Nothing helps us understand our culture better than looking at it from the outside in. It was in America that I first understood the big picture about Islam, the religion I was born in, and my culture of origin, Egypt. I lived under Islamic values the first thirty years of my life. It was only when I immigrated to the United States and began to live under Western values, which are ultimately derived from the Bible, that I could see those Islamic values for what they are.
The differences between moral and immoral, good and bad, honor and dishonor, and success and failure were totally different in America. I asked myself, Why is it that people in the West stand in line to wait for their turn while in the Muslim world people step on each other to get to be first? Why is it that in the West government leaders leave their office at the end of their term peacefully while in the Muslim world their term ends with either natural death or assassination? The list of questions I asked myself is long, and the answers are even longer. This book is dedicated to exploring those questions and answers.
In the West I found my peace and humanity. This is because of Biblical values that are the foundation of Western society. Among them are treating others as you would want to be treated, judging the sin but not the sinner, love, grace, peace, redemption, and healing.
Islamic society, on the other hand, looks up to the strongest fighters; respects power, those who enslave, bully, and shape others, and those with the most connections; and fears those who make the loudest noise, who will not hesitate to use terror and deception to achieve their goals.
A Black-and-White Matter
The world is hoping for Islam to reform. Many say that since Islam is an Abrahamic faith, if only violent jihad is taken out, Islam should be a great faith, able to co-exist beautifully with the non-Islamic world. In fact, that has been tried and failed miserably many times throughout history.
There are many reasons for that failure. But a central reason is that violent jihad is only the outward symptom of an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to the West and the values of the Bible.
But most nations and people around the world are building up their hopes with wishful thinking and denial of the truth about Islam. Islam has nothing to do with Abraham and Biblical values. In fact it awards the highest esteem to Muslims who kill the children of Abraham, the Jews.
After years of listening to Church sermons, reading the Bible, and interacting with Christians and Jews, I had adopted Biblical values, which, I had discovered, were contrary to all the values I grew up with under Islam. I started piling up a list of major foundational differences between the values of the Bible and of Islam. At first I had fourteen, but over time they reached almost sixty, and I am still regularly discovering additional differences.
My life is a miraculous transformation from the Koran to the Bible and from life under Islamic values to a life under Biblical values. The two different holy books have produced two diametrically different value systems and ultimately very different cultures.
Living under Biblical values saved my life. Today Biblically based societies are receiving millions of Muslim refugees who are mostly escaping Islamic society with its tyranny, chaos, destruction, and terror—though, as they’re not properly vetted, some jihadis are certainly hiding among them.
What Led Me to America?
I was born a Muslim in Cairo, Egypt. Between the ages of four and eight I lived in the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Gaza Strip, where I lost my father to the jihad against Israel. Citizens in majority Muslim countries, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, must adapt their life to a state of permanent jihad, war, revolution, and counter-revolution, especially when the Muslims are financially and militarily strong.
After the trauma of life in Gaza, my family moved back to Cairo, Egypt, where, as I got older, I began to understand the harshness of life under Islamic law. In Egypt I lived through more war: the 1956, 1967, and 1973 Wars with Israel and many other skirmishes, political unrest, and fighting between Arab nations such as Egypt’s war in Yemen. But the sudden loss of my father to jihad against Israel was by far the most traumatic event of my life. Out of that trauma I eventually learned to question how life could be so cheap in Islamic culture.
Asking questions and doubting is taboo under Islam. Islam failed to answer many important questions on my mind and the minds of many Muslims: Why are the majority of Muslims poor, angry, envious, and unhappy? Why does distrust and fear control Islamic interpersonal relationships? Why are Islamic governments so proud to sacrifice the lives of men, women, and children for jihad? Why do distinguished Muslim leaders lie from the pulpit of mosques? Why are we, Muslims, not as tolerant and forgiving of one another as Christians and Westerners? Why don’t we enjoy values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness like the West? Why are we controlled and enslaved by other Muslims? Why do Muslims not appreciate the value of minding one’s own business? And why are terror and violence the preferred solutions to so many of Islam’s problems?
It was only after I moved to America and became Christian that I figured out the answers.
Life Is Better under Biblical Values
Muslims are attracted to life in the West. This is obvious from the millions pouring into the West, while most Westerners would fear living in most parts of the Islamic world.
Very few immigrants to the U.S. attribute their attraction to America to the values of the Bible. Like most immigrants, I felt a natural attraction to American culture but did not fully understood why.
My journey to that understanding started when my flight landed on U.S. soil in late November 1978. Throughout the long flight from Cairo to Los Angeles, I had reflected on where I was and where I was heading. It felt like a scene from a movie about time travel. Flying to America felt like fast-forwarding ahead to the future. And yet the differences were not really a matter of time. Islamic culture will never catch up to Western culture because the differences between them are foundational. I didn’t understand any of that yet. But one thing I was sure of, though; I had made the right decision.
On my passport was a visa to America, the land that Islamic preaching called “the Great Satan”—but where I found my salvation. The contradictions between Islamic propaganda about the West and the reality are huge. The role that propaganda plays in the minds even of Muslims who are eager to move to the West is astounding.
I looked at my passport before landing to make sure that all my documents were in order before I had to present them to U.S. customs authorities. I noticed that in my Egyptian-government-issued passport the word “Muslim” was written under my name. The Egyptian government was telling foreign governments that my religion was not a private matter and that it was assigned by the state. Even though I was about to land in America, I felt I was still in the grip of Islam.
Most of the immigrants I met in America in the late seventies and early eighties were Muslims or Coptic Christian Egyptians. Most of us were unaware of how deeply wounded we had been by life under Islam. But in fact even in the seventies and eighties the majority of Muslim immigrants to the West were escaping years of trauma. Life under sharia is traumatic in and of itself, and it took us many years to heal the wounds of shame, pain, terror, and war.
When I came to America I needed to talk, but none of the other Muslim immigrants wanted to open this sensitive and painful discussion over why we left and the hell we came from. Arab and Islamic pride, shame, and resistance to admitting sin all stood in the way of Muslim immigrants opening up to one another. Islamic cultural taboos prevented us from verbalizing the real reasons why we had all left our homeland. That delayed the process of healing and assimilation. A few never recovered or healed at all.
Opening Up in America
Old pain from the old country did not dissolve away quickly. Most first-generation Muslim immigrants live and die in America without fully ridding themselves of the impact of the indoctrination, pain, and trauma of life under Islam. I remember that in my first few years in America, when people asked me questions about how exciting Egyptian history was, I sometimes felt tears coming down my face uncontrollably. It took me almost ten years to fully open up about my past and confront the baggage I was carrying from life under Islamic values.
In my late thirties I started seeing a counselor for the first time in my life. In my early sessions I burst out crying to the counselor while telling him, “My father died.” He said that he was so sorry to hear that and asked me when did it happen.
I said, “When I was eight.” My whole body was shaking by then. Then he asked me if I ever talked about it before and my answer was “No.” The counselor’s question made me aware that I came from a culture where openly talking about one’s true feelings, inadequacies, and vulnerabilities was taboo.
In Islamic culture, the wives and children of “martyrs” of jihad, like my mother, my siblings, and I, are not supposed to complain but rather to be proud of their hero jihadists.
The counselor was probably a bit staggered by my unusual story. I told him that I went to Gaza with my family as a toddler and left at age eight, that my father was head of the Egyptian military intelligence in Gaza and the Sinai, and that his job required him to continue the endless jihad against Israel. I told him he was assassinated in front of my little brother.
Life in the war zone of Gaza does not sound like the usual childhood, but we adapted to it. Children were not shielded from the bombing zones. Those who died died, and those who lived lived. No one around me questioned why.
As an adult in my late thirties, I once asked my mother why she didn’t stay in safety in Cairo with us children while my father conducted the jihad against Israel from Gaza. Cairo was just a few miles to the west of Gaza by train. My mother seemed confused by my question, as though this possibility had never even occurred to her or to my father.
Arabs of Gaza, under the Egyptian administration back in the fifties, bombed and attacked Israel from near civilian homes, schools, and hospitals. I remember many nights sleeping under my bed out of fear from the constant bombing. But when my family woke up in the morning no one talked about the events of the night; we all just went about our business of living.
Now, looking back on my childhood, I see that the Islamic values of jihad and terror desensitized us to cruelty, terror, fear. Islamic values meant that a constant state of terror against Jews and non-Muslims was regarded as normal and honorable. Under Islam, terror was something to be tolerated and not talked about much. Not even in the media. What the Arab media talked about instead was how bad Jews and other non-Muslims are—to justify the terror.
The only time Muslims spoke about terror was when Israel shot back at Arabs. Suddenly terrorism was a horrible thing, because Arab lives mattered. But when terror was carried out by Muslims against Jews and Christians, especially against the state of Israel, it was not only tolerated, but celebrated as an Islamic holy right. After all, the prophet of Islam himself said, “I have been made victorious with terror” (Bukhari 4.52.220).1
My father, whom I adored, was assassinated, killed in his office by an explosive package sent by Israel, in the presence of my brother. My sisters and I were in a nearby cinema and heard the explosion.
Many of those who attended my father’s funeral declared him a great “shahid,” a brave martyr for jihad. Islamic society expected us to be proud of our sacrifice. As recently as 2015, my mother was on Egyptian national TV expressing her pride in my father’s sacrifice as a shahid, and the sacrifices of our family for jihad.
Watching my mother on that show was difficult, especially as she no longer communicates with me because I became a Christian and support Israel. Islam’s unforgiving nature, resentment, and the ruthless nature of Arab pride and shame have controlled much of my mother’s life, unfortunately. She was a beautiful and intelligent woman, but she absorbed and lived by Islamic culture and Islam’s moral values, and she was never happy. I spent most of my life trying to make her approve of me, to please her and make her happy, but nothing that I did worked.
I suppressed my family tragedy—outwardly expressing very little, even about my father’s death, until I was in my late thirties in the office of a counselor in America, when finally I poured out my grief and started the mourning process.
It was at that point that I began to discover parallels between how Islam treats its despised enemies—Jews, the state of Israel—and how it treats its own people. Islamic culture sacrifices Muslim families for jihad. It even desecrates their bodies and makes a mockery of their grief. There are always extreme acts of mourning and wailing over the dead bodies when Muslims are killed in the jihad against Islam’s enemies. Dead bodies are often paraded in the streets before media cameras. The purpose is to show the world how evil Israel is. And to achieve the goal of slandering Israel and justifying Islamic terror against Jews, Muslims have been caught producing videos of fake victims and fake funerals.2
The Arab-Israeli conflict is representative of the dysfunction of Islamic moral values. The heart of Islam is not in the well-being of anyone, either Muslims or non-Muslims. In Islam, everyone is exploited, except the few at the top of the pyramid scheme.
Discovering the Opposite Values
A recent story from Afghanistan illustrates what I am trying to relay about the opposite values of the Biblically based West and the Islamic Middle East. An Afghani rapist bragged to an American soldier about how he had chained a boy to a bed for seven days, and how, when the boy’s mother tried to save her son, he beat her too. The young American Green Beret reacted by roughing up the bragging rapist. In doing that, he violated U.S. Army orders to ignore the rampant sexual abuse of young children, mostly boys, in Afghanistan and only to report the rape to local authorities. (Those orders are an example of how accommodation of Islam is undermining the Biblical values of the West.) The rapist was an Afghani police commander. The American Green Beret was discharged from the Army for disobeying orders.3
That story struck a chord with me because in the Muslim world it is not uncommon to be punished for doing the right thing, and standing up to oppression, tyranny, and the abuse of human beings. I could also relate to the Afghani mother and her son’s disappointment with and distrust of their own culture and legal system. It took a young American soldier brought up on Biblical values to hopefully awaken the conscience of a nation.
Defending what one’s gut says is right is often punished in Muslim culture. As a child and teenager I was punished for doing something similar to what the American soldier did in Afghanistan. I often witnessed brutal beatings and the abuse of maids, and I often defended the weak, standing between the maids and their brutal abusers. That got me in trouble and some of the anger and rage landed on me when I tried to stop the violence with my little body. I was blamed and told that it was none of my business; if I got hurt it was my fault for butting in to rescue the semi-slaves of society. There are many postings on YouTube showing the epidemic of physical abuse of housemaids and manual workers in Muslim countries, especially in Saudi Arabia and Arab Gulf nations.
It all goes back to moral values. Some actions that are commonplace and considered normal in Islamic culture would put people in jail in the U.S.
American jails are full of people who have done what Muslims in Islamic countries do in public and in the open and are never criticized for.
On the other hand, there are also many people in the Muslim world who are executed or jailed for “crimes” that are considered basic human rights in America. For example a Muslim girl who marries a Christian man is condemned to death if she refuses to leave the marriage, and the Islamic government also has the right to annul the marriage. When I wanted to marry a Christian man in Egypt, we had to wait for seven years until he and I were allowed to leave the country.
I have no childhood memories of being happy or being around happy people. Being happy and joyful was never a value in Islamic culture. Muhammad never said that he came to set us free, give us joy, or heal us from sin like Jesus did. On the contrary, happiness and good news were often concealed from people. If Muslims were happy, would they be able to hold onto the hatred and resentment that fuels the jihad against Islam’s enemies?
Now thirty-seven years later, I am still transforming: from Muslim to Christian, from Egyptian to American, from an upbringing of pride and shame to forgiveness and joy, from a people pleaser to a God pleaser, from being judgmental to leaving judgment to God, from seeing what’s wrong with others to seeing what’s good in others, from oppressed to liberated, from chaos to harmony, and from anger to internal peace.
It is said that most Americans take their freedoms for granted because that is all they know from birth. That is especially true when it comes to linking American freedoms, democracy, and way of life to Biblical values. Not too many people notice that Biblical values are everywhere in America, even among those who call themselves secular, non-religious, or atheist. But I see Biblical values everywhere here. There is no other explanation for how different life in America is from life in the Islamic world. I see Biblical values in the joyful smile of a supermarket employee asking me, “Is there anything I can help you with?” I see them in the honesty of most Americans when I got my purse returned back to me after losing it in a public area. I see them in the sincerity and kindness of my elderly American neighbor telling me, “I will pray for you.”
Below is a short list of just a few of the differences between Islamic values and Biblical values that I have personally experienced in my life. I will discuss each of these—and many others—in detail later in the book:
1. We Are All Sinners vs. They Are All Sinners
2. Life Is Sacred vs. Death Is Worship
3. Pleasing God vs. Pleasing Human Beings
4. Judge the Sin and Not the Sinner vs. Judge the Sinner, Not the Sin
5. Redemption from Sin vs. Immunity from Sin
6. Guided by the Holy Spirit vs. Manipulated by Human Terror
7. God the Redeemer vs. Allah the Humiliator
8. Healing of Spirit, Body, and Soul vs. No Healing Is Needed
9. Jesus Came to Save Us vs. We Have to Save Allah and Muhammad (and Muhammad’s) Reputation
10. Jesus Died for Us vs. We Must Die for Allah
11. Confession of Sin vs. Concealment of Sin
12. At War with the Devil vs. at War with Flesh and Blood
13. The Truth Will Set You Free vs. Lying Is an Obligation
14. Trust vs. Distrust
15. Faith vs. Submission
It is unfortunate that many Americans take Biblical values for granted, assuming that kindness, honesty, and joy are the norm, with or without the Bible. Those of us who grew up in the parts of the world beyond the influence of the Bible know better. Biblical values are the product of the Bible, and they cannot be preserved separate from the Bible. I am writing this book because I want to tell America that many countries and religions around the world do not live by Biblical values. In fact the area of the world where Biblical values were birthed, the Middle East, no longer practices Biblical values.
Biblical values are a treasure that America must never lose. Many Americans today fear that Biblical values are eroding, and I share their fears. The following chapters will explore the differences between Biblical values and Islamic values that led me to choose the Bible.