.

I described the darkness, the encounter with Jesus, the visions of hell and heaven, the commission I had been given.

I told her that Jesus is real, that he is Lord, that everything we had been taught about him was wrong.

Her reaction was worse than I had feared.

At first, she thought I was joking.

Then she thought I was still sick, that my brain had been affected by the lack of oxygen.

When she realized I was serious, she became angry, angrier than I had ever seen her.

She accused me of being possessed by Shayan, of being deceived by demons, of bringing shame upon our family.

She demanded that I go to the imam immediately and confess this sin, ask for forgiveness, undergo whatever spiritual cleansing was necessary.

I tried to explain that it wasn’t like that, that what I had experienced was real and true and from God.

But she wouldn’t listen.

She was crying, shouting, saying I had gone mad.

She threatened to leave me, to take the children away where I couldn’t poison their minds with this blasphemy.

The argument went on for hours, both of us getting more and more upset, neither of us able to convince the other.

In the following days, I tried to reach out to a few close friends, fellow teachers at the Madrasa.

I thought maybe they would listen, maybe they would at least consider what I was saying.

I met with them privately, one or two at a time, and carefully shared what had happened to me.

I thought if I explained it well enough, if I gave them enough detail, they would understand.

But they all reacted the same way, disbelief, concern, then anger, and rejection.

They told me I was being tested by Satan, that this was a spiritual attack meant to lead me astray from Islam.

They quoted verses from the Quran about how Shayan can appear as an angel of light to deceive people.

They insisted that what I had seen was demonic deception, not divine truth.

Some of them became hostile, warning me that I was on the verge of apostasy, that if I continued down this path, I would be considered a kafir, an unbeliever, an enemy of Islam.

One of them, someone I had considered a close friend for over a decade, told me bluntly that if I spoke about this publicly, I would bring punishment upon myself.

He didn’t specify what kind of punishment, but the threat was clear.

In our community, in our country, apostasy was not taken lightly.

People who left Islam, especially religious teachers and scholars, could face severe consequences.

Violence, even death.

He was warning me, maybe trying to protect me, but also making clear that there was a line I should not cross.

Word spread quickly.

Within a week, it seemed like everyone in our small town knew that Shik Karim had had some kind of strange experience during his heart attack and was now saying troubling things about Jesus.

People started looking at me differently, some with pity, some with suspicion, some with outright hostility.

I would walk to the market and people would stop talking when I approached.

Children who had been my students would avoid eye contact.

Neighbors who used to greet me warmly now hurried past without speaking.

The final blow came from the mosque leadership.

They called me in for a meeting, a formal gathering of the imam and several senior members of the community.

They asked me to explain myself, to tell them what I was teaching.

what I believed.

I tried to be respectful, tried to explain that I wasn’t attacking Islam or trying to cause problems, that I was simply sharing what I had experienced.

I told them about the encounter with Jesus, about the vision of hell and heaven, about the message I had been given.

They listened in cold silence.

When I finished, the imam spoke.

He said I was either deceived by demons or had suffered brain damage from my heart attack.

Either way, I was spreading dangerous ideas that contradicted the Quran and the teachings of Islam.

I was confusing people, leading them astray, damaging the faith of the community.

He gave me a choice.

Publicly recant everything I had said.

Confess that I had been confused or mistaken.

reaffirm my faith in Islam and my rejection of Christian doctrine or faced the consequences.

I sat there looking at these men I had known for years, men I had prayed with and worked alongside and respected.

And I knew I couldn’t do what they were asking.

I couldn’t deny what I had seen.

I couldn’t call Jesus a liar or a demon.

I couldn’t pretend that hell and heaven were not real.

Even if it cost me everything, even if it destroyed my life, I couldn’t deny the truth.

I told them I couldn’t recant, that what I had experienced was real, that Jesus Christ is Lord, whether they believed it or not.

That I was sorry to cause them distress.

But I had to be faithful to what God had shown me.

The Imam’s face hardened.

He said that as of that moment, I was relieved of my teaching position at the Madrasa.

I was no longer welcome to lead prayers or give lectures at the mosque.

I was to have no further involvement in religious instruction of any kind.

If I continued to spread these ideas publicly, there would be further consequences.

The meeting was over.

I was dismissed.

I walked out of that mosque for what I knew would probably be the last time.

The place where I had taught for over a decade, where I had delivered countless sermons, where I had led prayers and counseledled people and felt so purposeful and important.

All of that was gone.

Now, in a matter of weeks, my entire life had collapsed.

My wife made good on her threat.

She filed for divorce and moved back to her parents’ house, taking our daughters with her.

I tried to talk to her, tried to explain one more time, but she wouldn’t listen.

She said I was not the man she had married, that I had become someone she didn’t recognize, that she couldn’t allow our daughters to be influenced by my blasphemy.

The divorce went through quickly in our community.

When a wife left because her husband had become an apostate, there was no question about who was in the right.

The day she took the girls away was one of the worst days of my life.

Worse even than the darkness after death, because at least that had been impersonal.

This was personal.

This was my children crying, confused, asking why they couldn’t stay with Baba.

This was my youngest daughter reaching for me while my wife pulled her away.

This was watching my family drive away and not knowing if I would ever see them again.

I lost my income.

The Madrasa had been my only source of employment.

No one else in town would hire me now.

I was toxic, contaminated, dangerous.

I had some small savings, but they wouldn’t last long.

I had to move out of the house I’d been renting, which was owned by someone connected to the mosque.

I found a tiny room in a poorer part of town, barely large enough for a mat to sleep on and a small table.

The landlord didn’t ask questions as long as I paid rent.

My family disowned me.

My brothers came to see me, not to offer support, but to tell me I was dead to them.

My mother, when she heard what I had done, refused to speak to me.

My father, the imam who had raised me in Islam, who had been so proud when I memorized the Quran, said that he no longer had a son named Karim.

The pain of that rejection cut deeper than anything else.

I had lost not just my job and my wife and my children but my entire family, my entire history, my entire identity.

The isolation was crushing.

I would spend entire days without speaking to another human being.

I had no one to talk to, no one who understood what I was going through.

The few people who were kind to me did so out of pity, not friendship.

I was the crazy former shake who had lost his mind.

The cautionary tale people would tell their children about what happens when you stray from the straight path.

There were threats, anonymous notes pushed under my door, warning me to stop talking about my experience or face consequences.

Messages telling me to leave town.

Once someone threw rocks at my window in the middle of the night.

Another time I was walking home from the market and someone shoved me hard from behind, knocking me to the ground.

No one helped me up.

People just walked around me like I was garbage.

I sank into depression, dark, heavy depression, like I had never experienced.

I would lie on my mat for hours staring at the ceiling, wondering if I had made a terrible mistake.

Not about the truth of what I had seen.

I never doubted that but about speaking out.

Maybe I should have kept quiet.

Maybe I should have just lived with the knowledge privately and not told anyone.

Maybe then I would still have my family, my job, my life.

In my lowest moments, I questioned God.

I cried out to him in anguish.

Why had he sent me back to this?

Why give me a message that would cost me everything?

Why not just let me die and go to heaven?

What was the point of all this suffering?

Was anyone even listening to what I was trying to say?

Had I lost everything for nothing?

There were days when I thought about ending it all, just finishing what the heart attack had started, going back to wherever I would go.

Maybe heaven, maybe hell.

At least it would be an end to the pain.

But something always stopped me.

The memory of Jesus’s face.

The feeling of his hand on my shoulder.

The words he had spoken that he would be with me.

That he would never leave me.

Those promises kept me alive when everything else told me to give up.

Then about 6 months after my heart attack, something happened that changed everything.

A man came to visit me.

His name was Gergeis, and he was a Coptic Christian, a shopkeeper I had debated with many times over the years.

I had always been harsh with him, dismissive of his faith, condescending about his beliefs.

He had every reason to hate me, or at least to be glad about my downfall.

But when he knocked on my door that evening, his face showed nothing but kindness.

He said he had heard about what happened to me, about the experience I’d had and the price I was paying for speaking about it.

He said he had been praying for me for years.

Even when I was debating against him, even when I was teaching people to reject Christ, he had never stopped praying that God would reveal the truth to me.

He brought food, simple food, bread and cheese and fruit.

But it was the first gift I had received from anyone in months.

More than that, he brought friendship.

He sat with me in my tiny room and listened to my story without judgment, without interruption.

When I finished, he wept.

He said he believed me.

that what I had experienced was consistent with scripture, with the character of Christ, with the testimonies of others who had encountered Jesus supernaturally.

Then he did something I will never forget.

He reached into his bag and pulled out a book, an Arabic Bible.

He placed it in my hands and said I should read it.

He told me that if Jesus had truly appeared to me and sent me back with a message, then I needed to know what the Bible said, I needed to understand the full story of salvation, the full gospel, the complete truth about who Jesus is and what he has done.

I held that Bible in my trembling hands, staring at it like it was some kind of forbidden object.

In a way, it was.

I had been taught my whole life that the Bible was corrupted, unreliable, not to be trusted.

I had quoted verses from it only to criticize them, never to learn from them.

But now, holding it, I felt drawn to it.

Maybe this book contained answers.

Maybe it would help me understand what had happened to me.

Gurgess left after an hour or so, but he promised to return.

He said I wasn’t alone, that there were Christians who would support me if I needed help.

I thanked him, my voice breaking with emotion.

After he left, I opened the Bible, not knowing where to start, just letting it fall open to wherever it would.

It opened to the Gospel of John.

I started reading from the beginning.

The word was with God, and the word was God.

All things were made through him.

In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

The words were beautiful, profound, speaking to something deep in my soul.

I kept reading page after page, unable to stop.

Then I reached chapter 14:6, and there it was, the exact words Jesus had spoken to me in the vision, word for word in Arabic.

I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No one comes to the father except through me.

The exact same words.

Not similar, not close.

Exact.

I broke down weeping.

This was the confirmation I needed.

What I had experienced wasn’t a hallucination or a dream.

Jesus had spoken to me using words from scripture.

Words I had never read before.

words I didn’t know were in the Bible.

He had given me a piece of evidence that proved the experience was real that came from him.

That was divine truth.

I read through the night Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the story of Jesus’s life, his teachings, his miracles, his death, his resurrection.

Everything I had denied, everything I had argued against was here in these pages.

And it all made sense now.

It all fit together with what I had experienced.

The Jesus who had appeared to me was the same Jesus described in these gospels.

The message he gave me was consistent with the message in this book.

Over the following weeks, I devoured the Bible.

Acts, Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians.

Every book spoke to me, taught me, revealed more of the truth.

I read about Paul, formerly Saul, who had persecuted Christians and then encountered Jesus and was completely transformed.

I saw my own story in his.

I read Jesus’s words about how following him would bring division even in families.

I read about the cost of disciplehip, about taking up the cross, about losing your life to find it.

Everything confirmed what I was going through.

The Bible became my lifeline in my isolation, in my grief, in my loneliness.

These words sustained me.

They explained my experience.

They gave me hope.

They assured me that what I had suffered was not meaningless, that God had a purpose in all of it, that I was part of a much larger story of redemption.

I learned about grace, the concept that salvation is a gift, not something earned.

This was revolutionary to me.

My entire life had been about trying to earn paradise through good works, prayers, fasting, following rules.

But the Bible said it was all grace, all gift, all because of what Christ had done, not what I could do.

The relief of understanding this was overwhelming.

I didn’t have to earn God’s love.

I already had it freely given, paid for by Jesus’s blood on the cross.

But I also knew I couldn’t stay in my hometown much longer.

The threats were escalating.

People were becoming bolder in their hostility.

Someone spray painted caffir on my door.

Another time I was cornered by a group of young men who pushed me around and threatened worse if I didn’t leave town.

I realized that staying here might end with my death and not the kind that would send me back to meet Jesus.

The kind that would just end my ability to fulfill the mission he had given me.

In late 2016, almost two years after my heart attack, I made the difficult decision to leave.

Leaving meant abandoning any hope of seeing my daughters, at least for the foreseeable future.

It meant becoming a refugee in my own country, running for my own people.

But it also meant surviving, staying alive to continue telling the truth.

I packed one small bag with a few clothes the Bible Gerji had given me and what little money I had left.

In the middle of the night, I walked to the bus station and bought a ticket to Cairo.

I didn’t say goodbye to anyone.

I just left, disappearing into the darkness, heading toward an uncertain future in a city where I knew almost no one.

As the bus pulled away from my town, I looked back at the lights fading in the distance.

Everything I had known was back there.

My past, my identity, my family, my life.

All of it gone.

All of it sacrificed for the truth.

I felt grief, yes, but also something else.

A strange peace.

a sense that I was finally on the right path, that I was doing what God wanted me to do, that somehow, in ways I couldn’t yet see, this was all going to be worth it.

Continue reading….
« Prev Next »