Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to
the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)
Dear brothers and
sisters in Christ, I am Shaikh Abdul-Hameed. I was a Muslim born to an Indian
Muslim father and Pakistani Muslim mother. I was born in Fremont, California. I was raised in a Muslim household, until I left Islam at age of 16, then
unfortunately reverted back to Islam and ended up leaving Islam again and coming
back to Lord Jesus Christ, at the age of 17. I finished the Quran from cover to cover when I was
7-years-old and finished the Quran from cover to cover again, prayed when I was
young, younger than even when my dad started praying. As a child, I was
overwhelmingly narrow-minded, believed all other religions to be wrong and ONLY
Islam to be right, completely out of blind faith.
I always visioned
there being a world that has Muslims and ONLY Muslims. Not to mention I was a
very strong pro-Muslim since I was a kid. I even started obtaining negative
views of the Jews ever since my mother told me that they stole Jerusalem from
the Muslims. I began to see them as evil people. Even though I had negative
feelings against the Jewish people, despite that fact I belonged to the creed of
Sufism along with my family relatives. Sufism was a creed that taught that there
are sufi mystics, who are directly connected to Allah. There was a sufi mystic
my parents use to follow and still do by the name of Shaykh Nazim al-Qubrusi and
his deputy Shaykh Hisham Al Kabbani. My mom taught me to respect them as higher
authority people who performed miracles and that if you are his disciple then
they will protect you from harm.
These guys have a lot
of disciples from like all across the world, of which a lot of them are
westerners. Sufism as I was told was the true Islam, which Muslims have become
deviated from. Now as to how I become a Christian. It all began when my mom
hired a mullah who use to come to our house to tutor me and my sister. But
tragically this evil man started molesting me and it took me like a year or so
to be able to open my mouth about what was going on. Luckily, that guy was
eventually arrested and after a year or so he was sentenced to life
imprisonment. Despite that my life during post-molestation was so miserable and
was constantly getting more miserable. I even began getting feelings of going to
hell forever, as a result I started abandoning my Islamic prayers, thinking that
they will not help me whether I perform them or not at time.
This would however
upset my mother. Despite abandoning my prayers I started using other ways to
communicate with Allah (the god of Islam) like praying to him with my hands open
to him. At that same time, I started further augmenting my knowledge in Islam.
No matter what I try nothing helped in healing the pain I was going through.
Then eventually 9/11 terrorist attacks happened and I even cheered to some
degree for those terrorist attacks. Not only that, but during post-9/11 I would
often imagine seeing acts of Islamic terrorism and maybe even take pleasure in
seeing things like that. Possibly even imagine myself doing these acts of
terrorism. Even though I abandoned my prayers and might only pray now and then,
I still had some elements of that of a radical Muslim. But still you couldn’t
call me a radical Muslim because you can’t be a Muslim if you abandon your
obligatory prayers according to Islam. I didn’t know this then because I was
never told that abandoning prayers is equivalent to the sin of riddah
(the sin of renouncing Islam). After 9/11, I started noticing a feeling, where I
no longer felt that I was within the Islamic faith. It was a disturbing feeling
I had because whether I prayed or not Islam would always be something I would
take pride in. To rid these feelings I started looking for ways of somehow
eliminating these feelings and another feeling that I was having was that a
feeling of something dragging me to Christianity. Those ways that I eventually
adopted were going to
www.islam-qa.com and
www.aol40.com.
In going to
www.islam-qa.com, I started reading fatwas and began finding information
that started proving to me that Sufism, the creed that I was taught, was not the
true Islam at all. Reading the materials on this website and the justification
of 9/11 on
www.aol40.com/us_attack.htm, started turning me into a radical Muslim. It
was on
www.islam-qa.com where I found the information where Muhammad himself said
that the difference between the believers and unbelievers are the obligatory
Islam. I managed to do that in 2002, during my high school freshmen year, where
I got the permission from my school to go on a three-week trip with my family.
On that three-week trip, I spent most of the time doing Umrah (minor Islamic
pilgrimage) in Mecca, Saudi Arabia and then in Medina, Saudi Arabia. During that
time, I was able to bring myself back in performing my mandatory Islamic prayers
again.
Then after our Umrah,
we flew to Pakistan, where there was a party held for a family reunion and to
have a milasharif (a function where Muhammad is praised). At the party, I
met a family relative of mine, Fahad, where we both talked about the 9/11
terrorist attacks and this is when I told him that the Americans were running on
9/11 more faster than probably Hagar was when she was finding water for Ishmael.
According to Islam, Muslims believe that Hagar and her son, Ishmael were
banished to the valley of Mecca, where Hagar ran from Safa to Marwa (two
mountains found in Mecca) to find water for Ishmael. During that moment, I also
met another fanatic Muslim relative of mine with whom I also had an anti-America
conversation with. When my trip was over I came back to the United States.
People may ask me what were my parents were they radical Muslims. My
response would be no and to prove it I would like to say there was a time when I
told my father that I believe in extremist Islam and in response my dad told me
that he believes in the traditional Islam. Towards hearing this I said to myself
in my mind that the extremist Islam is the traditional Islam. This is the
problem with a lot of Muslims in that they are not aware of the extremist
teachings of Islam.
The website
www.aol40.com not only gave me the feeling that the 9/11 attacks were
justified by Islam, but also provided a lot of pro-Islamic articles and
anti-Christianity articles for me to read. The reason or at least one of the
reasons, of reading those articles would be with the desire of having the
capability of refuting the Christian faith and resist whatever feeling I was
having (which was dragging me to Christianity) from happening. No matter how
much I tried doing whatever I possibly could, the feelings of torment due to
post-molestation weren’t going away. Not to mention as a fanatic Muslim I had
another thing tormenting me, which was my extremist mentality. Then eventually,
during the summer of 2003 I started reading the articles of
www.answering-islam.org (a Christian based website that exposes Islam) to
see the case Christians present against Islam. It was during that time, when I
started reading the rebuttal articles to the anti-Christianity articles I use to
read on
www.aol40.com, on that website. After seeing, the Muslim argument against
Christianity and see how they (or at least most of them) were refuted in front
of my eyes. It was during that same summer, that I read the biography of a
Muslim girl who did whatever she can to heal her pain, but nothing happened,
except one day when she prayed to Lord Jesus Christ to help her and that’s
exactly what happened. After some time, I prayed to the Lord Jesus and renounced
Islam.
It was then I saw a huge improvement in my life my mental
tortures due to post-molestation started fading away and my Islamic
fundamentalism also started dissolving. Instead of imagining radical Muslims
committing acts of terror, I started imagining Muslim militants transforming by
the power of Christ. But unfortunately due to my parents taking me to a Western
convert/ex-“Christian” I thought of reverting back to Islam. All those problems
that I had as a Muslim started coming back the mental tortures and this time I
became more fanatical in one or more aspect than I was before I left Islam for
the first time. It took a long time to wake up again and make the decision of
leaving Islam. By God’s Grace I came back to His Son, Jesus Christ. I have even
changed my name to, Silas Abdul-Saleeb.
If you have
any questions, even about my testimony, please email me at:
missionaryofchrist01@yahoo.com
