We were finishing sentences about the most important event in human history intersecting with the most important moment of our personal lives.

I described the light.

Yousef described the warmth.

I described the scars on his hands.

Yousef described the words that echoed inside our chests.

I described falling to my knees on the marble floor.

Yousef described the love that flooded through us like a damn breaking.

That we traded the story back and forth, weaving it together like two threads forming a single rope.

And the camera captured all of it.

every word, every tear, every moment of raw, unfiltered truth pouring out of two identical faces that the Muslim world had celebrated as model believers.

Then I said the words that I knew would set the Muslim world on fire.

I looked into the camera and said, “Jesus appeared to us in Mecca, not in a dream, not in our imagination, in the grand mosque during Tawaf, surrounded by thousands of Muslim pilgrims circling the Cabba.

He stood there in the holiest place in Islam and declared that he is the way, not Muhammad, not the Cabba, not Islam, Jesus.

He is the way, the truth, and the life.

And no one comes to the father except through him.

We know this because we saw him with our own eyes.

Both of us two witnesses.

They two identical testimonies.

And we are telling the world because the world needs to know that the God they are searching for in Makkah is not inside a black stone.

He’s a living person with scars on his hands and love in his eyes and he is calling every Muslim on earth to stop walking in circles and come to him.

Ysef added, “We know what this testimony will cost us.

We know the Saudi government will cancel our passports.

We know our social media accounts will be deleted.

We know our father will disown us.

We know we may never set foot in Saudi Arabia again.

We know our lives are in danger.

We know all of this.

And we are speaking anyway because Jesus is is worth more than followers.

He is worth more than fame.

He’s worth more than safety.

He is worth more than the approval of our family and our country and the entire Muslim world combined.

He is worth everything.

The video was uploaded within 24 hours.

What happened next was beyond anything we could have anticipated.

It did not just go viral.

It detonated.

Within 3 days, it had been viewed over 20 million times.

Saudi state media issued a statement calling us mentally disturbed and victims of a western psychological operation designed to destabilize Islam.

Our social media accounts on every platform were permanently deleted.

3 million followers erased overnight.

Our father appeared on a Saudi television program and publicly disowned us.

He sat in front of the camera in his white tobee and his perfectly trimmed beard and said with a voice that did not tremble, “I have no sons named Tariq and Yousef.

They are dead to me and dead to this family.

May Allah guide them back to the straight path or punish them for their betrayal”.

Watching that clip on a laptop screen in our hotel room in Istanbul was the most painful moment of my life.

More painful than the years of emptiness.

More painful than the silence of Allah.

Hearing my own father declare me dead while sitting in the same chair where he used to help me memorize Quran as a child broke something inside me that I am still healing from.

But the messages, the messages that poured in from across the Muslim world made every sacrifice worth it.

Thousands upon thousands of messages from Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Iraq and Jordan and Morocco and Algeria and Indonesia and Pakistan and Malaysia and dozens of other countries.

Messages from Muslims who said I saw him too.

That I had a dream of the man in white.

I have been hiding my faith for years.

I thought I was the only one.

Your testimony gave me courage.

You spoke for me when I could not speak for myself.

One message came from a young woman in Riyad who said she was the daughter of a judge in the Saudi court system.

She said Jesus had appeared to her in a dream 6 months ago and she had been living in terror ever since.

She said, “Watching two sons of an Islamic scholar confess their faith publicly gave her the strength to believe that she was not insane, that what she experienced was real, that Jesus was real”.

She said, “I am not alone anymore because of you”.

Another message came from a man in Jedha who said he was a retired military officer.

He said he had encountered Jesus during Hajj 3 years ago but had never told a single soul.

He said our testimony broke the chains of fear that had kept him silent and he was now ready to live openly for Christ whatever the cost.

We are still in a secure location that I will not name for safety reasons.

We have applied for asylum and are being supported by Christian organizations that help persecuted believers from the Muslim world.

We have lost everything the world says matters.

Our country, our family, our fame, our followers, our income, our identity as Saudi citizens.

All of it gone.

And yet sitting here next to my brother in a small apartment with nothing but the clothes we packed for a trip we knew we would never return from.

I can tell you with absolute certainty that we have never been richer because we have Jesus and he is worth more than every follower, every real, every passport and every earthly kingdom combined.

Now, I want to speak directly to every Muslim watching this.

You do not have to walk in circles anymore.

You do not have to perform rituals that leave you empty.

You do not have to earn God’s love through endless striving and obedience to a system that never tells you if you have done enough.

There is a God who already did enough.

He did it on a cross 2,000 years ago.

His name is Jesus.

And he is not waiting for you to be good enough to come to him.

He’s standing in the middle of your circles right now, waiting for you to stop, to look up, and to see him.

Yousef and I want to end this testimony the way we do everything together.

So, here are our final words spoken as one.

We walked in circles around the Cabba for years searching for God.

But God was never in the circles.

He was standing in the center waiting for us to stop and look at him.

We stopped.

We looked and we found him.

His name is Jesus and he is everything.

If this testimony touched your heart, write in the comments, “We stopped and we found him”.

Let it be a declaration over your life.

Let it be a prayer over the Muslim world.

Let it be a signal to every secret believer hiding in every city in every country who thinks they are alone.

You are not alone.

We see you.

Jesus sees you.

And the day is coming when every circle will break and every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

That day is closer than you think.

We stopped walking in circles and we found him.

 

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A revolution is underway in parts of the region.

A Jesus revolution.

And >> reports say tens of thousands of mosques in Iran have closed with millions of people leaving Islam to follow Jesus.

>> Unprecedented number of Muslims are forsaking Islam.

>> I want to begin by sharing something from the Bible that changed my understanding of everything.

It is from the book of Isaiah 19:es 23-2.

The prophet Isaiah wrote these words over 2,700 years ago.

In that day, there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria.

The Assyrians will go to Egypt and the Egyptians to Assyria.

The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together.

In that day, Israel will be the third.

along with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing on the earth.

The Lord Almighty will bless them, saying, “Blessed be Egypt, my people, Assyria, my handiwork, and Israel, my inheritance”.

When I was a cleric, I read these words in my studies, of other religious texts.

I dismissed them.

I thought they were corrupted words, impossible words, foolish words.

Assyria is ancient Iraq.

ancient Syria, the lands where I come from.

How could we ever worship the God of Israel?

How could we ever be called his handiwork?

It seemed like a dream that could never be real.

But today, as I speak to you, I am watching these words come alive before my eyes.

I am watching millions of my Muslim brothers and sisters across the Middle East turn to Jesus Christ.

I am one of them.

And what I once thought was impossible, I now know is the most real thing I have ever experienced.

My name is not important.

Many people still want to kill me for what I am about to tell you.

So I must protect my identity.

But my story is important.

Not because I am special, but because I am one of millions.

What happened to me is happening to countless others across Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and every corner of the Islamic world.

We are finding Jesus, or perhaps I should say Jesus is finding us.

Let me take you back to the beginning.

I was born in Baghdad in 1979.

My father was a religious man, deeply devoted to Islam.

He worked during the day as a government clerk, but his true passion was his faith.

He spent his evenings at the mosque and he wanted nothing more than for his sons to become religious leaders.

My mother wore the full black abaya and nikab from the time she was a teenager.

She never questioned, never doubted, never wavered.

In our home, Islam was not just a religion.

It was the air we breathe.

the foundation of every decision, the lens through which he we saw everything.

I was the eldest of five children.

From the time I could speak, I was reciting Quranic verses.

My father would wake me before dawn for faj prayer.

While other children played in the streets of Baghdad, I sat in our small living room memorizing surah after surah.

By the time I was 7 years old, I had memorized significant portions of the Quran.

My father would beam with pride when I recited in the mosque.

The other men would pat my head and tell my father he was blessed with a righteous son.

When I was nine, my father enrolled me in a special religious school attached to our mosque.

It was 1988 during the Iraq war.

The city was tense, frightening, filled with air raid sirens and checkpoints.

But inside our school, we lived in a different world.

We studied Arabic grammar so we could understand the Quran in its original language.

We studied hadith, the sayings and actions of the prophet Muhammad.

We studied fick, Islamic Jewish prudence.

We learned the intricate details of prayer possessions, ritual cleanliness, and proper conduct.

I loved it.

I truly did.

This is important for you to understand.

I was not a hypocrite then.

I was not pretending.

I believed with all my heart that Islam was the truth, the final revelation, the perfect way of life.

When I prayed, I felt I was communicating with Allah.

When I read the Quran, I felt I was reading the direct words of God.

My faith was sincere, deep, and unquestioning.

The years of study were rigorous and demanding.

We would start before sunrise and often continue late into the evening.

Our teachers were strict, sometimes harsh, believing that discipline produced righteousness.

We memorized not just the Quran, but also countless hadith.

learning the chain of transmission for each one.

Studying which were authentic and which were weak.

We learned Islamic history from the life of Muhammad through the caliphates and conquests that spread Islam across the known world.

I excelled in my studies.

While other boys struggled with the complex Arabic grammar or grew bored with endless memorization, I thrived.

I had a gift for languages and for remembering texts.

By the time I was 15, I had memorized the entire Quran.

My father held a celebration inviting relatives and neighbors.

I recited long passages from memory while the guests ate and praised Allah for blessing our family with such a devoted son.

During my teenage years, Iraq was suffering under international sanctions.

The country was poor, resources were scarce, and people struggled to find basic necessities.

But our religious school was supported by the community, and we always had enough.

The mosque was a place of stability in an unstable world, a refuge from the chaos outside.

This reinforced my belief that Islam was the answer to all problems.

That if people would just submit fully to Allah’s will, everything would be better.

By the time I was 22 years old, I had completed my religious education.

The year was 2001.

The world was changing in ways we did not fully understand yet.

The Americans had just been attacked and soon they would invade Afghanistan.

Within two years they would invade my own country.

But in that moment in 2001 I was simply a young man who had achieved his dream.

I became a cleric, an imam, a religious teacher.

I was given a position at a mosque in a neighborhood in Baghdad.

I was given the honor of leading prayers, of teaching the youth, of counseling families.

My father cried with joy the first time I led Friday prayers.

I can still see his face in the crowd, tears streaming down his weathered cheeks, his lips moving in quiet.

Thanks to Allah for giving him such a son.

My mother prepared a feast that day.

Extended family came.

Neighbors congratulated my parents.

I was someone now.

I had status, respect, purpose.

I married a year later.

Her name was Zahra.

She was 18, quiet, obedient, devout.

Our marriage was arranged by our families as was customary.

I will be honest with you, I did not love her at first, but I respected her.

She was a good Muslim woman.

She kept our home clean.

She prayed faithfully.

She obeyed without question.

Over time, affection grew between us.

We had our first child, a son.

Within a year, then another son, then a daughter.

My life felt complete, blessed, ordained by God.

My days followed a pattern that rarely changed.

I would wake for fajger prayer at the mosque, leading the small group of devoted men who came in the darkness before dawn.

After prayer, I would return home for breakfast with my family, then back to the mosque for morning Quran classes with the children.

Lunch at home, afternoon prayer at the mosque, then teaching sessions for the teenage boys, evening prayer, night prayer, home to sleep.

Then the cycle would begin again.

On Fridays, I would prepare my kudba, my sermon with great care.

I would speak about obedience to Allah, about following the sunnah, the way of the prophet.

I would remind the congregation of the importance of prayer, of giving charity, of fasting during Ramadan.

Sometimes I would speak about current events, the American invasion in 2003, the chaos that followed, the violence between Sunni and Shia, the need for Muslims to remain faithful during trials.

I remember standing on that minbar, that pulpit, looking out at the faces of my community.

Men I had known my whole life.

Young boys who reminded me of myself at their age.

Old men whose fathers I had known.

I felt the weight of responsibility.

These people trusted me to guide them.

They believed I knew the truth, and I believed I did.

The American invasion of 2003 brought tremendous upheaval to Baghdad and all of Iraq.

The government fell within weeks.

The stable order we had known, oppressive as it was, collapsed into chaos, looting, violence, sectarian conflict.

Our city became a war zone.

Many of my congregation looked to me for spiritual guidance during this dark time.

I told them to remain faithful, to trust in Allah’s plan, to believe that the trial we faced were a tests of our faith.

But inside, in a place I barely acknowledged, even to myself, small questions had begun to form.

They started innocently enough.

I was studying a collection of hadith one afternoon in my small office at the mosque.

The book was open to a section about warfare, about how to treat captives and conquered peoples.

I read descriptions of violence that made me pause.

I read about the treatment of women taken in battle.

I read about executions and punishments that seemed harsh beyond reason.

I pushed the thoughts away.

I told myself that I was not learned enough to question these things.

I told myself that there was wisdom I did not understand, context I was missing.

I told myself that Allah knows best and who was I to question, but the questions kept coming like water seeping through small cracks in a dam.

I noticed things in my community that troubled me.

I saw how women were treated, how they lived in fear, how their testimonies were worth half that of a man’s in disputes.

I saw young girls married to much older men, their childhoods stolen in the name of religious tradition.

I saw the way we spoke about Christians and Jews, about kafir, about unbelievers.

We said they were destined for hell, that they were less than us, that their lives had less value.

I had Christian neighbors.

Before 2003, Baghdad had a significant Christian population.

They had lived in our country for nearly 2,000 years, long before Islam came.

They were Assyrian Christians, Calaldian Christians, ancient communities.

I knew some of them.

They owned shops in our neighborhood.

They were kind people, generous people, peaceful people.

I remember one family in particular.

The father’s name was Yousef.

He had a small shop where he repaired electronics.

My television had broken once and I brought it to him.

While he worked, we talked.

He was respectful, gentle in his manner.

He asked about my family.

He refused to take full payment for the repair, insisting on giving me a discount because we were neighbors.

What struck me was the peace in his eyes.

Despite everything happening around us, the bombings, the kidnappings, the violence, he had this quality of peace that I could not explain.

His children were polite and well- behaved.

His wife, who sometimes helped in the shop, smiled often despite wearing a cross around her neck that marked her as a target.

The violence against Christians in Baghdad intensified as the years passed.

Churches were bombed.

Christians were kidnapped for ransom or killed simply for their faith.

Many fled Iraq entirely, leaving behind homes and businesses.

Their families had owned for generations.

Those who remained lived in constant fear.

Then one day in 2006 during the worst of the sectarian violence, someone bombed their church.

It was a Sunday morning.

Yousef’s eldest son was killed.

He was 16 years old, preparing to finish his secondary education.

A bright boy with a ready smile, who had helped his father in the shop since he was small.

I heard about it that afternoon.

I felt I should go to offer condolences.

Though it was not common for Muslims to visit Christian homes in mourning, but something pulled me to go.

When I arrived at their home, I found Yousef sitting with family members.

His eyes were red from crying, but when he saw me, he stood.

He thanked me for coming.

He offered me tea.

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