A Former Muslim's Journey to Christianity

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sam. [00:00:30] Speaker B: Hadiya Miramati. Welcome to the Code Red Studio. [00:00:33] Speaker A: Oh, thank you for having me. It's an honor and a pleasure. [00:00:35] Speaker B: And as people watching will not know, we have done this once before and we had to restart, which gives me a little bit of an advantage now because I knew nothing previously. I did know something. I did my research, and I've learned much about Islam that I'm excited to share with our people who are watching. And the Lord's going to guide people this. You know, it used to be Christians shared tracks. [00:01:00] Speaker A: Yes. [00:01:00] Speaker B: And now we forward podcast. [00:01:02] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:01:03] Speaker B: So it'll be interesting to see who this gets to and what kind of comments we receive. And so let's begin at the beginning. Give us the context. [00:01:13] Speaker A: Okay. [00:01:13] Speaker B: Were you born into a highly religious Islamic family? [00:01:17] Speaker A: Oh, goodness, no. My father and mother, both Iranians, came before the revolution in the 60s to live the American dream. My father was finishing medical school out in Northwestern. They started in Illinois and then served at the Veterans Administration for 20 plus years. We moved to Southern California. That's where he served. And as he became wealthier, he went into private practice. We just became just kind of this very wild lifestyle because my parents, they were both raised secular, and so they didn't bring Islam as a tradition into our household. We had no trappings of religion whatsoever. And it was the 80s, and I actually started drinking with my parents by 13 years old, and it was a runaway train to nowhere, unfortunately. But I did really well in school, and so I still graduated high school with a 4.2, went off to college, and then I just realized that I really needed a relationship with God. And that's when I was told I was a Muslim. Because you're born into Islam. Unlike faith in Christ, where you have to be born again, you're born into Islam and that's who you are. And so I went on this. This search for where I would find my Muslim, you know, home, church. I mean, home mosque and family. And the first mosque I went into was an extremist one. It was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, and it was all about conquering America and making America a Muslim nation. Procreating, getting married, getting involved in politics, and finding a way to bring Americans into Islam. [00:02:51] Speaker B: So we talked about this a little bit earlier. Were they. And this is still in the 80s, correct? [00:02:57] Speaker A: No. By this time, we're in the 90s. [00:03:00] Speaker B: Okay. [00:03:00] Speaker A: Early 90s. [00:03:01] Speaker B: Were they speaking openly about these things? [00:03:03] Speaker A: Oh, very openly, huh? Very openly. [00:03:06] Speaker B: And it wasn't ringing. [00:03:08] Speaker A: People are speaking openly. [00:03:09] Speaker B: It wasn't ringing bells. It wasn't setting off alarms calling to me. It did. [00:03:14] Speaker A: I hated it. It sounded like craziness. I mean, it sounded like I had walked into some weird cult. [00:03:19] Speaker B: So you felt more like a California girl American than you did Persian and then you did Islamic? [00:03:27] Speaker A: Exactly. Well, I mean, I was born into a Persian family, so we had trappings of being a Persian family. The food, the language. I learned the language from my grandparents. My parents had Persian friends. All of them were Jewish growing up. So I grew up in a very predominantly Jewish neighborhood and community. And so this whole thing about fight the power had made no sense to me. My father was actually very involved in Republican politics, and I was very involved. I volunteered on campaigns. I actually started the first high school Republicans at Beverly High. Oh, cool. Yes. So it sounded like lunacy to me. I wanted nothing to do with it. And as a consequence of that, I found a mystical sect which was known as Sufism. And that was more my pace. It was more like the New Agey version of Islam, or at least for the most part, that was the veneer that you're finding a relationship with God and you're going to do all these practices that'll bring you closer to God. And it wasn't about committing jihad. [00:04:21] Speaker B: Did you read the Quran? [00:04:23] Speaker A: I did, absolutely. I got very, very engrossed because as a consequence of coming across the extremist community, I would go back to my teachers and being like, okay, wait a minute. What have I just walked into here? Like, who are these guys? Who are you guys? I knew nothing. And my teacher said to me, basically, you've walked into the struggle for the soul of Islam. And he was a very prominent shaykh, and he came from a prominent family. And he just started to download this information to me. And I said, well, if what you're saying is true, I want to prove it. And so my. I had by this time finished law school. And my analytical mind was like, okay, let's understand this. Let's understand what's going on. And I started to interview and research the radicalization process. Because at this time, we're at war in Bosnia and there's a civil war in Afghanistan. And if you recall, the US Government was very involved in that war. We were empowering bin Laden against the communists, right? And so American Muslim kids were going over to fight and die. And I couldn't understand why in the world that they would do that. And so as part of my investigations, I came across, or they found me, a couple of FBI agents that's basically started my career in US Government was. I started as an FBI informant and they were like, what are you doing? Why are you here? Why are you asking people questions? And I said to them, well, I want to understand what this radicalization process was. And for the FBI at the time, they didn't have the Internet. The Internet had first come out, you know, it's gaining prominence. And they had no, they only had an intranet. [00:05:49] Speaker B: Were they suspicious of you? [00:05:51] Speaker A: Not of me, because they knew the community I was a part of was having these knockout drag out fights. I mean, I got arrested in the same, I almost got arrested in the same mosque that I first went into because I was screaming about their oppression of women and what they were trying to do to the community. And other members of the community would get in fights out in the parking lot of the mosque because they wouldn't let us pray inside the mosques. It was a very, it was a very public battle to the point where they had issued a public, basically like a fatwa that we were enemies of the Muslim community. So the five national Muslim organizations basically identified us publicly and sent out a newswire that we are enemies of the Muslim community. [00:06:34] Speaker B: So would we consider. Now I say we, you're part of we now. But would a conservative Christian, I'm a Southern Baptist. Would we consider your sect of Islam that you had found a home in, liberal Islam? Would we consider like a looser interpretation of the Quran versus a more hardcore interpretation that you found in the first mosque? [00:07:01] Speaker A: Or is it the terminology? So the terminology is hard to parse out when it comes to Islam. So liberal in the sense that we weren't trying to kill people, but we were socially conservative, okay? So, so we engaged in all of the practices. So remember, Sufism is a particular sect that encompasses millions of people. So it spans the spectrum. My particular wedge, you know, sect in that sphere was very socially conservative, very devout in our practices and in our outward appearance and in our prayer rituals. But there were a lot of American New age Sufis, American converts, who didn't have any of the trappings of the rest of Islam, but they just love the poetry and the music and the dancing. Okay, but in the Muslim world, this fight between the Salafi jihadis and the Sufis was extremely violent. They were going around massacring tribal leaders, killing imams, replacing them with golf implants that were trained by the Muslim World League to basically take out what they considered to be pagan heresy, corruption of Islam, and supplant it with this authentic return to scripture. [00:08:13] Speaker B: Okay, so this is something I've never understood. We didn't really tackle this on our last conversation. So maybe you can help me connect the dots. I've never understood why Persian families, most people that I know who've been associated with Islam, Jewish communities by nature have typically been conservative socially in that they value family values. They sort of patriarchal or matriarchal in their structure or something to that effect. But they tend to politically have associations with the far left. And so you mentioned earlier this Islamic Marxist marriage that sort of took place. That seems really odd because when I think of Marxists, I think of socially liberal, liberal in every way, it seems. And when I think of Middle Easterners, I think of conservative family oriented people. How does this happen and why did it happen? [00:09:21] Speaker A: And it didn't start that way. So during Bush Jr during W. S term, the Muslims were predominantly Republican. For those reasons, they were socially conservative. After the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and all of the. They were disgruntled with what was happening with the Muslim world. They shift left. But the alliance between the Marxists, the progressives and the Islamists have only happened here in this country, at least in the past couple decades because the Marxist movement in the United States latched on to the Islamists as part of. So basically the Marxists were able to give them access, the public access that they needed and the funding that they needed. And the Islamists gave the cause, the noble social cause. [00:10:02] Speaker B: All right, so let me, let me speak. [00:10:04] Speaker A: That's how you end up with Gays for Palestine. [00:10:06] Speaker B: Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. That's a weird. That's a weird mix. [00:10:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Which makes no sense. [00:10:10] Speaker B: So if we were, if you and I, you're from California, if we were sitting down and we're going to make a movie about how this happened. Okay, do you see, do you think at some point you've got a Marxist leader and a Islamic leader or their representative sitting down across the table trying to figure out how to take over the world? I mean, what do you. Or do you think this just evolved? I mean, how did this happen? [00:10:36] Speaker A: Oh, wow. [00:10:37] Speaker B: If we were shooting that movie, do you, do you imagine, if you had to guess, was there a consultation of some sort, a wicked scheme, or was it. Am I oversimplifying it? [00:10:51] Speaker A: Well, when I lived in D.C. we used to sit around with congressional staffers and other people that worked in the White House and we'd say, you know, we, we used to dream before we got here that there was this room with 12 guys in it that were deciding the fate of the universe. And when we Got here, we realized there isn't. [00:11:06] Speaker B: It's a lot of 20 year olds writing this stuff. [00:11:08] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. That most of our law is formed by people 25 and under and that the congressional leader actually never reads those documents. And so it's quite frightening, actually, that nobody's sitting at the helm. But that being said, there is still, and I had experienced this in my own life, there is this deep state, there are actors that stay. And I knew in my own experience I had crossed Republican Democratic administrations and still had a job. And it was because I had backers, people that wanted to see my work get done, that didn't care what was happening at the top. [00:11:44] Speaker B: Are these government workers or are these outside funding? [00:11:47] Speaker A: So if you ever listen to any of the podcasts that Mike Benz did on Doge and what he calls the Blob, people flow in and out of government. So depending on the administration. If you're a Republican, you come in during the Republican administration, you go out doing a Democrat, you sit in a think tank, you write policy. So it was the same thing for us contractors. You went to a think tank that gave you a post, a perch to preach, you know, to give policy. A private foundation would give you money to go do a project. Then when your administration came in, you got a federal contract. Yeah, right. And so this is all happening underneath the surface of the top level things that are happening. So are there people that are lifers in our government that are running things? Yes, I firmly believe that because I knew that a lot of my backers wanted to see, wanted to see moderate Muslim networks thrive and defeat the radical jihadists. But there was other operators at a very high level saying, these people have no street cred. These Gulfies are our partners. Their Islam is the one that we're gonna manage. Okay, we're not gonna manage this ragtag group of culturally liberal Muslims. It has no credibility. They're basically heretics. And we were defeated at every turn. [00:13:14] Speaker B: The old saying, you follow the money and there's a lot of money emerging in the Middle east throughout the decades that preceded the times that we're talking about from the oil that's being found? [00:13:26] Speaker A: Yes. [00:13:27] Speaker B: At what point do you see, and maybe we're talking, is it as far back as World War II? Is it further back that suddenly that people in our nation said, we've got to figure out how to get a handle on this because the world's going to be dominated by oil and its wealth at some point? What happened there historically? [00:13:49] Speaker A: Well, I think that, that. So once there Is this discovery of these massive oil reserves in the Middle east, it becomes a world game. Who's going to control them? Right. So between Russia, China and the United States and Europe, to a certain extent, it was your power came from who were, who was going to control those reserves, who was going to control the global energy markets. And we see that with Iran. That, that's a constant issue is who's controlling the Strait of Hormuz. And so I think those interests have constantly overridden the existential threat that Islam poses. [00:14:27] Speaker B: So Islam has been ebbing and flowing throughout history. During all of this time, it's had times where it was very powerful. It's had times where it was hardly spoken of. I'm thinking about the Ottoman Empire. [00:14:38] Speaker A: Yeah, it was powerful for 1400 years. [00:14:40] Speaker B: Right. [00:14:41] Speaker A: It's been conquering Christendom for 1400 years. The only time it lost power was in the 20th century. [00:14:46] Speaker B: How did it intersect with what was going on with the discovery of the oil, the wealth that was being driven out of the Middle East? When did those two things intersect and did one help the other? [00:15:00] Speaker A: So there's the fall of the Ottoman empire, World War I, okay? And so the Western powers say, we're not fighting this global Islamic empire. I mean, we lost 75% of Christendom from 632 up until the end of World War I. We were losing constantly. And so all of the nations that are what we call now the Middle east were Christendom, Anatolia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt. Those were Christian nations. And so once they're conquered by Islam, when they're able to defeat the Ottoman Empire militarily, the powers, the Western powers said, we're not, we don't want to be up against this again. And so they drew these lines in the sand, divided these nations, took Sharia out of the constitution in an attempt to modernize and secularize these countries. Because without Sharia as a sour of the constitution, the communities were able to breathe. [00:15:50] Speaker B: I've never put those two things together. [00:15:52] Speaker A: Very, very important, very important because that's how we had mini miniskirts in Jordan. That's how even in Afghanistan, the women had, you know, even though they're a culturally conservative society, the women were wearing miniskirts and didn't have head covers and the rest of it. [00:16:06] Speaker B: And frankly, you know, if I were irreligious and if I were just talking to a Muslim friend and said, hey, man, you guys want to take over? Drop the Sharia law stuff because it doesn't sell well around here, you know, that would Be my instinct and my political advice. But you're telling me that the two are really connected. The political power, the growth of Islam, and Sharia law are kind of tied together. [00:16:29] Speaker A: Well, so Sharia law is everything in Islam. So praying and fasting is Sharia. [00:16:35] Speaker B: Okay. [00:16:36] Speaker A: Taking over and conquering Western nations is Sharia. Cutting the hands of the thief is Sharia. So Sharia is the entire corpus of Islamic law. The Quran, the hadith, the sayings of Muhammad, and the jurisprudence of the scholars and the interpretations of scholars. That's in the traditional Sunni doctrine. So the marriage between. So let's go back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, because once these societies, the Muslim thinkers decide we're not gonna win militarily, they begin the civilizational jihad. And so the civilizational jihad is we will not win them with armies. We're gonna win them with population. And so that, I think, even would have remained marginalized if it wasn't for the advent of oil. [00:17:22] Speaker B: Gotcha. [00:17:22] Speaker A: Okay. So with the Gulf money seeing this as an opportunity for Darul Islam, the abode of Islam, to reconquer the world, because their eschatology says they must conquer the world. It's a global expansionist doctrine. They don't stop until the world is in dar al Islam. And so they started to change those societies back to conservatism, back to a literal interpretation of the scripture. [00:17:48] Speaker B: How did they do that? [00:17:51] Speaker A: Brute force. In a lot of countries I've written, you know, my reports are online. I've written about it in, you know, 12 different countries. They basically massacred tribal leaders. They took over entire societies and communities, just flooded them with money, with teachers. They would take their young in the tribes, in the villages and send them to Saudi for a year, train them, send them back. [00:18:12] Speaker B: So they were. These were what we would consider like a militia forces. [00:18:17] Speaker A: Not just militia. They were. So they had a violent arm, they had militia forces, but they also had the dignified. They had schools, they had missionaries. They had every level of impacting society at the grassroots level to remake these societies. And often it was toit was basically telling them, oh, your version of Islam, this is paganism. This is heresy. This isn't Islam. What are you doing? What are you singing and dancing? Don't you read the Quran? And just pumping into their heads that you have to read the Quran, take it literal. Are you following what they're doing? And it's actually the same argument that I tell people today, reformers. I was like, tell me what part of Islam you're saying you're gonna reform Islam. Tell me, what part of Islam are we keeping? What part are we throwing out? [00:19:05] Speaker B: Good question. [00:19:06] Speaker A: So are we keeping child marriage? And they're like, no. And I was like, okay, you say that, but what is the legal age? Is 15 child marriage or is just 9? Like, where is that bar? Where's it moving? That's where the whole idea between it being incompatible with Western society because our laws say it's 18, you know, so if you're going to move that bar down, then you're telling me Islam is running a parallel system. You know, that your beliefs is going to run a parallel system. [00:19:34] Speaker B: And we tend to think, okay, for whatever reason, whether it's lack of education, for whatever it might be over in these poor countries in the Middle east, we can see that on one hand that there's a wealth motive that would cause Islam to spread. We can see in other places that there would be less educated. And I'm thinking Afghanistan or wherever it may be. And so these things can take hold, but not here. Not here in the United States. And then we look up one day and you've got Muslim prayers flooding Times Square. [00:20:05] Speaker A: Absolutely. I mean, I told you it was happening during my age, in the early 90s, where we were kicked out of mosques. I mean, when I was a Muslim, I never prayed in a mosque. I would not step foot in a local mosque because they were so militant that it didn't. I didn't believe in anything that they were teaching. So it was that this problem has existed since the Gulf has been flooding us with resources. And you could, any of your viewers could just Google Saudi textbooks in America and you find a plethora of articles that come up talking about what the Saudis were doing in the United States for decades. [00:20:41] Speaker B: So you think, you know, that there are, you know, on our college campuses, that there are people who are with it very intentionally trying to push these things. [00:20:52] Speaker A: Yes. [00:20:52] Speaker B: On Americans. And you have Christians, disengaged Christians who are just assuming good old usa it wouldn't happen here. And we're seeing. We're seeing that needle move. [00:21:04] Speaker A: Yes. Because of billions of dollars into our higher education system. [00:21:09] Speaker B: Where's that? And that's coming from where? [00:21:11] Speaker A: From Qatar and Saudi. I mean, I think the numbers go anywhere between 30 and 40 billion dollars that Saudi invests in our higher institutions. I mean, I went to ucla. I got an undergrad degree in history. I was taught by what's considered one of the most premier experts on the Ottoman history, Sanford Shaw. I did not realize. So I was taught that these Islamic armies came into. And they weren't des them as armies, but the Islamic people came over to these Christian nations and they were like, hey, we have this great new religion. We're going to build a golden age together. Interfaith. We're children of Abraham. And then everybody just voluntarily converted. It was literally not until I came to Christ that I had to relearn history and be like, oh no, that's not what happened. Actually. They raped, pillaged, burned down Christendom until they succumbed either to the jizya, the sword, or they converted. [00:22:05] Speaker B: What would you recommend if there were as a primer for someone who doesn't know that history? Is there a place to start? [00:22:11] Speaker A: Raymond ibrahim.com Easy enough. [00:22:15] Speaker B: We'll put that in the show notes. [00:22:16] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely everything you need to know. [00:22:19] Speaker B: Well, why am I sitting here talking to a sister in Christ today rather than a violent jihadist? What happened? Something must have happened. [00:22:27] Speaker A: Oh, just the mercy and grace of God, because I my not only my theological path that was orchestrated well before I knew the Lord, but then I come back to Southern California and I'm just a mess because my career is over. I don't want to be in Islam anymore. So basically that's killed every opportunity to further my career if I'm not a. Not a legitimate Muslim. And I was in another adulterous relationship and I followed a tweet of a girl I don't even know who said, my pastor changed my Life. And in 20 plus years in D.C. at Interfaith at the highest levels, nobody preached the simple gospel to me. Nobody told me Jesus loves you. Nobody told me Jesus saves you. And just hearing the simple gospel for the first time was remarkable. It was just a transformative message. It was so. It just brought such peace to my heart and such excitement at the possibilities of what my life could be like. And I was doing this entirely alone. I had lost my social network by this point. I'm back in my hometown and I'm just trying to raise my daughter, taking her back and forth to school. And this is all literally happening in my living room, in my car, and I am binge watching as many sermons I could possibly watch. And again, my analytical mind is thinking, okay, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? You're hearing about this Jesus. It's very different than Jesus of Islam. And I'm just praying my heart out. And it's one of those prayers that the Lord calls my name. Supernatural audible voice of God. Hedia, it's me. And people are Just like, how do you know it was God? And I was like, I don't know. How did Paul know it was God? [00:24:05] Speaker B: Right. [00:24:06] Speaker A: You just. You know that, you know. [00:24:08] Speaker B: Yeah. The fact that it's pointing you to Jesus is a good. The devil doesn't tend to do that. [00:24:12] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. [00:24:14] Speaker B: Exactly. So you were. Was Hibbs the pastor that you were listening to? [00:24:19] Speaker A: No. No, Actually, I wrote a chapter in my book. I don't publicly disclose the name because I think we're all going to, but I wrote a chapter in my book called the Paradox of the Celebrity Pastor, because he doesn't preach the full counsel of God, but he has that simple gospel down to a science. [00:24:38] Speaker B: Aren't you thankful God uses all he really did? [00:24:43] Speaker A: I will never forget what that first church did for me and just what his messages do. And occasionally listen to him now, and he's still pounding that simple gospel. Come to faith in Christ. He will heal you. He will redeem you. He will give you a new life. And it's just. I'm grateful for that. [00:24:59] Speaker B: So I'm curious. Once this happened and did you know that day, are you like, okay, I've been born all over again? Or was that something that. [00:25:08] Speaker A: No. So after that day, I knew that Christ was real, but I was terrified. So, I mean, I'm crying, I'm having this moment, and then I sit up, and immediately I was like, oh, no, you're gonna be a polytheist. You're gonna worship multiple gods, and people gonna try to kill you, and what are you gonna tell your family? And all this madness that. And I just spend more and more time. I bought Logos software and my Bible again. I have no interaction with people except online. And I'm just having that private time with God for him to reveal the scripture to me as I read it, because I have all of the Islamic scripture in my head. So I have to unlearn the gospel, the stories of God and of the prophets. I have to unlearn everything that I've learned. And then slowly, it starts to make sense to me, even passing of the covenant to Isaac and why he's the chosen one, and why the lineage passes through Isaac and not Ishmael. And it was, I think, my real. What I would say I was born again was probably during my baptism because I'd done all this research. I'd had this supernatural experience. I go to this church in North Carolina. They have an amazing online system where they have people call you after you've given your life to the Lord. And a young woman Reached out to me and she said, hey, they told me you're coming from California to get baptized. And I said, yeah, absolutely. She's like, friends, family, anybody? I'm like, I have nobody. And she said, well, I'm gonna meet you there. [00:26:42] Speaker B: How cool. [00:26:42] Speaker A: And she came from Idaho and she had some friends from D.C. come and meet me there. And you know that submersion in the water experience, when I came out, I was. That was it. [00:26:53] Speaker B: I knew you were all in. [00:26:54] Speaker A: I knew I was all in. [00:26:57] Speaker B: How did you break that news to. Or did they celebrate it? Did they see it as. Oh, no, because they weren't hardcore, were they? [00:27:05] Speaker A: Well, by that point they are. Okay, so by this point, I mean, we're. [00:27:09] Speaker B: What about your daughter? Was your daughter in the faith or was she. [00:27:13] Speaker A: She's. She was hysterical because I put her in Islamic school. She had learned. She was learning Arabic and Farsi. She was in a Persian Islamic school. And she was so rebellious, she almost got expelled. She was fighting with the other kids. She refused to wear a head cover. She would refuse to like. She was so naughty that she, I mean, she just hated Islam from birth. And so when I got baptized and I came home to explain it to her and I was. She's like, well, I'm gonna get baptized. And I was like, well, but you have to understand what that means. And you're accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and you want to spend an eternity with him and you, you know, you. [00:27:49] Speaker B: It's not just a good way to rebel. [00:27:51] Speaker A: Yeah. And I was like. She's like, well, that sounds like a no brainer. Why wouldn't I wanna do that? You know? And so, long story. I talk about this in the book, but she accepts faith at that age at 12, but definitely runs away. She dealt with a lot of trauma. She lost her entire family right when we left. I was a terrible parent before I met Jesus. No lie, quite frankly. And I was never home. She was raised with over a dozen nannies because none of them ever stayed. And so when I. She had a very large social network that was around her from my community that would take. Because I was always gone. And so she lost all of that when I left Islam. And so that had left some very significant. Yeah, significant. She didn't know her father. She had no relationship with him. And so those left some significant scars that really started to manifest as she got older and got into her teenage years. But thank the Lord, she rededicated her life to the Lord. She now goes to Arizona Christian University and We're super proud of her. [00:28:53] Speaker B: Praise the Lord. [00:28:54] Speaker A: Yes. [00:28:55] Speaker B: I'm thinking from all that we've talked about and so much that we talked about before the camera stopped and what to redeem from that that we haven't covered so far. I'm curious, and this just may be just a guy curiosity, but how does it go from these FBI agents approaching you to you becoming an official informant? Like, did they come up and say to you, hey, we've got a deal? How does that work? So here's what I'm asking. So my kids. I've got kids that are. Got one graduating. I've got one who's out of. Got two now that are out of school and one that's about to go to college. And they're always asking, so, dad, you're always leaving the country. You're always going to. Well, I'm a secret agent. And they're like, come on, dad. You know, it's like, but how do I get to go to Havana? How do I get to go to all these cool places? You know, you explain it. Well, it was because you're a preacher. Okay, maybe one of the two. But how do you. How does that go down? And I know that doesn't have anything to do with anything eternal or whatever. I'm just curious, how does that happen to where they say, hey, why don't you work for us? [00:30:12] Speaker A: You've watched the movies about, like, gangs? [00:30:14] Speaker B: Is it like that? [00:30:15] Speaker A: It is, pretty much. They come up to you. They. But mine wasn't. It wasn't. Cause they had dirt on me. [00:30:21] Speaker B: Did they do, like a deep background check or anything like that? [00:30:23] Speaker A: I have no idea because I wasn't in the government, so I don't know what they did to research me. I presume they did. [00:30:31] Speaker B: But they identified you as somebody that could help. [00:30:33] Speaker A: Yes. And as I said, a lot of that was very public, that I was obviously an enemy of the people. They were trying to understand. [00:30:40] Speaker B: I see. [00:30:40] Speaker A: And so it was. And. And it was really pre 9 11, we did not have a large counterterrorism department. This wasn't considered a problem. We were supporting the Afghan jihadis, We were supporting bin Laden. So this wasn't considered a problem. These guys uniquely felt there is a problem here because one was an Arab speaker. And so he says, this doesn't sound right. And because they couldn't do the public research, they didn't understand the players. They didn't understand how the San Francisco mosque connected to the New York mosque, how it connected to the Brotherhood. Who are the ideological. Do they sit on each other's boards? They're like, could you help us figure this out? And I was like, absolutely. [00:31:19] Speaker B: Okay, so I mentioned this briefly earlier. When I think of Islam, I think. And I know there's. There's Sunni, Shia. Where does the Louis Farrakhan group come in at? What type of Islam is that? [00:31:36] Speaker A: Okay, so the Nation of Islam is kind of like the Mormons. They claim Christianity, so he claims Islam, but he claims Elijah Muhammad was a prophet, prophet after Muhammad. [00:31:47] Speaker B: Okay. [00:31:48] Speaker A: So a lot of them transfer over, like, Malcolm X into traditional Islam, but they wanted to maintain their individuality and their separate platform and therefore said Elijah was a prophet as a. [00:31:59] Speaker B: So there's not a. There's not. These aren't the same teams or. They are the same teams. [00:32:04] Speaker A: Well, I mean, a lot of the tenants are the same. The pork. No pork. Five prayers. I actually think they cut it down to three prayers. If I'm not mistaken, they've reduced the number of prayers. So it is. It looks similar, but. And would jihadis or Islamists want to use Nation of Islam people? I'm sure. I'm sure. But they're like the Mormons and the Christians. [00:32:25] Speaker B: Gotcha. Gotcha. And we. You know, there's a. Culturally. I grew up in a fairly traditional Alabama family. My dad was a baby of 12 kids, very large family. A lot of bad sin problems in that family, but they stuck together. You know, we didn't have a divorce epidemic in our family family. I didn't know anybody that was divorced before, you know, cousins and that sort of thing. And so it was just. It was a traditional household, traditional upbringing in that way. And I can see in communities, whether it's in South America, whether it's in the Middle east that are traditional households by nature and. Or in the desire those things, an attraction to something like Islam. And again, a lot of this I'm getting from Hollywood, so totally tell me, you know, that's probably not your best source to get all your truth. Right. But you look at something, a young man like Malcolm X that hears about Elijah Muhammad, who hears about the Quran, that finds an order of living there, that's attracted to it and says, this is better than what I've seen out here in the world, and they're drawn into that. Is that accurate? Am I reading that right? [00:33:51] Speaker A: Absolutely. But I'll bring it closer to home. I field calls from mothers and families all over the country and in other parts of the world that have lost their kids to Islam. We have 50,000 documented Christians that convert every year, 67% of which are Muslim, are Protestants that are converting to Islam. And so it's an attraction. A couple of things I tell people there's four main reasons I think Christian kids and I unfortunately had converted dozens of Christians in my time as a Muslim. One was family hypocrisy. Basically looking at the lifestyles of their parents and their families and saying, whatever it is you're selling, I'm not buying. So if there was Jesus in the home and the father was beating the mother, then I don't want anything to do with your Jesus. So it was this rebellion against that hypocrisy. Two was the search for discipline. My life is off the rails, and I want discipline. I want order. And Islam provides order. Christianity does not. So they do. They have this view that Christianity is this freewheeling religion where we don't have any discipline. And it's something actually that's pervasive throughout the Muslim world, that Americans have no discipline. And so it's unfortunately bled over into our own communities where young girls and boys are thinking they can't find order and discipline within Christianity. Three is the inability to defend the authenticity of the Bible, so they get confronted by Muslims. So a young girl meets a young boy who's like, hey, you're pretty. You want to I buy you a meal? And he's gracious and he's gallant and he doesn't attack her. And he says, oh, well, have you heard of Islam? And she's like, no, I don't really know much. And he's like, well, you know, we. Muhammad is the last prophet in this stream of prophets, and we love Jesus. They always get in with the we love Jesus. And you know, the Bible's corrupted. And Muhammad came to perfect that message. It's like, my Bible is corrupted. What do you mean my Bible is corrupted? Goes home to the family, to the parents, or to the pastor and says, why is my Bible corrupted? And they're either dismissed. Either they won't have the courage to ask the question, or when they ask the question, they're like, honey, don't be silly. There's nothing wrong with your Bible. Go to school. They're not. They're not either. [00:36:08] Speaker B: It's not an academic approach, right? [00:36:10] Speaker A: They're either not literate themselves to understand how to defend the authenticity and the infallibility of the Bible, or they just dismiss it as just silly kid talk. [00:36:19] Speaker B: I think that's a good word that we need to camp out on just a little bit. When we were In Huntsville, our church started growing. And it was odd because it was growing not through Sunday morning services, it was Wednesday night services. And Wednesday night were Q and A. So teach a little bit. We had prayer time, then we'd do open mic, Q and A, ask anything. [00:36:38] Speaker A: I love that. [00:36:39] Speaker B: And we would have all these people that began to come over and join the church, and we would ask, well, why did you come to this church? There's a lot of options here. We want to know what's working, what's God using? And they said, well, and I don't want to out the gentleman that did this. It was another religious leader in the area. They were asking questions. And he said, we're not really trained to answer those questions. We go through the hoops, we do our thing. But I hear there's a Baptist church over in Capshaw that does this, so why don't you go ask him? And so they would come over there and we would try to give. And these, you know, this is NASA people. This is Redstone Arsenal. These are military people. These are engineers by nature and everything. They have questions about everything. And so we would study, we would try to give them good answers to good questions. And it was beautiful because we would see people coming that were Persian, we would see people that were Indian that were coming and Asian that were coming, and they would have the same kind of questions that nobody else was answering. And I'm not sure that we were doing that great a job, but we were at least trying to give them. [00:37:53] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:37:54] Speaker B: Yeah. Why can you trust the canon of Scripture? Why is it what it is? Why are the 66 books. Is it the books that we have? Why are there others even included? All of the. Nobody's answering those questions. [00:38:05] Speaker A: So true. [00:38:06] Speaker B: We're living in a day where they want real answers. [00:38:09] Speaker A: Absolutely. [00:38:10] Speaker B: They're being challenged. [00:38:11] Speaker A: Absolutely. And if you don't know the answer, say, you know what? That's a great question. Can you come back tomorrow? I'm going to look it up and we're going to talk about it. [00:38:17] Speaker B: That's okay. The rabbit is worth chasing. And I think, I wonder to what degree just the historical attraction of a faith that's represented in art, that's represented in styles of music and food. And I think we mentioned this earlier, to what degree is it Islamic or what degree is it a cultural thing apart from Islam, that maybe Islam has gotten some credit for? Whether it's beautiful buildings. I mean, my goodness, you look at some of these buildings, and the art is incredible. And so to what degree should we give Islam credit for that art. [00:38:57] Speaker A: A couple of things. Two, what you are seeing is the culture of these lands that were subjugated by Islam that Islam's getting the credit for. So you're looking at these countries and saying, wow, the Persian food is so great. I go to visit Jordan and they're so hospitable. These cultures are part of the way that they lived before the advent of Islam. So Islam is just a veneer on top of it. Not only that, but some of the architecture that you're looking at was actually inspired, created and worked on by subjugated Christians that were in those lands. So remember Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey. Some of that architecture is coming from Christians that were subjugated by Islamic armies. So we give the credit again to Islam and Muslim societies, but that's not necessarily the case. These were societies that were developing these kind of beautiful skills, especially the Persians, whether it's poetry, rugs, natural resources that they cultivated, music that they had way before the advent of Islam. [00:40:08] Speaker B: Okay, speak to us. You've got however many. And I've told you, I don't understand why people watch this program. I don't watch this program. I watch other people's program. I will watch what you say on somebody else's program because this is what it is. But there is a good audience and there's thousands, hundreds of thousands of people that you're speaking to right now. And most of those are going to be American. And I presume that most of those are probably going to be right leaning conservative evangelical Christians. What do we need to know from your experience and your calling to keep from what's happened in some other countries from happening here? [00:40:54] Speaker A: Great question, and I'm glad you asked it. The greatest threat that faces the United States is the rise of Islamization in our country. And for us as Christians, uniquely, we have to balance loving the sinner and hating the sin. So the sin, the demonic stronghold, is Islam we fight against not flesh and blood, but powers and principalities and forces in the heavenly realm. So we have to be the watchman on the wall against that demonic stronghold that's coming like a tidal wave at us. And at the same time, we need to love our Muslim neighbors into the kingdom, because ultimately the ballot box and bullets are not going to solve this problem. Only Jesus solves this problem. [00:41:41] Speaker B: That's interesting. You chose those two words. Ballots and bullets have always been our answer. [00:41:45] Speaker A: Right. And it's not going to solve this problem because ultimately it's a spiritual battle. And so we are in the business of seeking and saving the lost. So how do we stop this demonic stronghold and love them into the kingdom? Because it is really overwhelmingly the love and the graciousness and the kindness of a person transformed by Christ that will touch the heart of a Muslim who hasn't experienced love, because the word love doesn't even exist in the Quran. I was telling a story today that I remember back in my days of traveling village to village and risking my life, that these imams were constantly talking about those darn Christians, that they were so nice and so generous. Our people were converting, and they were so angry that we. That Christians were so nice and loving, and they were incapable of combating just kindness and graciousness and that it will continue to be our strength. And we. We. So we have to balance these two very difficult things. [00:42:49] Speaker B: How aggressive should we be? And by that, I mean, do we go to the mosque? Do we try to just frequent parts of town where you're going to have more people from that background? Do we try to move into neighborhoods? Do we go to restaurants? What do we do? [00:43:08] Speaker A: I like the restaurant part. Me and my husband do that. So the confrontations at the mosque, I don't want to. I don't want to throw shade on anybody who's doing that. There's a lot of, like, very powerful witnesses that say, we're not evangelizing, we're witnessing. We're standing up for the gospel. So I get that. My particular focus is I heard these wonderful examples of churches in Virginia that were teaching esl. For example, they were taking the refugee populations, signing up ESL classes, and guess how they taught ESL with the Bible. [00:43:42] Speaker B: Right. [00:43:43] Speaker A: So they were basically exposing these immigrants. They were having open houses, not interfaith events, open houses. Where? Like life in America. What's life in America? It's a Christian. Wow. And so basically explaining this is what life in America means. We are a Judeo Christian nation. These are our founding documents. This is how we live. This is what Jesus teaches us. Here's a meal. Offer them some food. Break bread together. Try not to serve meat because Muslims are suspicious you're gonna poison them with pork. [00:44:12] Speaker B: Really? [00:44:13] Speaker A: Oftentimes, like, I would never walk into a Christian person's house and eat their meat. [00:44:18] Speaker B: Wow. [00:44:19] Speaker A: So when I was a. When I was a Muslim, because I was very strict about what I ate, and often I was very particular about it being halal. So I knew their meat wasn't halal either. So it's best just to stay away from meat products. [00:44:30] Speaker B: Very good advice. [00:44:31] Speaker A: But it's just important to invite them into your space. I think, you know, being able to say that we're gonna talk about what I want to. We're going to teach you what the gospel is and we're going to provide resources for you. It's the same thing our missionaries do over there. So our missionaries go over to India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and that's what we do. We teach English, we give medical supplies. I'm like, why are we not doing the same thing here? [00:44:58] Speaker B: That's so true. Yeah. We've got a dear friend that's in a undisclosed location and that's what she's doing. She's going over as a pharmacist. [00:45:06] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:45:07] Speaker B: And helping as she can. And it comes up and she answers the question, leads people to Christ. [00:45:13] Speaker A: And you can do it safely here because we can preach Christ here. They're risking their lives doing that in a Muslim country because they could be exposed to apostasy and the criminal code for evangelizing. But here we are at liberty to give resources to these underserved communities and preach the gospel. [00:45:29] Speaker B: I think here, I'm aware of one mosque in Jacksonville. I don't know if you've had a chance to research our area at all. [00:45:36] Speaker A: Just a bit. [00:45:37] Speaker B: There's a plan for more to be expanded. And you know, we mentioned earlier about DeSantis recent. The recent ruling in law. Very innovative to keep Sharia law out of anything that would conflict with our freedoms as Floridians and as Americans. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? [00:45:58] Speaker A: So what I love about the law put forward by Florida, so I've been following this for a while. What Texas has and 12 other states have, I wish I can rattle them off, but I can't. Is called American law for Americ courts. And it doesn't specifically mention Sharia, but they're called the anti Sharia laws. So what American law for American courts articulates is that America is governed by a set of laws and principles codified by the Constitution, state law, federal law, and that no parallel legal system can operate next to those laws that no matter what, whatever issue may come up, if anything contradicts or contravenes those laws, our laws trump problem is it's not getting enforced. So unfortunately, Texas has an ALAC law, but as you see from Texas, it's actually not getting enforced. So let me come back to that. But then we have Oklahoma, who specifically mentioned we're banning Sharia. Well, the courts overturned it. So as you hear this very public outcry about Banning Sharia. As long as the US Constitution recognizes Islam as a sincerely held belief, the courts will prevent any attempt to ban [00:47:10] Speaker B: Sharia as a protection of religion. [00:47:12] Speaker A: As a protection of religion. People say, well, this is a political ideology. I say, I get it. It absolutely is. But you're gonna have to get the courts to parse that out. And this has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. And they say, no, Islam is a religion. So what Desantis did is they outlined specifically the parts of sharia that violate U.S. law. So I think he listed child marriage, punishment for thieves, and other areas that were in direct contravention to US Law. So he says, where Sharia affects public safety and US Law, it will be prohibited. And we don't know, and we don't know whether it'll hold up in court, but I think it was extremely innovative for him to, for them to do that. [00:48:01] Speaker B: Let's land on a couple of things. For one, before we get into this, if people want to learn more, if they want to get your book, where can they go? [00:48:08] Speaker A: My website is resurrectministry.com and they can also send me messages if they have questions. I field calls, I told you, from families with loved ones. And Amazon.com, also you can get my book. And it's also available on the website. [00:48:22] Speaker B: Okay, we'll put all that in the show. Notes, the link to all that. I wanted to close with just my personal curiosity. I've always found it interesting. And we know there's a lot of different views when it comes to the Christian world, when it comes to eschatology and even within the dispensational camps and all this sort of thing. From a dispensational point of view, we expect Jesus to return. You got a spectrum of when, how that's going to take place. I, I hold to the imminent return of Jesus Christ. We're expecting the Antichrist or the beast to rise up as a deceiver, to be revealed to the people. We believe that a false prophet is coming. This is a beast that will work. Signs and wonders. Islam as well has eschatology. And I think that's one of the interesting things. There are questions, and I don't remember who it was one of the philosophers that said that your worldview has to be able to answer certain questions and it has to answer, you know, where do we come from? How should we live? Where are all these things going? Does the moral system hold up? You know, it's got to answer certain things. I think that's where when it comes to Islam, it does have where we came from, where all things are headed. It has a moral system that most of us are going to find problematic, you see. But when it comes to eschatology, they also are expecting three individuals to be raised up or to return. And it's my understanding the Dajjal, the Mahdi and Isa. The Dajjal is a deceiver claiming divinity that would be possibly the one that we would consider Jesus Christ, the Mahdi. This is a rightly guided ruler, descendant of Muhammad and a king, a political leader, is that correct? [00:50:31] Speaker A: But he comes from the lineage of Muhammad. [00:50:34] Speaker B: Is the Mahdi the one that Saddam Hussein was depicting himself as and when he would show himself on a horse with the black flags and that sort of thing, [00:50:46] Speaker A: I don't know that particular instance. But if you're thinking also about ISIS and the black flags, ISIS with the black flags, they're basically saying that we create the fertile ground for the Messi to return. Okay, so there needs to be a state. [00:50:58] Speaker B: Gotcha. And so this would fit our understanding of a deceiver, a tyrant, a one world ruler type of thing. And they are expecting Islam is respecting the return of Esau or Jesus, which would fit our understanding of this false prophet who points back to the Jal as the way. And so I just find it fascinating how we're people smarter than me can make the math work, but I find it fascinating always how I found it fascinating that we're kind of expecting the same three types of individuals, you know? [00:51:45] Speaker A: Well, and I tell people this all the time. It's when they say how similar Jesus is in the Quran to the Bible, remember it comes 600 years later. So they cut and pasted our scripture [00:51:57] Speaker B: and how much of Islam. [00:51:59] Speaker A: It's not magical. No, it is literally just plagiarism. [00:52:03] Speaker B: And Muhammad himself was illiterate, if I remember correctly. Is that right? [00:52:06] Speaker A: Right, Correct. [00:52:07] Speaker B: And so how much of Islamic theology evolved over the course of time versus, you know, we would say as Baptist or as a reformed leaning person. Sola scriptura. [00:52:24] Speaker A: Right, that. [00:52:24] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff that's happened, but we kind of limit the authority of scripture. You know, can they say that of the Quran or is it something that's evolved over? [00:52:34] Speaker A: They do say it of the Quran, but it's not just the Quran. So as I mentioned when we first started talking about Sharia, so for the traditional four schools of thought, it was. And the reason I'll make that distinction, it'll be clear, was the Quran. And the Quran, the finished work. Now, hundreds of years later, it was revealed. And when Khalif Uthman came, he burned the old copies so that there'd only be one, but the one they believe that exists today is their one. And then where is that at? [00:53:03] Speaker B: Is that like. [00:53:04] Speaker A: I mean, the one I saw was in Uzbekistan, but the one. [00:53:07] Speaker B: If you say there's one, you mean there's like one authentic autograph copy? [00:53:11] Speaker A: Well, it was written on parchment. It was Khalif Uthman's Quran. [00:53:16] Speaker B: And this was where at Uzbekistan. Okay. [00:53:19] Speaker A: I wonder if it's still there. [00:53:20] Speaker B: I'm sorry to ask you. I was just. [00:53:22] Speaker A: No, I wonder if it's still there. [00:53:23] Speaker B: I wonder why it would be there. [00:53:26] Speaker A: I wish I knew that history. It suddenly escaped my brain versus Mecca. [00:53:30] Speaker B: You know what I mean? [00:53:31] Speaker A: No, there is a reason. There is a reason, but I just forgot it. But. Or yeah, I wish I could remember. So. But then there's also the Hadith, which is the thousands of sayings of Muhammad that were transcribed by his followers. So not by him himself, but these were things that he did and said. And then there is what we call kiyan, the reasoning of the scholars. So the four Sunni schools said, we are closing the doors of Ijtihad, meaning we will not allow any further interpretation. This is gonna be the canonical understanding of Islam. When the Salafi ideology came from Mecca that was inspired by the Brotherhood, they threw away kiosk, they threw away the Sunni interpretation. They said, basically, this is all corrupted. We're going straight back to. To the Quran and the hadith, and it has to be legitimate hadith. So any of the more liberal interpretations, they would say, weak hadith. That's weak. We're not using that. [00:54:30] Speaker B: Gotcha, gotcha. [00:54:32] Speaker A: To basically make sure that they stayed on the more conservative militant interpretations, understand, [00:54:39] Speaker B: in Christianity throughout history. And there's probably times where this wasn't true, and I'm not sure that I could identify one right now, but there's always been this Billy Graham figure, this DL Moody, this George Whitefield, or a John Wesley that God seemed to raise up. That kind of spoke for every one of what God was doing in the moment. Who right now speaks for Islam? [00:55:03] Speaker A: Oh, nobody. Nobody can. I mean, even between, you know, Saudi, as the custodians of the two holy mosques, the more. The closer they get aligned to the West. Their authority, even in the Muslim world, decreases because they had gained a tremendous amount of authority exporting these imams and training them and sending these textbooks. But they've been so Criticized by the west for doing that. They had to change some of the textbooks. They've had to change some of their ways because of political pressure. And so even their influence has waned. They have, you know, the Graham Mufti of Egypt. But people are like, who cares what Egypt says? There is nobody who sweeps the Muslims. [00:55:40] Speaker B: Well, it's really, it's very interesting. I didn't expect you to say that. I expected you to tell me that there's this guy somewhere or gal or whatever. It is definitely not a gallop. It's not a galler, but it does. You know, for something to be progressing at such a fast pace, that's organized, it's not disorganized, it's happening very, very intentionally, nation by nation. And there's nobody you can point to that. You can say, this guy's behind it all. There does seem to be an unseen power behind it. [00:56:12] Speaker A: Absolutely. And that's not to say that there aren't brotherhood networks inside Egypt in the United States. I mean, I can name you 10 Gu in the United States that are part of that network. But they're like, if you've ever heard of it, described in the jihadi terminology as cells. So they're not all necessarily connected. They don't have this national, you know, international conference once a year and they all get together. It's the same thing with the dark room and the 12 guys. [00:56:36] Speaker B: Gotcha. [00:56:36] Speaker A: Like, even here in the United States, you're seeing the same patterns happen over and over again. You're like, but are there five men in a room somewhere? I don't think so. These forces continue to operate in a certain pattern. And I think over time, some of the systems are put in place for them to just run on autopilot almost where the ideas are firmly planted. And people who take over leadership after the, you know, after the first generation dies, they appoint people that will continue that leadership style and it goes on. But what the explosion we've seen recently, that is the alliance with the Marxist movement, that is the alliance with the left. And it's best epitomized by Homa Abedin marrying George Soros son. [00:57:18] Speaker B: Right. [00:57:20] Speaker A: I mean, that is. Yeah, right. There is the greatest epitome of this alliance between the Marxists and the Islamists. [00:57:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I've not thought about that, but that's exactly what that is. [00:57:31] Speaker A: Yes. [00:57:32] Speaker B: You know, I want to close in saying, to remind our viewers that as Christians, what's behind whether we're talking about any false religion, whether it's Islam or any religion that's not preaching Jesus. There are demonic forces at work. There's power at work. It's a real thing. But we're also not describing something that's yin and yang. That's 50, 50. It's not a fair fight. Our Lord is infinitely greater than Allah and greater than anything that stands before Him. And whatever army is gathered against the Lord Jesus Christ, it will fail so quickly the days come. [00:58:13] Speaker A: I just wish more Christians felt that way, you know, that they could live fearlessly in knowing that he that is in you is greater than he that is in the world, no matter what. [00:58:22] Speaker B: What a great place to end. Thank you for coming on Code Red today. [00:58:25] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having.