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[from Jamal’s Facebook]

I recieved another email from a former Muslim woman who was greatly encouraged by Rifqa Bary’s situation. Please take a few minutes to read this very insightful story of a woman who went through a similar situation that Rifqa went through. There are many more people just like this that have been emboldened because of Rifqa’s situation. Also, please take a few minutes to pray for this woman who is suffering because of her decision to follow Jesus and leave Islam. She says that she wants the world to know her story, but I have changed her name to protect her identity.

Pastor Jivanjee-please forgive me for writing to you. My family and I have very few people that we can share about concerning the persecution that we experience from our Muslim side of the family.

I was born to an Arab Muslim father and Irish Christian mother just days after they returned to America after they had lived in the Middle East. I was, for all intents and purposes, raised strictly Arab, and a Muslim. No small feat to do in America! The confusion of being a mixed race child paled in comparison of being the offspring of such a religious union. We went to Qur’an classes by the time I was three. I learned to read and write Arabic at the mosque as well as visited it on the holy day of Friday. The Muslims believe in a book called the Qur’an, of which each Islamic person must read by the age of 16. Out of respect for our religion and my father, I wore the traditional veil at those times. It blinded me in more ways than one.

My father was the dominating force in my life, and as I became a teenager our ideas on life conflicted. I was not allowed to do anything that my peers did, and my father was struggling to impose his will on me, sometimes heavy handedly. A series of events occurred that have no significance now except that they led to a better way. Rejection and abuse led me to make a desperate choice: I would try to commit suicide.

How does one explain the despair that led a 15 year old girl to such a place? It was the loneliest place in the world. I truly had no hope, indeed I didn’t even know what it was. The darkness consumed me, and as the pills I took began to take effect, a strangely wonderful thing happened. I felt as if I was falling, and there was a great chasm beneath me, waiting to swallow me whole. All of a sudden I had a blinding flash of light break through the blackness, and I had a vision. I must explain here that in Islam I was raised to believe that God comes to us in visions and in dreams. A great deal of former Muslims have come to Christ in this way. There He was, the Lamb of God, Jesus, someone Who I was told was a prophet and Who became my Lord. He looked just like a picture I had seen in a postcard. I think that He had to come in a way that I would recognize Him. And His eyes were filled with infinite sorrow and compassion as He looked at me. He held out His hands, and His palms were bleeding.

Now I know that this sounds far-fetched. Would someone have seen Him there if they had been with me? I don’t know. But I do know this: He was there. I heard a voice echo in my soul, and it simply said,” You are not alone.” I snapped out of the foggy state I was in with a start. I felt as if my soul had been hanging over hell by a thread, and Someone yanked on it and pulled me back. I knew, I knew that life began and ended with this Man, and I gladly laid the tattered remains of my life at His feet and followed. I vomited the pills up violently, and the cuts of my wrists which had been bleeding profusely suddenly stopped. With each purge I felt better, as if some cancerous poison was seeping from my body. Indeed it was.

That was the hour, minute, second of my true conversion. I didn’t have any idea of Jesus beyond a prophet; never considered it. Salvation, savior and grace were completely foreign words to me. But He offered hope, and I took Him at His Word and absolutely sold myself to be His slave. I didn’t know what the future held, but I knew Who held the future. My grandfather, who is the strongest man of God I know, taught me first by example what unconditional love was and later by word. He was the only one who believed enough in me to explain what happened to me at my salvation. Indeed, I believe that it was his prayer that opened my eyes at that crucial moment.

I would like to say that all my problems disappeared, but they did not. But now I had a way to deal with them. The choice I made that day cost me dearly, but at that moment all I knew is that I loved Jesus. To my shame, I hid the fact that I had been snatched from the brink of death by God Himself, and became an undercover Christian for the next three years. I am truly the only teen I know that had to sneak out to go to church. I sat in church trembling, scared to death my dad would come bursting through the doors and drag me out. I went to a Catholic mass that was held on Saturdays so my dad didn’t find out. But a wooden cross that I was given made its way from my jacket pocket to the dryer and all of hell broke loose when Dad found it. I was not at home when he found it, a fact of which I still thankful for today.

My mother called me at the place I was babysitting and warned me not to come home. I was 18 thankfully, or I am absolutely sure that my father would have sent the police after me. I fled to the refuge of my grandparents, and I swear that night that God had to breathe for me. I was terrified, and with good reason. By choosing God, I would forsake family, faith and culture. But I had come too far to turn back. I went home to face the music.

My father was lying in wait, and what happened was so horrible I can not write the details. I didn’t deny that the cross was mine, and no, I wouldn’t recant the Name of Jesus. “If you deny Me before people, I will deny you before My Father. You are either for or against Me.” Jesus said. No question there!
I had truly done the unthinkable. I thank God for being in America, because in my home country it would have been well within the religious framework for me to be killed or imprisoned for forsaking my dad’s authority and Islam. But I obeyed God, not the law.

My father immediately and with finality cut me out of the house, disowned me, reigned abuse upon my head, and then of all things made a plan to lock me in the house, send me to Islamic classes to ‘cure’ me, and made sure I would get no college funding. I had no place to go. I literally had walked across the stage for graduation just days before. I was bereft, hurting, wondering how I would survive,
And then God showed up! It is so true that you don’t know that God is all you need until He is all that you have. Word came that I had a full ride scholarship to University that I swear I don’t remember applying for. I fled my childhood home, and I never looked back. I exploded into college and went to every church service I could, eventually settling into a strong campus ministry and church that surrounded me with community, family and love. I am grateful, grateful for that time, because it disciplined me into a no-excuses Christian and I grew by leaps and bounds.

Just recently, my brother, who was my best friend growing up, is becoming a threat to my children and I. This is perhaps the most painful thing that has ever occurred because while my brother remaining Muslim, we agreeed that religion would never come between us. I should have realized that Islam demands all, and as he became older, even though he is only 30-he is six years my junior, he has since had 2 sons (even though he married to a Catholic) he is spewing the same vitriolic hatred that is seen in my father. I can barely breath at the thought that I have lost him now too. I knew that the price that I would pay would be steep, but my brother, my best friend growing up and not nearly as “traditional” as Dad, is bitter and hateful towards my sister and I and telling us we are brainwashed, and threatening to turn us into -of all things-child protective service for teaching our children Christianity and homeschooling.

I am so tired of this. My husband and I are seriously considering leaving the state because of the family discord that seems never-ending. There are a million reasons to stay, but one over-riding one to leave: peace, as much as one can find in this old world. However, my American grandfather, who is the reason I am a Christian, is 90 years old and my very heart. He is my real father in all that matters. I will not, and have not been released by the Lord, leave as long as he draws breath.

This is where being a child of a mixed family really stinks. My mother is in this state of nervous tension and really relies on my sister and I, my father is off in some never-assimilated to America guilt-induced Islamic extremism, and my brother is apparently following in his footsteps, and I am just confused. I am continuing to stand firm, and will listen to the Lord as what He would have us do. I just really needed to vent to someone who understands where we are coming from. If I remember your testimony, your father left Islam, did he not? So you are a second generation Christian too, child of an immigrant. Thank you for “listening.”

May God bless you for the work you are doing, especially with Rifqa,

Zainub