“I Am The I AM” – What A Voice Said To A Muslim Scholar At 1AM That Destroyed 37 Years Of Islam
“I Am The I AM” – What A Voice Said To A Muslim Scholar At 1AM That Destroyed 37 Years Of Islam
I had spent 15 years praying for princes.
15 years of palace prayer halls and royal households and powerful men who needed God’s ear, my voice, my scholarship, my 37 years of faithful Islamic practice.
These were things people trusted, things people built their spiritual lives around.
And then my 9-year-old daughter was put in an ICU with a disease that was consuming her brain.
And every single thing I had spent 37 years building was not enough.
The prayers went up and came back empty.
The imams I called prayed with everything they had.
The Quran filled that hospital corridor night after night.
And my daughter kept getting worse until the night I finally stopped praying correctly and started praying honestly.
Until the night I told God I was ashamed of him.
Until the night the silence in that prayer room changed and the voice spoke to me that I was not prepared for, that did not come from my tradition, that called itself by a name I had spent years teaching my students to reject.
And my daughter was healed by morning.
And my entire life was never the same again.
They came for me 4 months later.
A friend called with a warning.
We left that same night and I am here today in a country I will not name telling you the story that cost me everything and gave me back something I didn’t know I was missing.
A man on a cold hospital floor, not a palace floor.
A hospital floor, the kind with scuff marks and the smell of disinfectant and fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look like they are already half gone from this world.
A man with his forehead pressed against that floor, with his robes twisted around him, with his hands clutching nothing, with his voice.
The voice that had moved princes to tears reduced to a broken whisper that could not find its way through the ceiling.
A man who had prayed for everyone else’s emergencies for 15 years finally arriving at his own.
And discovering in that arrival that everything he thought he knew about prayer had a flaw and he had found it.
He had found the flaw.
And on the other side of the flaw there was silence.
That man was me.
That flaw was the third floor of King Fahd’s specialist hospital in Riyadh.
And the reason I was on it was 9 years old and her name was Lama.
Lama was my only daughter.
I have two sons, Faris, who was 14 at the time, and little Sami, who was six.
But Lama, Lama was 9 years old and she had her mother’s eyes and she had somehow, despite being the child of a serious man who spent most of his life in scholarship and solemnity, become the most joyful human being I had ever been in close proximity to.
She laughed at things that weren’t funny and made them funny by laughing at them.
She had opinions about everything.
She argued with me about the correct way to eat dates.
She insisted the pit should come out before you bite.
I maintained this was unnecessary.
We had this argument approximately twice a week and she never conceded a single centimeter of ground.
She wanted to be a doctor.
She told me this when she was 6 years old with a completeness of conviction that I found both amusing and entirely believable.
She was going to be a doctor.
It was simply a fact.
She had decided.
She was 9 years old and she was going to be a doctor.
And on a Wednesday evening in February, she came home from school complaining of a headache.
By Thursday morning, she had a fever of 40°.
By Thursday afternoon, she could not turn her head without screaming.
By Thursday evening, she was in the emergency department of King Fahd’s specialist hospital.
And the young doctor with tired eyes was using the words acute bacterial meningitis and the world as I had known it simply stopped.
Meningitis.
If you do not know this disease, let me tell you what the doctors told me in that corridor.
In the language they use when they are trying to be honest without being cruel, it is an infection that reaches the membrane surrounding the brain and the spinal cord.
In its bacterial form, in its severe presentation, it moves fast.
It is not the kind of illness that gives you weeks to adjust.
It gives you hours.
The inflammation it causes inside the skull builds pressure against the brain.
Pressure that if it is not stopped does not stop on its own.
The doctors told me that Lama’s case was severe.
They told me that they were doing everything they could.
They told me, in the careful language of people who have delivered this speech before and know its weight, that I should prepare myself.
Prepare myself.
I am the man people call when they need to prepare themselves.
I am the man who sits beside the dying and reads Quran and helps the living find the words for what is happening.
I have sat with grieving fathers.
I have prayed over sick children.
I have been the calm in other people’s storms for 15 years.
And standing in that corridor with a fluorescent light above me and the smell of disinfectant around me and my wife, Hessa’s hand gripping mine so tightly I could feel her pulse through her fingers, I understood for the first time, not academically, not theologically, but in the bones, what it felt like to be on the other side of those conversations.
Prepare myself.
For what?
For a world without Lama’s arguments about dates, for a world without that laugh, for a world in which my only daughter, who was going to be a doctor, did not become a doctor.
I could not hold the shape of it.
My mind kept sliding off the edges of it the way hands slide off ice.
I went to the prayer room in the hospital.
I prayed.
Of course I prayed.
It is what I do.
It is what I am.
I prayed with everything I had.
With 22 years of scholarship, with 15 years of practiced intercession, with every technique and every form of supplication that my tradition had given me.
I prayed with my face on the floor and my voice breaking and my heart open in a way it had never been open before because I had never needed anything the way I needed this.
I prayed through Thursday night and into Friday morning.
I prayed Fajr.
And then I kept praying.
I called colleagues, other imams, scholars I respected, men with reputations for powerful intercession.
They came.
They prayed over Lama through the glass on the ICU window.
They recited Quran.
They performed ruqyah.
We did everything.
We did everything that our tradition said to do and we did it with complete sincerity and we did it together and we filled that hospital corridor with the words of the Quran until the nurses were looking at us with a mixture of respect and discomfort.
And Lama got worse.
By Friday evening, the doctors said the pressure was increasing.
They said they were considering emergency intervention.
They said the words they had been carefully not saying, which was that if the pressure was not brought down in the next few hours, there would be brain damage.
And beyond brain damage, the word they said last, quietly, with their eyes on the floor, there was death.
I went back to the prayer room.
I was alone this time.
It was past midnight.
The other imams had gone home to their families.
Hessa was in the waiting area outside the ICU with her sister.
I was alone in the small room with a prayer mat and the Quran and the most complete silence I had ever experienced.
And I did something that I had never done in 22 years of Islamic scholarship and practice.
I told Allah I was disappointed in him.
I know how that sounds.
I know the theology of it, the impropriety, the presumption, the danger of speaking to God with accusation rather than submission.
I know all of it.
I have taught all of it.
But I was a father whose daughter was dying on the other side of a wall and the prayers I had sent up for 48 hours had returned to me empty.
And I was done with the correct posture and the correct formula and the correct way of approaching the throne.
I pressed my forehead to that prayer mat and I said in a voice that was barely a voice, that was more breath than sound, I am ashamed.
I am ashamed of you.
I have given you my life.
I have given you 37 years of obedience and scholarship and service.
I have prayed for princes on your behalf.
I have told hundreds of people that you hear, that you respond, that you are near.
And my daughter is dying and you are silent.
And I am a liar because I told them you are near and you are not near.
You are nowhere.
And if you are anywhere, if you are real and you are present and you are the one I have served, then speak to me.
Save her.
Show me that any of it was real.
I said all of this with my face on the floor of a hospital prayer room at 1:00 in the morning.
And then, and I need you to stay with me here because this is the moment everything turns.
This is the hinge the whole rest of my life swings on.
The silence changed.
It is very hard to explain the difference between one kind of silence and another, but there is a difference.
The silence of an empty room is one thing.
The silence of a room that has just become occupied is something else.
The air has a different quality.
The stillness has a different texture.
The darkness seems to be paying attention in a way it wasn’t before.
I have tried many times to describe what happened in that prayer room at 1:00 in the morning, and this is the closest I can get.
The silence changed.
Something entered it, and then a voice spoke.
Not from outside me, not from the walls or the ceiling, not from any physical location I could point to, but also absolutely not from inside me, not from my own mind or my own desperation generating something to comfort itself.
This was not that.
I know the difference between the voice of my own need and a voice that comes from outside the self.
This came from outside the self.
It said, and again no language, no Arabic, no identifiable tongue, but understood completely, understood the way music is understood in the body before the mind has processed it.
It said, “You are searching for the true healer.
I am the I am, the one who is and was and is to come.
The son of man.
I know your daughter.
I know her name.
Go to her now.”
That was it.
That was all.
I lifted my head from the prayer mat, and the room was a room again.
Fluorescent light.
Prayer mat.
Quran on its stand.
The distant sound of the hospital going about its nighttime business.
Nothing visible.
Nothing that could be photographed or measured or reported.
Just a man on a prayer mat with a wet face and the absolute cellular on argumentable certainty that something real had just spoken to him.
I got up.
My legs were unsteady, not from fear, though there was fear, but from something larger than fear that was moving through me the way a current moves through water, reorganizing everything it touches.
I walked out of the prayer room.
I walked down the corridor.
I pushed open the door to the ICU waiting area.
Hessa was standing up.
She was standing and her hands were over her mouth, and she was looking through the glass at something.
And when she heard me come in, she turned, and her face her face was something I have no word for.
She said, “Ziyad, they are saying her fever broke.”
I went to the glass.
Inside the ICU, two nurses were moving around Lama’s bed with the particular purposeful energy of people responding to an unexpected change.
The monitor above her bed, which had been showing numbers that made the doctors’ faces go tight every time they looked at it, was showing different numbers.
The attending physician came out to us 20 minutes later.
A careful man.
A precise man.
The kind of doctor who does not use words loosely.
And he said, with an expression that mixed professional composure with something that looked almost like bewilderment, “Her intracranial pressure is dropping.
The fever has broken.
We don’t fully understand the rate of change.
We are going to continue monitoring, but this is a significant improvement.
This is not what we expected at this hour.”
He said that.
“This is not what we expected at this hour.”
I know what hour it was.
I know what happened at that hour in a small prayer room down the corridor on a prayer mat when a broken man ran out of correct posture and started speaking the truth.
I know the connection.
The doctor did not know the connection.
He attributed it to the medication finally taking effect, to the particular resilience of a child’s immune system, to the unpredictability of disease progression.
He is a good doctor, and those are reasonable explanations, and I do not argue with them.
I simply know what I know.
Lama was discharged 11 days later.
She walked out of King Fahd Specialist Hospital on her own two feet with her mother holding one hand and me holding the other.
And she turned to me in the car park and said, with the complete conviction of a 9-year-old who has just survived something she probably doesn’t fully understand, “Baba, I am still going to be a doctor.”
I held it together until we got to the car.
Then I sat in the driver’s seat, and I could not drive for 10 minutes.
I want to tell you about the 11 days Lama spent recovering in that hospital because those 11 days were not just her recovery.
They were the beginning of mine.
Every day I sat beside her bed, I watched the color come back into her face.
I watched her appetite return.
First small things, a few spoonfuls of soup, half a piece of bread, and then more.
And then one afternoon she ate a full meal and complained that the hospital dates were inferior to the ones we had at home.
And I laughed so hard the nurse came to check on us.
I watched my daughter come back to life day by day in that hospital room.
And every night, after Hessa had gone to rest and the ward had quieted, and Lama was sleeping with the particular peaceful heaviness of a child healing deeply, I sat in the chair beside her bed, and I thought about the voice.
“I am the I am, the one who is and was and is to come.
The son of man.”
I am a scholar.
I have spent my entire adult life inside the structures of Islamic knowledge.
The Hadith sciences.
The Tafsir tradition.
The classical theology.
The jurisprudence.
I know the texts.
And sitting beside my sleeping daughter in that hospital room, I turned those words over in my mind with the same precision I would bring to a difficult passage of classical Arabic.
And I knew, with the certainty of a man trained to recognize the weight of specific theological language, that those words did not come from my tradition.
The I am.
I knew this name.
Every serious Islamic scholar knows it because a serious Islamic scholar knows the texts of the other Abrahamic traditions well enough to refute them, or believes he knows them well enough.
I had taught courses on comparative religion.
I had written a chapter in one of my books on the Christian distortion of the divine nature.
I knew that the name I am was the name that the Torah records God giving to Moses at the burning bush.
I knew that the Christians claimed that Jesus had used the same name for himself, and that this was one of their central theological claiMs. One of the claims I had spent years explaining away as misinterpretation, corruption, the result of a text that had been changed by human hands over centuries.
I had spent years explaining it away, and now it had been spoken to me in a hospital prayer room at 1:00 in the morning at the precise moment my daughter’s condition turned.
I sat beside Lama’s bed, and I thought, “Either I explain this away, too, or I follow it.”
I had spent 37 years explaining things away.
I was tired of it, I think, if I am honest.
I had been tired of it for longer than I knew.
The voice had cracked something open that had been wanting to open for a long time.
And now that it was open, I found I did not have the energy or the desire to close it again.
I needed to find out who had spoken to me.
I began carefully.
I am by nature a careful man.
Methodical.
Precise.
Trained in the evaluation of sources and the weighing of evidence.
I did not rush.
I did not make impulsive decisions.
I began the way I would begin any serious research question, by going back to the primary sources.
The hospital had a small library for patients and families.
Among its books, and I think now about the quiet providence of this this small detail that could so easily have been otherwise, there was a Bible, a single Arabic Bible, placed on a shelf between a medical encyclopedia and a collection of poetry.
The kind of thing that ends up in a hospital library through donation and sits unread for years.
I found it on the third day of Lama’s recovery when I was walking the corridor late at night to clear my head.
I stood in front of that shelf for a long time before I took it down.
I carried it back to Lama’s room under my arm with the spine facing inward, the way a man carries something he is not ready to be seen carrying.
I sat in my chair beside my sleeping daughter, and I opened it.
I want to tell you what it felt like to read the Gospels for the first time as a man who was reading them to find something rather than to refute something because those are two completely different acts of reading.
I had read portions of the Gospels before in the context of my comparative religion work, in the context of preparing arguments, in the context of a mind already organized around a conclusion looking for evidence to support it.
That kind of reading is not really reading.
It is a kind of sophisticated not seeing.
You look at the text through the filter of what you have already decided about it.
And the filter catches everything that might disturb you.
And you only receive what confirms what you already hold.
This time there was no filter.
This time I was reading as a man who had heard a voice in the dark and needed to know whose voice it was.
And the Gospels, read that way, are not what I had spent years telling people they were.
The figure who walked through those pages was not the corrupted, diminished, merely human prophet that Islamic theology had handed me.
It was something else.
He was something that the pages could barely contain.
Something that kept breaking through the ordinary surface of the narrative in moments that stopped my breath.
The way he spoke not like a man reporting what God had told him.
The way the prophet spoke.
The way the Quran itself speaks.
But from inside.
From his own authority.
From a place that was not received from outside but native to himself.
As if he was not conveying the word but was himself the source of it.
And the I am sayings.
I found them on the fourth night in the Gospel of John.
And I sat with them for a long time.
Before Abraham was, I am.
I am the resurrection and the life.
I am the way, the truth and the life.
I am the good shepherd.
Statement after statement.
Each one using the same construction.
Each one placing himself not as a messenger pointing toward God but as the thing itself.
The life, the truth, the way, the resurrection.
The religious authorities of his time understood exactly what he was claiming.
It was why they wanted him dead.
They were not confused about what he meant.
They heard it clearly.
The question was only whether it was true.
I closed the Bible on the sixth night, sat in the dark beside my sleeping daughter, and asked myself that question directly.
Not academically.
Not theologically.
Personally.
Is it true?
And underneath the question, already present before I had finished asking it, was an answer that had been forming since a prayer room at 1:00 in the morning.
Since the moment the silence changed.
Since the moment a voice spoke words that did not come from my own tradition and that I had not generated from my own desperation.
An answer that had been sitting in my chest for six days, quiet and patient, waiting for me to stop moving long enough to feel its weight.
Yes.
It is true.
Lama came home on a Tuesday.
Our home in the Sulaymaniyah district of Riyadh.
A comfortable home, a quiet street.
The kind of neighborhood where you can hear the evening call to prayer from the mosque two blocks away.
And the sound feels like the street itself exhaling.
We brought her home and she walked through the front door and went immediately to her room to check that everything was where she had left it.
With the thoroughness of a 9-year-old who does not fully trust that the world maintains itself in her absence.
Faris and Sami were both home and there was noise and food and the particular chaos of a family reassembling itself after a crisis.
And I sat in the middle of all of it and felt two things simultaneously.
A gratitude so large it had no edges.
And a secret so heavy I could feel it changing the way I held myself.
I had not told Hessa.
I did not know how to tell Hessa.
My wife is a deeply faithful woman.
Not a scholar.
Not a theologian.
But a woman whose faith is woven into the fabric of her daily life in a way that is genuine and complete.
The call to prayer, the fasting, the Quran she reads every morning after Fajr.
These are not performances for her.
They are the structure of who she is.
I did not know how to sit across from this woman and say, the voice that saved our daughter was not the voice we have been praying to.
I did not have the words.
I was not sure the words existed.
So I carried it alone for another two months.
I kept my duties.
I continued my service to the royal household.
The scheduled prayers.
The religious consultations.
The occasional travel with family members for whom I served as spiritual adviser.
I stood in palace prayer halls and raised my hands and opened my mouth and performed the role of Sheikh Zayed al-Rashid.
Trusted Imam.
Spiritual authority.
Reliable man of God.
And inside, underneath the performance, something was happening that I could not stop and had stopped trying to stop.
I was praying to Jesus privately in my locked study late at night.
I was speaking to the one who had spoken to me.
I did not have the language for it yet.
I did not know the forms, the traditions, the theology of Christian prayer.
I simply spoke.
I told him what had happened.
I told him I was frightened.
I told him I did not know what I was doing or where this was going or what it was going to cost me.
I told him I believed he was who he said he was.
And that I did not fully understand what that meant yet.
But that I was not willing to pretend otherwise.
I told him about Lama.
About how she had argued with the nurse about the temperature of her soup on the ninth day of her recovery.
And how I had stood in the doorway watching and felt a love so large it was almost indistinguishable from pain.
I told him I understood in a way I had not understood before.
Something about a father and a child.
And something about what it means to intervene.
These were not polished prayers.
They were not scholarly prayers.
They were the prayers of a man who had lost his footing and was learning to walk again on completely different ground.
But they were the most honest prayers I had ever prayed in my life.
And something received them.
Something was present in those late-night conversations that had never been present in 37 years of correct and scholarly and precisely performed Islamic supplication.
Something warm.
Something that knew me.
Something that, and this is the word I keep returning to, the word that captures it better than any theological language.
Something that was genuinely, personally glad I was there.
The discovery, when it came, came the way these things always come.
Through the smallest, most ordinary failure of caution.
I had been buying Christian books through an online account I believed was secure.
Theology, history, commentary on the Gospels, a biography of a former Muslim scholar who had made the same journey I was making.
I kept them in a locked drawer in my study.
I was careful.
I thought I was careful.
My eldest son, Faris, found them.
He was not snooping.
He was looking for a charger he thought he had left in my study.
And the drawer was not fully closed.
And he was 16 years old and curious in the way that 16-year-olds are curious.
And he pulled it open.
He came to me that evening with the expression of a young man who has found something he does not know what to do with.
A mixture of confusion and alarm.
And the particular look of a child who has just discovered that his parent is more complicated than he understood.
He held up one of the books and he said, Baba, what is this?
I looked at my son for a long moment.
He was standing in the doorway of my study with a book about the historical evidence for the resurrection in his hand.
And his face was asking me a question that deserved an honest answer.
I had been carrying this alone for four months.
I was tired of carrying it alone.
And something about the directness of his question, the simplicity of it.
Baba, what is this?
Cut through everything and reached the place where the honest answer lived.
I said, sit down, Faris.
I need to tell you something.
I told him everything.
The prayer room.
The voice.
The 11 days.
The books.
The late-night conversations in the study.
I told him with the kind of plainness that comes when you have been holding something too long and your arms finally give out.
He sat across from me and listened without interrupting.
And when I finished, he was quiet for a long time.
Then he said, does Mama know?
I said, no.
He said, you have to tell her, Baba.
Whatever this is, she has the right to know.
My 16-year-old son, in that moment, was wiser than I had been for four months.
I told Hessa that night.
Her response was not what I feared and not what I hoped for.
Because the honest truth is that real responses to real things are never exactly what you fear or hope.
She did not scream.
She did not break down, but she sat very still while I spoke.
The way she had sat still in the hospital waiting area during the worst nights, with a stillness that was not absence, but a kind of gathering of herself.
When I finished, she asked me one question.
She said, “Do you believe he saved Lama?”
I said, “Yes.
With everything in me, yes.”
She was quiet for a long time after that.
Then she said, “Then I need to understand this.
I am not where you are.
But I need to understand.”
That was Hessa.
That has always been Hessa.
She does not go where she cannot see, but she is willing to look.
I need to tell you now about the phone call.
Because the phone call is what ended the quiet chapter and began the desperate one.
It came on a Thursday morning, 4 weeks after I had told Hessa and Faris.
I was in my study when my phone rang, and I saw it was a number I recognized.
A colleague, an Imam named Sheikh Mubarak, a man I had known for 12 years through our professional circles.
A man I considered a friend in the careful way that men in positions like mine consider people friends.
He did not greet me with the usual pleasantries.
He said, very quickly and very quietly, “Ziyad, I am calling you as a friend, and I am taking a risk calling you, and I need you to listen to me and not ask me how I know what I am about to tell you.”
He paused.
Then he said, “There is an investigation.
Your name is in it.
Someone has reported you.
They know about the books.
They may know more than that.
There are people who have been asked about you.
I do not know how much time you have, but I do not think you have much.
Do you understand what I am telling you?”
I understood.
In Saudi Arabia, apostasy, the leaving of Islam, is not a private matter.
It is not a matter between a man and his conscience and his God.
It is a legal matter, a state matter, a matter that the authorities treat with a seriousness that I, as a scholar who had spent his career inside the system, understood completely.
I was not a private citizen.
I was a public religious figure.
I was an Imam with connections to the royal household.
My conversion, if established and confirmed, would not be treated as a personal religious journey.
It would be treated as a scandal, a betrayal, a security matter.
The consequences that faced me were not abstract.
I knew exactly what they were.
I had, in a different chapter of my life, considered them appropriate.
I sat at my desk for 2 minutes after the call ended.
Just 2 minutes.
Then I got up and I went to find Hessa.
I told her we had to leave tonight.
She looked at me for a moment, just one moment.
Then she said, “I will get the children.”
I have thought about that moment many times since, the completeness of it.
The absence of argument or hesitation or demand for extended explanation.
A woman who was still working out what she believed, who had not yet arrived where I had arrived, who had every reason to choose the safety of the life she knew over the uncertainty of whatever I was leading her into.
And she looked at me for one moment and said, “I will get the children.”
23 years of marriage had built something between us that was stronger than the crisis pressing against it.
I do not take that for granted for a single day.
I called a number I had been given months earlier by a contact whose name I will not share, to a channel I will not describe.
There are people who exist specifically for moments like this one.
People who understand the geography of escape, who know which roads and which borders and which hours and which documents.
I had hoped never to need this number.
I dialed it with hands that were entirely steady, which surprised me.
And a voice answered, and I said the words I had been told to say if I ever called.
And the voice said, “How many people and how much time?”
I said, “Four people, and I do not know.”
The voice said, “Be ready in 3 hours.
I will not tell you the route.
I will not tell you the border or the country we crossed into first, or the names of the people who helped us move.
I will tell you that we left our home in Sulaymaniyah with one bag each, and that Lama was told we were going on a surprise trip, and she asked if there would be good dates where we were going, and I said I did not know, and she said that was concerning.
I will tell you that Sami fell asleep in the car within 20 minutes and slept through most of the journey with the absolute trust of a 6-year-old who believes that wherever his father is driving is the right place to be going.
I will tell you that Faris sat in the back with his eyes on the window and did not speak for a long time, and then reached forward and put his hand briefly on my shoulder and then took it away, and that this small gesture from my 16-year-old son cost me more tears than almost anything else in a night that contained many things worth weeping over.
I will tell you that at some point in the early hours of the morning, when we had crossed into a place where I could exhale for the first time in hours, I pulled the car to the side of a dark road and I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel, and I spoke to the one who had spoken to me in the hospital prayer room.
I said, “You saved my daughter.
You spoke to me in the dark.
You turned my world inside out and brought me to this road in the middle of the night with my family and one bag each, and I want you to know that I am not sorry.
I am frightened and I do not know what comes next, and I have left everything I built over 37 years behind me on that road, and I am not sorry because you are real and you are here and you saved my daughter.
And you have been present in my study at midnight, and you have been present on this dark road, and I believe what I believe, and I am yours.”
Hessa put her hand over mine on the steering wheel while I said this.
She did not say anything.
She just put her hand over mine.
And I understood that she was closer than she had been, that the road was doing something in her, too.
That the one who pursues does not only pursue one person in a family, he pursues the whole family with a patience that does not run out.
We have been outside Saudi Arabia for 8 months now.
I will not say which country.
I will say that it is a place where my children go to school, and my daughter has already informed her new teacher that she intends to be a doctor, delivered with the same completeness of conviction she has always carried, in a language she is still learning, which makes it, if anything, more impressive.
Sami has made friends with a speed that shames the rest of us.
Faris is quieter than he used to be.
He carries something now, the knowledge of what the world contains, that no 16-year-old should have to carry so early, and I pray for him specifically and daily.
Hessa is reading.
She’s asking questions.
She’s not where I am yet, and I do not push her.
The one who found me in a hospital prayer room is perfectly capable of finding her in her own time and in her own way.
And my job is not to argue her into anything, but to be honest about what I have seen and what I know, and to let her watch the life that knowing it has produced in me.
I am connected with a small on-the-ground community of former Muslim scholars and religious leaders, men and women who have made the same journey from the inside of Islamic religious authority to the Golgotha foot of a cross that nobody warned them about.
We meet through encrypted channels.
We pray together across distances.
We share the particular fellowship of people who have paid a price that most believers never have to consider, and who have found, on the other side of that price, that what they received was worth what they paid.
I lead a small Arabic-speaking house church.
I use everything I was trained to do.
The voice, the scholarship, the ability to open a text and help people find themselves inside it.
But I use it now in the service of the one who is actually there, the one who was in the light between the marble pillars for Omar, the one who was in the black above the earth for Tariq, the one who was in the silence of a hospital prayer room for me, the one who is not confined to any building or any direction or any set of correct performances, but who comes personally and specifically and with complete knowledge of the person he is coming to, into the places where people have finally run out of the energy to pretend.
I was a man who prayed for princes and could not pray for his daughter.
I was a man with a voice that moved powerful men to tears and could not find a single word that that reached beyond the hospital ceiling.
I was a scholar who had 37 years of knowledge, and in my moment of greatest need, that knowledge lay around me like broken equipment, present, useless, not equal to what was required.
And into that moment, into that specific and irreducible poverty, came the one who said, “I am the healer you are looking for.
I am the I am.
I know your daughter’s name.
Go to her now.”
He knew her name.
Out of all the names in all the world, he knew the name of a 9-year-old girl in a Riyadh hospital who wanted to be a doctor and had strong opinions about dates.
He knew her name and he knew mine and he knew the exact hour when I would finally be empty enough to hear him.
That is who he is.
That is what he does.
He does not wait for you to find the correct formula or the correct direction or the correct credential.
He comes to the hospital floor.
He comes to the moment of exhaustion.
He comes to the exact place where you have run out of everything else and there is nothing left but the truth of what you actually need.
And what I actually needed was not a better prayer technique or a more powerful intercession or a sign impressive enough to satisfy a scholar’s standards.
What I needed was the one who made the girl who argued about dates.
The one who made the boy who put his hand on his father’s shoulder in the dark.
The one who made the woman who said, “I will get the children.”
Without a single moment of hesitation.
He made all of them.
He knows all of them by name.
And he found me, a man who had spent his whole career pointing people toward God and had somehow, in all that pointing, missed the one who was standing right beside him.
And he said the three words that were always true and that I had spent 37 years not hearing.
“I am here.”
He is here.
For you, reading this in whatever room, in whatever crisis, in whatever exhaustion of performance and pretense you are currently living inside, he is not at the end of a long journey of religious achievement.
He is not reserved for the scholars or the pure or the ones who have their theology sorted out.
He is here.
Now, in the specific and unrepeatable moment of your specific and unrepeatable life.
I know because he came to mine.
My prayer requests for Hessa, that the one who pursues would find her fully in his own perfect time.
For Faris, that the weight he carries would become wisdom and not bitterness.
For Lama, who is going to be a doctor, that she would know one day with her whole heart who healed her.
For Sami, that he would grow up in the freedom his father never had.
For Sheikh Mubarak, who risked something significant to make one phone call, that the God of that phone call would find him, too.
And for every Imam, every scholar, every religious leader reading this who performs in public what they can no longer feel in private, that the silence would change for you the way it changed for me, that something would enter it.
That three words would find you in the dark.
You are not too far.
You are not too religious.
You are not too educated or too committed or too deep inside the system to be reached.
He knows your name.
