My name is Anas. I'm 32 years old. And on October 8th, 2018, I was leading a protest in Manhattan, burning Bibles outside a Christian conference.
I was about to light the seventh Bible when something happened that changed my life forever.
Today, I'm a Christian pastor.
I was born into what you might call a fortress of faith. My father served as imam at the Mazjid al-nur mosque in Brooklyn, a position he had held for over 20 years by the time I came into this world.
Every morning I would wake to the sound of him preparing for fajr* prayer, his voice echoing softly through our small apartment as he recited verses from the Quran.
[*Fajr is first prayer of the day in Islam, occurring before sunrise.
The fajr prayer, alternatively transliterated as fadjr prayer, and also known as the subh prayer, is one of the five daily mandatory Islamic prayers. Consisting of two rak'a, it is performed between the break of dawn and sunrise. It is one of two prayers mentioned by name in the Qur'an. Due to its timing, Islamic belief holds the fajr prayer to be of great importance.]
My mother taught Quran classes to children in our community.
Her gentle but firm voice guiding dozens of young minds through the sacred text every week.
As the eldest of four siblings, I understood from my earliest memories that I was expected to follow in their footsteps to become a religious leader who would carry our family's legacy forward.
The mosque was my second home.
While other children spent their afternoons playing video games or watching television, I was memorizing verses, learning the proper pronunciation of Arabic words and studying Islamic history.
By the time l turned 12, I had memorized nearly half of the Quran.
My father would beam with pride when visitors to our home heard me recite, and my mother would quietly thank Allah for blessing her with such a devoted son.
I led prayers at the mosque youth group, feeling the weight of responsibility as younger boys looked up to me for guidance.
The spiritual connection I felt during those moments was real and powerful.
When I prostrated in prayer, I truly believed I was communicating directly with the creator of the universe.
Everything changed after September 11th, 2001.
I was only 9 years old, but I could feel the shift in how people looked at us.
My father received threatening phone calls at the mosque.
My mother was spat on while grocery shopping, in her hijab, making her an easy target.
Classmates at school would whisper behind my back, asking each other if my family were terrorists.
The pain l saw in my parents' eyes ignited something fierce inside my young heart.
I began to feel a personal responsibility to defend not just my family but my entire faith community.
In high school, I joined the Islamic Student Association and quickly became its most vocal member.
I organized interfaith debates where I would passionately argue for the truth of Islam and challenge what I saw as misconceptions about our religion.
I spent countless hours researching Christian theology, not to understand it, but to find flaws I could expose.
I became skilled at pointing out contradictions in the Bible, questioning the Trinity doctrine, and arguing that Jesus was merely a prophet, not the son of God.
Each successful debate felt like a small victory for Allah and for my community.
But my activism took a darker turn as l entered college.
I started attending study groups led by more radical voices in our community.
Men who spoke about the systematic oppression of Muslims worldwide and the need for active resistance.
They taught me that Christianity wasn't just a different religion but a deliberate enemy of truth.
They showed me statistics about Christian missionaries targeting Muslim communities, about conversion tactics they claimed were deceptive and manipulative.
I began to believe that Christians weren't just wrong about Jesus.
They were actively evil, deliberately leading people away from salvation.
The breaking point came in 2016 when my younger brother Ahmed announced to our family that he had become a Christian.
I will never forget the sound my mother made when he told us. A whale of grief so profound it seemed to shake the walls of our home.
My father sat in stunned silence for nearly an hour before quietly asking Ahmed to leave and never return.
The family I had known and loved was shattered in a single evening.
Ahmed had been my closest sibling, the one who looked up to me most. And now he was gone.
I blamed Christian missionaries entirely for what happened to Ahmed.
In my mind, they had stolen him from us using lies and emotional manipulation.
They had destroyed my family's peace and broken my parents' hearts.
The anger I felt wasn't just theological anymore. It was deeply personal.
Every Christian l encountered became the face of the people who had taken my brother away from Islam and from our family.
I vowed that night that I would do everything in my power to prevent other Muslim families from experiencing the same devastation.
My activism became my life's mission.
l organized counter protests outside Christian events, especially those that advertised Muslim outreach programs.
I distributed literature outside churches on Friday evenings, hoping to intercept any Muslims who might be curious about Christianity.
I created online content exposing what I called the deceptive tactics of Christian evangelists.
Every convert I prevented felt like a victory.
Every Christian argument I dismantled felt like justice for my brother's betrayal and my family's pain.
Think about the most passionate conviction you've ever held. Something you believe so deeply that you would have sacrificed everything for it. That's how I felt about opposing Christianity.
It wasn't just an intellectual position or a religious duty.
It was the fire that burned in my chest every morning when I woke up and every night before I fell asleep.
I genuinely believed that I was fighting a holy war against the enemies of truth and I was prepared to dedicate my entire life to that battle.
By 2018, I had built a network of like-minded activists across New York City.
We monitored Christian events, organized protests, and worked to expose what we saw as the false promises of Christianity.
I had become exactly what my parents had hoped for, a strong defender of the faith.
But I had also become something they never expected, a man consumed by hatred for the followers of Jesus Christ.
The announcement came through our network in early September 2018.
A massive Christian conference was scheduled for Manhattan.
3 days of what they called reaching the lost with the love of Christ.
When I read those words on their promotional website, my blood boiled.
The conference featured prominent Christian speakers, worship leaders, and most concerning to me, an entire track dedicated to Muslim evangelism.
They were advertising workshops with titles like understanding Islamic culture and building bridges to Muslim communities.
To my eyes, this wasn't bridge building. This was an invasion.
I spent hours studying their conference materials, reading through speaker biographies and workshop descriptions.
The more I learned, the more convinced I became that this event represented everything wrong with Christianity's approach to Islam.
They were planning to train hundreds of Christians in what I saw as sophisticated manipulation tactics designed to steal Muslims from their faith.
The conference would send these newly trained missionaries back to their communities across the country, armed with strategies to target vulnerable Muslims like my brother had been.
The decision to organize a counter protest came naturally.
But I knew it needed to be more than our usual demonstrations.
Standing outside with signs and chants wouldn't be enough to match the scale of what I perceived as their threat.
We needed something that would capture media attention. Uh something that would send a clear message to Christians that their targeting of Muslims would not go unopposed.
The idea of burning Bibles came to me during a late night planning session with my core group of activists.
I remember the moment I suggested it, sitting in my apartment with five other men I had been organizing with for over 2 years.
The room fell silent as I laid out my reasoning.
The Bible was the foundation of everything Christians believed.
I argued burning their holy book would symbolically demonstrate the destruction of their false teachings.
It would show them that we were not afraid of their attempts to convert us, that we rejected their claims about Jesus with absolute conviction.
Most importantly, it would generate the kind of media coverage that would expose their evangelistic conference to public scrutiny.
My fellow activists embraced the idea immediately.
We began planning what we called Operation Truth, a demonstration that would combine traditional protest elements with the symbolic destruction of Christian scripture.
I volunteered to handle the collection of Bibles, a task that took me to places I had never imagined entering as a devout Muslim.
I visited hotel lobbies where Bible sat in lobby displays, collected them from donation boxes outside churches, and even purchased used copies from second hand bookstores.
Each Bible l gathered felt like evidence I was collecting for a trial, proof of Christianity's false claims about divine revelation.
The preparation process intensified my hatred for Christianity in ways I hadn't expected.
Handling those Bibles, seeing the words printed inside them, reading passages that claimed Jesus was divine, it all felt like holding poison in my hands.
I would return home after each Bible collection trip and spend extra time in Islamic prayer, asking Allah to cleanse me from the contamination of Christian lies.
The 12 Bibles l eventually gathered sat in my apartment like enemy weapons waiting to be destroyed.
As October 8th approached, I reached out to Islamic groups across the five burrows, Muslim student associations at local universities, and individual activists I had connected with through social media.
My message was urgent and clear.
Christians were planning a massive evangelistic assault on our community, and we needed to respond with unprecedented force.
The response exceeded my expectations.
By the weekend before the conference, I had commitments from nearly 40 people to participate in our demonstration.
The night before October 8th, I barely slept.
I spent hours reviewing my planned speeches, practicing the words I would speak as each Bible burnt.
I rehearsed explanations of why Christianity was false, why the Trinity doctrine was a pagan corruption of monotheism, why Jesus was merely a prophet whose message had been distorted by his followers.
I prepared responses to questions reporters might ask, crafting sound bites that would clearly articulate our position to the media.
Every word needed to be perfect because I knew this would be our biggest platform yet.
I woke that morning feeling like a soldier preparing for the most important battle of his life.
I performed extra prayers asking Allah for strength and clarity.
I called my father at the mosque and asked for his blessing on the day's activities.
Though l didn't tell him specifically about the Bible burning plan, he prayed for my success in defending the faith and told me how proud he was of my dedication to Islamic truth.
Those words from him filled me with even more determination to make the demonstration successful.
The final preparations took place in Central Park where my core group gathered at sunrise to review our plans and distribute materials.
We had Islamic literature to hand out protest signs with carefully crafted messages and media contact information to ensure maximum coverage of our actions.
I carried the bag containing the 12 Bibles, feeling their weight as a reminder of the symbolic power of what we were about to do.
Each book represented years of Christian deception that we would destroy in front of the world.
As we began our march toward the conference center in Manhattan, I felt an energy I had never experienced before.
The group was chanting Islamic phrases, our voices echoing off the buildings as we moved through the streets.
People stopped to watch us pass, some with curiosity, others with obvious concern.
I led the group with complete confidence in our mission, carrying myself like a general leading troops into righteous battle.
The bag of Bibles felt heavier with each step, but not from physical weight. They carried the weight of everything I believed about Christianity's threat to Islamic truth.
Have you ever felt so certain about something that you would stake everything on it?
That morning, walking through Manhattan toward what I believed would be our greatest victory against Christian deception, I had no
doubt that we were doing Allah's work. The conference center came into view, and I could see Christians already
arriving for their morning session. My heart raced with anticipation as I prepared to show them exactly what I
thought of their attempts to steal Muslims from the true faith.
The Manhattan Conference Center stood before us like a fortress of everything I despised about Christianity. (MCC here)
Hundreds of people were streaming through the main entrance, carrying Bibles under their arms, wearing name tags with cheerful conference logos, chatting excitedly about the sessions they planned to attend.
Watching them enter that building felt like watching an army of deception, preparing for battle against the truth.
I positioned our group of protesters directly across from the main entrance, ensuring maximum visibility for both the conference attendees and the media crews l'd contacted the night before.
The contrast between their joy and my anger was stark and immediate.
These Christians were smiling, hugging each other, taking selfies in front of the conference banners.
They looked like people attending a celebration rather than what I saw as a training camp for religious warfare.
Their happiness infuriated me because l knew or thought I knew that their joy was built on lies about Jesus being divine.
Every smile felt like mockery of Islamic truth.
Every friendly greeting between conference attendees felt like conspiracy against my faith.
We began our demonstration with traditional protest chants, holding signs that proclaimed Islamic truths and exposed what we called Christian deceptions.
The media crews arrived quickly, drawn by our vocal opposition to the conference.
Local news reporters approached me for interviews, giving me the platform I had hoped for to explain why we were there.
I spoke passionately about religious freedom, about the right of Muslims to practice their faith without interference from Christian missionaries.
But I knew the real impact would come when we moved beyond words to dramatic action.
The first Christians who approached us surprised me with their responses.
I had expected anger, defensiveness, perhaps even hostility that would justify our aggressive tactics.
Instead, an elderly man with white hair and kind eyes walked slowly toward our group, his hands empty, his expression filled with sadness rather than rage.
He stopped directly in front of me and said quietly, "Son, I'm praying for your heart." The simplicity of his words caught me off guard.
I had prepared for arguments about theology, for debates about scripture, but not for this gentle declaration of prayer.
I responded with the harshness I had planned, telling him to keep his prayers and focus on learning the truth about Islam instead.
But even as the words left my mouth, something about his demeanor unsettled me.
He didn't argue back or defend his faith with the aggression l expected.
He simply nodded, said, "God bless you." and walked away.
I watched him enter the conference center, and for a moment I wondered what kind of deception could make a person so peacefully confident in beliefs I knew were false.
More Christians began stopping to engage with us, but their approaches followed the same unexpected pattern.
A young woman knelt on the sidewalk nearby and began praying silently, tears streaming down her face as she watched our protest.
A group of teenagers started singing hymns rather than shouting counterprotests.
Families walking past would pause to watch us, and I could see parents whispering to their children, but their whispers seemed to be instructions about prayer rather than warnings about dangerous Muslims.
Their peaceful responses were not what I had anticipated, and they certainly were not what I had prepared for.
The time had come to escalate beyond words and signs. I reached into my bag and pulled out the first Bible, a red leather bound copy I'd taken from a hotel lobby.
I held it high above my head so everyone could see it clearly.
My fellow protesters, cheering as they understood
purpose that will last for eternity. I gained peace with God and peace in my heart.
I began this story by telling you that I was once the Christian's greatest enemy, burning their holy book in the streets of Manhattan.
I end it by telling you that Jesus took that enemy and made him a son.
The Bibles I destroyed in hatred led to my heart being transformed by love. If Jesus can
reach someone like me, someone who spent years fighting against him, then he
can
reach anyone. No one is too lost, too angry, too opposed, or too far gone for the
love of
Christ. My name is Annus, and Jesus changed absolutely everything for me.
He took my life of hatred and gave me a life of love. He took my ministry of destruction and gave me a ministry of healing.
He took my heart of stone and gave me a heart of flesh.
This same Jesus stands ready to transform your life too if you will let him.
The question is not whether he can change you, but whether you will surrender to his love.
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