Saudi Princess Cries After Reading the Bible, Declaring: “Jesus Appeared To Me & Heal My Lupus”
Jesus, thank you for your word that has not only saved me but healed my disease.
I am grateful.
Jesus, thank you.
That was me kneeling on the cold floor of of my small apartment in East London, holding a Bible I swore I would never touch, crying like a baby because the God I had mocked, debated against, and rejected my entire life, had just healed my dying body and set my broken soul free.
Just months before that moment, I was lying in a hospital bed at King’s College Hospital with failing kidneys, an inflamed heart, and a death sentence called lupus, eating me alive from the inside.
I had begged Allah to heal me.
I had prayed taj every single night until my forehead was bruised from prostration.
I had undergone rukia with shakes, drunk zam zam water by the liter and cried on my prayer mat until I had no tears left.
But Allah was silent.
For months, nothing but silence.
Then a nurse named Grace threw a lifeline I never asked for.
But she told me about Jesus and I threatened to report her.
She gave me scriptures and I wanted to burn them.
But when you are dying and everyone else has abandoned you, desperation makes you do things you never imagined.
I opened that Bible expecting to find nonsense.
Instead, I found the God who had been waiting for me my whole life.
He spoke when Allah was silent.
He came close when everyone else was distant.
He healed what no medicine, no imam, no amount of prayer toward Mecca could touch.
But to understand why those tears meant so much, you need to know where I came from.
You need to know the story of a princess who was never allowed to be a princess.
You need to know about the shame that drove my pregnant mother from Saudi Arabia to the cold streets of London.
You need to know about a father who sent money every month, but never sent love, never sent acknowledgment, never sent a single word to the daughter he helped create.
You need to know about the little girl who clung to Islam like a drowning person clings to driftwood because it was the only connection she had to a homeland that rejected her.
You need to know about the university student who became the lioness of Islam, debating Christians and crushing their arguments, believing she was earning Allah’s favor with every victory.
You need to know about the young woman whose body turned against her, whose immune system attacked her organs, whose butterfly rash spread across her face like a mark of shame.
You need to know about the nights I screamed at the ceiling asking Allah why he had abandoned his faithful servant.
Uh you need to know about the moment I whispered the name of Jesus for the first time and felt a presence in that hospital room that changed everything.
My name is Nura Bent Khaled al-Rashid.
My father is a prince of the house of Saud.
My mother is a woman who loved the wrong man and paid for it with exile.
And this is the story of how I went from being a hidden daughter of Saudi royalty, rejected by my bloodline, and abandoned by Allah to becoming a daughter of the King of Kings, healed, restored, and finally home.
My mother, Fatima Al-Harbi, was a beautiful young woman from a respected family in Jedha.
She was not royalty but her family had connections to the powerful circles in Saudi Arabia.
She worked as an administrative assistant in one of the royal offices in Riyad and that is where she met my father Prince Khaled bin Faizel al-Rashid.
He was a member of the house of Sud the ruling family of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
He was tall, handsome, educated in Switzerland, and had a charm that made women fall at his feet.
My mother was young and naive.
She believed every word he spoke.
He told her he loved her.
He told her he would marry her.
He told her she would live in palaces and wear diamonds and be treated like a queen.
She believed him because she wanted to believe him.
She loved him with everything she had.
When my mother discovered she was pregnant with me, she was terrified but also hopeful.
She thought this would be the moment my father would finally make good on his promises.
She thought he would go to his family and announce his intention to marry her.
She thought I would be the bond that sealed their love forever.
Uh but when she told him about the pregnancy, everything changed.
His face went cold.
His eyes became distant.
He told hers that marriage was impossible.
He already had a wife from a powerful family and taking a second wife from a non-royal background would bring shame to his name.
He told her the timing was wrong.
He told her his family would never accept it.
He told her many things, but what he really meant was simple.
He did not love her enough to fight for her.
He did not love me enough to claim me as his own.
My mother was devastated.
In Saudi Arabia, an unmarried pregnant woman is not just a personal tragedy.
It is a family catastrophe.
It is shame that spreads like fire and burns everyone it touches.
Her family would be disgraced.
Her name would be ruined.
She could face punishment under the strict religious laws.
Ha.
She could lose everything, including her life.
My father knew this.
He knew what he was doing to her when he refused to marry her.
But he gave her one option.
He arranged for her to leave Saudi Arabia qu uh quietly before anyone discovered her pregnancy.
He gave her money, a plane ticket to London, and a contact who would help her settle there.
He told her he would continue to support her financially.
He told her to never contact his family publicly.
He told her to raise me in silence, far away from the kingdom, far away from his name, far away from the truth of who I was.
My mother arrived in London in the winter of 1994.
Pregnant, alone, heartbroken and terrified.
She knew no one.
She spoke limited English.
She had money from my father, but money cannot buy you a home when your heart is shattered.
She found a small flat in White Chapel.
It’s an area in East London with a large Bangladeshi and Arab immigrant population.
It was nothing like Jedha.
The streets were gray and wet.
The buildings were old and cramped.
The cold seeped into her bones in ways she had never experienced.
But she had no choice.
She had burned every bridge behind her.
Saudi Arabia was close to her forever.
Her family had disowned her when they discovered the truth.
She was completely alone in the world with only me growing inside her belly as her reason to keep living.
I was born in March 1995 at the Royal London Hospital in White Chapel.
My mother named me Nora, which means light in Arabic.
She told me later that she chose that name because I was the only light in her darkness.
When she held me for the first time, she made a promise to herself.
She promised that I would know who I was.
Um, she promised that I would never forget my royal blood.
She promised that even though my father had rejected us, I would grow up proud of my Saudi heritage.
She promised that one day somehow I would be accepted by my father’s family.
She spent my entire childhood trying to keep that promise, even when it broke her heart over and over again.
Growing up in White Chapel was nothing like growing up in a palace.
Our flat was small, two bedrooms on the third floor of a council building with thin walls and noisy neighbors.
My mother worked cleaning jobs during the day and sometimes evening shifts at a halal restaurant on Brick Lane.
She was always tired.
Her hands were always rough from scrubbing floors and washing dishes.
But no matter how exhausted she was, she never let me forget who I was.
She would sit me down in the evenings and tell me stories about Saudi Arabia.
She described the golden deserts and the towering buildings of Riyad.
She told me about the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
She taught me about our family, the al-Rashid branch connected to the house of Saud, the rulers of the kingdom.
She showed me photographs of my father, a tall man in a white th and red checkered shema.
Looking like a king from a fairy tale.
My father sent money every month without fail.
It arrived through a wire transfer from a bank in Zurich, always the same amount, always on the 15th of the month.
The money was enough to keep us comfortable, but not luxurious.
My mother used it for rent, food, school supplies, and clothes.
She saved a little each month.
Our hoping that one day we might be able to return to Saudi Arabia with our heads held high.
But the money came with no letter, no phone call, no message of love.
It was guilt disguised as generosity.
It was my father’s way of silencing his conscience without opening his heart.
I grew up knowing I had a father who paid for my existence but refused to acknowledge it.
I grew up wealthy in pounds but bankrupt in paternal love.
I tried many times to reach out to my father’s family.
When I was 14, I found an email address for one of my half-bros, Faizal bin Khaled, and sent him a long message introducing myself.
I told him I was his sister.
I told him I lived in London.
I told him I wanted to know my family.
He never replied.
When I was 17, I found a phone number for one of my father’s cousins and called him.
Uh, a servant answered and said, “The family did not know anyone by my name.” The line went dead.
Every attempt I made was met with silence, rejection, or outright denial.
To them, I did not exist.
I was a mistake that had been exported to England and was supposed to stay hidden forever.
But I refused to disappear.
I refused to let them erase me.
I held on to my identity with both hands.
Even when they tried to pry my fingers loose.
Islam became my anchor in those confusing years.
When I did not know where I belonged, I belonged to Allah.
When I felt rejected by my father’s family, I felt accepted in the mosque.
I started praying five times a day.
When I was 11 years old, my mother taught me how to perform wudoo, the ritual washing before prayer.
She taught me the words of the salah in Arabic.
The she bought me my first Quran with English translation, and I read it cover to cover before I turned 13.
I wore my hijab proudly, even when girls at school mocked me.
I fasted during Ramadan with discipline and joy.
I gave charity from my pocket money.
I was not Muslim because my mother forced me.
I was Muslim because Islam gave me something my father never did.
It gave me identity.
It gave me belonging.
It gave me a home when I had no home.
I rejected Western culture with every fiber of my being.
I saw the English girls at my school with their short skirts and their boyfriends and their alcohol and their parties and I felt disgust.
I saw them as lost souls chasing empty pleasures while I had the truth of Allah guiding my path.
I refused to assimilate.
I refused to become British in my heart.
It even though I carried a British passport, I was Saudi.
I was Muslim.
I was a daughter of the al-Rashid family whether they accepted me or not.
And I swore to myself that one day I I would return to Saudi Arabia, not as a hidden shame, but as a proud daughter of the kingdom.
That was my dream.
That was my obsession.
That was the fire that burned inside me through every cold London winter and every unanswered message to my father’s family.
I did not know then that Allah was about to go silent on me too.
And I did not know that my healing would come from the last place I ever expected.
By the time I turned 18, I had built my entire identity around two things.
My Saudi blood and my Islamic faith.
I could not control whether my father’s family accepted me, but I could control how I represented myself to the world.
Or would I chose to be the most devoted Muslim in every room I entered? I chose to be the voice that defended Islam against every critic, every doubter, every person who dared to question the truth of the Quran.
When I finished my A levels with top grades, I applied to the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
S OAS was known for its focus on Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
It attracted students from all over the Arab world, from Pakistan, from Indonesia, from every corner of the Muslim world.
It was the perfect place for someone like me.
A place where I could study my heritage academically while surrounding myself with people who shared my faith.
I was accepted to study Arabic and Islamic studies and I felt like my life was finally beginning.
My first week at SOAS felt like coming home to a place I had never been.
The hallways were filled with women in hijabs and men with beards discussing theology and politics.
The cafeteria served halal food.
The prayer rooms were always full during salah times.
I heard Arabic spoken everywhere mixed with Udu, Farsy, Turkish, and a dozen other languages from the Muslim world.
For the first time in my life, I was not the odd one out.
I was not the strange girl in the hijab who refused to eat pork or attend Christmas parties.
I was normal.
I was surrounded by people who understood me without explanation.
I joined the Islamic society in my first week and immediately became one of its most active members.
I attended every lecture, every study circle, every community event.
Uh I volunteered to organize sisters ga g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g gatherings and Quran study sessions.
By the end of my first semester, everyone in the Islamic society knew my name.
Nura al-Rashid, the passionate one, the fierce one, the one who never backed down from a fight.
The fights came often and I welcome them.
SOAS was a diverse campus and not everyone was Muslim.
There were Christian societies, atheist groups, secular activists, and people who loved to challenge religious beliefs.
Debates were common in the student union, in the courtyard, in the common rooms.
And whenever Islam was questioned, I made sure I was there to defend it.
I prepared for these debates like a soldier preparing for battle.
I memorized Quranic verses in Arabic and English.
I studied the hadith the sayings of prophet Muhammad.
I read books by Islamic scholars like Ibia an al- gazali and contemporary apologists like Ahmed Dat and Zakir Nike.
I watched hundreds of hours of debate videos online learning how to counter Christian arguments, atheist objections and western criticisms.
I became a weapon forged in the fire of knowledge and I was ready to use that weapon against anyone who challenged my faith.
The Christian students were my favorite targets.
I found their beliefs easy to dismantle, at least in my mind.
I would approach them in the common areas and start conversations that always turned into debates.
I asked them how God could be three and one at the same time.
I asked them how a loving God could let his son be tortured and killed.
I asked them why they trusted a Bible that had been translated and edited hundreds of times over thousands of years.
Uh I quoted verses from the Quran that called Christians misguided.
I told them that Jesus was a prophet of Islam, not the son of God.
I told them that their religion was a corruption of the original message that Moses and Abraham and Jesus himself had preached.
Most of them could not answer my questions.
Most of them walked away flustered and did embarrassed.
And every time I won a debate, I felt it I felt a surge of pride.
I was defending Allah.
I was protecting the truth.
I was proving that Islam was superior to all other religions.
There was one debate I remember more than any other.
It happened in my second year at S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O SAS during an interfaith dialogue event in the main lecture hall.
The event was supposed to promote understanding between different religious groups on campus.
Representatives from the Islamic society, the Christian Union with the Jewish society and the secular humanist group were invited to speak.
I was chosen to represent the Islamic society and I prepared for weeks.
I wrote my speech carefully filled with Quranic verses and logical arguments against the Trinity and the crucifixion.
When my turn came to speak, I stood at the podium and looked at the audience of over 200 students.
I saw my Muslim brothers and sisters watching with pride.
I saw the Christian students watching with nervous anticipation.
And I delivered my speech with fire in my voice and ice in my heart.
I dismantled Christian theology piece by piece.
I mocked the idea of God dying on a cross.
I called the Bible a corrupted book unworthy of trust.
When I finished, my side of the room erupted in applause.
The Christian representative, a young woman named Emily from the Christian Union, looked pale and shaken.
She gave her response, but it was weak and defensive.
I had one and everyone knew it.
After that debate, my reputation on campus reached new heights.
Muslim students I had never met would approach me and thank me for defending Islam.
They called me a lioness.
They said I had the spirit of a mujahida, a female warrior for the faith.
I loved the attention.
I loved the respect.
I loved feeling like I mattered, like I was doing something important with my life.
My father’s family might have rejected me, but the Muslim community embraced me.
I had found my tribe, my purpose, my identity.
I was Nura al-Rashid, the lioness of Islam, and no one could take that away from me.
I started writing articles for Islamic blogs and websites.
I made videos responding to Christian missionaries and atheist YouTubers.
But I dreamed of becoming a famous Islamic speaker who would travel the world defending the faith.
I thought Allah was pleased with me.
I thought I was earning his favor with every debate I won, every Christian I silenced, every argument I crushed.
My social circle was exclusively Muslim.
I had no Christian friends, no Hindu friends, no atheist friends.
I avoided them deliberately.
I believed that close friendships with non-Muslims would corrupt my faith and lead me astray.
The Quran warned about taking disbelievers as allies, and I took that warning seriously.
My closest friends were sisters from the Islamic society, women who shared my values and my vision.
We prayed together, studied together, ate together, and encouraged each other in our faith.
We talked about marriage and finding righteous husbands who would lead us closer to Allah.
Uh we talked about raising children who would memorize the Quran and grow up to be soldiers for Islam.
We talked about the future of the Muslim Ummah and our role in defending it against Western corruption.
Christianity was not just a different religion to us.
It was an enemy, a distortion of truth, a tool of Western colonialism designed to lead Muslims away from the straight path.
I remember one conversation with my friend Amina during our third year at SOAS.
We were sitting in a cafe near Russell Square drinking mint tea and discussing our futures.
Amina asked me what my ultimate dream was and I told her without hesitation.
I want to go back to Saudi Arabia, I said.
I want my father’s family to accept me.
I want to live in the kingdom and serve Islam from the land of the two holy mosques.
Amina looked at me with sympathy in her eyes.
She knew my story.
She knew about my father’s rejection and my mother’s pain.
She reached across the table and held my hand.
“Inshallah,” she said.
“If Allah wills it, it will happen.
You just have to keep being patient and faithful.” I nodded and smiled, but inside I felt a familiar ache.
I had been patient for over 20 years.
I had been faithful my entire life.
When would Allah reward me? When would my father’s family finally see my worth? I pushed the doubt away and focused on my tea.
Doubt was dangerous.
Doubt was from Shayan.
I would not let it take root in my heart.
By the time I graduated from SOAS with first class honors, I had become everything I set out to be.
I was respected in the Muslim community.
I was feared by the Christian students.
Uh I was known as a fierce defender of Islam who could dismantle any argument against the faith.
I had published articles uh made videos spoken at conferences.
I had built a reputation that made my mother proud and gave me a sense of purpose I had never felt before.
I applied for a master’s degree in Islamic studies at the same university and I was accepted with a full scholarship.
Everything was going according to plan.
I was on my way to becoming a scholar, a speaker, a voice for the um I had no idea that my body was about to betray me.
I had no idea that the strength I had built over 23 years was about to crumble like sand.
I had no idea that the god I had defended with such passion was about to go silent when I needed him most.
But that is a story for another chapter.
What the first sign that something was wrong came during the summer after my graduation.
I was sitting in my flat in White Chapel reading through research papers for my upcoming master’s program when I noticed my hands were aching.
It was a strange kind of pain deep inside my joints like someone was squeezing my fingers from the inside.
I shook my hands and stretched them.
Thinking I had been typing too much, the pain faded after a few minutes, and I forgot about it.
A week later, it came back stronger.
This time, my wrist joined the chorus of pain.
I could barely hold a pen without wincing.
I told myself it was stress.
I told myself I had been working too hard.
I took some paracetamol and went to bed early.
But the pain kept coming back and each time it stayed a little longer and hurt a little more.
By the time September arrived and my master’s program began, the pain had spread to my knees and ankles.
Some mornings I woke up and could barely walk to the bathroom.
My joints felt swollen and stiff like they had rusted overnight.
I would stand in the shower, letting hot water run over my body, hoping the heat would loosen whatever was locking me up.
Sometimes it helped, most times it did not.
I started taking ibuprofen every day, sometimes three or four times a day just to get through my classes.
My mother noticed that I was limping and asked what was wrong.
I told her it was nothing, just growing pains or maybe the cold London weather affecting my bones.
She looked at me with worried eyes but did not push further.
I did not want to worry her.
I did not want to admit that something might be seriously wrong with me.
Uh then came the fatigue and that was worse than the pain.
I had always been an energetic person, waking up early for fudger prayer and staying up late studying or making videos.
But suddenly I could not keep my eyes open past 9 in the evening.
I would sleep for 10, 11, 12 hours and wake up feeling like I had not slept at all.
My body felt heavy, like someone had filled my bones with lead.
Walking from my flat to the bus stop exhausted me.
Climbing the stairs at the university left me breathless.
I would sit in lectures and struggle to focus because my brain felt wrapped in fog.
Words that I had known my whole life suddenly escaped me mids sentence.
I would forget what I was saying.
Halfway through a thought, my friends noticed and asked if I was okay.
I smiled and said I was just tired from the workload.
But inside, yikes, I was terrified.
This was not normal tiredness.
Something was eating me from the inside, and I did not know what it was.
The rash appeared in October, and that was when I knew I could no longer pretend everything was fine.
I woke up one morning and looked in the mirror to perform woodoo before fajger prayer.
Across my cheeks and the bridge of my nose was a red rush in the shape of a butterfly.
It looked like someone had painted crimson wings on my face.
The skin was raised and warm to the touch.
I tried to wash it off, thinking maybe it was a reaction to something I ate or a new soap I had used, but it did not wash off.
It stayed there angry and visible, a mark that I could not hide even with makeup.
I skipped my classes that day.
I sat in my flat and cried.
I did not know what was happening to my body.
I did not know why I was falling apart.
I was only 23 years old.
I was supposed to be strong.
I was supposed to be the lioness of Islam.
But the lioness was crumbling.
And she did not know why.
My mother forced me to see a doctor after she saw the butterfly rush.
She made an appointment at the Royal London Hospital and practically dragged me there.
The doctor examined me or asked about my symptoms and took blood samples.
She told me to come back in a week for the results.
That week was the longest of my life.
I could not sleep.
I could not eat.
I could not focus on anything except the fear that was growing inside me like a tumor.
I prayed constantly, begging Allah to let it be nothing serious.
I recited surah al fatha over and over hoping the words would protect me.
I made dua in the middle of the night or crying on my prayer mat asking Allah to heal whatever was wrong with me.
I had served him faithfully my whole life.
Surely he would not abandon me now.
Surely he would answer my prayers and make this nightmare disappear.
The doctor called me back to the hospital on a gray Thursday afternoon.
I sat in her office with my mother beside me holding my hand tightly.
The doctor looked at us with a serious expression and began to explain.
She said my blood tests showed several abnormalities.
My white blood cells were low.
I had antibodies that were attacking my own body.
My inflammatory markers were elevated.
She said she needed to run more tests to confirm, but based on my symptoms and the initial results, she believed I had systemic lupus arythmatitosis.
I stared at her blankly.
I had never heard that word before.
Uh, she must have seen the confusion on my face because she simplified it for me.
Lupus, she said, you have lupus.
It is an autoimmune disease.
Your immune system, which is supposed to protect you from infections, has turned against your own body.
It is attacking your healthy tissues as if they were foreign invaders.
I sat in that office and listened as the doctor explained what lupus would do to me.
She said, “My immune system could attack any part of my body at any time.
It could attack my joints causing pain and swelling.
It could attack my skin causing rashes and sores.
It could attack my kidneys potentially leading to kidney failure.
It could attack my heart causing inflammation of the lining around it.
It could attack my lungs making it hard to breathe.
It could attack my brain causing seizures, memory problems, and confusion.
She said, “Lupus was chronic, meaning it would never go away completely.
It worked in cycles of flares and remissions.
Sometimes I would feel almost normal.
Other times, the disease would rage through my body like a wildfire.” She said there was no cure.
The best they could do was manage my symptoms with medications and try to prevent major organ damage.
I felt like the floor had opened beneath me and I was falling into a pit with no bottom.
The weeks that followed were a blur of hospital visits, blood tests, and new medications.
The doctors put me on hydroxychloricquin, a drug originally used for malaria that somehow helped control lupus symptoms.
They put me on prednazone, a steroid that reduced inflammation but came with terrible side effects.
My face swelled up from the steroids.
I gained weight rapidly.
Uh I could not sleep at night because the medication made me restless and anxious.
My hair started falling out in clumps.
I would run my fingers through my hair and come away with handfuls of black strands.
I watched my hair circle the shower drain and cried until I had no tears left.
The butterfly rash spread and darkened.
My joints swelled so badly that I could not make a fist.
Some mornings I could not get out of bed without my mother helping me.
I was 23 years old and I needed my mother to help me walk to the bathroom like I was an old woman.
The worst part was the kidney involvement.
A few months after my diagnosis, my legs started swelling.
At first, I thought it was just water retention from the steroids, but the swelling got worse and worse until my ankles looked like balloons.
Oh, the doctors uh ran more tests and found protein in my urine.
They said the lupus was attacking my kidneys, a condition called lupus and nephritis.
They increased my medications and added new ones.
They told me I needed to be careful about salt intake and fluid consumption.
They told me that if the kidney damage progressed, I might eventually need dialysis or a transplant.
I was 23 years old and doctors were talking to me about kidney failure.
I felt like I was living someone else’s nightmare.
This could not be my life.
This could not be happening to me.
The chest pains started in the spring.
Sharp stabbing pains in my chest every time I took a deep breath.
I went to the emergency department at King’s College Hospital, terrified that I was having a heart attack.
They ran tests and told me I had pericarditis, uh, inflammation of the sack around my heart, another gift from lupus.
They gave me more medications and told me to rest.
Rest had become my entire life.
I dropped out of my master’s program because I could not keep up with the work.
I stopped making videos and writing articles because I did not have the energy or the mental clarity.
I stopped attending Islamic society events because I could not walk far without exhaustion.
Everything I had built, everything I was proud of was stripped away piece by piece.
The lioness of Islam was now a sick girl trapped in a failing body.
Watching her dreams dissolve like morning fog.
The mouth ulcers made eating painful.
They appeared inside my cheeks, on my tongue, on the roof of my mouth.
Every bite of food felt like chewing glass.
I lost weight rapidly because I could barely eat.
My face or which had been round and full from the steroids became gaunt and hollow.
I looked in the mirror and did not recognize the person staring back at me.
Dark circles surrounded my sunken eyes.
My skin was pale except for the angry red butterfly rasha that never faded.
My hair was thin and patchy from all the shedding.
I looked like a ghost of the woman I used to be.
And the question that haunted me every single day was simple and devastating.
Why was Allah doing this to me? I had served him faithfully my entire life.
I had defended his religion against every critic.
I had prayed five times a day without fail.
I had fasted, given charity, worn my hijab with pride.
What had I done to deserve this? What sin had I committed that warranted this punishment? The questions echoed in my mind constantly, and I had no answers, only silence.
When the doctors told me there was no cure for lupus, I refused to accept it.
I was a Muslim.
I believed in a God who could do anything.
Allah had parted the sea for Musa.
He had saved Ibraim from the fire.
He had healed Aayub after years of terrible suffering.
If Allah could do all those things, surely he could heal me from this disease.
I decided that the hospital treatments were not enough.
I needed spiritual healing.
I needed to connect with Allah on a deeper level and beg for his mercy.
I had been a good Muslim my whole life.
But maybe I had not been good enough.
Maybe there was some sin I had forgotten to repent for.
Maybe my faith was not strong enough.
I decided to increase my worship and my prayers until Allah had no choice but to answer me.
I would knock on the door of heaven until it opened.
I was desperate now and desperation makes you willing to try anything.
I started waking up for tahajud the voluntary night prayer that is performed in the last third of the night before faj.
I had prayed to Hajjud occasionally before, but now I made it a daily practice.
I would set my alarm for 3 in the morning and drag my aching body out of bed.
My joints screamed in protest as I performed woodoo with cold water.
My swollen fingers struggled to hold the prayer rug as I spread it on the floor.
But I forced myself to stand, to bow, to prostrate, to whisper the words of prayer into the darkness.
I cried during every tahajjud.
I begged Allah to look at me with mercy.
I told him I was sorry for any sin I had committed, knowingly or unknowingly.
I promised to be a better servant if he would just take this disease away from me.
White, I prayed until my forehead was sore from pressing against the rug.
I prayed until the first light of dawn crept through my window and then I prayed fudger and collapsed back into bed exhausted but hopeful that Allah had heard me.
I increased my Quran recitation dramatically.
I had always read Quran regularly but now I made it my mission to recite for hours every day.
I focused especially on verses about healing and mercy.
I recited surah al fatha hundreds of times because I had heard it was a cure for all diseases.
I recited surah ashar which says that with hardship comes ease hoping that my ease was just around the corner.
I recited ayat al- kursi the verse of the throne believing it would protect me from harm.
I recited the last three suras of the Quran and blew on my hands and rubbed them over my body.
Uh, a practice I had learned was from the sun of the prophet.
I recited and recited and recited until my voice was and my eyes were blurry from staring at the Arabic text.
But the lupus did not care about my recitation.
The pain in my joints continued.
The rash on my face remained.
The fatigue pressed down on me like a heavy blanket.
Nothing changed.
My mother suggested we seek Rukia, the Islamic practice of spiritual healing through Quranic recitation.
She found a man in East London who was known for performing rukia on sick people.
His name was Sheik Abdullah al- Farci and he operated from a small flat above a halal butcher shop in Tower Hamlets.
We visited him on a cold Tuesday evening.
The flat smelled of incense and old books.
Shik Abdullah was an elderly man with a long white beard and kind eyes.
He listened as I described my illness and nodded slowly.
He said that sometimes physical illness has spiritual roots.
He said that perhaps I had been afflicted by the evil eye or touched by jin.
He said he would recite Quran over me and ask Allah to remove whatever was harming me.
I lay on a mat on the floor while he recited verses in a loud melodic voice.
His words washed over me like waves.
I wanted so badly to feel something, to feel healing energy flowing through my body, to feel the disease being driven out.
But I felt nothing except the familiar ache in my joints and the heaviness in my chest.
We visited Shik Abdullah three more times over the following weeks.
Each time he recited over me for an hour or more, each time he gave me instructions.
He told me to drink water that had been recited upon it.
He told me to apply olive oil that had been blessed with Quranic verses.
He told me to recite certain duas before sleeping and after waking.
I followed every instruction perfectly.
I drank the blessed water and felt nothing.
I applied the blessed oil and felt nothing.
I recited the duas with complete sincerity and felt nothing.
My mother paid shik Abdullah generously for his services.
Money we could not really afford to spend.
But she was desperate to see her daughter healed and she would have given everything she had if it meant I could be well again.
After our fourth visit, Sheikh Abdullah looked at me with sad eyes and said that my healing was in the hands of Allah alone.
He said, “I must be patient and trust in Allah’s wisdom.
I left his flat feeling emptier than when I arrived.” My friends from the Islamic Society rallied around me when they learned about my illness.
They organized group dua sessions where dozens of sisters would gather and pray for my healing.
They would sit in a circle, raise their hands and cry out to Allah on my behalf.
Ya Allah, heal our sister Nura.
Ya Allah, remove this disease from her body.
Ya Allah, have mercy on her and restore her health.
I sat in the middle of these circles, tears streaming down my face, overwhelmed by their love and their faith.
I truly believed that if enough people prayed hard enough, Allah would have to answer.
I believed that the combined faith of all these devoted Muslims would move mountains and cure diseases.
But after every dua session, I went home to the same pain, the same fatigue, the same butterfly rush, staring back at me in the mirror.
I The mountains did not move.
The disease did not care how many people prayed.
Someone suggested I try Zamzam water, the holy water from the well near the Cabba in Mecca.
Muslims believe that Zamzam water has miraculous properties and can cure illnesses.
My mother ordered bottles of Zumam water from a trusted source in Saudi Arabia.
When they arrived, I treated them like liquid gold.
I drank Zum water every morning on an empty stomach.
I made dua before drinking, asking Allah to make it a cure for whatever was afflicting me.
I bathed in zam zam water, pouring it over my head and letting it run down my diseased body.
I whispered prayers as the water touched my skin, believing with all my heart that this sacred water would do what no medicine could do.
But the Zamzam water did not heal me.
My joints still achd.
My kidneys still leaked protein.
My hair still fell out.
My heart still felt like it was wrapped in thorns.
The sacred water was just water.
and my sacred faith was beginning to crack.
I reached out to my father’s family in desperation.
I had not contacted them in years, not since my last rejected attempt at connection during university.
But I was dying.
Or at least it felt like I was dying.
And I wanted them to know.
I wanted them to pray for me.
I wanted them to acknowledge that I existed, even if only in my suffering.
I wrote a long email to my half-brother faizal bin Khaled, the one who had ignored my previous message years ago.
I told him about my diagnosis.
I told him about the kidney involvement and the heart inflammation.
I told him that I might not have long to live.
I told him that I was not asking for money or recognition.
I was only asking for prayers.
I asked him to mention my name to the family so they could make dua for my healing.
I sent the email and waited.
Days passed.
Then weeks, no reply came.
My father’s family remained silent.
Just as they had always been.
Even in my suffering, I was not worth acknowledging.
Even as I begged for prayers, I was not worth a single response.
The silence from my father’s family was painful, but the silence from Allah was unbearable.
I had been praying constantly for months.
I had woken for Tahajjud every single night.
I had recited Quran until my throat was raw.
I had undergone rukia and drunk zam water and followed every Islamic remedy I could find.
I had begged and pleaded and cried on my prayer mat until I had no more tears left and Allah had said nothing.
He had done nothing.
Uh my condition was not improving.
If anything, it was getting worse.
The doctors increased my medications.
They talked about possibly starting chemotherapy drugs to suppress my immune system.
chemotherapy like I had cancer, like my own body was a tumor that needed to be poisoned into submission.
I could not understand why Allah was allowing this to happen to me.
I could not understand what I had done to deserve this abandonment.
The darkest moment came on a winter night in February.
I was lying in bed unable to sleep because of the pain in my joints and the thoughts racing through my mind.
My mother was asleep in the next room.
The flat was silent except for the sound of rain against the window.
I stared at the ceiling and asked the question I had been afraid to ask for months.
Is Allah even real? Does he hear me at all? Or or have I been praying to nothing my entire life? The question felt like blasphemy leaving my mind.
I had spent my whole life defending Allah against doubters and critics.
I had debated Christians and atheists with absolute certainty that Islam was the truth.
But lying in that bed, broken and sick and abandoned, I could not find that certainty anymore.
I could not find anything except darkness and silence and the growing suspicion that I was completely alone in the universe.
The despair settled over me like a heavy fog in the days that followed.
I stopped waking for tahajjud because it seemed pointless.
I reduced my Quran recitation because the words no longer comforted me.
I prayed the obligatory prayers but my heart was not in them.
I went through the motions bowing and prostrating and reciting the words but inside I felt hollow.
Uh my friends from the Islamic society continued to visit and pray for me but their presence only reminded me of the faith I was losing.
I smiled and thanked them and said amen to their duas.
But inside I was screaming, why is Allah not answering? Why has he abandoned me? What kind of God watches his faithful servant suffer and does nothing? I could not say these words out loud.
I could not admit to anyone that my faith was crumbling.
I was supposed to be the lioness of Islam.
I was supposed to be the one with unshakable belief, but the lioness was dying and her roar had become a whisper, and the god she had defended her whole life was nowhere to be found.
I was admitted to King’s College Hospital in March after a severe lupus flare that attacked my kidneys and heart simultaneously.
The doctors said my condition had become critical.
Uh, my kidney function was declining rapidly and the inflammation around my heart was causing dangerous fluid buildup.
They needed to monitor me closely and adjust my medications aggressively.
I was placed in a private room on the fourth floor of the renal ward.
The room had pale blue walls, a single window overlooking a gray London sky, and machines that beeped constantly, reminding me that my body was failing.
My mother stayed with me as much as the hospital allowed, sleeping in an uncomfortable chair beside my bed, holding my hand, and whispering prayers I no longer believed in.
I lay in that hospital bed, feeling like a prisoner in my own body, trapped in flesh that had turned against me, abandoned by the god I had served my entire life.
The nurses rotated in shifts, different faces appearing every few hours to check my vitals.
I’d adjust my IV drips and record numbers on their charts.
Most of them were professional but distant, doing their jobs efficiently without much conversation.
I preferred it that way.
I did not want to talk to anyone.
I did not want sympathy or small talk or cheerful encouragements that everything would be fine.
Nothing was fine.
I was 24 years old lying in a hospital bed with failing kidneys and an inflamed heart.
And the God I had trusted had abandoned me completely.
I wanted to be left alone with my misery.
But then she arrived and everything began to change.
Her name was Grace Adami and she was a night shift nurse who started caring for me during my second week in the hospital.
She was a Nigerian woman in her early 40s with warm brown skin, kind eyes, and a smile that seemed to glow even in the dim hospital lighting.
Hi, Co.
Grace was different from the other nurses from the very first moment I met her.
She did not just check my vitals and leave.
She lingered.
She asked me how I was feeling, not in the mechanical way the other nurses did, but in a way that made me feel like she actually wanted to know the answer.
She fluffed my pillows and adjusted my blankets without being asked.
She brought me warm tea even though it was not part of her duties.
She sat beside my bed during quiet moments and talked to me about small things.
The weather outside, a funny thing her son had said that morning, a recipe she was planning to try on her day off.
At first, I found her presence annoying.
I wanted to wallow in my despair, and her warmth kept interrupting my darkness.
But despite my coldness, she kept coming back, kept smiling, always kept treating me with a kindness I did not deserve and had not asked for.
One night, about a week after Grace started caring for me, she came into my room to check my IV line and found me crying.
I had been trying to hide my tears, but the pain in my body, and the emptiness in my soul had become too much to contain.
The tears flowed silently down my cheeks, soaking my pillow, and I did not have the energy to wipe them away.
Grace did not say anything at first.
She simply pulled a chair beside my bed and sat down.
She reached out and took my hand in hers, her warm fingers wrapping around my cold, swollen ones.
She held my hand in silence while I cried, not trying to fix anything, not offering empty words of comfort, just being present with me in my pain.
When my tears finally slowed, uh, she looked at me with those kind eyes and asked a question no one else had asked me since I got sick.
She asked me if I had hope.
I stared at her, confused by the question.
Hope for what? I asked bitterly.
Hope that I will get better.
The doctors say there is no cure.
Hope that my kidneys will recover.
They are failing more every day.
hope that my life will return to normal.
I do not even remember what normal feels like.
I have no hope.
I have nothing.
Grace listened to my bitter words without flinching.
She did not look offended or discouraged.
She simply nodded slowly as if she understood exactly what I was feeling.
Then she said something that made me angry and curious at the same time.
She said that she knew someone who could heal me.
She said that she knew someone who could restore my hope and give me a future.
She said his name was Jesus.
I pulled my hand away from hers immediately, my face twisted with anger and disgust.
I knew she was a Christian.
I had seen the small gold cross she wore around her neck, but I never expected her to try to convert me in my hospital bed.
I told her to stop immediately.
I told her I was a Muslim and that I did not want to hear about her corrupted religion.
I told her that Jesus was just a prophet in Islam, not the son of God, and certainly not someone who could heal diseases.
I told her that I had debated Christians like her for years and destroyed their arguments with Quranic truth.
I told her that if she ever mentioned Jesus to me again, I would report her to the hospital administration for inappropriate behavior.
My voice was harsh and my words were cruel.
But Grace did not seem hurt.
She simply nodded calmly and said she understood.
She apologized for offending me and said she would respect my beliefs.
Then she finished checking my IV line and left the room quietly.
I lay in my bed fuming, angry at her audacity, angry at Christians in general, angry at the universe for putting a missionary nurse in my room when I was too weak to fight back properly.
But her words haunted me through the night.
There is someone who can heal you.
His name is Jesus.
I tried to push the words away, but they kept returning, circling in my mind like birds that refused to land.
I told myself she was deluded.
I told myself Christianity was a false religion with a corrupted book.
I told myself that Jesus was dead and could not heal anyone.
But another voice whispered from somewhere deep inside me.
A voice I tried to silence but could not.
That voice asked a simple question.
Has anyone else been able to help you? The imams had prayed over me with no result.
The shakes had performed rukia with no result.
My Muslim friends had made dua with no result.
I had drunk Zam Zam water and recited Quran for hours and prostrated until my forehead was bruised and nothing had changed.
Allah had been silent for months.
What if this Christian nurse knew something I did not? The thought felt like betrayal, but I could not make it go away.
Grace continued to care for me over the following days, but she kept her word and did not mention Jesus again.
She remained kind and attentive, bringing me tea and adjusting my pillows and sitting with me during the lonely night hours.
Part of me wanted to hate her for what she had said, but I could not.
There was something about her presence that felt different from anything I had experienced before.
When she was in the room, the heaviness in my chest seemed lighter.
When she smiled at me, I felt a warmth that had nothing to do with the hospital heating.
I watched her interact with other patients.
Always gentle, always patient, always radiating a piece that I desperately wanted but could not find.
One night, I asked her why she was so peaceful.
I expected her to mention Jesus again, but she did not.
She simply said that she had found something worth living for and someone worth trusting completely.
She said that no matter what happened in her life, she knew she was loved and she knew she had a purpose.
Then she smiled and left me with my thoughts.
The question tormented me for days.
What had she found that I had not? That I had devoted my entire life to Allah.
I had prayed and fasted and given charity and defended Islam against all attackers.
I had done everything right and yet I had no peace.
I had no assurance that I was loved.
I had no sense of purpose except the purpose of being sick and waiting to die.
Grace had none of my religious credentials.
She was just a Nigerian nurse working night shifts in a London hospital.
But she had something I did not have and it drove me crazy trying to understand what it was.
One night after she finished checking my vitals, I stopped her before she could leave.
I asked her to tell me more about what she believed.
She looked at me carefully, perhaps suspecting a trap.
I assured her I was not going to report her.
I said I just wanted to understand.
She sat down beside me and began to talk and I listened for the first time without planning my counterarguments.
Grace told me about Jesus in a way I had never heard before.
She did not talk about theology or doctrine or religious debates.
She talked about him like he was a person she knew personally, a friend who walked beside her every day.
She said that Jesus loved her not because of what she did but because of who she was.
She said that he had died on the cross to take the punishment for her sins so that she could have a relationship with God without fear or shame.
She said that he had risen from the dead and was alive right now reaching out to anyone who would receive him.
She said that he was not distant or silent.
He was close.
Closer than a brother, closer than a mother, closer than anyone I had ever known.
She said that he heard every prayer and saw every tear and cared about every detail of my life.
Her words washed over me, and I felt something staring in my chest that I had not felt in a long time.
It felt like hope, fragile and small, but real.
Before Grace left that night, she asked if I would consider reading the Bible for myself.
She said that she could not force me to believe anything, but she promised that if I read the words of Jesus with an open heart, he would reveal himself to me.
She said, “There were many stories of Muslims encountering Jesus and being transformed.” She said, “I had nothing to lose by looking at the evidence myself.” After she left, I lay awake thinking about her words.
Everything inside me screamed that this was wrong.
I was betraying my mother, my heritage, my identity, everything I had built my life upon.
But another part of me, the part that was dying in that hospital bed, whispered that maybe it was time to try something different.
I had tried everything Islam offered and it had not worked.
Maybe it was time to see what the other side had to say.
Maybe it was time to open the book I had mocked and dismissed for years and see if it had anything to offer a broken dying woman.
The next morning when my mother left to get food from a halal restaurant down the street, I took out my phone and searched for something I never thought I would search for.
I typed healing scriptures in the Bible into Google.
Dozens of results appeared.
Websites and articles and YouTube videos about what the Bible said about healing.
I clicked on a website that listed verses organized by topic.
My hands trembled as I scrolled through the page.
Like I felt like I was committing the ultimate betrayal, like I was spitting on everything my mother had taught me and everything I had defended my whole life.
But I kept scrolling.
I found a section called promises of healing and began to read.
The first verse I saw was from Isaiah 53 verse 5.
It said that he was pierced for our transgressions.
He was crushed for our iniquities.
The punishment that brought us peace was on him and by his wounds we are healed.
Healed.
By his wounds we are healed.
The words hit me like electricity.
I kept reading hungry for more.
I found Psalm 103:es 2 and three which said to praise the Lord and not forget all his benefits that he forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases he heals all your diseases.
I found Jeremiah 17:14 what which said heal me oh Lord and I will be healed.
Save me and I will be saved for you are the one I praise.
I found Matthew 11 28 where Jesus himself said, “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.
Come to me.” The words were an invitation, personal and direct, nothing like the distant commands I was used to in the Quran.
This Jesus was not standing far away demanding obedience.
He was reaching out his hand asking me to come to him promising rest for my weary soul.
I found first Peter chapter 2 verse 24 which said that he himself bore our sins in his body on the cross so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness.
And by his wounds you have been healed.
By his wounds you have been healed.
I read those verses over and over.
tears uh streaming down my face.
Oh, something was happening inside me that I could not explain.
The words were not just words.
They were alive.
They were reaching into the darkest, most broken places inside me and touching wounds that no medicine had been able to reach.
For months, I had been begging Allah to speak to me.
And all I had received was silence.
But these words, these ancient words written thousands of years ago were speaking directly to my heart as if they had been written just for me in this moment.
I felt a presence in that hospital room.
A warmth surrounding me that had nothing to do with the heating system.
I felt like someone was standing beside my bed, not visible but absolutely real, waiting for me to acknowledge him.
And for the first time in my life, I whispered a name I had never called upon before.
I whispered the name Jesus.
I closed my eyes and spoke out loud, my voice trembling and broken.
I said, “Jesus, I do not know if you are real.
I do not know if you can hear me, but I have tried everything else and nothing has worked.
Everyone else has been silent.
If you are who this book says you are, if you really can heal diseases and restore broken people, then please help me.
I am dying.
My body is failing.
My faith is gone.
I have nothing left.
If you are real, show me, heal me, save me.
I will give you my life if you just show me that you are real.
The words poured out of me like water from a broken dam.
I cried and prayed and begged.
And somewhere in the middle of that desperate prayer, something shifted.
The heaviness that had been pressing on my chest for months suddenly lifted.
The darkness that had surrounded me for so long cracked open and light poured through.
I felt peace flooding my body.
Peace unlike anything I had ever experienced in all my years of Islamic prayer.
And I knew in that moment with absolute certainty that Jesus was real and he was in the room with me.
The days that followed were like waking up from a nightmare.
The doctors ran their usual tests and found that my kidney function had stabilized unexpectedly.
The inflammation around my heart was decreasing.
My lab results were improving in ways they could not explain.
One doctor looked at my chart and then looked at me with confusion in his eyes.
He said he did not understand what was happening.
He said my body seemed to be turning a corner that they had not anticipated.
He said it was unusual, perhaps even remarkable.
I knew what was happening.
Jesus was healing me.
The God who had seemed so silent.
Uh the God I had rejected and mocked and debated against for years had heard my desperate prayer and was restoring my body piece by piece.
I told Grace what had happened and she wept with joy.
She held my hands and thanked Jesus for answering her prayers for me.
She said she had been praying for me every single night since she first walked into my room.
She said she had asked Jesus to reveal himself to me, and he had done exactly that.
Over the following weeks, my recovery accelerated in ways that baffled my medical team.
The butterfly rash that had marked my face for over a year began to fade.
My joint pain decreased dramatically.
My energy returned slowly but steadily.
I was able to walk to the bathroom without help, then walk down the hallway, then walk outside into the hospital garden and feel the sun on my face without it burning my skin.
My hair stopped falling out and began to grow back.
My kidney function continued to improve until the doctors said they no longer needed to discuss dialysis as a possibility.
One month after my prayer to Jesus, I was discharged from the hospital with a sack of medications and a follow-up appointment schedule.
But I knew that the medications were not what had healed me.
Jesus had healed me.
The one I had rejected, the one I had mocked, the one I had debated against with such pride and certainty had reached into my hospital bed and pulled me back from the edge of death.
I sat in my flat in White Chapel on my first night home, holding a Bible that Grace had given me as a discharge gift.
It was a simple paperback with a blue cover.
Nothing fancy, but it was the most precious thing I owned.
I opened it to the Psalms and read the words that had become my lifeline.
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
Tears rolled down my cheeks, but they were different tears now.
They were not tears of despair or anger or hopelessness.
They were tears of joy, overwhelming joy that bubbled up from somewhere deep inside me and overflowed through my eyes.
I whispered through my tears, “Jesus, I am so happy I came in contact with your word.
I am shedding tears of joy because you healed my diseases.
You heard me when no one else did.
You came close when everyone else was silent.
You saved me when I was ready to give up.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The first person I had to tell was my mother.
She had watched me suffer for over a year.
Well, she had held my hand through countless hospital visits and sleepless nights.
She had prayed for me constantly, crying out to Allah to heal her only daughter.
She deserved to know what had happened to me.
But I knew that telling her would break her heart.
I knew that the words I was about to speak would shatter everything she believed about me.
I waited until a quiet evening when we were sitting together in our small living room in White Chapel.
The television was off.
The flat was silent except for the hum of traffic outside.
My mother was sipping tea, looking tired but peaceful, grateful that I was finally home from the hospital and getting stronger every day.
I took a deep breath and told her I needed to share something important.
She put down her tea and looked at me with curious eyes, not suspecting what was coming.
Uh what I told her everything.
I told her about the months of silence from Allah, the prayers that went unanswered, the despair that had consumed me in the hospital.
I told her about Grace, the Nigerian nurse who had shown me kindness when I was at my lowest point.
I told her about the conversation that had made me so angry at first and then so curious.
I told her about searching for healing scriptures online and finding verses that spoke directly to my broken heart.
I told her about the night I cried out to Jesus in desperation, expecting nothing but receiving everything.
I told her about the peace that flooded my body, the presence I felt in the room, the healing that had baffled my doctors.
I told her that I had given my life to Jesus Christ and that I was no longer a Muslim.
The words hung in the air between us like smoke from a fire that had just started burning.
My mother’s face went through several expressions in the span of a few seconds.
Confusion came first, as if she did not understand the words I was speaking.
Then came disbelief.
her eyes searching my face for signs that I was joking or testing her.
Then came horror, the realization that her daughter, the fierce defender of Islam, had converted to the religion she had spent years attacking.
Finally came grief deep and raw, pouring out of her eyes in tears that felt silently down her weathered cheeks.
She did not scream or shout.
She did not curse me or throw things.
She simply sat there weeping, her body shaking with sobs, mourning the daughter she felt she had just lost.
I reached out to hold her hand, but she pulled away.
What? She looked at me like I was a stranger who had invaded her home, wearing her daughter’s face.
The rejection cut deeper than any pain the lupus had ever caused.
The days that followed were the hardest of my new faith.
My mother barely spoke to me.
She moved through the flat like a ghost, cooking meals in silence, praying her salah in her room with the door closed, avoiding eye contact whenever we pass in the hallway.
I tried to explain to her what I had experienced.
I tried to tell her about the love of Jesus and the peace that now filled my heart.
But she did not want to hear it.
Every time I mentioned Jesus, she would put her hands over her ears and walk away.
She told me I had been deceived by Shayan.
She told me the Christian nurse had brainwashed me when I was weak and vulnerable.
She told me I was going to hell and taking her with me because she had failed as a mother.
Her words were daggers.
But I understood her pain.
I had been exactly like her just a few months ago.
I would have said the same things to anyone who left Islam, I could not expect her to understand overnight what had taken me months of suffering to discover.
I reached out to my friends from the Islamic Society, hoping that maybe some of them would be more open to hearing my story.
I was wrong.
The first friend I told was Amina, my closest companion from university, the one who had held my hand in the cafe and prayed for my healing.
When I told her I had become a Christian, she stared at me in stunned silence for a long moment.
Then her face hardened into an expression I had never seen before.
She called me a mertad, an apostate, the worst thing a Muslim can become.
She said I had betrayed Allah and the um she said I had betrayed her personally after all the prayers she had offered for me.
She said she could no longer be my friend because the prophet had said that Muslims should not take disbelievers as close allies.
She stood up from the table where we were sitting and walked away without looking back.
I never heard from her again.
The other friends reacted similarly.
Some blocked my phone number without explanation.
Some sent long messages condemning me and warning me about the punishment that awaited apostates in this life and the next.
Some forwarded my story to others in the Muslim community.
And soon I became known as the traitor, the one who had abandoned Islam after everything the community had done to support her during her illness.
The people who had once respected and admired me now spoke my name with disgust.
The Islamic society that had celebrated me as their lioness now treated me like a disease they needed to quarantine.
I was alone.
The community that had been my family for years had cut me off completely.
The rejection was painful.
But somewhere beneath the pain, I felt a strange sense of freedom.
I was no longer performing for anyone.
I was no longer trying to earn approval from people who only loved me when I said what they wanted to hear.
I was simply Nora, a woman loved by Jesus.
and that was enough.
The final rejection came from my father’s family, though it was less dramatic because they had never truly accepted me in the first place.
I wrote one last email to my halfb brotherther fisel.
What on telling him that I had recovered from my illness miraculously and that I had found faith in Jesus Christ, I did not expect a response and I did not receive one.
But a few weeks later, the monthly wire transfer from the bank in Zurich stopped arriving.
My father had finally found a reason to cut me off completely.
As long as I was a sick Muslim daughter, he would send guilt money to EA’s conscience.
But a Christian daughter was worse than a dead daughter in his eyes.
The money stopped, and with it, the last thread connecting me to my Saudi heritage was severed.
I was no longer a hidden princess of the house of Saud.
I was an orphan by choice, rejected by the family that had never wanted me.
Finally free from the hope that had tortured me for 25 years.
The freedom was painful but also liberating.
I no longer had to wait for acceptance that would never come.
In the midst of all this rejection, I found a new family.
Grace introduced me to her church, a vibrant congregation in Stratford called New Life Community Church.
The first time I walked through the doors, I was terrified.
I had never been inside a church before.
I did not know the songs or the prayers or the rituals.
I did not know how to act or what to say.
But the moment I stepped inside, people surrounded me with warmth and welcome.
They hugged me like I was a long lost sister coming home.
They asked my name and listened to my story with tears in their eyes.
They did not care that I was a former Muslim who had spent years attacking their faith.
They only cared that that I was now part of their family.
The pastor, a Ganaian man named Pastor Emanuel Mensah, took my hands and prayed over me with such love and sincerity that I wept through the entire prayer.
For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged somewhere without having to earn it.
I threw myself into learning about my new faith with the same intensity I had once devoted to defending Islam.
I attended Bible study groups and asked endless questions.
I read books by Christian authors explaining theology and doctrine.
I watched sermons online by preachers from around the world.
I memorized scriptures and meditated on them day and night.
But more than the knowledge, I treasured the relationship.
I learned to talk to Jesus like a friend, sharing my fears and hopes and dreams with him in prayer.
I learned to listen for his voice in the quiet moments.
But that gentle whisper of guidance and comfort that I had longed for during all those months of Islamic silence, he spoke to me through scripture, through other believers, through circumstances that seemed too perfect to be coincidence.
He was present in a way that Allah had never been.
Not distant and demanding, but close and compassionate, walking beside me through every challenge, my health continued to improve in ways that amazed my doctors.
At my sixmonth follow-up appointment, the rheatologist looked at my test results with visible surprise.
She said my lupus was in complete remission.
She said my kidney function had returned to normal levels.
She said there was no sign of active inflammation anywhere in my body.
She asked me what I had been doing differently, expecting me to mention some new diet or alternative therapy.
Like I told her, I had started following Jesus and that he had healed me.
She looked at me with a mixture of confusion and professional skepticism, but she could not argue with the numbers on her screen.
The disease that was supposed to stay with me for life.
The disease that had no cure.
The disease that had nearly killed me was gone.
Not managed.
Not controlled.
Gone.
I walked out of that hospital with tears of gratitude streaming down my face, praising Jesus with every step.
As my health stabilized, I began to feel a calling that I could not ignore.
I thought about all the Muslims around the world who were suffering the way I had suffered.
I thought about the people crying out to Allah in the darkness and hearing nothing but silence.
I thought about the men and women in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt, in Pakistan, in Indonesia who were searching for God and finding only emptiness in the religion they had been taught from childhood.
I had been one of them.
I knew their pain intimately.
I knew the desperation of unanswered prayers and the loneliness of spiritual abandonment.
And I knew that there was hope for them.
The same hope that had found me in a hospital bed in London through the words of a Nigerian nurse and the pages of a Bible.
I felt Jesus calling me to share that hope with others, especially with the Arab world that I still carried in my blood.
I started small recording video testimonies on my phone and posting them on social media.
I spoke in Arabic, my mother tongue, the language that connected me to my Saudi heritage, even though I had never lived in the kingdom.
I told my story simply and honestly describing my illness, my desperation, get my encounter with Jesus and my miraculous healing.
I expected maybe a few hundred views from curious friends and strangers.
Instead, the video spread like wildfire across the Arab internet within weeks.
I had thousands of followers from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and beyond.
Messages poured into my inbox from Muslims who were struggling with doubt, suffering with illness, crying out to Allah without response.
They wanted to know more about the Jesus who had healed me.
They wanted to know if he could heal them, too.
The messages broke my heart and filled it with purpose.
At the same time, a young woman in Riyad wrote that she had been diagnosed with cancer and was losing hope.
She asked me to pray for her and to send her the scriptures that had brought me healing.
The a man in Cairo wrote that he had been secretly doubting Islam for years, but was terrified to leave because of what his family would do.
He asked me how I found the courage to follow Jesus despite the cost.
A teenage girl in Aman wrote that she had attempted suicide twice because she felt abandoned by Allah and worthless to everyone around her.
She asked me if Jesus really loved people like her or only people who deserved it.
I responded to as many messages as I could, sharing scriptures, praying for healing, pointing people to the Jesus who had transformed my life.
The threats came along with the encouragements.
Anonymous accounts sent me messages promising death if I did not stop spreading Christianity.
People quoted hadiths about the punishment for apostasy, reminding me that the prophet had said to kill anyone who leaves Islam.
Uh some messages included detailed descriptions of what they would do to me if they ever found me.
I would be lying if I said I was not afraid.
Some nights I lay awake wondering if someone would track me down and carry out their threats.
But the fear never outweighed the calling.
I had spent years defending a religion that left me dying and hopeless.
Now I had found a savior who had brought me back from the edge of death.
How could I stay silent about that? How could I let fear stop me from sharing the best news I had ever received? Jesus had promised that he would be with me always, even to the end of the age.
If he was with me, what could any human being do to me? Today, I continue to create content in Arabic, sharing the gospel with the Muslim world that once was my entire identity.
when I have connected with other former Muslims who have found Jesus and we encourage each other in our faith.
I have discipled new believers who are taking their first steps out of Islam and into relationship with Christ.
I have spoken at churches and conferences telling my story to anyone who will listen.
My mother still has not accepted my faith but our relationship has slowly improved.
She sees the change in me, the peace and joy that she cannot explain.
And sometimes I catch her watching me with curiosity instead of grief.
I pray for her every day, believing that the same Jesus who found me in a hospital bed can find her in our living room in White Chapel.
I have not given up hope for her.
Just as Jesus never gave up hope for me, I used to be a princess without a kingdom, a daughter without a father, a Muslim without peace.
I spent my whole life searching for acceptance from a family that did not want me, and from a God who would not speak.
But Jesus changed everything.
He became the father I never had.
Accepting me unconditionally, not because of my performance, but because of his love.
He became the family I always wanted.
Surrounding me with brothers and sisters who love me for who I am, not what I can do for them.
He became the kingdom I was born for.
A kingdom not of this world where there is no rejection, no shame, no silence.
only love that never ends.
I was a princess of Saudi Arabia in blood, but an orphan in reality.
Now I am a daughter of the King of Kings and I have finally come home.
If you are watching this and you are where I was suffering in silence, crying out to a God who will not answer, I want you to know that there is hope for his name is Jesus.
He healed my diseases.
He restored my soul.
He gave me a future when I had none.
And he will do the same for you if you simply call on his name.
He is enough.
That he is more than enough.
He is everything.
