Transcription from video by One for Israel. Published with permission from iGod.co.il / One for Israel.
Raised in Sudan, in the most radical sects of Islam, he was raised to hate Christians and especially the Jews. But God transformed his life from hate to love.
Zachariah, he was a nice person. He was a decent person. He was very smart. He was the only Christian in the whole of the school – and I hated him. I thought, as a Muslim, I must be better than him. But he was better than I.
We started to beat him every single day that we came to school. And we agreed on that night, we need to kill him. It was dark, it was cold, and we went ahead of him. There were five of us. We climbed a tree and waited there. From far away, we saw a torch coming. The light became bigger and bigger as it approached us. The minute that he just went under the tree, we jumped at him. He was crying, he was screaming, he was shouting. We broke his arm; we broke his leg. He started to bleed. Because he started to scream and begging for help, I put my hand on his mouth so that no noise will come out of him, similar to when you are slaughtering a sheep, you know – it’s just shivering. The others were beating him.
I felt very proud – you were actually doing something for Allah, you know, you want to please him. Suddenly, he could no longer breathe, and we could not hear his voice. We left him in the woods between life and death.
We went back. You wash yourself, and you pray. Zachariah never came back. I never saw him again.
Forced to memorize the Quran
I was born and raised up in a very, very fanatic Muslim family. When I was a child, my father brought me to a Quran school. I was only eight years old, and my father just dropped me there. They shaved my head.
We sat in a circle. The sheikh sat in the middle of the circle, and he had a very long whip. I was forced to memorize the Quran. Every mistake that you do, this whip will just come right in the middle of your head. You’re not allowed to cry, because in our culture they tell you men never cry. I was crying every single night. They told me: “You belong to the Islamic Ummah. That’s why you fight for it, you stay loyal to it.”
I started to hate people, to hate everybody who’s not a Muslim. And I especially used to hate the Jews. So, I was preparing myself to go and fight for Allah in the jihad. But every night I went to bed, and when we put the light off, I did not know what will happen with me if I die.
A miracle
My cousin was severely sick. The doctors said, “he’s going to die.” They gave him only a couple of days. One day came two people, they were Coptic Christians. One of them wanted to greet me, and then I saw that he had a cross, and then I pulled my hand back. I said “well, I’m not going to touch a hand with a cross.” Then he said to me: “We hear that this child is sick. We would like to pray for him.” Only out of politeness, I told them “okay.”
They started to speak to God like a person speaks to his friend. They said: “God, please heal this child.” The minute that they said amen, this child opened his eyes for the first time in four weeks. He started to move his hands, he started to speak. He sat in his bed and started to walk. One of those two persons who prayed sat down with me and he said to me: “You know what? The real miracle is that God wants to change your heart. Do you believe that Yeshua is alive?” And I told him “yeah.” Because according to the Islamic tradition, God took him to heaven, and he is alive, and he will come back one day. And he said to me: “Because he’s alive, you can speak to him.”
That changed my entire life.
Two empty graves
When I started to read the Scripture, nobody needed to convince me to love the Jewish people. The only way for Muslims to start to love the Jews is when they meet Yeshua (Yeshua is Jesus’ Hebrew name, red).
I loved my family. I loved my father. I loved my mother, and I loved my community. When I decided to follow Yeshua, my grandfather and my father said to me: “You are no longer one of us.” They made a funeral. They invited friends and family. They brought a coffin to the cemetery, and they said, “our son is dead.”
To be declared dead with no family… I said to God: “Where are you?” I heard this voice, and this voice told me: “You know that the grave where your name is written, you know that grave is empty. And guess what? My grave is also empty.”
25 years of prayers
I went to Egypt for the first time after many years, and I was in a pastoral conference. One of the Sudanese pastors came to me. He was an elderly man with gray hair. He started to speak to me and he asked me: “Where did you come from?” I told him my story, he started to cry. Then I asked him, “why are you crying?” He said to me: “Do you remember me? My name is Zachariah.”
Suddenly, I remembered him. The last time I saw him, it was in that dark night. I could hear suddenly the way that he was screaming, even though that was 25 years ago. Suddenly I started to see his broken arm and broken legs. I started to see the scars which I caused him. I started to be full of shame.
I was a bad person, yeah. I was terrible. Zachariah looked me straight into the eyes again and he said to me, “Yassir, because you hated me so much, I was always praying for you.”
He opened his Bible, and the minute he opened his Bible, I saw that my name was written on the first page.
I hated him, he prayed for me.
On that day, God confronted me. He said to me: “Even before you started to think about me, I was thinking about you.”
To love those who hate you, you need someone whose name is Yeshua.
