The Price to Pay: A Muslim Risks All to Follow Christ

I had become a Christian; my life had changed. I could not go backward now. My name was no longer Muhammad. My old first name no longer meant anything to me. But I saw very well that they did not even understand what I was saying to them. For them there was only a problem that could easily be settled with money. Everything depended on the sum to be offered. But all of their attempts ran into a wall: I refused to become Muslim again. To them I was an apostate.

We had already spent three hours discussing it at the side of the desert road. We had not made an inch of progress; each one was still encamped on the position that he had taken up. I was psychologically drained by the questions from every side.

Suddenly the tone intensified. The aggression became palpable, menacing: “If you are not willing to come with us, someone will kill you. In any event your body will be repatriated. And your wife and children will die of hunger here; they will come back to their country on their own.” For a brief moment I forgot the distressing situation that I was in and attempted a vague interior smile tinged with sadness. How could that Shiite Iraqi imagine for one second that an Arab woman would manage to earn a living by her own efforts, without the help of a man?

In the absence of a counterargument, my uncle Karim’s eyes showed hatred and his expression hardened.”

“You must have undergone brainwashing”, he remarked coldly.

I could tell that he too was at the end of his patience, that he did not want to talk anymore. An evil like this called for a radical remedy: Islamic law, Sharia.

“You know our law. You know that there is a fatwa against you. This fatwa orders us to kill you if you do not become a good Muslim again like us, like before!”

I felt nauseous. My stomach clenched into an even tighter knot. I knew what was going to happen. In recalling that death sentence, Karim was obliged to follow through or else be considered an unbeliever or, worse, a renegade. My last support had just slipped out from under my feet. Confronting the inevitable, I exploded: “If you want to kill me, go ahead! You came with weapons and used force, but I would like to use reason and speak with you. Read the Qur’an and then the Gospel, and after that we can have a real discussion. Anyway, I do not think that you really have the courage to shoot me!”

The wave of anger and fear had made me talk too fast. What did I have to gain from such provocative language, like the swagger of the man sentenced to death who defies the firing squad one last time? Maybe I thought that, being foreigners in that country, they would not dare to alert the nearby localities by the noise and thus risk being arrested. The detonation was deafening, with endless repercussions in the valley. By what miracle had Karim not succeeded in hitting me? In the depths of my soul I heard something like a female voice that whispered to me, “Ehroub. Flee!” I did not try then to explain this strange occurrence but took to my heels and dashed off as though escaping from a brush fire.

As I ran I heard bullets whistling around me. There were certainly some aimed at me, and aimed to kill me, judging by the trajectories, which came very close to grazing me. The seconds seemed to pass like centuries, until I managed to get far enough away that I could no longer hear their voices.

Since I was still running and thinking of the last minute that I had left to live, I did not feel the pain caused by the bullet. I just noticed that my foot became airborne, as though propelled by an incredible force. When I realized what was happening, I was on the ground, in the mud, with the sensation of a hot liquid running along my leg. But since I was completely wet, I could not tell whether it was blood or mud. My last thought was to notice the silence that had fallen. The weapons had stopped, no doubt when they saw me fall. Then I lost consciousness.