Ahmet's Testimony

I, Ahmet, the most pious son of a Muslim family, have always been interested in religious knowledge. I used to pray and fast from a very young age. I don't know why, but I have always felt the love of Allah in my heart. My love for Allah was always alive in my heart. So I started reading religious books from a young age to know Allah better, and as I grew older and more knowledgeable, my love for Allah and the Prophet Muhammad became known to everyone.

   People who knew me always used to joke that “Hodja is here”. But these jokes started to come true day by day. After attending a Qur'an course at the mosque during the summer months, the imam soon assigned me to give Qur'an lessons to younger children.

  In my high school years, I started to join the Readers branch of the Nur Community through a friend of mine. Day by day, I was not only knowing Islam, but I was deepening in Islam by practicing what I knew. One day, while reading the Turkish translation of the Holy Qur'an, the verses about Christians caught my attention. As a result of my research on Christianity and Jesus Christ, I chose to take on the task of going to Christians and preaching Islam. There were no Christians around me, and the only information I had about Christianity was the Islamic sources I had read. So when I found out that a free Bible was being offered on the website kutsalkitap.org to learn more about Christianity, I immediately filled out the form and requested it. Soon after, I received the Bible and then I had the opportunity to meet and chat with Christians. I was worried that if I told them that I wanted to convert them to Islam, they would not want to meet me, so I told them that I was researching and that I only wanted to attend their worship and conversations. From then on, I started to go to church, do research and occasionally preach Islam without making my intentions too obvious. After a while, I realized that all we knew about Christianity was hearsay. The Christianity we were told about in schools and mosques was quite different from the Christianity I saw in the church. Everything was not as we were told. I was very worried about them going to hell because I had a deep love for them from my childhood, and I was trying to preach Islam as much as I could, saying that my duty was to tell them the truth.

   But after a while, as I got older, I realized that I also needed to be saved from hell. I was praying, fasting, reading and teaching the Holy Qur'an, I was doing many good deeds, but I also had a lot of sins. In order to get rid of these sins, I was clinging to my religion more and more, and for a while it was going well, but after a while everything was getting worse. After 3 years of preaching Islam to Christians, I realized that I am really a sinner and I am heading towards hell. I was so sure of the reality of the eternal world that the thought of this world being temporary and facing death at any moment scared me so much. After all, we are here today and gone tomorrow, who can guarantee that after death they will go to heaven? So I started praying day and night for Allah to forgive me and save me from hell and take me to paradise. I was also paying close attention to all my religious obligations and asking for forgiveness. But the more I embraced Islam, the more I felt that I was sinking. What I had learned in the congregation and what was taught in the mosques made me realize how difficult it was to get out.

   I could clearly feel that I was no longer at peace, I had accepted that I was lost in the darkness and I was running out of strength. So what will happen, I thought, will it always be like this? How will I get out of it? It was painful for me to even breathe anymore. I was afraid that if I continued like this, I would lose my mind. But suicide seemed like a solution for me because I knew I couldn't live like this anymore, but I was holding myself back because if I committed suicide, I would go to hell for eternity. Still, I didn't know how much more I could endure with this inner unrest and pain.

   In the meantime, I was still going to church and telling the people there how much peace I had found in Islam, but when I came home, I was witnessing that what I was saying was far from the truth. Nevertheless, when I went to Christians, I was impressed by the fact that they kept telling me that if I believed in Jesus Christ, I could earn Allah's approval, that I could go to heaven forever through Jesus Christ. I wondered how people of this corrupt faith could speak with such certainty when we, who are the last religion and the true religion, could not be so sure where we were going. I always refused their invitations because I thought that if I became a Christian I would definitely not go to heaven. But one day as I was walking in pain I could not stand it any longer and said, ‘What have I got left to lose? I am sure I cannot be saved anymore. I'm going to accept the offer of these Christians and when I see that it doesn't work, I'm going to end my meaningless life’. Because I just wanted to try it, and after I tried it, I would be completely estranged from God and there would be no reason for me to live anymore.

   As I was walking down the road I said to myself, ‘Jesus, I accept you as my savior’... After a few seconds something started happening, I couldn't understand what it was. From that moment on the peace that I needed so badly in my life started pouring into my heart like a waterfall. I didn't know what it was, but I liked these feelings so much that I started walking for hours in the city where I lived. I was walking from one place to another until the middle of the night, and even though it was raining in the evening, I was still walking with the happiness of these feelings. I was in shock. How was this possible? How could something I had never believed in give me such peace? Could a belief that my mind had a hard time accepting be true? Based on what I was feeling, yes, it was real, but it was hard to accept. So the next day my mind fought with my heart and I started to think that what I was doing was absurd. I said the word of martyrdom and immediately became a Muslim. I don't know why, but at that moment I was again filled with restlessness, gloom, hopelessness and darkness. When I felt that I could not cope with it, I immediately called out to Jesus again and asked him to save me, and whether I asked for help or not, my heart was filled with joy and peace again.

   It was very difficult for me to make that decision, so I went through this back and forth several times that day and the same thing happened every time. The next day it was the same thing, the next day it was the same thing. During that week I became a Muslim and a Christian, not knowing what to do because of this difference I was experiencing. I couldn't make sense of what I was going through, so I kept it a secret until my sister came to me and told me that she had a dream about me. My sister came to me when I was alone and told me that she had a dream in which there were two long tables and many people were sitting and eating at these tables. We were sitting at one of the tables as a family when a loud voice said ‘Christians and Muslims should be separated’ and I got up from my family and sat at the Christian table. After he told me about his dream, my blood ran cold, and while I was trying to hide it, my sister came and told me that she had seen everything in her dream. When I gathered my courage and asked her when she had this dream, she said it was a week ago and I was really worried. But I looked at her and said, ‘God has shown you what happened, I don't know why, but I find peace in Jesus Christ. I really don't understand, maybe I have to stay like this for a short time. After many years, maybe He will make me become a Muslim again, but for now I need to follow Jesus Christ’ and I told my sister that I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior. It must have been the effect of the dream, because my sister, although very religious, did not react negatively at all and anxiously accepted my decision and said, “There is a good in everything”.

   Everything started after that week. My peace of mind, which I thought would disappear for a few days, was increasing day by day, not disappearing, but never diminishing. I started to read the Bible again, this time with determination, and I continued to read the Torah and the Psalms over and over again, and then I started to study the Holy Quran again, and I realized that even in the Holy Quran, Jesus stands in a very different place from the other prophets. But there were still questions in my mind that I could not understand. Was the Torah, the Psalms, the Bible really not changed? Was the spirit inside Jesus really Allah, as Christians say? How can the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit be one God? Many questions like these were constantly plaguing my mind. I was asking these questions to everyone in the church, and they were giving their own answers, but they were not satisfying me at all. A sister from the church said to me, “Why do you always ask us? Why don't you ask the one who sent these books? He will give you the best answer.” I realized that I had never prayed before to help me understand these questions. From that day on, every day I would say, “God, I want to know Your way, I ask people, but their answers do not satisfy me. Show me which one is your way, which one is your truth.” I thought I would understand everything at once, but I continued to pray like this every day for exactly 3 months. And finally, I don't know how it happened, but it was as if there was a veil in my mind and that veil was suddenly lifted, so I started to find the answer to every question I was wondering, trying to understand. After discovering the answer to every question in my mind, I was ready to accept Jesus Christ as my savior, not only with my heart but also with my whole mind. Years have passed since then and the peace I have received from Jesus Christ has never diminished but has increased immensely. With the salvation provided by Jesus Christ, I no longer have the fear of losing my mind, nor the fear of committing suicide... Now I know that God loves me and that what is written in the Bible is true. That is why I have been reading the Bible tirelessly for years and why I encourage everyone to do so. And the more I discover how true everything in the Bible is throughout my life of faith, the more peace I feel...