Ex-Muslim's Wife Gets Taken By Saudi Prince, Then JESUS DID THIS

 Testimony: Ex-Muslim's Wife Gets Taken By Saudi Prince, Then JESUS DID THIS

MY name is Yusuf Alhadi. I am 34 years old. 

And on March 14th, 2020, I watched my entire life collapse in front of my eyes. 

It happened so quickly that even now, years later, I sometimes wonder if my mind created parts of it to soften the blow. 

Thinking about what Mariam might cook for dinner. 

The next moment, my phone vibrated with a call from our neighbour's house.

One moment I was tightening a bolt under the hood of an old Hilux. My hands black with grease. 

Oh, her voice shaking, telling me that something terrible had happened at the marketplace. 

I remember running. 

My feet pounded the  pavement. 

My heart thrashed inside my chest like a trapped bird. 

When I turned the corner toward the market,  I saw the black SUV's first, polished metal reflecting the afternoon sun. 

Doors still open, engines still humming.

Then I saw the royal guards. 

Then I saw Mariam. 

Two men held her by the arms. 

She wasn't screaming, but her whole body trembled like a leaf caught between storms. 

She looked so small between those tall men, so fragile, so terrified. 

I shouted her name, but my voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. 

One of the guards turned toward me with a look that froze my bones before I even reached them. 

"Prince Samir Iban Rashad has requested her   presence," he said, as if reading a grocery list. 

Requested?

Such a polite word. 

Such a monstrous lie. 

Have you ever felt your soul trying to leave your   body while you're still alive? 

That was what it felt like watching the guards push Mariam into the SUV. 

She twisted her neck one last time to look at me, eyes wide, wet, pleading before the car door   slammed shut. 

The sound echoed inside my skull like a gunshot. 

I chased the car until my legs gave out. 

Asphalt tore the skin off my palms when I fell.

The tail lights grew smaller, then disappeared entirely into the river of traffic, as if the city itself swallowed her whole. 

I thought that was the day I died. 

But now I know it was the day Jesus began writing a new story for me. 

I was not always a man who understood pain. 

For most of my life, I believed suffering was something that happened to other people. 

To those people who wandered from the straight path, those who angered God, those who lived without discipline or devotion. 

That belief wasn't taught to me out of cruelty. 

It was simply the air I breathed growing up. 

In my childhood home, faith was not a part of life. 

It was life. 

Every breath, every decision, every movement of body or thought belonged to Allah as my father  understood him. 

My earliest memories are of cold water splashing across my face before dawn. 

My father's stern voice whispering verses as he guided my small hands through the motions of Wudu.

Wuduʾ is the Islamic procedure for cleansing parts of the body, a type of ritual purification, or ablution. The steps of wudu are washing the hands, rinsing the mouth and nose, washing the face, then the forearms, then wiping the head, the ears, then washing or wiping the feet, while doing them in order without any big breaks between them.

Our house always felt half asleep at that hour. 

Dim light seeping under the doors. 

The smell of dust and old prayer rugs. 

The distant call of the muezzin echoing across the rooftops like a lullaby turned upside down.

(The muezzin (/m(j)uˈɛzɪn/; Arabic: مُؤَذِّن, romanized: Muʾaḏḏin), also spelled mu'azzin, is the person who proclaims the call to the daily prayer (ṣalāt) five times a day (Fajr prayer, Zuhr prayer, Asr prayer, Maghrib prayer and Isha prayer) at a mosque from the minaret.) 

 I remember shivering as my father wrapped a shawl around my shoulders and whispered, "'A good man begins with obedience, Yusuf."

I wanted to be a good man so badly.

By the time I turned 10, I could recite entire Surahs from memory. 

(a list of the 114 Surahs of the Qur'an)

By 12-year-old, I had memorized nearly half the Qur'an. 

The neighbourhood imam would pat my head and say,  "This boy will bring honor to his family."

My mother was full of pride whenever she heard me recite the Qur'an. 

Faith shaped me the way a potter shapes clay. 

Pressing, smoothing, carving. 

I didn't question anything because I never needed to. 

Certainty is a comfortable prison when you don't know you're inside it. 

But the truth is, even then something was missing. 

 I could never name it, but it hovered beneath all my achievements. a faint hollowness, a sense that devotion could be performed perfectly while the heart remained untouched.

But I buried those feelings quickly. 

They felt dangerous, like cracks in a wall that was supposed to be unbreakable. 

Years passed. 

I left home, found work in a garage on the outskirts of Riyadh, and built a modest life. 

The heat was unbearable. 

Most days sweat mixing with engine oil, dust coating every part of my skin. 

But there was something satisfying in the work, something honest. 

Cars didn't lie. 

Engines didn't scold you for asking questions. 

Machines broke for understandable reasons, and they could be fixed with your own hands. 

And then came Mariam. 

The day I met her, she spoke softly, barely above a whisper. 

As we sat in her father's sitting room, her eyes stayed lowered, but there was something warm in her presence, something gentle that made the atmosphere less stiff. 

She didn't try to impress me, didn't hide her nervousness. 

Somehow that made her even more beautiful.

We were married within months. 

Not a lavish wedding ceremony, just family, neighbours, food, simple smiles. 

But I remember walking into our tiny two-room apartment afterward and feeling like I had stepped into a palace.

Mariam placed a small vase of jasmine on the windowsill. 

She unpacked our dishes. 

She laughed. Oh, how she laughed.

And everything in that cramped space seemed to glow. 

We had so little, yet it felt like abundance. 

We planned meals around whatever discount vegetables we could find at the market. 

We argued about to save for Hajj. (Hajj is an annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holiest city for Muslims. Hajj is a mandatory religious duty for capable Muslims that must be carried out at least once in their lifetime by all adult Muslims who are physically and financially capable of undertaking the journey, and of supporting their family during their absence from home.)

Should we hide the money in a box or open a small saving account? 

Some nights we fell asleep talking about the number of children we hoped for. 

Mariam wanted three. 

I wanted four. 

We prayed about it constantly. 

Every morning before sunrise, we knelt side by side on our prayer rugs. 

I remember the warmth of her shoulder brushing mine, her voice rising with mine, two streams of devotion merging into one. 

I used to think as long as we pray, nothing can destroy us. 

Have you ever believed something so strongly that you built your entire life on it only to discover later it was sand beneath your feet? 

That certainty carried me through everything. 

Through long days at garage when customers yelled at me, through months when work was slow and money tighter than ever. 

Through nights when the desert wind rattled the windows and I held Mariam close just to feel steady. 

To me, she was not only my wife, she was the living proof that God was pleased with me. 

She brought peace into every corner of our home. 

She soothed my frustrations. 

When the world felt unfair, when I worried we didn't have enough, she would take my hands and whisper, "We have more than many, and Allah sees our hearts." 

Her faith strengthened mine. 

Her presence steadied me. 

I used to get home from work covered in oil and dust. 

And she would greet me with that radiant smile, the kind that makes you believe even for a moment  that everything in life will be okay. 

She would place her hand gently on my cheek and say, "You work so hard, Yusuf. Sit. Rest. Let me feed you." 

That was love to me. 

Not fireworks, not poetry, just two imperfect people choosing each other again and again in the quiet moments.

We were poor, yes, but we were rich in ways I didn't understand until much later. 

At night, lying next to her, I used to imagine our future with such confidence. 

A bigger apartment, children running