By Daniel Corado –
As result of accepting Jesus in the Muslim land of Morocco, Rachid got kicked out of his house and wandered homeless for two years.
His mother was distraught when rumors reached her that her son was no longer Muslim. She called together the whole family and they confronted him. Just say the shahada, she said. The shahada is the maximum profession of Islam: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.”
“I was hesitating for a few moments,” Rachid remembers on a “Brother Rachid in English” video on YouTube. “I said, ‘Mom, I can’t say it.’”
Mom cried. Dad, uncles, aunts, cousins – everyone gathered to confront and grill Rachid – expressed outrage. He was summarily kicked out of the family.
Today, Rachid is one of the most potent evangelists to Muslims via the Internet. He escaped Morocco, where it is illegal to leave Islam, and settled in America.
Rachid was raised in a small village in Morocco. His dad was an imam and was training Rachid to become an imam.
His village was so small that it didn’t have a high school, so Rachid moved to Casablanca with his uncle to study. In his free time, he listened to the radio and stumbled across Christian broadcast.
This was the first time he’d ever heard about Christianity (outside of what he’d learned from the Koran). He found out that Jesus was crucified (the Koran says that somebody else was put on the cross in his place). He found out that there is salvation through forgiveness, not work.
The revelations were startling, and Rachid was challenged, even offended. But he wrote a letter (during a time before there was internet) to the broadcasting facility abroad, and they answered. He wrote again and again. A correspondence of years went on, and Rachid was challenged as to the truth.
Eventually, the broadcasters based in Cyprus sent him a Bible, which he began to read. He was 16 and eventually accepted Jesus as his Savior. He found out about an underground church and started attending.
Not long after, his family became suspicious. He wasn’t attending the mosque, wasn’t praying, wasn’t doing the outward rituals of Islam. His cousins told on him to his parents.
A confrontation with all family members was organized, and they demanded directly from Rachid the truth. Knowing the consequences would be grave, Rachid tried to evade their pressing questions. “It’ between just me and God,” he said.
But his mom, who was desperate to prove her son was faithful, tried to make it easy on him. “Just say the shahada,” she said.
Rachid knew Jesus was in his heart and couldn’t bring himself to lie. He said he couldn’t.
“Everybody was shouting at me,” he recalls on a Call of Love Ministries video on YouTube. “It was surreal. My mom was crying. They spit on me. Some of them cursed me. I never thought my family would hurt me.”
Immediately, he was homeless. “I left without knowing where to go,” he recalls.
Rachid made his way back to Casablanca, where he stayed with the underground pastor and with some of the brothers.
He had no official residence for two years. “Sometimes I even slept on the street.”
“I lost my study. I lost my family. I lost everything,” he recalls.
Religious police tracked movements of the Christian converts like Rachid. Eventually, newspapers caught wind of his conversion and published an expose of him. Now he was not just homeless, he was publicly identified as an apostate and as an enemy of society and norms.
It became dangerous for him to live in Morocco.
The Christians from abroad who had helped him grow in his faith arranged for him to flee the country. He took refuge in Cyprus. He met other former Muslims from Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. He got married in 1997.
Eventually, he moved back to Morocco, where he got a job and his own apartment. He held church services in his home.
That was an effective ministry – until an insider from his church sold information about members to the police. This led to another round of persecution. The news again did hit pieces. The mosque next to his apartment preached regularly against him.
Every time he left his apartment, he looked right and left to make sure he wouldn’t be jumped. He expected a knife attack at any moment.
The pressure became unbearable. Rachid and his wife relented and moved to Europe.
Rachid didn’t embrace the change. Of course, he and his wife were safe, free to pursue their private religious convictions. But he rued the loss of ministry, the loss of purpose. While he lived in Morocco, he was saving souls, despite the danger.
He was frustrated, depressed and aimless.
Then a friend asked him to join a new T.V. program evangelizing Muslims in Arabic. “I’m not a T.V. person,” he said.
His wife laughed at him for that response. “You have a mouth,” she told him. “Pray about it. If we, Muslim-background believers, don’t preach to our people, who will do it?”
Her words germinated inside him. He took the challenge. Rachid was so successful, so effective, bringing critiques against Islam, preaching truth both in English and in Arabic via airwaves.
While Islamic countries ban missionaries and evangelizing, they can’t block out broadcast signals.
Today, Brother Rachid is one of the two pioneers, along with Zakaria Botros, ministering in Arabic via broadcast, the later via the internet, into Muslim nations.
To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here
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About this writer: Daniel Corado studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy of Santa Monica.
