Atheist Surgeon Converts to Islam “I Begged God to Save My Daughter”
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So, I was raised atheist. I went to an academic medical school, successful, making money, you know, happy with my life. I had a daughter who was born with a congenital heart defect. Her lower body was dying because... it wasn't getting any oxygen. They sent me out of the room. I just headed straight to the prayer room in the hospital. I said, "Oh God, if you are there, I need help. If you save my daughter, then I will follow." I started looking into everything. Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism. My brother, he sent me a translation of the meaning of the Quran. When I read these, everything just clicked. After I became Muslim, my wife of 14 years divorced me. My mother and my father disowned me.
Get out of my house and never come back! One night, I had this dream in which the Prophet ﷺ (may God's peace be upon him), I was in his presence and pointed towards the mountains and said, "Go to the mountains." Go to the mountains. Assalamualaikum (peace be upon you), Dr. Laurence Brown. Thank you so much for accepting our invitation. We are very happy to have you with us. Wa alaikum assalam wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh (and upon you be peace) I want to start with who is Dr. Laurence Brown? Can you tell us briefly about your life, please? So I'm a... I'm an ophthalmologist, an author, and right now I'm living and working in Saudi Arabia.
I was born into a family that was Quaker, but non-practicing. So the Quakers are a denomination, a Protestant denomination of Christianity. I became Muslim around a little bit over 30 years ago. That brought me to Saudi Arabia, and I have been living and working in Saudi Arabia ever since. How was your life in regards to faith? What were you believing in? I was raised atheist. You know, I grew up in the United States. I was born and raised in San Francisco.
I went to an academic high school, college, medical school, internship, residency, and in all of these academic environments, the majority of the professors, my colleagues, fellow students were atheist, and you know, it was considered the belief system of the intellectuals. You know, because the intellectuals intellectualize away the existence of God. So that was my... that was my belief until... until I had a spiritual awakening. Please tell us about this experience. What was the thing that made you question your beliefs and start this journey? It's kind of hard to put my finger on it. I had become a consultant ophthalmologist after this long period of of education and training.
So-- and successful, making money, basically buying everything I needed, and you know, happy with my life, and I just started to look around and feel like there's got to be something more. But the epiphany for me was I had a daughter who was born with a congenital, um, heart defect called the-- well it's not really the heart, it's the major vessel off of the heart, the aorta. And she was born with a coarctation of the aorta. And so at birth, she was... her lower body was dusky blue, more... more dark blue than the, um, than the surgical scrubs that I'm wearing, okay? So it looked like her body was... was dying because it wasn't getting any oxygen.
And, of course, me as a doctor seeing this, it was very frightening. And, um, as I said, I was atheist up until this moment, even though I was beginning to feel the presence of a creator, and that... that sensation can only come from the creator Himself. All of my life, I had always been in control. I never had faced a situation in my life in which I had felt that I was not in control. This was the first time in my life where I felt I can't do anything here. There's nothing I can do here. Always before, if I needed money, I worked harder. If I needed this, I did that, you know. I always was in control of my life.
And here I am facing something where looking at this child in her condition, I realized there's nothing I can do. The only thing that will save this child is my creator. They sent me out of the room. I walked out of the... the NICU and it was just something in my heart. I just headed straight to the prayer room in the hospital. I entered the prayer room and I just... I ended up praying a very simple prayer. Have you ever heard of the Skeptic's Prayer? Okay, the... the Skeptic's Prayer is just to pray, you know, "Oh God, if there is a God, save my... save my soul, if I have a soul," right? And, you know, that's... that's how a lot of skeptics, that's how a lot of atheists pray.
And I did not know the Skeptic's Prayer at that time, but that's close to what I prayed. Actually, even closer to what I prayed was Al-Fatiha (The first chapter of the Quran). In the sense that I recognized my creator. I said, "Oh God, if you are there, I need help." I just asked my creator, speaking to God directly, I said, "You know, if you save my daughter and guide me to the religion that is most pleasing to you, not necessarily most pleasing to me, but most pleasing to you, then I will follow." And I left the prayer room and I went back to the intensive care unit. I had been away for maybe 10 or 15 minutes to let the doctors make their examination and their determination.
And, you know, when you go into the neonatal intensive care unit, it's a process. You have to wash, you have to... you have to put on a gown, gloves, mask, hat, all of these things. And so while I was going through this, I was looking through the window and I saw the doctors huddled around my daughter off in the far corner of the room. And they were looking up and looking at me, and I could see from the look on their faces... I... ...I could see from the look on their faces that something had changed. So when I got into the room, and... ...it, you know... it's been maybe 35, 36 years, and I cannot tell this story without getting choked up.
So, when I approached the doctors, the pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon looked at me and said, "She's going to be fine." And I realized that all of them were buying this explanation, but what I was feeling in my heart was they weren't with me a few minutes ago when I was praying for my creator to save this child. And so that was really the moment when faith entered my heart. My daughter, my daughter Hannah, she went on to, um, become completely normal. She did not need medicine, she did not need surgery, she did not need any kind of intervention. She became completely normal.
You can call that a miracle or you can accept the doctor's explanation, but for me, I realized I had made a promise to my creator. I had asked him, I had promised that if he would save my child and guiding... guide me to the religion that was most pleasing to him, that I would follow. Got to get over this choked-up feeling to continue. So what happened after that was about four or five years of really psychological trauma for me because I had promised to follow if Allah (God) guided me to the religion that was most pleasing to him, and I could not find it. I mean, I started... I started looking into everything: Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism.
And in the end, of course, I did what most people in the West do. I, you know, I picked up a Bible, I started reading the Old Testament. When I started reading the Old Testament, something connected with me. I said, "Okay, I believe in a lot of what the Old Testament is teaching." So, I found a lot that I could believe in regarding the essence of our creator. But at the same time, the Old Testament predicts three prophets to follow. But then the question remained in my mind, where is this third prophet? There's a lot made about the word Paracletos in the Bible.
A lot of people talk about how Paracletos can be translated to Ahmad, which is one of the names of Muhammad ﷺ (may peace and blessings be upon him). Paracletos is found in the Bible only five times. Once in this passage, and in another passage, Jesus, alayhis salaam (peace be upon him), is identified as Paracletos. So now we know what a Paraclete is. Jesus was one, and he's talking about another coming after him where there are many. Now, if that does not sound like a final prophet in the chain of prophethood, I don't know what does. And when I saw that, you know, that cemented the conviction in my heart that there is a final prophet to be... to be searched for.
I would always have the same feeling. I would always have the feeling like, "Okay, there's some connection here, the belief in God as one, and the belief in the chain of prophethood, the belief in the chain of revelation, angels, day of judgment, Allah's control over all things." Okay, I got all that. But then this other thing, the concept of Jesus being the son of God, no, I... I don't buy that. The Trinity, the three in one, the one in three, co-equal, consubstantial, co-eternal. No, I... I just can't... I can't accept that. And I would ask questions of the priests, the parsons, the ministers, and so on. You know, I'd always ask them, "Where do you find your evidence for these things?
Where does Jesus say he was the son of God?" And they would point me to some passage and I'd say, "No, no, no, no." In the Bible, Jesus calls himself the Son of Man 88 times. There is not a single passage in the Bible where he calls himself the son of God. So why are you following what other people say about him? Why don't you follow what he says about himself? He called himself the Son of Man. Why are you using this metaphorical term? The Bible identifies all believers as children of God. Why are you using this metaphorical term? Why don't you use literally what Jesus said? And so that left me just saying to my creator, "I... I'm searching, but I'm not finding." Then what...
what happened was my brother... he's older than me by 21 months and, alhamdulillah (all praise is for God), he became Muslim. Now, my brother and I were never close. We were not like this, we were like this. We... you know, we have said since the time of my conversion, we've always said that we were never really brothers until we became brothers in Islam. It was only after Islam that we really became brothers. And I didn't even know why at the time. I just thought it was too strange.
But about a year later, he sent me a translation of the meaning of the Quran and a book of seerah, a book of the history of the Prophet ﷺ (may peace and blessings be upon him), specifically Martin Lings' biography of Muhammad according to the earliest sources. When I read these, everything just clicked. It was like having a jigsaw puzzle that was missing a few pieces, and you found those pieces and they fell into place, and now you had a complete picture. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had a complete picture.
This was the final prophet, this was the final revelation, and it fell in line with the chain of prophethood from the past, it fell in line with the Old Testament predictions of the qualities of the final prophet. That's when I became Muslim. I think the path to belief is as much, uh, as much following your heart as it is following your mind. Remembering that it is Allah who guides who He wills. And how does He guide? Well, I mean, He guides through the heart and, you know, also through revelation. And revelation, of course, is an intellectual process, reading revelation and understanding the evidences that validate the... the revelation and the religion. Can you tell us the...
describe the feeling? I think the main feeling was peace. You know, I was struck looking back on that time at how many people noticed that I myself became so much more relaxed. There were other emotions, but I just remember making wudu (ablution) and just realizing, subhanallah (glory be to God), this is a calming process. It forces you to slow down and take time from whatever you're doing to wash and to think about why you're doing it and to dedicate this to your purification before prayer. And that whole process is just soothing. How did the people around you react to your conversion to Islam? How did your family react? After I became Muslim, my wife of 14 years divorced me.
So, I ended up losing my wife, I lost my children because the court gave her the children because I was Muslim. They gave her custody. The court gave her custody. The process was clearly slanted against me because, for example, when... what is now my ex-wife, when she went to the court to file for divorce, the judge filed the divorce initiation proceedings, but she also placed an injunction upon me, uh, saying that I was not allowed to go within 100 feet of the home, 100 feet of my home, 100 feet of my wife, 100 feet of my children, and so on.
Before doing that, she asked my wife, she said, "Do you feel threatened by this man?" And she said, "No." And she said, "Has he ever hit you?" And she said, "No." And she said, "Does he abuse you verbally?" And she said, "No." I mean, 'til this day, you can ask my ex-wife and she will testify to this fact. You know, the judge asked her, "Well then why do you want a divorce?" And she just said, "I just want out. We're going in different directions. He's, you know, he's become Muslim, I'm Christian," and so on. And the judge said, you know, the judge just placed this injunction upon me because I was Muslim.
That's my read on it, based upon the conversation that happened between my ex-wife and the judge, how it was related to me. That's my read on it. And so, as a result, I went through a period of time when I could not even see my children. Just to give you a full picture of how humiliating the process was, the court made it so that in order for me to see my children, I had to hire a bodyguard. I had to hire a bodyguard to be present to protect my children from me. That's how much they humiliate the father in these circumstances. And this despite the fact that no history of verbal abuse, no history of physical abuse, no... no threatening behavior, nothing. My wife just went along with it.
You know, you can ask her her reasons, but that is how humiliating the process was. So, in any case, what else did I lose? Okay, so... you know, the house, the wife, the children, the car, the property, uh, I mean, in the house alone, I had... I had a quarter of a million dollars in artwork, just... just in artwork alone on the walls. I lost all of that. I walked away from the divorce with... with uh, my, you know, my SUV and uh, $5,000, and that was it. In addition, I lost a lot of my friends. My mother and my father disowned me. They sent me a letter saying, you know, " Don't visit, don't call, don't write. We don't want any contact with you. You're out of the will." etc, etc.
And that was that. Now, the nice thing about that story is that many, many years later, we were able to communicate. As they became older, we improved our, you know, our relationship to the point where both of them individually made shahada (declaration of faith) before they passed. Both of my parents have passed. Each one individually made shahada (declaration of faith), uh, and I hope that Allah accepts that from them. So, we heard that you live in Medina, the city of our Prophet ﷺ (peace and blessings be upon him). I want to ask, what impresses you the most about his... his character? Alayhis salatu wassalam (peace and blessings be upon him).
I think it's one of the very essential testimonies to the strength of his character and the truth of his message. Those who disparage the Prophet ﷺ (may God's peace and blessings be upon him) by saying that he was only after wealth or women or to be the commander or the king or whatever, this is something that they cannot answer because if he had been willing to give up Islam, the Quraysh were offering to make him the wealthiest among them, to make him their king without the constraint of Islam over how many wives he could have. He could have the largest harem of the most beautiful women in the world, you know, and so on.
He could have had everything he wanted if he had stopped preaching, not if he had continued. The path forward was a path of suffering and hardship, but that was the path that he dedicated himself to. So, this is the example of a man who is dedicated to the truth of revelation and to the service of his creator. To me, it's beyond impressive. It is something that no human being will ever be able to achieve. Have you ever seen him in your dream, (peace and blessings be upon him)? Okay, now you're really cornering me. Yes, uh, I have, alhamdulillah (all praise is for God).
One night, I had a dream in which the Prophet ﷺ (may peace and blessings be upon him), I was in his presence and we were in a like an old-style town, like the kind you would see in an American cowboy movie. So the Prophet ﷺ (may God's peace and blessings be upon him) pointed towards the mountains and said, you know, "Go to the mountains." And I looked at them and it was something bizarre to me. I had never seen mountains like this. He said, "Go to the people of the mountains because there's jihad (struggle) in the mountains." We all understand jihad (struggle) doesn't necessarily mean fighting, you know, it means it can mean struggle, or personal struggle.
I remember saying to him, "Okay, but our time is not like your time. If anything happens to me in my time, there's nobody to take care of my wife and child." The Prophet ﷺ (may peace be upon him) said, "I will take care of your wife and child." It was like a scene cut in a movie. We were suddenly inside this wooden building next to us. It was like a general store. On the counter were these large glass containers full of candy. And he picked up one large glass container, it was like this size, full of candy, full of these like round candies, and he put it in my right hand.
And then he picked up this large glass jar full of these round gumballs, and he put it in my other arm, and he said, "Take these to the people of the mountains." That was the dream. What that would have been in uh, 1999. So, I made my decision to come to Medina. I had a job offer in Saudi Arabia. I took my decision and I came to Saudi Arabia on a two-year contract. And obviously, everything worked out. This is 26 years later. Here I am, still in Medina, alhamdulillah (all praise is for God). But here's the point about the dream.
One day I was standing out on my balcony and I was looking at Mount Uhud and I had seen it many times before, but for some reason, the time of day, the position of the sun, the lighting upon the mountain, everything was just perfect, and for the first time I realized, subhanallah (glory be to God), this was the mountain I saw in my dream, which means that these are the people of the mountain, the people of Medina. So this is my jihad (struggle) or my struggle. Now, it doesn't end there because I am committed to this part of the world, my daughter, as I said, she's 27. There came to be a time when she had to go to college. And so I was...
I was ready to leave my job to go with my family back to the West so my daughter could have a western education. But my wife reminded me of the dream that my place is here. And she went with my daughter to America. Now, my wife is Palestinian. She was going to America to help take care of my daughter, but the fact of the matter is that both of them were having to get used to American ways, find their way around, you know, learn the ins and outs of the society, while my daughter would be going to college and my wife would be there to help her manage, you know, help her adjust.
So, one day while she was in America, one of the things that she found very difficult was every day she would go to college with my daughter by Uber and then come back by Uber. And then at the end of the day, Uber there to pick her up and Uber back. And one of the things that she was always worried about were these Ubers. A woman alone in a car with a man she's never met before and so on. And one day she had this dream in which she dreamt that she was going to an Uber car to get into the Uber car, and the driver got out and opened the door for her. And the driver... Sorry. The driver who opened the door for her was Muhammad ﷺ (may peace and blessings be upon him).
So, later in the day, or even right away, I can't remember, but my wife just called me up and she just said, "Well, your dream has been fulfilled." And I said, "What do you mean?" She said that the Prophet ﷺ (may God's peace and blessings be upon him) had promised to take care of my wife and my daughter when I was not there. This dream is what kind of gave her the strength to uh, lose her fears and just carry on. Alhamdulillah (all praise is for God). Wow, such a beautiful story. Two different dreams and the fulfillment of the dream is like, wow, happened in another dream. I just want to have it just one extra question.
Maybe, you know, I'm also a medical doctor, but I'm a general practitioner. What is the most fascinating thing in the human body, especially in your field, that makes you say that this is, you know, a work, amazing work of God, like every other work? What is the thing that fascinates you in the human body, especially in the human eye? Before I became Muslim, one of the things that started me on my spiritual search was that I met a couple of people who had near-death experiences.
The experience of a person having a near-death experience is to come out of your body and look down upon your body, and then as you rise up, look down upon the entire scene, to have a very acute awareness, to be able to hear what people are saying, see what they are doing. Even people who are far away from you, like one of the women who had a near-death experience, she was a pedestrian who was hit by a car, and she was hit so hard that her chest was split open, her lungs and her heart were visible. She was pronounced dead at the scene by the paramedics, okay, but she survived.
And she described rising up to the height of the clouds, but at the same time that she was so far away, she could see everything in detail, hear everything that was said and done to, you know, to her body. She could even see people blocks away who had seen the accident and hear what they were saying. Now, as a doctor, I had no explanation for this, but I became interested. At that time, there was an association in London which had collected about 2,000 of these near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences. And so one of the things that put me on a spiritual search was this awareness that there was something to our bodies more than our material existence. And that could only be a soul.
Now, some people will recognize that, some people not. But perhaps... so I would... I would say, you know, first of all, answer to your question, the most miraculous, amazing, beautiful thing inside our bodies is our ruh, our soul. So let me say something else: life. This is an answer not only to what is so beautiful about us, the fact that we are alive, but it is also a refutation to atheism. Because atheism can explain through the Big Bang and through the process of evolution through natural selection, they can use this to partially— not entirely, and I can get into that later— but partially explain how we came to be.
But the one thing that they cannot answer is where life came from, right? I mean, what made something, what made the primordial cell or the primordial organism from which everything evolved, if you... if you believe in that concept, what made it live? Allah challenges us with life. You know, He challenges the disbeliever by saying, "Take the dead body, right? And make it live again. Put the ruh (soul) back inside it. Put the soul back inside it and make it live." And human beings have tried. They have tried Frankenstein things. They have tried to take dead animals and Frankenstein their parts together, and they cannot make them live.
I've heard that in Russia— I don't know if it's true or not— but I've heard that they tried to do the same thing with human beings, no success. You cannot make it live. So again, where do you get the life from?
Get out of my house and never come back! One night, I had this dream in which the Prophet ﷺ (may God's peace be upon him), I was in his presence and pointed towards the mountains and said, "Go to the mountains." Go to the mountains. Assalamualaikum (peace be upon you), Dr. Laurence Brown. Thank you so much for accepting our invitation. We are very happy to have you with us. Wa alaikum assalam wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh (and upon you be peace) I want to start with who is Dr. Laurence Brown? Can you tell us briefly about your life, please? So I'm a... I'm an ophthalmologist, an author, and right now I'm living and working in Saudi Arabia.
I was born into a family that was Quaker, but non-practicing. So the Quakers are a denomination, a Protestant denomination of Christianity. I became Muslim around a little bit over 30 years ago. That brought me to Saudi Arabia, and I have been living and working in Saudi Arabia ever since. How was your life in regards to faith? What were you believing in? I was raised atheist. You know, I grew up in the United States. I was born and raised in San Francisco.
I went to an academic high school, college, medical school, internship, residency, and in all of these academic environments, the majority of the professors, my colleagues, fellow students were atheist, and you know, it was considered the belief system of the intellectuals. You know, because the intellectuals intellectualize away the existence of God. So that was my... that was my belief until... until I had a spiritual awakening. Please tell us about this experience. What was the thing that made you question your beliefs and start this journey? It's kind of hard to put my finger on it. I had become a consultant ophthalmologist after this long period of of education and training.
So-- and successful, making money, basically buying everything I needed, and you know, happy with my life, and I just started to look around and feel like there's got to be something more. But the epiphany for me was I had a daughter who was born with a congenital, um, heart defect called the-- well it's not really the heart, it's the major vessel off of the heart, the aorta. And she was born with a coarctation of the aorta. And so at birth, she was... her lower body was dusky blue, more... more dark blue than the, um, than the surgical scrubs that I'm wearing, okay? So it looked like her body was... was dying because it wasn't getting any oxygen.
And, of course, me as a doctor seeing this, it was very frightening. And, um, as I said, I was atheist up until this moment, even though I was beginning to feel the presence of a creator, and that... that sensation can only come from the creator Himself. All of my life, I had always been in control. I never had faced a situation in my life in which I had felt that I was not in control. This was the first time in my life where I felt I can't do anything here. There's nothing I can do here. Always before, if I needed money, I worked harder. If I needed this, I did that, you know. I always was in control of my life.
And here I am facing something where looking at this child in her condition, I realized there's nothing I can do. The only thing that will save this child is my creator. They sent me out of the room. I walked out of the... the NICU and it was just something in my heart. I just headed straight to the prayer room in the hospital. I entered the prayer room and I just... I ended up praying a very simple prayer. Have you ever heard of the Skeptic's Prayer? Okay, the... the Skeptic's Prayer is just to pray, you know, "Oh God, if there is a God, save my... save my soul, if I have a soul," right? And, you know, that's... that's how a lot of skeptics, that's how a lot of atheists pray.
And I did not know the Skeptic's Prayer at that time, but that's close to what I prayed. Actually, even closer to what I prayed was Al-Fatiha (The first chapter of the Quran). In the sense that I recognized my creator. I said, "Oh God, if you are there, I need help." I just asked my creator, speaking to God directly, I said, "You know, if you save my daughter and guide me to the religion that is most pleasing to you, not necessarily most pleasing to me, but most pleasing to you, then I will follow." And I left the prayer room and I went back to the intensive care unit. I had been away for maybe 10 or 15 minutes to let the doctors make their examination and their determination.
And, you know, when you go into the neonatal intensive care unit, it's a process. You have to wash, you have to... you have to put on a gown, gloves, mask, hat, all of these things. And so while I was going through this, I was looking through the window and I saw the doctors huddled around my daughter off in the far corner of the room. And they were looking up and looking at me, and I could see from the look on their faces... I... ...I could see from the look on their faces that something had changed. So when I got into the room, and... ...it, you know... it's been maybe 35, 36 years, and I cannot tell this story without getting choked up.
So, when I approached the doctors, the pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon looked at me and said, "She's going to be fine." And I realized that all of them were buying this explanation, but what I was feeling in my heart was they weren't with me a few minutes ago when I was praying for my creator to save this child. And so that was really the moment when faith entered my heart. My daughter, my daughter Hannah, she went on to, um, become completely normal. She did not need medicine, she did not need surgery, she did not need any kind of intervention. She became completely normal.
You can call that a miracle or you can accept the doctor's explanation, but for me, I realized I had made a promise to my creator. I had asked him, I had promised that if he would save my child and guiding... guide me to the religion that was most pleasing to him, that I would follow. Got to get over this choked-up feeling to continue. So what happened after that was about four or five years of really psychological trauma for me because I had promised to follow if Allah (God) guided me to the religion that was most pleasing to him, and I could not find it. I mean, I started... I started looking into everything: Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism.
And in the end, of course, I did what most people in the West do. I, you know, I picked up a Bible, I started reading the Old Testament. When I started reading the Old Testament, something connected with me. I said, "Okay, I believe in a lot of what the Old Testament is teaching." So, I found a lot that I could believe in regarding the essence of our creator. But at the same time, the Old Testament predicts three prophets to follow. But then the question remained in my mind, where is this third prophet? There's a lot made about the word Paracletos in the Bible.
A lot of people talk about how Paracletos can be translated to Ahmad, which is one of the names of Muhammad ﷺ (may peace and blessings be upon him). Paracletos is found in the Bible only five times. Once in this passage, and in another passage, Jesus, alayhis salaam (peace be upon him), is identified as Paracletos. So now we know what a Paraclete is. Jesus was one, and he's talking about another coming after him where there are many. Now, if that does not sound like a final prophet in the chain of prophethood, I don't know what does. And when I saw that, you know, that cemented the conviction in my heart that there is a final prophet to be... to be searched for.
I would always have the same feeling. I would always have the feeling like, "Okay, there's some connection here, the belief in God as one, and the belief in the chain of prophethood, the belief in the chain of revelation, angels, day of judgment, Allah's control over all things." Okay, I got all that. But then this other thing, the concept of Jesus being the son of God, no, I... I don't buy that. The Trinity, the three in one, the one in three, co-equal, consubstantial, co-eternal. No, I... I just can't... I can't accept that. And I would ask questions of the priests, the parsons, the ministers, and so on. You know, I'd always ask them, "Where do you find your evidence for these things?
Where does Jesus say he was the son of God?" And they would point me to some passage and I'd say, "No, no, no, no." In the Bible, Jesus calls himself the Son of Man 88 times. There is not a single passage in the Bible where he calls himself the son of God. So why are you following what other people say about him? Why don't you follow what he says about himself? He called himself the Son of Man. Why are you using this metaphorical term? The Bible identifies all believers as children of God. Why are you using this metaphorical term? Why don't you use literally what Jesus said? And so that left me just saying to my creator, "I... I'm searching, but I'm not finding." Then what...
what happened was my brother... he's older than me by 21 months and, alhamdulillah (all praise is for God), he became Muslim. Now, my brother and I were never close. We were not like this, we were like this. We... you know, we have said since the time of my conversion, we've always said that we were never really brothers until we became brothers in Islam. It was only after Islam that we really became brothers. And I didn't even know why at the time. I just thought it was too strange.
But about a year later, he sent me a translation of the meaning of the Quran and a book of seerah, a book of the history of the Prophet ﷺ (may peace and blessings be upon him), specifically Martin Lings' biography of Muhammad according to the earliest sources. When I read these, everything just clicked. It was like having a jigsaw puzzle that was missing a few pieces, and you found those pieces and they fell into place, and now you had a complete picture. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had a complete picture.
This was the final prophet, this was the final revelation, and it fell in line with the chain of prophethood from the past, it fell in line with the Old Testament predictions of the qualities of the final prophet. That's when I became Muslim. I think the path to belief is as much, uh, as much following your heart as it is following your mind. Remembering that it is Allah who guides who He wills. And how does He guide? Well, I mean, He guides through the heart and, you know, also through revelation. And revelation, of course, is an intellectual process, reading revelation and understanding the evidences that validate the... the revelation and the religion. Can you tell us the...
describe the feeling? I think the main feeling was peace. You know, I was struck looking back on that time at how many people noticed that I myself became so much more relaxed. There were other emotions, but I just remember making wudu (ablution) and just realizing, subhanallah (glory be to God), this is a calming process. It forces you to slow down and take time from whatever you're doing to wash and to think about why you're doing it and to dedicate this to your purification before prayer. And that whole process is just soothing. How did the people around you react to your conversion to Islam? How did your family react? After I became Muslim, my wife of 14 years divorced me.
So, I ended up losing my wife, I lost my children because the court gave her the children because I was Muslim. They gave her custody. The court gave her custody. The process was clearly slanted against me because, for example, when... what is now my ex-wife, when she went to the court to file for divorce, the judge filed the divorce initiation proceedings, but she also placed an injunction upon me, uh, saying that I was not allowed to go within 100 feet of the home, 100 feet of my home, 100 feet of my wife, 100 feet of my children, and so on.
Before doing that, she asked my wife, she said, "Do you feel threatened by this man?" And she said, "No." And she said, "Has he ever hit you?" And she said, "No." And she said, "Does he abuse you verbally?" And she said, "No." I mean, 'til this day, you can ask my ex-wife and she will testify to this fact. You know, the judge asked her, "Well then why do you want a divorce?" And she just said, "I just want out. We're going in different directions. He's, you know, he's become Muslim, I'm Christian," and so on. And the judge said, you know, the judge just placed this injunction upon me because I was Muslim.
That's my read on it, based upon the conversation that happened between my ex-wife and the judge, how it was related to me. That's my read on it. And so, as a result, I went through a period of time when I could not even see my children. Just to give you a full picture of how humiliating the process was, the court made it so that in order for me to see my children, I had to hire a bodyguard. I had to hire a bodyguard to be present to protect my children from me. That's how much they humiliate the father in these circumstances. And this despite the fact that no history of verbal abuse, no history of physical abuse, no... no threatening behavior, nothing. My wife just went along with it.
You know, you can ask her her reasons, but that is how humiliating the process was. So, in any case, what else did I lose? Okay, so... you know, the house, the wife, the children, the car, the property, uh, I mean, in the house alone, I had... I had a quarter of a million dollars in artwork, just... just in artwork alone on the walls. I lost all of that. I walked away from the divorce with... with uh, my, you know, my SUV and uh, $5,000, and that was it. In addition, I lost a lot of my friends. My mother and my father disowned me. They sent me a letter saying, you know, " Don't visit, don't call, don't write. We don't want any contact with you. You're out of the will." etc, etc.
And that was that. Now, the nice thing about that story is that many, many years later, we were able to communicate. As they became older, we improved our, you know, our relationship to the point where both of them individually made shahada (declaration of faith) before they passed. Both of my parents have passed. Each one individually made shahada (declaration of faith), uh, and I hope that Allah accepts that from them. So, we heard that you live in Medina, the city of our Prophet ﷺ (peace and blessings be upon him). I want to ask, what impresses you the most about his... his character? Alayhis salatu wassalam (peace and blessings be upon him).
I think it's one of the very essential testimonies to the strength of his character and the truth of his message. Those who disparage the Prophet ﷺ (may God's peace and blessings be upon him) by saying that he was only after wealth or women or to be the commander or the king or whatever, this is something that they cannot answer because if he had been willing to give up Islam, the Quraysh were offering to make him the wealthiest among them, to make him their king without the constraint of Islam over how many wives he could have. He could have the largest harem of the most beautiful women in the world, you know, and so on.
He could have had everything he wanted if he had stopped preaching, not if he had continued. The path forward was a path of suffering and hardship, but that was the path that he dedicated himself to. So, this is the example of a man who is dedicated to the truth of revelation and to the service of his creator. To me, it's beyond impressive. It is something that no human being will ever be able to achieve. Have you ever seen him in your dream, (peace and blessings be upon him)? Okay, now you're really cornering me. Yes, uh, I have, alhamdulillah (all praise is for God).
One night, I had a dream in which the Prophet ﷺ (may peace and blessings be upon him), I was in his presence and we were in a like an old-style town, like the kind you would see in an American cowboy movie. So the Prophet ﷺ (may God's peace and blessings be upon him) pointed towards the mountains and said, you know, "Go to the mountains." And I looked at them and it was something bizarre to me. I had never seen mountains like this. He said, "Go to the people of the mountains because there's jihad (struggle) in the mountains." We all understand jihad (struggle) doesn't necessarily mean fighting, you know, it means it can mean struggle, or personal struggle.
I remember saying to him, "Okay, but our time is not like your time. If anything happens to me in my time, there's nobody to take care of my wife and child." The Prophet ﷺ (may peace be upon him) said, "I will take care of your wife and child." It was like a scene cut in a movie. We were suddenly inside this wooden building next to us. It was like a general store. On the counter were these large glass containers full of candy. And he picked up one large glass container, it was like this size, full of candy, full of these like round candies, and he put it in my right hand.
And then he picked up this large glass jar full of these round gumballs, and he put it in my other arm, and he said, "Take these to the people of the mountains." That was the dream. What that would have been in uh, 1999. So, I made my decision to come to Medina. I had a job offer in Saudi Arabia. I took my decision and I came to Saudi Arabia on a two-year contract. And obviously, everything worked out. This is 26 years later. Here I am, still in Medina, alhamdulillah (all praise is for God). But here's the point about the dream.
One day I was standing out on my balcony and I was looking at Mount Uhud and I had seen it many times before, but for some reason, the time of day, the position of the sun, the lighting upon the mountain, everything was just perfect, and for the first time I realized, subhanallah (glory be to God), this was the mountain I saw in my dream, which means that these are the people of the mountain, the people of Medina. So this is my jihad (struggle) or my struggle. Now, it doesn't end there because I am committed to this part of the world, my daughter, as I said, she's 27. There came to be a time when she had to go to college. And so I was...
I was ready to leave my job to go with my family back to the West so my daughter could have a western education. But my wife reminded me of the dream that my place is here. And she went with my daughter to America. Now, my wife is Palestinian. She was going to America to help take care of my daughter, but the fact of the matter is that both of them were having to get used to American ways, find their way around, you know, learn the ins and outs of the society, while my daughter would be going to college and my wife would be there to help her manage, you know, help her adjust.
So, one day while she was in America, one of the things that she found very difficult was every day she would go to college with my daughter by Uber and then come back by Uber. And then at the end of the day, Uber there to pick her up and Uber back. And one of the things that she was always worried about were these Ubers. A woman alone in a car with a man she's never met before and so on. And one day she had this dream in which she dreamt that she was going to an Uber car to get into the Uber car, and the driver got out and opened the door for her. And the driver... Sorry. The driver who opened the door for her was Muhammad ﷺ (may peace and blessings be upon him).
So, later in the day, or even right away, I can't remember, but my wife just called me up and she just said, "Well, your dream has been fulfilled." And I said, "What do you mean?" She said that the Prophet ﷺ (may God's peace and blessings be upon him) had promised to take care of my wife and my daughter when I was not there. This dream is what kind of gave her the strength to uh, lose her fears and just carry on. Alhamdulillah (all praise is for God). Wow, such a beautiful story. Two different dreams and the fulfillment of the dream is like, wow, happened in another dream. I just want to have it just one extra question.
Maybe, you know, I'm also a medical doctor, but I'm a general practitioner. What is the most fascinating thing in the human body, especially in your field, that makes you say that this is, you know, a work, amazing work of God, like every other work? What is the thing that fascinates you in the human body, especially in the human eye? Before I became Muslim, one of the things that started me on my spiritual search was that I met a couple of people who had near-death experiences.
The experience of a person having a near-death experience is to come out of your body and look down upon your body, and then as you rise up, look down upon the entire scene, to have a very acute awareness, to be able to hear what people are saying, see what they are doing. Even people who are far away from you, like one of the women who had a near-death experience, she was a pedestrian who was hit by a car, and she was hit so hard that her chest was split open, her lungs and her heart were visible. She was pronounced dead at the scene by the paramedics, okay, but she survived.
And she described rising up to the height of the clouds, but at the same time that she was so far away, she could see everything in detail, hear everything that was said and done to, you know, to her body. She could even see people blocks away who had seen the accident and hear what they were saying. Now, as a doctor, I had no explanation for this, but I became interested. At that time, there was an association in London which had collected about 2,000 of these near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences. And so one of the things that put me on a spiritual search was this awareness that there was something to our bodies more than our material existence. And that could only be a soul.
Now, some people will recognize that, some people not. But perhaps... so I would... I would say, you know, first of all, answer to your question, the most miraculous, amazing, beautiful thing inside our bodies is our ruh, our soul. So let me say something else: life. This is an answer not only to what is so beautiful about us, the fact that we are alive, but it is also a refutation to atheism. Because atheism can explain through the Big Bang and through the process of evolution through natural selection, they can use this to partially— not entirely, and I can get into that later— but partially explain how we came to be.
But the one thing that they cannot answer is where life came from, right? I mean, what made something, what made the primordial cell or the primordial organism from which everything evolved, if you... if you believe in that concept, what made it live? Allah challenges us with life. You know, He challenges the disbeliever by saying, "Take the dead body, right? And make it live again. Put the ruh (soul) back inside it. Put the soul back inside it and make it live." And human beings have tried. They have tried Frankenstein things. They have tried to take dead animals and Frankenstein their parts together, and they cannot make them live.
I've heard that in Russia— I don't know if it's true or not— but I've heard that they tried to do the same thing with human beings, no success. You cannot make it live. So again, where do you get the life from?