Inside the Revolution

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  “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 a
nd 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 m
ake 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.