My Father Is an Imam. I Was Accused of Blasphemy in Pakistan. I Found Jesus in Prison

My name is Bilal. I come from Lahore. My father is an imam, a respected Islamic scholar, a man whose opinion on religious matters has been sought by his community for 30 years.

I grew up in the shadow of his scholarship and his authority. I became a scholar myself in his tradition in his madrasa.

I was for the first 29 years of my life exactly the kind of person my father had intended me to be and then I was accused of blasphemy and I spent 14 months in Kotlakpat prison in Lahore waiting to find out whether I would die for something I had not done and in that prison in a cell with no pastor and no community and no one to guide me I found Jesus Christ and that the finding cost me everything that remained after the prison had already taken and most of it.

I want to tell you this story carefully, not because I am afraid. I have been more afraid than I can describe and whatever fear is left in me is small compared to what has already passed.

But because the details matter and because the people who have not been inside the Pakistani blasphemy system do not fully understand what it is and because I think that understanding matters for what I want to tell you at the end.

So let me start at the beginning. My father Imam Tariq Kureshi has been the director of a madrasa in Lahore for more than 25 years.

He is a man of genuine learning. A hai a man who has memorized the entire Quran.

A man who reads classical Arabic and who has studied hadith and fik with a seriousness that I genuinely respected even after I came to disagree with much of what he taught.

He is not a stupid man. He is not a cruel man in the ordinary sense.

He is a man who has built his entire identity, his entire life, his entire legacy on a specific understanding of God and truth and community and who cannot conceive of a world in which that understanding is wrong.

I was his eldest son. This carries specific weight in a Pakistani family of his standing.

I was the heir to the scholarship, the heir to the madrasa, the heir to the community’s trust.

From the time I could read, I was being prepared for this. I studied Arabic before Udu, Quran before anything else.

By the time I was 12, I could discuss Islamic Jewish prudence at a level that impressed the older students.

By the time I was 18, I was teaching younger students. By 25, I was a junior lecturer at the Madrasa, beginning to take on some of the teaching responsibilities that would eventually, in my father’s plan, become my full role.

I believed what I was teaching. I want to be clear about this. I was not secretly doubtful, not privately questioning, not performing a faith I did not hold.

I was a genuine scholar in a tradition I had been formed in and that I had as best I could assess at the time genuinely internalized.

The questions that eventually came to me came from inside the tradition. They were not imported from outside.

They were the questions that serious study of any rich intellectual tradition eventually produces. The places where the arguments are less settled than the official teaching suggests.

The tensions between different scholarly positions. The problems that have been debated for centuries without resolution.

I was a serious student and serious students find these things. This is important for understanding what happened next.

Because the accusation that eventually came against me was not, as it is sometimes portrayed in stories like mine, the accusation of a man who had obviously and publicly turned against his faith.

It was the accusation of a man who had asked inside a madrasa seminar a question about a hadith whose authenticity has been genuinely contested by Islamic scholars for centuries.

The question was not heterodox. It was the kind of question that serious scholars in the tradition ask but it was heard by a man who had reasons to want me gone and he heard it as an opportunity and he used it.

His name was Rashid. He was a fellow lecturer at the Madrasa, a man of my father’s generation, which is to say a generation older than me, who had expected to become the Madrasa’s senior lecturer, when my father eventually reduced his own teaching load, and who had watched with increasing resentment, as my father’s obvious intention to pass that role to me rather than to Rashid became clear.

The professional jealousy between us was not hidden though it was managed with the surface politeness that Pakistani institutional life requires.

I will not reconstruct the details of the seminar in which the question was asked because doing so would require me to relitigate an accusation that has already been judged to have no merit and I have no interest in that.

What I will tell you is what happened after Rashid filed a report with the local police under section 295 C of the Pakistani penal code alleging that I had spoken blasphemously against the prophet Muhammad.

The blasphemy laws in Pakistan I want to explain this for people who may not know the details are extraordinary in their scope and in the specific danger they create.

Section 295C mandates the death penalty for anyone convicted of defiling the name of the prophet.

The law does not require strong evidence. The accusation itself once made carries enormous social weight and the situation created by a blasphemy accusation is almost uniquely dangerous.

The accused cannot be defended aggressively in court without the defense being accused of repeating the blasphemy.

A quiddle can trigger mob violence against the acquitted person and judges are under significant social and religious pressure to convict regardless of the evidence.

I was arrested 3 days after Rashid filed the report. My father was present when the police came.

He did not intervene. I understand why. To intervene publicly in a blasphemy case, even on behalf of your own son, is to risk having the accusation associated with you.

He stood in the doorway of his house and he watched them take me. I looked back at him as they led me away.

His face was I want to find the right word. Closed. A man who had closed his face against something that was too painful to look at with it open.

I was taken to Kat Lakpat prison in Lahore. I was 29 years old. I was placed in a cell and I was told that I would be held pending investigation under the blasphemy statute.

I was given no timeline. Under the Pakistani blasphemy laws, there is no set period for pre-trial detention.

I could be held for months, for years. The law creates no urgency for the state to resolve the case quickly.

I sat in that cell on the first night and I tried to understand what had happened to me.

Not emotionally. The emotions were too large to process on the first night. Intellectually as a scholar, I tried to map the situation onto frameworks I had been given for understanding the world.

Frameworks that included the will of God, the concept of trial and suffering in Islamic theology, the narratives of the prophets who had also suffered.

I had taught these frameworks to students. I had believed them. I tried to apply them.

They did not hold. Not because they were entirely wrong, but because there is a specific thing that happens when you are in a cell and you do not know when you will come out and you do not know what will happen to you and that specific thing is that abstractions become insufficient.

The frameworks that are adequate for teaching become inadequate for living inside. And in the gap between the framework and the reality, questions come that the framework cannot absorb.

The questions that came to me in Kot Lakpat were not initially theological. They were prior to theology.

They were, “Is there anyone here in this place in the dark? Is there anyone who sees me?”

I want to tell you about Kot Lakpat prison in a way that is honest without being gratuitous.

It is a place of significant difficulty, overcrowding, poor sanitation, a hierarchy among prisoners that is enforced by physical means.

the specific vulnerability of a person accused of blasphemy which in a Pakistani prison means being accused of a crime that many of your fellow prisoners consider worthy of extrajudicial punishment.

I was aware of this vulnerability from the beginning and I navigated it with great care.

But I also want to tell you that the 14 months I spent in that prison were in the most counterintuitive possible way the most significant period of my life.

Not because of what was done to me. What was done to me in that prison was not good and I do not recommend it.

But because of what I found in the space that the prison created the specific involuntary stripped down space of a man who has had everything external removed and must therefore discover what if anything is underneath.

About 3 months into my detention, a man was transferred into my cell. A man I will call David, a Pakistani Christian who had been imprisoned on an unrelated charge.

David was an ordinary man, not an educated man, not a theologian, not a person of any particular social standing.

He was a brick layer from a Christian community in Lahore, a man of simple faith and extraordinary steadiness who read his New Testament every day with the concentration of a man reading something that keeps him alive.

We shared a cell for 11 weeks before he was transferred again. David and I talked.

He had no agenda regarding me. He was not trying to convert me. He was simply being who he was in the same space I was in.

When I asked him questions about what he was reading, he answered them. When I was silent, he was silent.

When the nights were difficult, and the nights in Kot Lakpat were frequently difficult, he would sometimes pray quietly, not loudly, not for an audience, just praying.

And there was something about the quality of his prayer that I noticed and that I could not account for within the frameworks I had been given.

He was praying to someone who was present. Not performing ritual in the direction of a god who might or might not be listening, talking to someone who was there.

I asked him once, “How do you know he is listening?” David looked at me for a moment and then he said in Punjabi in the specific cadence of an uneducated man who has no interest in impressing anyone because when I talked to him I am not alone anymore.

I sat with that answer for weeks. David was transferred. He left his New Testament with me.

He pressed it into my hands the morning he left and he said, “Read it slowly.

Start with the Gospels. Ask God to show you what is true. He was echoing without knowing it the exact words that Emanuel had said to Ysef Okonquo, though I would not know that story for years.

There are apparently certain instructions that the spirit gives through ordinary people that are remarkably consistent across very different circumstances.

I took the New Testament. I hid it, not well, but enough. And I began to read.

I was a scholar of classical Islamic texts. I had spent 15 years reading in Arabic, studying hadith, analyzing legal opinions, working through commentaries.

I knew how to read a religious text. I brought that same rigor to David’s New Testament.

And I was immediately struck by something that my training had not prepared me for.

The Islamic scholarly tradition had taught me that the gospels were corrupted texts, not the original revelation given to the prophet Issa, but documents that had been altered by human hands over centuries, unreliable as sources of divine truth to be treated with theological suspicion.

I had taught this to students. I had believed it. Reading the Gospels for the first time as a primary text without the filter of that teaching was an experience I can only describe as being corrected by reality.

The internal consistency, the specificity of detail, the quality of the portrait of Jesus that emerged from four different perspectives.

These were not the marks of a corrupted or invented text. Whatever one concluded about the theological claims, the literary and historical texture of the gospels was not what I had been taught to expect.

They were primary source documents shaped by the hands of people who were either eyewitnesses or close to eyewitnesses, and they had the specific quality that primary source documents have.

They include things that are inconvenient, things that do not serve the narrative, things that a fabricator would have omitted.

The disciples frequent failure to understand the women at the tomb. Peter’s denial. These are the marks of honesty, not fabrication.

I read the gospels as a scholar first and a seeker second. And what I found in my scholars’s assessment was that the documents were more credible than I had been taught.

That the portrait of Jesus they contained was not the portrait of an invented figure.

that the resurrection accounts with all their complexity and their inconvenient details had the texture of people reporting something that had actually happened and that they were still in some cases struggling to interpret.

And then I read the Gospels a second time as a seeker and what I found the second time was different from what I found the first time.

The first time I was assessing the text. The second time the text was in some way I cannot fully account for assessing me.

I want to tell you about one specific passage. It was in the Gospel of Luke the 15th chapter.

The chapter that contains three parables. The lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son.

I had encountered versions of the first two in Islamic tradition. The third one I had not.

The story of the son who takes his inheritance, leaves, wastess everything, ends up feeding pigs in a distant country and then decides to return and the father who sees him coming from far away and runs to meet him.

The father who does not wait for the apology, who does not require the demonstration of worthiness before the embrace.

Who runs? I was a man in a cell in Kot Lakpart prison who had been accused of something he had not done whose own father had watched him be taken away without intervening who did not know if he was going to die in this place.

And I read about a father who runs who sees the returning son while he is still a long way off who does not wait.

And something in me, something that was not the scholar, not the jurisprudent student, not the Madrasa lecturer, something more fundamental than all of those things asked.

What if there is a father who runs? What if the God who is actually there is not the God who requires sufficient performance before the embrace?

What if the God who is actually there is the one who is watching the road?

I put the New Testament down on the stone floor of my cell and I said in Punjabi in the language of my mother the language that was under all my Arabic and all my scholarship.

I said I’m here. I’m the one in the far country. If you are running if you are the father who runs I am here.

I am coming back. That was my prayer. That was the moment. I was 30 years old in a prison cell with nothing.

And I found everything. I spent 11 more months in Kot Lakpod after that night.

The case moved slowly as blasphemy cases in Pakistan always move slowly because no one involved in the judicial system wants to be the one who visibly accelerates the acquitt of someone accused under 295C.

My lawyer, a man who took my case for a fee I could not fully pay, a man of genuine courage who had worked religious freedom cases before, filed motion after motion.

The evidence against me was, as it had always been, essentially non-existent. Rasheed’s testimony was inconsistent.

The other witnesses were unreliable. The case was legally weak. After 14 months, it collapsed.

The judge dismissed the charges. I was released on a Tuesday morning. I remember it was Tuesday because of the specific quality of the light in Lahore on a Tuesday morning in March, which is something you remember when you have been inside for 14 months.

I walked out of Kot Lakbat and I stood on the street and I breathed the air of Lahore.

That specific combination of dust and food and diesel and flowers that is not pleasant by most objective measures, but that is to anyone who has been deprived of it.

The most beautiful smell in the world. My lawyer was beside me. My mother was there.

She had not given up, had never given up, had visited every week and sent food and prayed every day and aged noticeably in those 14 months.

She held me and I held her and neither of us spoke for a long time.

My father was not there. I had not expected him to be. But the absence had a wait.

I was taken to my mother’s sister’s house. My parents house was not safe for me.

Not immediately after the release. Because the social situation around a blasphemy aqu quiddle in Pakistan is complex and sometimes dangerous.

The acquitt does not erase the accusation in the eyes of everyone. There are people for whom the dismissal of charges is evidence of a corrupted system rather than evidence of innocence.

I needed time and I needed to be somewhere that was not the obvious address.

I had not told anyone during the 14 months about what had happened to me in the cell.

Not my mother, not my lawyer. David’s New Testament was hidden in my clothes when I left.

I carried it out in my shirt, pressed against my chest, and I have it still.

I waited 2 months after my release before I told my father about my faith.

I waited partly because the situation was still delicate and partly because I needed time to understand what I was going to say and how.

My father and I had had one brief formal meeting in the weeks after my release, a meeting that was awkward and that neither of us had the vocabulary to navigate.

The accusation had been between us like a third person in the room. He had not intervened when I was arrested.

I had not asked him why. We had not spoken about any of it. I went to his study on a Sunday afternoon when I knew my mother would be in the other part of the house and we would be unlikely to be interrupted.

I sat across from his desk, the same desk I had sat across from my entire childhood, in the same chair that students sat in when they came to him with questions.

And I told him, I told him everything. David’s New Testament, the Gospels, the 15th chapter of Luke, the prayer in the cell.

I told him as clearly and as fully as I could because I had decided that if I was going to tell my father the most important thing that had ever happened to me, I was going to tell it completely.

My father listened without interrupting. He was a man trained to hear arguments in their entirety before responding.

He listened to everything and when I finished he was silent for a long time and then he said, “You were alone in a prison cell for 14 months.

You were afraid. You were vulnerable. A man gave you a book and you read it and you told yourself a story that made the fear manageable.

This is not faith. This is psychological weakness in an extreme situation.” I said, “That is one way to understand it.

He said it is the correct way to understand it. I said Baba and I did not finish the sentence because there was nothing I could say after Baba that was going to change where we were.

He said you are my son but you are also the son of an imam.

And if what you are telling me is true, if you have genuinely abandoned Islam, then you have done something that I cannot stand beside.

Not publicly, not privately. You understand what I am telling you? I understood what he was telling me.

In the cultural and religious context of his life and his position, a son who apostatizes is not just a personal failure.

It is a public statement about the Imam himself, about the quality of his scholarship and his household and his faith.

To acknowledge my conversion to allow me to remain in his life openly as a Christian would be in his world to endorse it and that he could not do.

I said I understand. He said then I think there is nothing more to say.

I left his study. I did not see him again before I left Pakistan. I have not spoken to him since.

I want to stop here. Because I know that someone watching this has a father or a mother or a family who has said some version of what my father said, not necessarily with the same words, but the same meaning.

I cannot stand beside this and I want to say to that person. I know.

I know what it feels like to hear those words from the person whose standing beside has mattered most to you.

I know the specific weight of that silence. I am not going to tell you it gets small.

It does not get small. But I am going to tell you that there is something that holds even when the people you needed to hold you cannot.

And I am going to tell you what it is by the end of this.

Stay with me. I left Pakistan 8 months after my release. The decision to leave was not simple.

Pakistan is my country, my language, my family, the specific texture of a world that made me.

Leaving it was not only logistics. It was a grief but the situation was not sustainable.

My presence in Lahore as a man who had been accused of blasphemy and who was now known in certain circles to have converted to Christianity.

That presence created danger not only for me for my mother who was still living in my father’s house and whose position was already complicated by what had happened for my siblings.

The danger that attaches to a blasphemy accusation does not completely dissolve when the case is dismissed.

It follows. I had connections through my lawyer to organizations that helped people in situations like mine.

There are networks, careful, quiet, not widely publicized that exist specifically to help Pakistani Christians and converts from Islam who are in danger and who need to reach safety.

These networks are staffed by people of extraordinary courage who operate in conditions of real personal risk.

I will not describe them in detail. I will say only that they helped me and that I am alive and in Norway partly because of the specific bravery of people I cannot name.

The journey out of Pakistan took 4 months and several transit countries. I arrived in Norway in the second year after my release.

I applied for asylum on the grounds of religious persecution and conversion from Islam. The Norwegian system, I say this with genuine gratitude, took my case seriously, assessed the evidence carefully, and granted me refugee status after a process that was slow and uncertain, but ultimately fair.

I have been in Norway for 3 years. I live in a city in the west of the country whose name I sometimes still cannot pronounce correctly, which I find quietly funny.

I am learning Norwegian, which is a beautiful language spoken by people who are polite to a degree that still occasionally surprises me.

I work at a warehouse, as other men in stories like mine have worked at warehouses, and I am learning to see that work as dignity rather than diminishment, which is a process that takes longer than I expected.

I attend a church where there is a community of Pakistani and South Asian Christians.

People who know what it costs, who do not require me to minimize the cost.

People who have also lost things. We understand each other in the specific way that people understand each other when they share not just a faith but a specific kind of history with that faith.

The history of finding it at great expense and choosing to keep it at greater expense.

Still, I want to say something about the Pakistani blasphemy laws because I think silence about them is a kind of complicity and I have been given a platform and I intend to use it.

Sections 295B and 295 C of the Pakistani Penal Code are instruments of oppression. They are used frequently, repeatedly with documented patterns, not to protect genuine religious sentiment, but to settle personal disputes, to remove economic competitors, to target religious minorities, to silence internal disscent.

The vast majority of people accused under these laws are not people who have actually blasphemed in any meaningful sense.

They are people who have been accused by someone who had a reason to accuse them.

The accusation itself, not the conviction. The accusation is enough to destroy a person’s life, enough to trigger mob violence, enough to justify imprisonment without timeline.

I am one of the relatively fortunate ones. My case collapsed. I got out. Many people have not gotten out.

Asia BBE spent years on death row for a crime that any honest assessment of the evidence showed she had not committed.

Shabbaz Bhhati the Pakistani minister for minority affairs was assassinated for speaking against the blasphemy laws.

Lawyers who defend blasphemy accused have been killed. Judges who are quit have been killed.

I’m saying this not as bitterness. I have done a great deal of work with the help of my community and my faith to move beyond bitterness.

And I think I have largely succeeded. I am saying this as witness. I was inside this system.

I know what it looks like from the inside. And what it looks like from the inside is a mechanism specifically designed to make certain categories of people, religious minorities, women, the poor, internal critics, permanently vulnerable to the worst impulses of anyone who wishes to use the law against them.

This is not Islam as the tradition I was trained in at its best understands itself.

The great scholars of the Islamic tradition, the scholars whose work I spent 15 years studying were people who took the question of justice with extraordinary seriousness.

The prophet said, “Help your brother whether he is an oppressor or he is oppressed.”

The tradition at its best is a tradition that knows the difference between genuine blasphemy and the weaponization of a blasphemy accusation.

The tradition at its best would not recognize what section 295C has become. I say this not to attack Pakistan or to attack Islam.

I say it because the people still inside that system, the people who are right now in cells in Lahore and Karachi and Fisalabad waiting for cases that may never be resolved.

Those people deserve witnesses who will say clearly what the system is. My mother calls me every week on Sunday at a time that is evening in Pakistan and afternoon in Norway.

She calls. We talk for 30 minutes, sometimes 45. We talk about practical things, how I am eating, whether I am sleeping, the Norwegian weather, which she finds incomprehensible and worrying.

We talk about my siblings, my two younger brothers and my sister who are all still in Lahore who are navigating their own lives inside a situation that my departure complicated.

We talk carefully around certain things. We do not talk about my father usually. We do not talk about my faith directly.

But once it was about a year after I arrived in Norway, so perhaps 2 years ago, she said something that I want to tell you about.

We were at the end of a call and she said in the way that she sometimes says things quickly and quietly as if she is not sure she should say them.

Bilal, I don’t understand what you believe now. I will not pretend I do. But I want you to know that whatever you believe, whatever it was that you found in that place, it changed you in the way that something real changes a person.

You are different from before. You are, she looked for the word. Settled, she said finally.

You are settled in a way you were not before. I said yes. She said, “I don’t know what to do with that, but I see it and I am glad you are not in that place anymore.”

That was all she changed the subject. We talked about the weather in Norway, but I held what she said and I hold it still.

My mother who is the wife of an imam who prays five times a day who has never questioned the framework she was raised in and has no intention of questioning it.

My mother looked at what happened to her son and said it changed you in the way that something real changes a person.

She is right. It did and she sees it. And somehow across all the distance and all the silence and all the things we cannot speak directly she is glad that is enough.

It is more than enough. I want to be completely honest about the accounting what I lost and what I found laid alongside each other so that you can see the full picture.

I lost my country. Pakistan is not available to me in any safe sense. The blasphemy accusation has not been fully erased in the minds of everyone who knows about it.

And the conversion that followed would, if widely known, create new danger. I cannot go home.

I cannot visit my mother. I cannot see my siblings grow and change and live their lives in real time.

I know Pakistan through a Sunday phone call and occasional photographs and the specific ache of a person who loves a place they cannot return to.

I lost my father. Four years of silence. I do not know if that silence will ever break.

I have prayed for it. I pray for my father every day. The same prayer by name.

Tariq, please. Whatever he needs, whatever can reach him, whatever door is available. I hold this prayer with open hands, not clenched ones.

I do not know what the answer will look like or when it will come.

I trust the God who runs toward returning sons to know what to do with a proud man in Lahore who does not know he is also the returning son.

I lost my career, 15 years of Islamic scholarship, a position in the tradition I was raised in the specific respect of a community that valued what I had studied and what I could teach.

None of that is available to me in the same form. In Norway, I am a warehouse worker, which is honest work and which I do not resent, but which is not the same as being a teacher of things I love.

I lost my reputation. In the community I came from, I am the man who was accused of blasphemy and then converted to Christianity.

Two unforgivable things. The narrative of what happened to me has been shaped by people who were not there and who have their own reasons for shaping it the way they have.

I have no way to correct it inside that community and I have largely made peace with that.

Now what I found, I found the father who runs, the God who does not wait at the edge of the far country for you to demonstrate sufficient worthiness before he moves.

The God who is already running, already moving toward you, already further down the road than you expected when you turned around.

I found in a prison cell in Lahore the specific verifiable historically grounded claim that God had entered human history in the person of Jesus Christ had lived inside the human condition including its worst parts.

The fear, the abandonment, the unjust accusation, the death and had come out the other side of death as a statement that death was not the last word.

This claim not as metaphor, not as myth, but as the central defining historically argued claim of the Christian faith.

This claim is what I found. And it is not a small thing to find.

It is not a consolation prize for losing everything else. It is the answer to every question that was underneath my questions.

I found the peace that Paul describes in his letter to the Philippians, the peace that passes understanding.

I want to tell you that this is not a metaphor. Paul wrote those words from prison.

I read them in prison. The peace that passes understanding is the peace that is present when the circumstances actively argue against peace.

When every external measure says you should not be at peace right now and something underneath all of it says, “And yet and yet you are held.

The ground holds. You are not alone. That peace has not left me in six years.

Through the remaining months in Kotlakpot, through my father’s silence. Through the four months of transit to Norway, through the warehouse in a Norwegian city whose name I mispronounce.

Through the Sunday calls with my mother that have to leave so much unsaid, through all of it, the peace underneath the grief.

The peace underneath the loss, the peace, not the absence of the grief, the presence of the peace.

Simultaneously, the God who holds me holding the grief too, making it survivable, making it not the last word.

This is what I found. And I would not trade it. Not for my country, not for my career, not even God help me for my father’s silence to end.

Because I trust the God who holds me to also be pursuing my father in ways I cannot see.

And that trust is itself a piece. Not for anything I have lost would I trade what I found.

That is the accounting. That is the full picture. I want to speak to someone specific right now.

Someone who is in a place where there is no community, no pastor, no one to guide you.

Someone who is like I was in that cell alone with a question and a book and no one to explain it to them.

I want to say the spirit of God does not require a pastor. He does not require a church building or a community or a set of credentials or a particular set of circumstances.

He found me in Kotlakpat prison through an uneducated brick layers new testament. He will find you wherever you are.

Ask simply, directly in whatever language is most yours. Show me what is true.

He answers that prayer. I know because he answered it for me. And if you are alone right now, reach out.

The link in the description will connect you to people who can help. You do not have to do this alone.

And now, let me finish. I want to say something about my Islamic training because I think it would be dishonest not to.

My 15 years of Islamic scholarship gave me things that I have not lost and do not want to lose.

It gave me a deep love of careful serious engagement with religious texts. It gave me a respect for the weight of theological tradition, the understanding that the questions of God and human beings and justice and mercy have been wrestled with by serious minds for millennia, and that any honest engagement with those questions has to take that history seriously.

It gave me Arabic, which means I can read the Quran and the classical commentaries in their original language.

And it gave me the scholarly habits of mind that allowed me to read the New Testament with the rigor it deserves.

It also gave me an understanding of what genuine faith costs. The Islamic tradition at its best takes seriously the idea that faith is not comfortable.

That following God requires something real. That the prophet suffered, that the path of righteousness is difficult, that commitment to truth can cost a person everything.

I believe this before I came to Christ. I believe it still. The difference is that I now understand the suffering differently.

I understand it as the suffering of a person who is participating in some small way in the pattern of the one who also suffered unjustly and who came out the other side.

The cross. I want to talk about the cross for a moment because it is the thing that my Islamic training most prepared me to resist and that I ultimately found I could not resist.

In Islamic theology, the crucifixion did not happen. The Quran says Jesus was not crucified, that it appeared to the onlookers that he was, but that God raised him up before the death occurred.

I had taught this. I had believed it. What I found in the cell reading the gospel accounts of the crucifixion.

What I found was a specificity and a detail and an honesty that did not read like a story that had been managed toward a theological conclusion.

It read like witnesses reporting something terrible that had happened. The darkness at noon, the cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Which is perhaps the most shocking thing anyone claiming to be God has ever said, and which no fabricator would have included, because it complicates the theological claim rather than simplifying it.

The women who stayed, the burial that was confirmed by people who had no reason to confirm it if it hadn’t happened, and then the resurrection.

The accounts that do not agree on every detail, which is what honest reports from different witnesses who have seen something extraordinary, always look like the empty tomb that neither friend nor enemy could deny.

The appearances to individuals and to groups over 40 days. The transformation of a group of terrified hiding disciples into people who were willing to die for the specific claim that Jesus had risen bodily from the dead.

I brought my scholars training to these documents. I brought the same critical rigor I would bring to any text and my scholars conclusion was these documents have the texture of truth.

The death is real. The resurrection is attested by more evidence than almost any other event of the first century.

The God who allowed himself to be accused unjustly and to die for it. This is the God who found me in a cell where I was accused unjustly and who did not promise me I would not suffer but who said, “I know what this is.

I have been here. Come to me. I came. I want to tell you about Norway.”

Because I think part of the testimony is the ordinary and I do not want to skip it.

Norway is cold in a way that Lahore did not prepare me for. Not dangerously cold.

I have not suffered from the cold in a way that has threatened me, but persistently, comprehensively, matterof factly cold, as if the country has simply decided that warmth is a seasonal visitor rather than a baseline condition.

I have bought many layers. I am still calibrating. The people are quiet in public in a way that I initially read as unfriendly and that I now understand is simply a different social contract than the one I grew up in.

They do not make conversation with strangers in the same way. They do not offer opinions unsolicited.

They keep to themselves in a way that has its own kind of respect in it.

I have come to appreciate this. After years of living in contexts where everyone’s business was everyone’s business, there is something restful about a country that allows you to simply be.

I have learned to cook Norwegian food badly but with improving competence. I find the food unfairly maligned.

I have made friends among my Pakistani and South Asian church community who understand me in one way and among my Norwegian colleagues at the warehouse who understand me in a completely different way and who have been without knowing it one of the most significant means of grace in my life.

They do not know my history. They know me as the Pakistani man who is learning Norwegian and who brings interesting food to the team lunches and who works reliably and well.

They treat me as a person, not as a symbol, not as a testimony, not as a case, as a person.

After the years of being defined by accusations and legal processes and the weight of what had happened to me, being treated simply as a person has been an extraordinary gift.

I pray every morning in Punjabi usually sometimes in Arabic, the Arabic of the Psalms which I discovered after my conversion and which have become the most important prayer texts in my life because they say everything I have felt including the things I could not say out loud.

Psalm 22, which Jesus quoted from the cross. Psalm 46, which says, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”

Psalm 139 which says, “Where can I flee from your presence? In Shol, in the depths of the ocean, in the wings of the morning.

You are there. You are there. He is there. He has been there in every place I have been.

In the madrasa where I studied, in the cell in Kot Lakpat, in the transit countries I cannot name.

In the warehouse in Norway, in the Sunday calls with my mother, in the silence from my father, he is there everywhere.

In every place I have been, he was there before me. I want to speak directly to Pakistanis who might be watching this inside Pakistan and in the diaspora.

This is reaching you. I don’t know how, but it is because this is how these things move in the way that water moves through places.

It was not invited. First, to those of you who know someone accused under the blasphemy laws or who might be accused yourselves, please know that there are organizations that exist to help.

Please be careful. Please know that there are people outside Pakistan who are watching and who are praying and who will do what they can.

The link in the description will help you find them. Second, to those of you who are Muslim, who are watching this with the complicated feeling of a person who loves their tradition and who is also, if they are honest, troubled by some of what the tradition has become in its more politicized forms.

I want to say your trouble is legitimate. The Islam I studied, the Islam of the great jurists, the Islam of the Sufi poets, the Islam of people who took the mercy of God seriously.

That Islam is better than what section 295C represents. The scholars of that tradition knew the difference between genuine religious offense and the weaponization of a religious accusation for personal gain.

If you are troubled by the gap between the tradition at its best and the tradition as it sometimes operates, that trouble is honest.

Third, to the Pakistani Christian watching, the person from one of Pakistan’s minority communities who is navigating their faith in a context that does not make it easy.

I see you. You are not alone. The body of Christ is larger than any country’s borders, and you are part of it.

And you are prayed for by people you have never met, who are holding your name before the God who runs.

And fourth, this is the one I want to end on. To the Pakistani who is searching, who is curious about Jesus, who may have had a question they were afraid to ask, or who has found themselves in a place where the frameworks they were given are not holding, or who is in some version of the far country and is wondering if there is a father who runs.

To that person I want to say there is the father runs. He ran toward me in a prison cell in Lahore and he did not require me to prove worthiness first.

He does not require it of you. He is running. You are not too far.

The distance between where you are and where he is is shorter than you think because he has been covering it from his end the whole time.

Come. The door is open. It was opened at the cross and it has not been closed since.

Come, let me try to describe what it feels like to be whole. Not happy in every moment.

I am not happy in every moment. Not free from grief. I grieve my country, my father, my mother’s voice on the phone when she has to change the subject because we cannot go further.

Not free from the ordinary difficulties of a man rebuilding a life in a foreign country with limited language and limited resources, but whole, integrated.

The same person in every room I walk into. The same person alone and in company.

The same person in the warehouse and in the church and on the Sunday call with my mother.

Not performing different versions of myself for different contexts. Not maintaining a surface over a different interior whole.

This is new for me. Or rather, this is the thing I had been looking for my whole life without knowing what it was.

The hollowess that I described in those early years, the thing that all the scholarship and all the religious performance and all the achievement had not been able to fill.

That is gone. Not because the external circumstances of my life are good. They are complicated.

But because the thing underneath the circumstances is solid. The ground holds. I am held.

The peace that Paul describes, the peace that passes understanding. I think the reason it passes understanding is that it is not produced by circumstances.

Understanding produces peace by calculating. The situation is manageable. The threats are limited. The future is likely to be acceptable.

The peace that Paul describes is not produced by that calculation. It is not a conclusion from evidence.

It is a gift that arrives from outside the circumstances and that is present even when the circumstances argue against it.

Present in a prison cell. Present in 4 years of a father’s silence. Present on a Sunday afternoon when my mother has to change the subject.

Present now in this room. In this camera, in this testimony that I am giving you because I was given it first and you need to know it is available.

I am Bilal Kureshi. I was born in Lahore. My father is an imam who does not speak to me.

My country is not available to me. I have nothing that the world counts as security or status or belonging.

And I am in the most fundamental sense of the word at peace. That peace is not mine.

I did not produce it. It was given to me in a prison cell by the god who enters prison cells.

It is available to you wherever you are. Whatever you have lost or are afraid of losing.

Whatever cell you are in, literal or metaphorical, he is there. He has always been there.

He is running. You are not too far. Turn around. He is already coming.

Before I finish, one thing. If this story found you and something in you has moved, please do not let that movement pass without acting on it.

Not a large action, a small one. Read the 15th chapter of Luke 5 minutes.

The parable of the prodigal son. Read it as if it is addressed to you personally and then sit with what it does in you.

If you are in Pakistan, if you are in danger, if you need help, please look for the organizations in the description.

You are not alone. People are watching and people are praying and people will help.

If this testimony gave you something, please pass it on. One person, the one who needs to know that the father runs, that the distance is not too great, that the far country is not permanent.

Subscribe to this channel. More voices are coming, more people, more countries, more different paths to the same ground, the same running father, the same peace that does not require good circumstances to be real.

My name is Bilal. I was in Kotlakpat. I am in Norway now and the ground is solid.