Chapter Twenty-Nine

The Ground War—Part Two

More accounts of leaders on the front lines

For the past several decades, the most effective and influential pastors and ministry leaders operating on the front lines of the Christian ground war in the Muslim world have been those who, like Hamid, were born into nominal Christian families. But as more Muslims have come to faith in Christ, grown in their faith, and begun to gain practical ministry experience, a rising number of Muslim Background Believers have emerged as effective spiritual leaders in the epicenter as well.

Samir is one example. I met him on my first trip to Iraq in February 2008 and was immediately impressed with his love for Jesus Christ and his passion for ministry.613

Born in 1968 in a southern Iraqi village, Samir, an Arab, was raised a devout Shia Muslim. While his forefathers were Shia imams (high-ranking Islamic clerics) and his parents were devout, Samir said, “Nobody pushed me to be very religious. I chose that. I was about eleven or twelve. I started going to the mosque and meditating on many things. There was something special between me and my God, I believed. I felt God was very near to me. I was so close to God that I used to try to do funny things to make God laugh. And I felt He did laugh, and I felt He was happy . . . and I was happy.”

After he graduated from college, trained to be an electrician, Samir was arrested. “I was perceived by Saddam’s police as a Shia activist or a subversive,” he told me.

“Were you a rebel?” I asked him.

“Yes, I was,” he conceded. “I was against the government and against the Sunnis. But I was not violent.”

Samir spent seven months in jail. When he was released, he was required to serve in the Iraqi Army, but he refused and was sent back to jail. A special court released him from army service—Saddam’s Sunni-dominated army had no interest in training Shias to use weapons—but Samir was fired from his job. With his growing reputation as a Shia activist, he found it difficult to find work.

By the end of 1994, Samir decided that if he was going to be tagged as a Shia Radical anyway, he might as well become a Shia Radical. So he moved to the Iraqi city of Najaf and applied to study at the Hawza, the most elite Shia Muslim seminary in all of Iraq, second in prestige and influence only to the main seminary in Qom, Iran. Once accepted, Samir plunged himself into his studies and received high marks from his professors.

In time, Samir not only completed his studies but was greatly honored by being invited to become a professor at the seminary to teach Shia doctrine to the fresh, eager students. Samir eagerly agreed.

Visions and Trances

“There are two areas of teaching at the Hawza,” Samir told me. “The first concerns knowledge—that is, teaching students Islamic theology and Sharia law. The second concerns one’s spiritual life—that is, helping students develop their relationship with God. I was fascinated with both, but especially with getting closer to God and helping others do the same.

“Shia Islam is very mystical, and we taught the students that there are higher and higher levels of spiritual growth that they need to attain and lead other people to. One of these levels is discovering God’s love for you and building your love for God until you become consumed by God. The challenge is that Shia doctrine teaches that God’s love is not available for everyone, only for those who go through this very specific spiritual journey that we were teaching at the Hawza.

“We taught our Shia seminary students to do various spiritual exercises. In these exercises you are supposed to meditate until you are in, essentially, a trance. In that trance, you will begin to see visions or revelations of ancient imams and the various prophets and other historical figures. But Shias consider actually seeing such visions a very low level of revelation, because seeing these ancient figures could hinder a person from going higher and seeing God Himself. But these visions and revelations are indications that you are going in the right direction.

“Now, please understand, Joel, that I was teaching this all to my students. I was one of only four professors at the seminary teaching this form of meditation. But one day something unexpected happened.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“One day I was meditating, and it was almost as if I was flying in an airplane,” Samir explained. “I was climbing up from the ground, higher and higher, and then I started passing through the clouds, and I was climbing higher and higher and then suddenly it was as though I was slipping away from the atmosphere and entering another reality, and then I saw Jesus. He was smiling at me. He looked just like the one I had seen in the JESUS film that I had once seen on television, but with a darker face, an Eastern face. In the first vision, I had no communication with Jesus, but I felt very peaceful. Then, over the course of the next few days, He appeared a second, third, fourth, and fifth time. He began to speak to me. He gave me answers to the many questions I had.”

The Qur’an, Samir noted, teaches Muslims that Jesus is to be highly revered. It says Jesus was born of a virgin, was a wise teacher, and did miracles. But it does not give many more details than this. Yet Samir had become intensely hungry to understand this Jesus who kept appearing to him. He could not tell the two hundred Shia students he was teaching about the visions he was having. But as a scholar, he knew he had to do more research. So one day he told one of his students to go to Baghdad and find a complete Arabic copy of the Bible for him, though he did not say why. The student complied, and Samir, in the privacy of his own room, began reading the Bible voraciously. The more he read, the more intrigued with Jesus he became. So he would pray more, hoping to see Jesus again, and he did. For a certain period in the mid-1990s, Samir said, Jesus was appearing to him every day.

“The Lord in some of these appearances would give me homework assignments. He would tell me where to read in the Bible, specific verses. He would give me a verse, without a specific address. For example, He would tell me to find where it says, ‘But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.’ But He wouldn’t tell me where in the Bible that verse is. So I would have to read the whole Bible to find the verses.”

Other times, there were specific events that Jesus would tell Samir would happen, and they would come to pass. Once, for example, Jesus told Samir that he would see a certain person in Beirut, and sure enough, the next time Samir was in Beirut he saw that person, even though that person did not live in Beirut and rarely traveled to Lebanon.

“From the first homework assignment that He gave me,” Samir told me, “He called me to follow Him alone. He made it clear that He had a very big work to do and that He was calling me to be part of it.”

The Transforming Power of the Bible

Samir, the Shia seminary professor, had fallen in love with Jesus Christ. He had become convinced that Jesus was the One True God and the only way to salvation. He had become convinced that Islam was wrong, that the Qur’an was not the word of God, and that only the Bible contained the true words of the living God. The process he went through to reach such conclusions was not a classic conversion process, to be sure. But there was no question: Samir had become a fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ. And as soon as he realized his calling to serve Christ by teaching the Bible and not the Qur’an, he fled the Hawza for his life.

Samir told me that when he thinks about his salvation, he remembers the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis. Joseph was captured by his brothers and sold into slavery. But eventually God set him free, made him a leader in Egypt, and used him to save his brothers and all the people of the Middle East from a terrible famine. Joseph could have been angry with his brothers for forcing him into slavery, but he wasn’t. “You meant evil against me,” Joseph told his brothers, “but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive” (Genesis 50:20).

Similarly, Samir believes he was enslaved in Shia Islam, but he is not angry with his Shia brothers. Rather, he believes God took him to the Hawza to help him better understand the Shias and to learn how to reach them with the gospel of Jesus Christ and teach them through the transforming power of the Bible.

“I am so grateful to God, and I am so fortunate,” Samir told me. “By entering all those visions and trances I could have been trapped by Satan forever and sent to hell. But I think that God, in His amazing love and grace, respected the innocence of my childhood, when I wanted to know Him and make Him laugh. So God protected me from getting trapped. He pulled me close to His heart through Jesus Christ and taught me His Word. I was so lost, but He came and saved me just because He loved me so much.”

Samir is convinced a great revival is under way in the Shia world and that God is revealing Himself in supernatural ways to many devout Muslims who were lost and trapped in their own sins like he once was. In Iran to his east, millions of Shias are coming to faith in Jesus Christ, and tens of thousands are entering full-time Christian ministry to preach the gospel, make disciples, and plant churches. Samir believes that in time millions of Iraqi Shias will come to Christ too, and he is committed to teaching the Bible to young Iraqi disciples to prepare for that day to come to fruition. “The Lord has a special work to be done among the Shias of Iraq,” he said with great passion and confidence. “God is working directly here, just like in the first century when Jesus chose the disciples directly.”

Samir’s story inspires almost everyone who hears it. In fact, while he was sharing his testimony with me, another Iraqi—in this case a former Sunni Wahhabi Muslim who had his own miraculous encounter with the Lord and is now in full-time Christian ministry—was sitting beside me and listening as well. Deeply moved by Samir’s faith, this MBB turned to me and said, “Jesus has removed the hatred for the Shias from my heart. When I see the intense, passionate devotion of the Shias to God, I am moved. They are wrong. They don’t yet know that Jesus is the King of kings and the Lord of lords, as my brother Samir now does. But they are so devoted. I want to understand this devotion better and help reach them with God’s truth so they can be devoted to Jesus instead. And now, when I see for myself that God has chosen a Shia person to follow Jesus Christ and serve Him in ministry, I know that He is really powerful and is really moving in this country.”614

A Kurdish Jihadist Becomes a Revivalist

God is drawing not only Iranians and Arabs into His Kingdom; He is drawing Kurds to Christ as well and is appointing them to be courageous “ground warriors” for His name.

During my first trip to Iraq, I had the privilege of meeting a particularly passionate and effective Kurdish Christian leader by the name of Kerem.615 Today, he is sharing the gospel, discipling new Muslim converts, and training up future church leaders. But not that long ago, Kerem was a foot soldier in a much different war.

“I was born in 1969 in a Sunni religious family,” Kerem told me one cold winter night in Kurdistan as we sipped coffee together. “Because my family was religious and committed to religion and I was going regularly to mosque, I met members of a Radical religious group. And gradually I found that those people believed in jihad. I was so excited with them. I had faith in jihad like them. My terrorist group that I was a member of was worse than al Qaeda.”

“In what way was it worse?” I asked.

“Al Qaeda in Iraq is a known organization with a known leader and with clear intentions of attacking the U.S. and Israel, as well as Muslim apostates, with suicide bombers and other terrorist means,” he explained. “But our group [Al Haraka Al Islamia Fe Kurdistan, or the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan] was brainwashing simple people to become time bombs in their own homes—to become radicalized Muslims who reject every norm and custom in their home if it is not pure, fanatical, Islamic teaching, to create a spirit of rebellion. We trained people to think of themselves as true, pure holy men and then to attack their families as infidels.”

Kerem became a teacher of the Qur’an and received terrorist training to kill infidels. “But from 1988 until the beginning of 1991,” he told me, “I had many questions inside myself about God. I hated serving God by force. I hated praying by force, fasting by force, and I did not feel right about forcing others to follow God and destroy their families. When I asked my leaders—religious leaders or political leaders—if this was right, if we were doing the just thing, they told me don’t ask these questions. I was prohibited from asking questions.”

After Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the subsequent Gulf War in 1991 in which the U.S.-led coalition defeated Saddam’s forces and liberated Kuwait, there was a revolution in Iraq. The Kurdish Muslims in the north and the Shia Muslims in the south rose up in hopes of overthrowing Saddam’s government. “We declared jihad against Saddam and his regime,” Kerem explained. “We carried weapons and started to fight.”

One day, Kerem and several of his colleagues led an attack against an Iraqi military unit and in the process captured four prisoners. “The emir, or the prince, of our group told us to go and kill those prisoners. There was a river nearby. Other prisoners captured by fellow terrorists were killed there and thrown into the river. We took our prisoners there, and they knew that we were about to start shooting them. But they were begging for their lives, and they started praying parts of the Qur’an because they noticed that we were Muslims.”

Kerem was deeply conflicted. As a Kurd, he hated Saddam’s regime and was dedicated to liberating the Kurdish people. But he had been developing doubts for some time about the violence he and his friends were engaged in. Now he kept telling himself, “These are Muslims. As a Muslim, I cannot kill them.”

At that point Kerem threw down his weapon and refused to join in the executions. “One of my group told me that I would be shot because I had disobeyed the emir,” Kerem recalled. “But I prefered to be murdered instead of being a murderer!”

The executions proceeded. All four of the prisoners were killed. When Kerem and his colleagues got back to their headquarters, sure enough, Kerem was denounced by the leaders of the group for disobeying orders. But he shot back, “I will do worse than disobey your orders. I divorce Islam from this moment.” He repeated the words three times. “They thought I was giving excuses for my behavior. They threatened to kill me because I had left the religion.”

Fearing for his life, Kerem fled from the headquarters and eventually escaped to Iran for safety.

“Wow,” I said. “Things must have really been bad for an Iraqi to escape to Iran for safety.”

He laughed and agreed. But he said he didn’t know what else to do. He was a wanted man inside Iraq. He was a wanted man inside his own terrorist organization. What’s more, he was wracked with guilt and anxiety and confusion and desperate to find peace.

The Turning Point

“Inwardly I knew there was a God,” Kerem told me. “But I also knew He was a different God from Allah.”

The Qur’an, he said, was teaching him to hate and to kill. He, in turn, was teaching such violent suras from the Qur’an to young, impressionable Muslims, and he was recruiting others to wage jihad against Saddam’s regime as well as against Muslim families that weren’t as Radical as his terrorist organization thought they should be. He knew this was wrong, but he had no idea where to turn or what to do next. “When I left this terrorist group, I left also the praying and everything,” Kerem said. “I hated God. I hated praying. I hated everything called religion. I liked only one thing: myself, my life.”

Years later, Kerem was able to slip back into Iraq. He decided to move to Baghdad and lose himself in the vastness of the big city. Gifted with artistic talents, he enrolled in a fine arts academy, and completely unexpectedly, this proved to be the turning point in Kerem’s life.

“There was a painting on the wall of one of the classrooms with a cross on it and the words, in Arabic, ‘God is love.’ I was curious about this, but I was also confused. It was a very strange thing to me to think of God as love. The god I knew had no love. There was a Christian girl in my class, so one day I asked her, ‘What does that saying mean?’”

The girl told him that this was a verse from the Bible, from 1 John 4:16, which says plainly, “God is love.”

“I had no idea what she was talking about,” Kerem said. “So I asked her if she could get me a copy of an Arabic Bible—there was no Bible in the Kurdish language at the time. After two days she brought me one book, the book of Matthew. I went back home and started reading. I couldn’t sleep. I read it three times. As I read, I knew it was all true. I just knew it. And I felt a peace that I couldn’t explain come over me. I felt angels all around me. I felt that there was a burden on my chest that was gone. I felt that I had discovered someone called Jesus. The next day I went back to the college, and I was smiling. Most of the students noticed that, and they asked me why I was happy. I couldn’t tell them why. Not yet.”

That night, Kerem turned on his radio and happened to tune in to Trans World Radio, a Christian broadcasting network operating out of Monte Carlo. “The man on the program was repeating the same verses of the Sermon on the Mount that I had just read in Matthew.616 I was so moved by the Sermon on the Mount. It was so beautiful. I had never heard any teaching like it, and I knew it was true. I knew in my heart that these words were spoken by the One True God. After finishing his program, the man on the radio offered the opportunity to pray to receive Jesus Christ as my Savior. I didn’t hesitate. I accepted this lovely God. And from that day my life started changing. I had been hating God, but then I started loving God. I had been hating people of all religions, but then I started loving all, even people in Islam. Once I became a follower of Jesus, then Jesus just gave me a love for people I had never experienced and could hardly explain.”

Kerem not only found himself filled with a divine love; he also had an insatiable hunger to know God personally and study the Bible more and more for himself. He read the book of Matthew constantly, as it was the only portion of the Bible that he had at that point. As he read, he developed an intense desire to obey Jesus because he loved Him so much.

He learned about the importance of being baptized as an act of repentance—that is, turning away from one’s own way of doing things and choosing to follow Christ—and as a simple act of publicly professing one’s love for and devotion to the living God. He saw that John the Baptist told the people to “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2). He saw that Jesus was baptized in order to “fulfill all righteousness.” He saw that this made the Father say He was “well-pleased” with Jesus (Matthew 3:13-17). He also saw that Jesus told His disciples to “go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20).

Kerem decided that he, too, should be baptized. He quietly visited one church after another, but they were filled with nominal Christians—not true followers of Jesus Christ—who refused to baptize him because he had been a Muslim. He insisted that he had been changed by God, but they refused to listen. “They were afraid to baptize me,” Kerem explained. “They were afraid of the secret police. They were afraid of informants. They were afraid for many reasons. But they forgot the 366 times in the Bible it says, ‘Do not be afraid.’”

Kerem refused to give up, and eventually, by God’s grace, he found a brave Catholic priest who baptized him in the early 1990s.

This is one of the things I love most about Kerem: he has no fear. He believes in the greatness of his God. He knows how powerful his God is because of how dramatically God changed his life, from jihad to Jesus. Now, Kerem says, he is willing to go wherever Jesus tells him to go, do whatever Jesus tells him to do, and say whatever Jesus tells him to say, no matter what happens.

And he is not all talk. Kerem, I have found, is a man of action. First he led his brother to faith in Jesus Christ. Then he helped translate the New Testament into the Kurdish language. Now he is helping translate the Old Testament into Kurdish. He is also training young men to read and study and be able to teach the Bible, because he has seen the power of God’s Word to change lives, beginning with his own. What’s more, he is absolutely convinced that Kurdish MBBs are going to be used by God to take the gospel all throughout the Middle East—through regions of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran—and he is determined to stay engaged in the spiritual battle for the souls of Muslims until God takes him home to heaven.

“The truth is, I did not really decide to follow Jesus,” Kerem told me. “Jesus called me to follow Him, and I was not able to resist that call. Like when Jesus called Matthew and said, ‘Follow Me,’ Matthew left all to follow Jesus. He couldn’t resist. This is a divine calling.”

One Last Question

The apostle John concluded his account of the life of Christ with this thought: “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25).

I feel these chapters on the Revivalists could be concluded the same way. Having met with and interviewed more than 150 Revivalist leaders, I could not possibly include all of their stories in these pages. And I must confess this pains me, because I find each of their testimonies of God’s love and power utterly amazing and deeply encouraging, especially in light of the extreme persecution and pressures that these leaders face on a daily basis.

Once when I was in Iraq, I had the privilege of having dinner with the first known Shia Muslim convert to Christianity in the entire modern history of Iraq. He became a follower of Jesus Christ in 1967. He was baptized in 1972. He began to share his faith and make disciples and plant churches in 1985. He has been kidnapped by Radicals multiple times. But he loves Jesus more than ever. And he is absolutely convinced that the Iraqi church will eventually be led by MBBs, even though most pastors there now are NCBBs.

Another time, I had the honor of dining with arguably the most influential ministry leader in Iraq, an NCBB who told me the story of how he went into full-time ministry. He had been an ordinary professional business man. One day, his village was attacked by Radical Islamic terrorists, one of whom ran up to his house, leveled an AK-47 at him, and pulled the trigger. But the gun didn’t fire. The terrorist pulled the trigger again. It still didn’t fire. The terrorist pointed the gun in the air and pulled the trigger to test the gun. This time it did fire. So once more the terrorist pointed the gun at this Christian man and pulled the trigger. But again, the gun didn’t fire. The terrorist ran off, and the Christian man knew that God had miraculously spared his life. The next day, he quit the Iraqi oil company he was working for and committed himself to serving the Lord full-time, making disciples and training church leaders.

In Afghanistan, I had the privilege of meeting a senior Afghan church leader who had been living in the United States in 2001. That summer, he saw a documentary film on television about the horrors the Taliban was inflicting on the people of his home country. He prayed, “Lord, if You get rid of the Taliban, I will quit my job and move back to Afghanistan to serve You there.” Two months later, the 9/11 attacks happened. Two months after that, this man saw a breaking news story on CNN announcing that U.S. military forces were on the ground in Afghanistan to destroy al Qaeda and the Taliban. He gasped. The Lord had kept His end of the bargain. Now it was his turn. Keeping his promise, he quit his job and moved to Afghanistan, where God is now using him in a mighty way.

In talking to these and a host of other Christian leaders in the epicenter, I had one question that continued nagging at me. They were describing millions of people coming to Christ throughout the region through dreams and visions. And they were noting that those who come to faith in Christ through visions are fruitful immediately, meaning they start living holy, pure lives and are completely dedicated to Christ from the moment of conversion. They compared these conversions to Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus in Acts 9. Paul never doubted his decision to follow Jesus later on. He never wavered. He never faltered. He was bold and devout right away, because his experience with Christ was so personal and so powerful that it changed him forever.

What, then, I asked, is the role of sharing the gospel, preaching the gospel, showing people the JESUS film, using radio and satellite broadcasting, and so forth if God is drawing these people to Himself supernaturally?

“That’s a great question,” one dear Iraqi Christian brother replied. “It’s true that every single Shia MBB I know or have ever heard of has come to faith in Christ directly, without apparent human persuasion. It’s not always a dream or vision, although it often is. Sometimes it is simply that the Lord speaks to them directly in their heart, sometimes audibly, sometimes not. The key is that one day they don’t believe in Jesus, and the next day they do. But it’s not because someone sat down and persuaded them. It’s that God just did a supernatural work in their heart.”

“Okay,” I said, “but again, why are so many Revivalists risking their lives to communicate the gospel to Muslims if the Muslims who are coming to Christ are not being persuaded by the Revivalists?”

“Because, Joel, the Bible tells us to teach the Word of God and to preach the gospel, and so we obey,” he replied gently. “And actually, when you look closer at the stories of these MBBs, you will find that each of them has had some exposure to the name of Jesus and the story of Jesus in his or her past. Think of what the apostle Paul said: ‘Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved. How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher? How will they preach unless they are sent? Just as it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things!” . . . So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.’617

“Likewise, in Matthew 13, Jesus teaches the parable of the seed and the sower. He insisted that His followers sow seeds—that is, preach the gospel and teach the Word of God—everywhere. We don’t know whose hearts will be like good soil and receive God’s Word and bear the fruit of changed lives. Only God knows that. We are simply supposed to obey. Just like the farmer—he just plants the seeds; it is God who makes them grow and bear fruit. Arguing with Muslims about Christ will not lead people to Christ. But we are supposed to teach them about Jesus whenever possible, and encourage them to read the Bible, and love them, and pray for them; and somehow God uses this as part of His mysterious plan to adopt Muslims into His Kingdom.”

I had my answer, and it wasn’t complicated. If you love Me, Jesus said, you will obey Me. It was not an easy answer, but it was simple.