Out Of Islam: One Muslim's Journey to Faith in Christ

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OUT OF ISLAM by Christopher Alam

Published by Charisma House

Charisma Media/Charisma House Book Group

600 Rinehart Road

Lake Mary, Florida 32746

www.charismahouse.com

This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Cover design by studiogearbox.com

Copyright © 2006 by Christopher Alam

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alam, Christopher, 1954-

Out of Islam / Christopher Alam.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-59185-890-9 (paper back)

1. Alam, Christopher, 1954- . 2. Christian converts from Islam--Biography. 3. Conversion--Christianity. I. Title.

BV2626.4.A39 A3 2006

248.2’46092--dc22

2006009069

ISBN-13: 978-1-59185-890-4

e-ISBN: 978-1-59979-873-8

To Britta, Immanuel,

Victoria, and Gabriel

Acknowledgments

I WANT TO THANK my fathers, mentors, and friends in the faith who have loved me, encouraged me, and made a difference in my life. First, the late Rev. Kenneth E. Hagin Sr., always Dad to me. Then Harald Bredesen, Reinhard Bonnke, Ray McCauley, Billy Joe Daugherty, John Nuzzo, Stanley Hofwijks, Mark Butler, Sam Hinn, Jerry Horst, Bill Lee, Bruce Eilenberger, Sam Smucker, Kong Hee, Joseph Prince, Enevald Flaaten, Tony Cooke, Nicholas Mavondo, William Lamhno, Kenneth Hagin Jr., Ulf Ekman, and so many others whose names I cannot put here because of lack of space.

Contents

Prologue: An Unfinished Sermon

1 Muslim Roots

2 Pakistan Air Force College

3 Wars Within and Without

4 Without Direction

5 Strange Encounters

6 Persecution

7 Reaching Out

8 A Prisoner for Christ

9 Going Underground

10 Escape

11 Help From the KGB

12 Istanbul, Turkey

13 Operation Mobilization

14 Sweden

15 Settling Down

16 And Then the Fire Fell

17 Signs and Wonders

18 Further Training

19 Into the Missions Field

20 To the Ends of the Earth

21 Looking Back

22 Looking Ahead

Epilogue: An Invitation to You

Appendix: My Little Connection With Pope John Paul II and With History

Prologue

AN UNFINISHED SERMON

SOMETHING WAS IN the air.

I could feel it.

The words Are you ready? slipped from my lips and roared from the platform speakers and across the grass field. My eyes traced the scene before me. A short distance away sat thousands who gathered in a soccer stadium not to cheer on a team but to listen to a man behind a pulpit.

I was the man.

Returning as He promised, Jesus is coming again. Are you ready?

Uncountable eyes stared back at me.

Overhead the sun pressed down its rays, warming the late afternoon and washing the stadium in light. The weather in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, presented no distraction. Blagoevgrad, once a bastion of Communism, once a showpiece of a political philosophy that had no tolerance for the very message I brought to this service, was now the center of an evangelistic crusade. Communism was now a dark memory, and the city was open to a presentation of the gospel. I had the honor of presenting it.

Those who lived in New Testament times called this land Macedonia. The city lies nestled at the foot of the Rila and Pirin Mountains and is the major municipality of the region. Twenty-five villages ringed the city limits. Those who sat in the stands had come from city and town—one in four of the city’s population was present, and each sat in stony silence.

Jesus is coming again. Are you ready to meet Him?

I had delivered a simple message about Jesus, one I had given many times, but something was different. Something was in the air—and something was in me.

In my core, at the center of my being, the ever-present passion I felt for Jesus flashed to a roaring blaze. I had proclaimed a message about the life of Jesus, about His death, about His triumphant resurrection that changed the world. Now I came to the climax of the sermon—the imminent return of Christ.

I never finished.

Are you ready? I asked again, then paused.

The silence was palpable, heavy.

Then a sound.

A noise.

Someone in the stands shouted. Then another. Before I could utter my next words, the crowd was on its feet. They surged forward, pouring over the railing that separated the seating from the field like a river over the crest of a waterfall.

Their noise rose in thunderous tones. The platform upon which I stood vibrated, resonating with the voice of the congregation.

They flowed forward like the tide, crossing the distance between the seats and platform in moments. Hands shot up, reaching skyward as if attempting to touch the face of God.

Tears rolled down their cheeks, and their voices rose in loud prayers—prayers for mercy, prayers of acceptance. At the platform many knelt, heads bowed, souls sobbing.

My sermon was over before I planned. God moved ahead without me. I stood still as a statue as I watched the sight unfold before me. I was at a loss for words, which is not something that happens often. The Holy Spirit touched not one, not a hundred, but thousands of listeners.

What could I say? What could I do? What could I add?

The same emotion that had swallowed the crowd inundated my own soul. Meaningful words were gone from my mind. I surrendered the microphone to a Bulgarian pastor and asked him to lead the crowd in a salvation prayer.

In this moment of high drama, in the midst of this outpouring of the Holy Spirit, I felt broken in the most marvelous way. I stumbled to the back of the platform, hiding myself behind some chairs. Inside me emotion boiled, then erupted in sobs; sobs turned into prayer.

While thousands were finding salvation at the front of the platform, I was facing my own sense of unworthiness to be part of such a stunning display of God’s power.

Thank You, Lord Jesus, was all I could mutter. I have learned that the more meaningful the emotion, the more simple the prayer. Thank You for saving me when I was down and lost; thank You for bringing me so far and allowing me to see Your power and Your glory. You have brought me such a long way . . . such a very long way. Thank You, Lord. Thank You.

The words came with tears and with the stiff realization that the man who hunkered down behind folding chairs in prayer was far removed from the person he used to be—the person I used to be.

The service continued, and I returned to my duties. My sermon may have been cut short, but God wasn’t finished. A paralyzed man, carried in a blue blanket by his family, rose to his feet and began to run through the crowd. Others, just as crippled, stood, walked, and jumped, some for the first time in their lives. Blind eyes began to see, deaf ears opened, and miracles abounded—all in a stadium in the heart of a former Communist city.

As always, Jesus had the final word, not just in this city or in this crusade, but in my life—something no one would have anticipated.

That night in my hotel room, I lay on my bed, my spirit soaring and my thoughts directed to God. In the dark of that evening, I thought about what I had seen, what I felt in the pulpit, and the long road that led me here.

The man that lay on the bed in the hotel room was not the same man who decades before began life in a Muslim home.

Chapter 1

MUSLIM ROOTS

I AM CHRISTOPHER ALAM, descendant of Muhammad, of Ishmael, and of Abraham.

I was born on March 29, 1954, in a Muslim home in Pakistan. My father’s side of the family was Hashemite Arabs from the Middle East. Members of my grandfather’s extended family still live in Jordan and Lebanon. People called us by the honorific title Shareef (or Sayyid by some), a term used only for those directly descended from Muhammad, the founder of Islam.

Muhammad had only one son, Ibrahim, who died in infancy; consequently, the family line runs through his daughter Fatima, who became the wife of Ali, Muhammad’s young cousin and the first convert to Islam. Because I was a direct descendant of Muhammad, people respected me, treating me as a holy person. Most considered me superior to them. I, however, knew my own heart and could never escape the fact that I was nothing more than a sinner.

One of my uncles had a copy of our family tree. It traced our lineage back to Muhammad and from there to Ishmael, Abraham’s son, and, of course, to Abraham himself. We were proud of our heritage.

My father was a hero, decorated for gallantry under fire during a covert operation conducted while he was with the ISI. I was proud of him.

My grandfather was a religious man, having made the pilgrimage to Mecca. The British government decorated him for his service to the Crown and granted him a title. He was renowned for his hobby of herbal medicines. He traveled far and wide collecting rare plants and herbs for his remedies and lived a disciplined, healthy lifestyle. He outlived four wives and died at the astonishing age of 106. I must clarify here that he never had more than one wife at a time. While Islam dictates that a man may have as many as four wives simultaneously (because that is how many wives Muhammad had), my grandfather chose not to follow the practice. Muhammad had at least thirteen wives, and he married his last wife Aisha when he was fifty-seven and she was just nine years old.

My father was born when my grandfather was seventy and was the seventh and final child from grandfather’s fourth and last wife. Growing up, I remember meeting so many uncles, aunts, and cousins that I lost count. I still run into people who claim to be my cousin, people I have never met. Because of the age difference between my father and his oldest siblings, I have nephews and nieces older than my parents. They addressed me as uncle whenever we met. At times it was confusing.

For example, when I was a cadet at the Pakistan Air Force College, one of my nephews was a fellow cadet. He outranked me. Whenever we met, I would come to attention, salute, and call him sir. When he gave me orders, he did so as he would others of lower rank but also made certain to address me as uncle. He knew that when we were out of uniform I would be his senior because I was his uncle.

My family left the Middle East and settled in what was then British India. My father held the King’s Commission, and he was an army officer and graduate of the Royal Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun, India. Upon the division of British India into India and Pakistan, the old British Indian army split as well. The officers and men had the choice of joining either the new Indian Army or the new Pakistan Army. My father, being Muslim and seeing no future for Muslims in the new India, opted to join Pakistan and continue his service there. That is where I was born.

As with most military families, we moved to a new military base every three years or so. My childhood was an ever-changing chain of military bases spread throughout the country. My father was an artillery officer, but he also served two tenures as a senior commanding officer in the famous Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the organization that worked with the CIA to create the Taliban and to arm Afghan and Arab fighters battling the Soviets in Afghanistan. One of those Arab commanders was a man by the name of Osama bin Laden.

My father was a hero, decorated for gallantry under fire during a covert operation conducted while he was with the ISI. I was proud of him.

For much of his career we lived in cantonments, or military bases, except the time he served in the ISI. During those years we lived in town; he wore civilian clothes, and he made it clear that we were never to reveal his identity to anyone. I was to tell people that he was a businessman and nothing more. He would often sneak into India on dangerous missions. By the discussions I overheard in our house, I knew that he and his team kept an eye on diplomats, missionaries, and foreigners. I also knew which of the diplomats in the U.S. embassy worked for the CIA and which of the many American humanitarian workers in the country reported to them. We had strange uncles who visited us, and there was a lot of cloak-and-dagger activity around our house. I lived in a home where everything was hush-hush.

I grew up with the military and came to love the uniforms, the soul-stirring skirl of bagpipes, and even the sweet smell of burned cordite at the firing ranges. To this day, I have a passion for the musical wail of bagpipes. Bagpipes are the only musical instrument classified as an instrument of war. The sound of the pipes does something to the heart of a soldier. For me, I can say that its effect has not diminished; it still causes my blood to warm and my eyes to tear.

As a little boy I grew up with the sight and sound of bands playing stirring marches like Heilan Laddie, Bonnie Dundee, A Hundred Pipers, the slow march Skye Boat Song, the incomparable lament Flowers of the Forest, and other melodies so loved by the Scots. For over a century, on different battlefields in far-flung places, our regiments had served alongside and established strong bonds with Scottish Highland regiments. Through this long association our army had adopted the enduring traditions of bagpipes and tartan. As a child, I decided that one day I too would march to those pipes and drums wearing the khaki uniform my father wore with such pride.

My father rose to the rank of general, as did one uncle and three cousins. Until recently, two of my uncles and two cousins were cabinet ministers in the government, and my mother was a member of parliament. We socialized with the military elite and dignitaries from politics and business. Among our close friends was the late General Zia-ul-Haq who served as president of Pakistan until his aircraft was blown up in flight some years ago. One of my old classmates and friends was his aide-de-camp and died with the general.

The environment I grew up in was thoroughly Muslim, and I had no knowledge of Christianity or its doctrine.

In my early years, my father was not an overly religious man. I remember him facing Mecca and praying to Allah every evening, but then he and my mother would go to the army officers’ club or some nightclub in the city, sometimes returning home late and intoxicated. We had sizable stocks of liquor at home, yet my parents often hosted all-night prayer and Quran recital meetings in our house. It was the way we lived, and I never thought of this as a double standard. It was the normal lifestyle for moderate Muslims. As the years went by, however, my father shifted from moderate to fundamentalist Muslim. He ceased drinking alcohol and grew more religious, even making a number of pilgrimages to Mecca. It was a sudden and stark change.

My mother was born in New Delhi, India. Her oldest brother was my father’s best friend and classmate when they were cadets. It was through that friendship that my parents met. She came from a talented moderate Muslim family that was active in the performing arts. Her sister was a protégé of the famous Oscar-winning director Satyajit Ray and became a famous movie star in India. My mother also had talent. In those days, before the advent