I have to tell you something. I have to tell you what happened that day because I cannot keep it inside anymore.

I have been a Muslim imam for 31 years. I have led thousands of prayers.

I have read the Quran from beginning to end more times than I can count.

I have taught children how to pray since I was a young man myself. I know what a normal prayer session looks like.

I know what children sound like when they are being children, when they are distracted, when they are whispering to each other instead of focusing.

I know all of that. I have seen all of that. But what happened on that Thursday afternoon in our mosque in Riyad, I have never seen anything like it in my entire life.

Not once. Not even close. And I am not a man who says things like that easily.

I am a careful man. I am a man who thinks before he speaks. My own father raised me to never speak about something unless I was sure about what I saw with my own eyes.

He used to say, “Ahmad, do not open your mouth if your eyes did not see it.”

And so I am telling you now, I saw this. I was there. I was standing right in the front of the room when it happened.

And everything I’m about to tell you is exactly what I witnessed. It was a Thursday.

The time was around 4:00 in the afternoon. We had a children’s prayer group that met every Thursday at that time.

It was something we started about 2 years before this happened. The idea was simple.

We would bring children between the ages of 7 and 10 years old to the mosque and we would teach them how to pray the right way.

We would teach them the words, the positions, the meaning behind everything. Most of their parents worked long hours and they would drop the children off and pick them up afterward.

We had around 22 children that day. Some of them I had known since they were babies.

Some of them were newer to the group, but all of them were between 7 and 10 years old.

Little ones. Small hands and small voices and sneakers that squeak on the floor when they walked.

I remember the weather that day. It was hot outside, the way Riyad is always hot, but inside the mosque, it was cool from the air conditioning.

The light that came through the windows was soft and golden. The kind of light that comes late in the afternoon.

Everything felt quiet and peaceful. Everything felt completely normal. I had no reason to think that day would be any different from any other Thursday we had spent with those children.

We started the session the way we always started it. I gathered the children together and had them sit in rows on the prayer mats.

I reminded them to be still and to focus their hearts. Some of them were a little restless at first, the way children always are.

A little boy named Yousef, who was 8 years old, kept turning around to make his friend laugh.

A girl named No, who was nine, was fixing the edge of her headscarf and not really paying attention yet.

These were normal things. These were exactly what I expected. I led them through the opening recitation slowly, the way I always did, making sure they could follow along.

We went through the first part of the prayer together. I could hear their small voices joining mine, some of them stronger and more confident, some of them still learning and soft.

After the recitation, I asked them to stay on their mats and to spend some personal time in quiet prayer.

I told them to close their eyes and talk to God from their hearts. Not the formal words, not the recitation, just their own words, whatever they wanted to say.

I told them to be honest and to be open. I told them that God hears even the quietest prayer.

And that is when everything changed. I bowed my own head to pray. I closed my eyes.

The room got very quiet. The only sound was the soft hum of the air conditioning and the distant sound of traffic outside.

I started praying for the children, asking for their hearts to be open, asking for them to grow up to be people of faith and goodness.

I was in my own prayer when the first sound reached me. It was a sound I had never heard before.

Not in 31 years, not anywhere. It started with one child. I did not open my eyes right away because at first I thought maybe a child was crying softly.

Sometimes children cry during prayer, especially the younger ones who are thinking about something that is heavy on their heart.

But this sound was not exactly crying. It was more like a sound that was coming from deep inside the child from somewhere very far inside.

It was the sound of something real, something that was not rehearsed or learned or copied from anyone.

It was raw and it was small and it was completely real. Then a second child made a sound and then a third.

I opened my eyes. What I saw when I open my eyes is something I will never be able to fully explain with words.

I will try. I will do my best. But I want you to know before I even start that words are too small for this.

Every word I use is smaller than what actually happened in that room. The children were still on their mats.

None of them had moved from their positions. But their faces, their faces were completely different from any faces I had ever seen on any child at any time.

Their eyes were closed. Their heads were tilted slightly upward as if they were looking at something above them, even though their eyes were shut.

And on every single face, on all 22 of those children, there was an expression that I can only describe as seeing something, not imagining something, not pretending something, actually seeing something right in front of them.

The expressions were different from each other. And that is what struck me hardest because if children were pretending, if they were playing a game or copying each other, their expressions would look similar.

But they were not similar at all. Some of the children had tears streaming down their faces, completely silent tears just running down their cheeks without any sound.

Some of them had their mouths slightly open like they were about to say something, but were too amazed to speak.

One child, a boy named Tar, who was 10 years old and was usually the most energetic and distracted child in the group, had his hands pressed flat against his chest.

His whole body was very still. His face was like I had never seen it before.

It was peaceful in a way that was beyond what a 10-year-old boy normally looks like.

The kind of peace that takes years to find. Then the sounds started to grow.

They were not speaking Arabic. They were not speaking anything I recognized. The sounds that were coming from these children were languages I had never heard in my life.

Not English, not French, not Uru, not Somali, not any of the many languages I have heard in 31 years of leading a mosque where people come from all over the world.

These were not any of those languages. The sounds were fluid and they were beautiful and they seemed to have a rhythm to them like they meant something like each child was actually saying something real and important just not in any language that I or any other person in that room had ever learned.

I stood completely frozen. I want to be honest with you about that. I was frozen.

My body would not move. Not because I was afraid, though I did not fully understand what was happening.

It was more like I was in the presence of something so far beyond me that my body understood even before my mind caught up that the only right response was to be completely still.

I looked around the room. There were two other adults with me that day, two men who helped with the children’s program.

Brother Khalid and brother Fel. I looked at them and they were exactly like me, frozen, standing completely still with their eyes wide open, looking at the children the same way I was looking at them.

None of us spoke. None of us moved. The children were praying. That is the only word I have.

They were praying in these languages that none of us could understand. And as they prayed, the sound grew.

It was not loud, not the way a crowd is loud. It was more like music that builds slowly where each voice joins the one before it and together they become something greater than any single voice could be.

The voices of those 22 children, all between 7 and 10 years old, all praying in languages none of us knew, filled that room in a way that I have no natural explanation for.

I felt something on my skin. I felt warmth. Not the warmth from the sun or from a heater.

This warmth was different. It started on my arms and it moved up to my chest and my face.

It was the kind of warmth that feels like being held. Like when someone who loves you puts their hands on your shoulders and you feel their warmth through your clothing.

That is the closest I can come to describing it. And then the little girl nor the 9-year-old who had been fixing her headscarf at the start of the session.

She opened her eyes and when she opened her eyes, they were filled with tears and she looked directly at a place in the center of the room.

She was not looking at me. She was not looking at any of the other children.

She was looking at something in the middle of the room at something none of the rest of us could see.

And she said something. She said it in Arabic, which is why I understood it.

She said in a voice so quiet I had to strain to hear her. You came.

Just those two words, you came. Then she closed her eyes again and went back to the language she had been praying in before, the language none of us knew.

I felt my knees go weak when she said that I am a big man.

I’m not someone who has weak knees. But in that moment, my knees felt like they might not hold me.

Because in the way she said it, in the tone of her voice, in the look on her face when she said it, I understood that she was not speaking to an idea.

She was not speaking to a concept or a memory or something she had read about.

She was speaking to someone who was standing right there in that room. Someone she could actually see.

I did not know then who she was seeing. I did not understand it. My mind was searching through everything I knew, everything I had ever learned, everything I had ever been taught.

Nothing I had ever been taught prepared me for what was happening in that room.

The children continued. For how long, I honestly cannot tell you with certainty. My sense of time left me completely during those moments.

When I think back to it, it feels like it could have been 20 minutes or it could have been 2 hours.

Brother Khaled told me afterward that it was about 45 minutes from when the first child made that first sound to when the last child slowly opened their eyes.

45 minutes of those children praying in tongues they had never learned, weeping without sadness, their faces full of something I had no word for.

Some of them began to move during that time. Not wildly, not in a way that looked uncontrolled.

Some of them raised their hands slowly, the way you might reach up to touch something that is just above you.

Little hands, seven-year-old hands, 8-year-old hands, reaching upward towards something. One small boy, Muhammad, who was only seven and was the youngest child in the group, he stood up from his mat without opening his eyes.

He stood up very slowly and very carefully and he stretched both of his arms out in front of him, the way a child reaches for a parent.

And his face when he was standing like that with his arms out was the face of a child who has found what he was looking for.

The most complete relief I have ever seen on a human face. I watched all of this without making a sound.

Brother Khaled and brother Fisel watched without making a sound. I think we all understood without saying it to each other that whatever was happening in that room, we did not have the right to interrupt it.

We did not have the understanding or the authority to say when it should stop.

We just watched. The moment that broke me completely, the moment when I could no longer hold myself together was when a 10-year-old girl named Aisha began to speak.

She had been one of the children who were praying in tongues like the others.

But then the tongue speaking slowed down and she began to cry. Real crying this time, the kind where the shoulders shake and the breath comes in short bursts.

And through her crying in Arabic, she began to speak. She said, “I did not know.

I did not know who you were. I am sorry. I am so sorry.” She said it over and over.

I did not know who you were. That broke me. That broke me completely because in all my years of leading prayer, I had never heard a child apologize to someone who was standing right in front of her.

Children apologize to their parents. They apologize to teachers. They apologize to friends. They do not apologize to concepts.

They do not apologize to ideas. Aisha was apologizing the way you apologize to a real person, to someone who is right there looking at you and who has every right to be upset with you, but who you can tell is not upset at all.

That is how she sounded. I realized I was crying myself. I had not noticed until that moment.

The tears were on my face and I had not felt them start. I am a 63-year-old man.

I have buried my own parents. I have sat beside people as they died. I have heard hard news and carried heavy things in my life.

I’m not a man who cries easily. But I was standing in the front of that room watching children who could not possibly have set this up, who could not have planned it or rehearsed it or organized it between them.

And I was crying like a child myself. One by one, after some time, the children began to come back.

Their eyes began to open. The sounds began to quiet. The room began to settle.

And as each child opened their eyes and came back to full awareness, the expression on their face changed.

Not to sadness, not to confusion, but to the kind of quiet that comes after something very big.

The kind of quiet that a person has after they have received news that changed everything.

Little Yousef, the 8-year-old who had been turning around to make his friend laugh at the beginning of the session, was one of the last to open his eyes.

When he did, he looked around the room slowly like he was trying to remember where he was.

Then he looked at me and he said in his small 8-year-old voice, “Imamama, did you see him?”

I could not answer right away. I tried to speak and nothing came out. I cleared my throat and tried again.

I said, “Who did you see, Yousef?” He thought about it for a second. The way children think about things when they want to get the words exactly right.

Then he said, “The man with the light.” He had light coming from his hands and from his face.

He knew my name. He said my name and it felt like my whole chest went warm.

I asked him, “Did he tell you who he was?” Yousef nodded. He said his name, but I already knew it when I looked at his face.

It was Isa. That is the Arabic name. The one Christians call Jesus. I felt the ground under me the way you feel the ground when you take a step.

And the surface is not where you expected it to be. Everything shifted under me.

Not physically, but in my mind and in my heart. 31 years as an imam, 31 years of leading a mosque, of teaching the Quran, of building my entire life around one understanding of who God is and how he speaks.

And now this 8-year-old boy who 5 minutes ago was trying to make his friend laugh was telling me that ISA had come into the room and said his name.

I asked the other children then. I know I must have looked a little unsteady because brother Fisel came and stood close to me like he was ready to hold me up if I needed it.

I asked the children to tell me what they experienced if they wanted to share it.

What happened next was something I will hear in my head until the last day of my life.

Child after child began to speak. Some of them were still wiping tears from their faces.

Some of them were holding hands with the child next to them. And they all describe the same thing, but in different ways with different details, the way witnesses to a real event always do.

They described a man, a man made of light, standing in the center of the room.

They said the light was warm and it did not hurt their eyes even though it was very bright.

They said the man was looking at each of them individually, that even though there were 22 children in the room, each child felt like they were the only one the man was looking at.

Some of them described details. One boy said the man had marks on his hands, marks that went all the way through, and that the light came most strongly from those places.

A girl said he smiled at her, and when he smiled, she felt like someone had taken a very heavy thing off of her back that she did not even know she had been carrying.

A younger boy said that when the man spoke, the sound of his voice did not come from outside.

It came from inside, like the words were already in his chest before he heard them with his ears.

Nor the 9-year-old who had said, “You came.” She told me that she had prayed the week before by herself at home at night, a prayer she had not told anyone about.

She said she had asked God to show her if there was more to know.

That is exactly what she said. A 9-year-old girl at home alone asking God if there was more to know.

And then the following Thursday in the mosque during children’s prayer, this happened. I am still processing that detail.

A 9-year-old asked God a genuine question and got an answer the following week. That child’s simple prayer, her honest and open question, was heard and answered.

I have been a man of prayer for over three decades. And that detail, a child’s quiet prayer being answered like that, moved me more than almost anything else about that whole day.

The children began speaking in those unknown languages again for a short period after they shared their testimonies, but softer this time, like the quiet at the end of something rather than the middle of something, and then it stopped completely.

The room returned to full quiet. The air conditioning hummed outside, a car passed. The afternoon light was still gold through the windows.

I sat down on the floor. I know that might sound unusual for an imam to simply sit down on the floor in the middle of a session.

But my legs finally insisted and I had nothing left to argue with them. I sat down and I looked at these children who were looking back at me with their quiet changed faces.

And I thought about everything I had been taught and everything I had taught others.

And I thought about those 22 children and the languages that had come out of their mouths, languages I am certain none of them had ever studied or heard.

And I thought about Yousef saying, “ISA.” I thought about Aisha saying, “I did not know who you were.”

I thought about Muhammad, the seven-year-old, standing with his arms out like a child reaching for a parent.

I did not have answers. I want to be honest about that. I did not walk out of that mosque that day with everything figured out.

I did not have a neat explanation or a clear road map for what to do next.

I was shaken in a way I had never been shaken before. Everything I thought I knew was sitting differently inside me, like furniture that had been moved to new places in a familiar house.

It was all still there, but nothing was where I had left it. What I did that evening after the parents had come and taken their children home, after brother Khaled and brother Fisel had both gone home looking as quiet and changed as I felt, was I sat alone in the empty mosque for a long time.

The lights were low. The room was empty. The prayer mats were still on the floor where the children had been sitting.

And I prayed. I prayed the way I have not prayed since I was a young man first learning what prayer was.

I prayed without any formula and without any structure. I just talked. I talked to God and I said everything I was feeling.

I said I was confused. I said I was afraid. I said I had given 31 years to this and I needed him to help me understand what had happened in that room.

I said I wanted to know the truth whatever the truth was even if it was different from what I had always believed.

I said I wanted to know the way nor had asked the week before. I asked God if there was more to know.

Something happened while I was praying alone in that room that I will only share in a small way because it belongs to me in a private sense.

I will say only this. I was not alone in that room when I prayed.

I know that I felt that same warmth that I had felt when the children were praying.

The warmth that moves up through the chest. And in my heart, not with my ears, I heard a name.

My name. My full name spoken with more love and more gentleness than I have words for.

And I knew then what the children knew. I understood then what Yousef was trying to describe when he said the man knew his name, and it made his whole chest go warm.

I have not shared this story publicly until now. For a long time, I kept it only between myself and the two brothers who were with me that day.

We were all afraid of what people would say, afraid of what it would mean for our lives and our community.

I am still afraid of some of those things. I will not pretend otherwise, but I am more afraid now of staying silent than I am of speaking because those 22 children experienced something real.

Nor’s simple prayer was answered. Aisha’s apology was received. Muhammad’s arms found something to reach and Yousef, my restless little 8-year-old who could never sit still, sat completely still for 45 minutes while the light came through the hands of someone who knew his name.

I do not have a full explanation of where my life goes from here. I am still walking through that slowly and carefully and honestly, but I am walking.

I am asking. I am open in a way I was not open before. And I believe that openness is exactly where that walk begins.

I have been a man of prayer for 31 years. I believe I am finally learning what prayer can truly be.

I believe I am finally beginning to understand who actually hears it. Those children showed me that.

22 small children with sneakers that squeaked on the floor. They showed me and I will never be the same.