23

My father had laughed when I first said it. It was not a small laugh either; it was a roar so loud all the traders in the market stopped their business and looked at us. He was clean shaven at the time, and he laughed so hard that the veins in his neck stood out. I liked the sound of his laugh, so I said it again.

“I want the ice cream shaped like a panda. That one right there.”

As predicted, he laughed again, placing his hand on my shoulder. It was gentle and warm, and I wanted to reach up and hold it. I wanted to weave my tiny fingers around his, to hold on to this moment and never let it go.

“Why not something else?” His eyes sparkled as he teased me. “Look, they even have sliced cow’s foot. I know how much you like that.”

I made a face, crossed my arms, and pretended to be mad. “Cows can be found anywhere, but pandas only live in China. That’s why I want the ice cream.”

My father gave in and then told me it was time to head back home. I walked beside him, holding the panda ice cream like a trophy, carefully licking up the drips and trying to make the treat last as long as possible.

It was my happiest moment with him.

In my memory, he started growing his beard soon after. The beard signaled an end to his placing his hand on my shoulder, an end to his filling the air with laughter, an end to my walking alone with him to the market.

The truth was less dramatic. The signs of physical affection, the sound of laughter, and those daddy-daughter moments were never regular features of my life. That memory stands in isolation, a single event in stark contrast to all the others. Even before he grew his beard, he was characteristically distant and cold.

As the debates continued and my father watched silently from the back, I knew he would never change his mind. There was no nostalgia for him, no idyllic period to return to. The moments of warmth were as temporary as the panda ice cream that had melted in the sun. As the third week of debates drew to a close, I decided two things needed to happen urgently.

I’d had little contact with my two older sisters since they married and moved out. That made me even more determined to share my faith with my brother and younger sister. I had met with them nightly since all this began. We would talk about what had been said in the debates, and they would ask questions about Christianity. It was important to me that, along with seeing the risks of becoming a Christian and the flaws of Islam, they knew about the wonderful freedom and truth of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

One night, about three weeks into the debates, my brother and sister told me they were ready to give their lives to Jesus. With our voices hushed to make sure my father did not wake up, my mother and I sat with them in my room and led them in prayer.

When we had finished our tearstained embraces, I gave them a warning: “Be careful. Don’t tell anyone you’re a Christian yet. When the right time comes, you’ll know it. But until then, you have to keep your new faith secret.”

†

More debates took place in the days that followed, and as before, I tried to take any opportunity I could to share my faith. Sometimes that was harder than other times. The atmosphere in the room was beginning to shift. No longer was I facing educated, thoughtful lecturers from my college. Nor were there foolish clerics hoping to win me back by weighing the Qur’an and the Holy Bible side by side. Instead, my opponents were all pompous clerics who tried to patronize me.

Sometimes, when they felt threatened, they would get angry. It became increasingly common for me to find myself shouted at, called an infidel, and accused of blasphemy. At times like these, the conversation felt less like a debate and more like a rally to stir up hatred among the crowd.

At one such time, a mullah was shouting at me for not following Muhammad’s sunna—the collection of his actions and deeds.

“Are you following all of his sunna?” I asked when his tirade paused.

“Of course!” He looked around at the people in the audience, many of whom were nodding at him.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “You’re missing one.”

“Which one?”

“Hazrat Muhammad was fifty-one years old when he married Hazrat Aisha, who was just six years old at the time, a few years younger than Hazrat Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah. He waited three years, but still she was nine years old when he took her to his bed.”

He looked at me blankly. I pressed on. “Do you have a daughter?”

“Yes.”

“How old is she?”

“Eight.”

“Tell me honestly: Wasn’t Hazrat Aisha too young to be taken as a wife when she was still playing with dolls? According to this current era, it would be rape or child abuse.”

He held up his hand. “Hazrat Muhammad just obeyed Allah.”

“Really?” I knew that with every word, I was fueling the hatred of me in the room. “If Hazrat Muhammad was instructed by Allah to take a child as his wife, why did he refuse the first two caliphs of Islam, Abu Bakr Siddique and Umar Farooq, when they asked to marry his own daughter Fatimah? Why, instead of those old men, did Hazrat Muhammad choose for her husband Ali, who was about twenty-five years old? And why, when Hazrat Muhammad had multiple wives, did he never allow his son-in-law Ali to get a second wife, even though he desired to marry the daughter of Abu Jahal? Hazrat Muhammad allowed other followers to be polygamists, but he didn’t want to upset his daughter Fatimah.”

The mullah was quiet. He looked at me with nothing short of pure hatred. As the crowd started shouting, I made my final point. “I became a Christian because in the Holy Bible, the law is the same for everyone. There is no hypocrisy within its pages.”

†

Three days before the end of the fourth week, I had my twenty-first debate. Thanks to my opponent, the atmosphere in the room was different from the start. He was an imam, a famous cleric from the other side of the country. He’d drawn a large crowd—easily the biggest one yet. I guessed that between the people wedged together on the floor, those in the courtyard and the street outside, and the others gathered elsewhere in the house, there must have been almost two hundred in attendance.

The room was silent. I watched people strain to get a better look at my opponent, and I took a look too. I remembered seeing him on TV once or twice. I had never listened to what he was preaching, but it was obvious he was a celebrity in our community. For the first time in all the debates, I felt a shiver of nerves run through me.

“Tell me,” he said as he got up to speak, “is it right to worship Jesus—to praise him or bow down to him? Does a prophet deserve that?”

My brain blanked. I had nothing to say. It was all I could do to look at the imam and not be paralyzed by the silence all around us. “That’s—that’s a good question,” I stammered. “What do you think?”

His smile was gentle and genuine, and for a moment I wanted to trust him. I got a glimpse of how good it would feel to have all these people look at me with respect and awe rather than hatred and contempt.

“He was human,” the imam said. “He was created by Allah, the exalted one. But it’s Allah and Allah alone we should praise.”

I looked around the room. For once, people were staring not at me but at my opponent. They were nodding along. But how many of them, I wondered, had ever read the Qur’an for themselves? How many of them had studied it or asked hard questions of their clerics instead of simply accepting surface-level answers? How many of them had gone deep and faced the confusion and lies at the heart of the Qur’an?

I felt so sorry for them. As I stood up to speak, my tongue was released. I called out some references in the Qur’an and asked the imam to read them. He did not argue. When he read three different accounts of Allah commanding the angels to bow down before Adam, the imam stared back at me, as calm as anything.

“Those three references all show Allah commanding the angels to bow down to a human. Is that right?”

“I don’t know,” he said, unperturbed.

“Might it be that this was a kind of practice for when Jesus was born? The Qur’an tells us that Jesus Christ is both God’s Holy Spirit (Ruh al-Qudus) and his Word (Kalimatullah) in human flesh. Jesus Christ is more worthy of praise and worship than Adam. And aren’t we allowed to worship God whether he is in the form of the Holy Spirit, whom no one can see, or as human flesh?”

The imam remained unfazed by my words. He simply sat and listened, concentrating on what I was saying as if I were defending Islam rather than exposing it. I told him about the 353 Old Testament prophecies that Jesus fulfilled and about how at Jesus’ baptism God sent his Spirit in the form of a dove. Still the imam just stared politely at me.

Then he left. There was no shouting, no retaliation—just a quick exit as the crowd watched in silence.

A few moments later, the room exploded. People were shouting, waving their arms, and surging like an angry tide. I sat down and thanked God for again providing me with knowledge and wisdom that was not mine. I blocked out the sounds of the room and poured out my gratitude to God.

When I looked up, there were no angry faces shouting at me. All I saw were people’s backs as the last few shuffled quietly out of the room. Only one person was looking at me: my father. His stare was more cold and lifeless than I had ever seen it.

†

I was grateful that my brother and sister had become Christians, but there was one other matter I had to attend to before my father brought the debates to a close. I sensed that my time was running short, and I knew I needed to act quickly.

My mother helped me, first by making sure the house was clear when I made the phone call and then by taking me to the market the next day. We said good-bye at the market near her workshop and agreed to meet each other there within two hours.

When I walked into John’s lab again, it was as if the fatwa and the mobs and the debates had never happened. We talked easily about his work and my mother’s conversion and my brother’s healing. I could not stop smiling, rejoicing at what God was doing in both our lives.

But reality soon set in.

“We don’t have long,” he said. “My pastor is ready.”

He led me out of his lab and into his car. Then we headed to the other side of the city, to a neighborhood I had never been to before. It was one of the poorest areas around and was home to many of the Christians who swept the streets.

In the past, I would have been nervous to be seen there. Even after becoming a Christian, it was risky for someone dressed in a full Islamic veil like I was to be seen there. Not all Christians, I knew, were like John. In fact, many Christians in Pakistan were hostile toward Muslims. As a result of years of mistreatment and hostility, they sometimes reacted out of fear and mistrust.

But that day I was not scared at all. I knew there was a risk I might be stopped and questioned, but what could they do to me that was worse than what my father had in mind? We parked the car and walked the last few blocks to an unremarkable-looking building on an unimpressive street. I did not mind that people were staring at me: I was dressed as one of their persecutors. They had every right to be scared.

Everyone knew what Islamic extremists were doing to Christians. Not long before, a Christian girl who was charged with stealing had been given the death penalty by an Islamic court, and a Christian man whose crime wasn’t even specified was hog-tied and dragged through the streets, again with the support of the Islamic officials. When the mob stopped dragging him, they finished him off within minutes.

I thought of a Muslim woman who was a teacher at my college. When her five children were still small, her husband died. A year after being widowed, she announced that she wanted to marry a Christian man. People gathered in the street to protest, screaming that she was wrong to marry an infidel. She stood on the street with her children, begging the crowd not to hurt her or her family. She promised to abandon her plans of marriage, but after that she was never accepted back into the community. She lost her job, her home—everything.

When I was a child, there was a woman I knew who had converted from Christianity to Islam when she got married. She was considered a pariah, an outsider. Nobody would accept the food she sent around as gifts from house to house. Even though the cooked almonds and cashews in milk smelled delicious, my mother told me not to touch it. “The blood inside is Christian blood,” she said. And when this woman’s children were of marrying age, no one would marry them. There was no mercy for her. Ever.

†

I stood at the front of the church and looked at the pastor. He seemed nervous.

“You’re sure nobody saw you come here?”

“I’m sure,” John said.

The pastor looked at me. “And you told nobody?”

“Nobody,” I said.

He bit his lip and checked the window for the third time since we had walked in.

“Please,” I said, “when I die, I want to die as a Christian. I want to be baptized. Nobody but us will ever know.”

He looked at John and then back at me. “Okay,” he said. “But we’ll do this quickly.”

He spoke a little about what baptism means, about the prayers he would lead me in, and how he would use water to mark my head with the sign of the cross. When he was finished explaining everything, he paused. “It’s common for people with Muslim names to choose a new name when they become Christians. What name do you want to be known by?”

“That’s easy,” I said. “From now on I want to be called Esther.”

†

The next day, a Thursday, I woke up late, but I woke up ready. I hadn’t thought I was scared before, but as I sat on my bed and let my mind delight in what it would be like to stand face-to-face with Jesus, I realized I had lost the final traces of fear that had been clinging to me.

My baptism had been a simple ceremony. I had cried through much of it, though not out of fear or sadness. Warm, heavy tears had fallen from my cheeks for one simple reason: love. If ever I had wondered whether Jesus could love a sinner like me, my baptism banished doubt forever. I don’t know how, but I knew: God’s love for me was real.

I had gone to sleep with the peace of God resting heavily on me, and I had woken up feeling just the same.

“I’m a child of your Kingdom now,” I said aloud to my empty bedroom. “There’s nothing about death that scares me.”

No debate was scheduled for that day, and I walked downstairs, expecting it to be quiet. It was not. Curious, I went to see who was in the meeting room.

My father was talking with Anwar and a dozen or more other clerics. They did not see me at first, and I knew exactly what they were talking about. Words like jihad and heaven and kafir carried across the room.

“You should talk to him,” I said, pointing at Anwar. The conversation stopped, and everyone turned to look at me. “He’s the one who first told me that the Bible can teach us about the prophets. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” he said. “I did.”

Before I could say anything else, my father marched toward me and shut the door.

An hour later, my mother came to my room, sobbing. “I heard them as they were leaving. They said that you aren’t coming back to Islam. They’ll kill you tomorrow after prayers.”

Her sobbing grew louder. I tried to comfort her, telling her that it was okay, that we had both known this would happen. From the moment I’d become a Christian, I had known that I’d be punished and that nobody would ever accept me again. There is no grace, no mercy, no love in Islam.

When my mother caught her breath, she spoke softly. “They said they’ll give you such an exemplary death that nobody in Pakistan will ever try to follow your footsteps. They’re telling your father that children are given by God and that killing you is doing the will of Allah. This is his jihad—if he kills you himself, he will go straight to heaven when he dies.”

Yes, I thought. Of course they’d say that. The promise of avoiding judgment and gaining Allah’s favor was such a potent motivator. It had been strong enough for me to consider being a suicide bomber and strong enough to turn the man who gave me life into my murderer.

“It’s okay, Ami. You’re a Christian, and so are three of your children. If I stay firm until the point of death, I believe that many more people will come to know Jesus too. If my death brings more people to him, I’m happy. Jesus’ death brought many to him, and Paul and nearly all the other apostles endured painful deaths. It was all part of God’s plan. Maybe this is his plan for me.”

She looked at me, and fresh tears streaked her face.

“I just want to stay firm until the end.”

†

I spent hours reading a book John had given me. He said that the usual gift for new converts was a copy of the Holy Bible, but he had chosen something different for me. It was a book about Christian martyrs.

The sunlight tracked across my room as I fed on those stories. Some Christians had been skinned alive, some had been stoned, and some had endured deaths so brutal I couldn’t even conceive of how someone would come up with such an idea. But surprisingly, with every story I read, I found myself more at peace. I would soon be with the Lord.

Would he take my spirit to be with him while my father did things to my body? Or would I remain in my flesh until the very end? Whatever I experienced, I knew it would not compare to what Jesus went through. Even if I was lashed and spit on, taunted and beaten, I vowed to take my suffering quietly, just like my Savior did.

“Lord,” I prayed, “however many drops of my blood are spilled, let that be the number of souls that come to you through my death.”

†

My mother touched my arm, breaking my focus on what I was reading.

“This isn’t right,” she whispered. “I can’t stand to see people kill you. I gave birth to you. It isn’t right.”

“Ami, it’s okay. I’m under blasphemy for leaving Islam and declaring my love for Jesus. They will kill me. It would be madness to think they might change their minds.”

“Well, I don’t agree. I want to help you escape.”

“No,” I said. “What if someone sees me? They will give me a private death, and what would the point of that be? And I don’t want people to think I’m running away in fear.”

“Nobody thinks you’re afraid, Zakhira. You’ve stood up and debated them all. But if you run and escape, then maybe God will save you so you can tell many more people about Jesus.”

“You really think so?”

She nodded.

I felt my breath grow heavy within me, just like the time I woke up from the dream when I met Jesus. The sense of peace was stronger than ever.

“Okay,” I said. “If it really is God’s will, I guess I’ll make it out.”