Why We Left Islam (7 page)

Knowing this truth has transferred my way of thinking from being a follower of Mohammad and idolizing Adolf Hitler to believing in Jesus Christ, from believing lies to knowing the truth, from being spiritually sick to being healed, from living in darkness
to seeing the light, from being damned to being saved, from doubt to faith, from hate to love, and from evil works to God’s grace through Christ. This is who I am today. Praise be to God! I hope in reading my testimony and the others included in this book you may begin to realize that this is a battle between good and evil and peace and terrorism, a clash between freedom and neo-fascism. As I declared while speaking at Columbia University: Today I stand for the rights of all people; I stand for blacks to be free from slavery, for Muslims to freely convert to Christianity, for Jews to refuse to be Christians, and for atheists to have the right to be atheists. And I will die for everyone’s right to free speech in the United States.

Walid Shoebat
Founder of the Walid Shoebat Foundation
Author of
Why I Left Jihad
and
Why We Want to Kill You

C
HAPTER
T
HREE
REDEMPTION

“I I had always despised the smiles they[Christians] had on their faces when we criticized, hurt, or humiliated them. . . Now I know the reason for their smiles. It is their love, forgiveness, and tolerance toward their enemies.”

W
HILE THE TYRANNICAL and extremist elements that exist in Iran and Palestine may not be too surprising to Westerners—especially after September 11—what is happening in neighboring Egypt is. The land of the pharaohs, a must-see destination for millions of tourists, is also, sadly, a hotbed of Islamic extremism.

Egypt is, after all, the location that birthed Osama bin Laden’s second in command, Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Though born into the Egyptian aristocracy and trained as a surgeon, Zawahiri, like so many other young men in Egypt, rejected his privileged background and instead grew attracted to radical Islam through the teachings of Sayyid Qutb, the man whose ideas would help shape al-Qaeda. In 1998, Zawahiri brought his Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization into a union with the forces of Osama bin Laden. Together, they formed al-Qaeda and the rest is tragic history. This is the backdrop for the story of Ahmed Awny Shalakamy.
¹

Today, Ahmed believes he is living witness that twisted belief systems inspire humans to commit unthinkable atrocities. He admits that when he was young, he was so filled with hate that he went out with a machete and killed two innocent Sikhs—a father and son. An innocent Bangladeshi Hindu meanwhile, was caught on the street, dragged by Ahmed to a mosque, and beaten to death. The victim’s pleas for mercy seemingly had no effect on the fundamentalist worshippers who proceeded to chant “Kill the
kafir
!” In this testimony, Ahmed also reveals how he lured non-Muslim women into Islam,
and following their conversion paraded them through the streets to bring shame to their families.

Ahmed has gone through a complete 360-degree turn in his mindset and writes his testimony because he has come to believe humans are not born evil but become evil through indoctrination. He now spends his life finding the women he converted and helping them rebuild the lives he once played a part in shattering.

Ahmed has a message for everyone reading his words: terrorism is not a way of life, but a path to death. And until we stop radical Islam, no one is safe. Ahmed left Islam because he believes it led him to kill. And he worries that Westerners won’t recognize this threat until it’s too late.

Redemption

I grew up in Giza, Egypt. My father was a building contractor and was involved in Islamic activities. He was the chairman of one of the local Islamic associations and was responsible for making the call for prayer. He also gave Islamic lessons and at times spoke at the mosque on Fridays.

My father hated Christians. He taught me that they are infidels who contradict themselves by saying that Jesus Christ is God while their distorted book (the Bible) has verses that prove he is only a prophet. It was all part of the rhetoric we got used to hearing from booming mosque loudspeakers, and from the playing of radio and audiocassettes in the streets. In such an atmosphere, a Muslim child in Egypt is breastfed hatred along with his mother’s milk.

My father’s association was active in many fields. It ran a dormitory for girls, a workshop, a clinic, a nursery, a
madrassah
to study the Qur’an, and a section for preaching Islam. The main interest of his association was to proselytize Islam by any means.

During the rule of the late president Anwar El Sadat, the Grand Imam of El Azhar, Mohammad Abdel Halim Mahmoud, was involved in plotting together with Sadat’s vice president, Mr. Hussein el Shafei. Sheikh Keshk was also involved in this planning together with Mohammad Osman Ismail, Assiut’s previous governor, and Mohammad Abdel Mohsen Saleh. Both Ismail and Saleh were the founding fathers of the various Islamic
proselytizing associations that sprouted up, and with which my father was involved.

The goal of these groups was to convert Egypt into an Islamic state over a period of fifty years. Members of the royal Saudi family, who were related to the Wahabi movement and to oil princes from the Gulf, financed this plan. Money was spent lavishly to seduce Christian women and girls any way possible. The cost in the seventies and early eighties was about five thousand Egyptian pounds for the entrapment of each girl. The money was split so that the Muslim man who lured the Christian woman into conversion received half and the members of the police and collaborating associations would receive the other half.

The work of the proselytizing associations in Egypt continues to take place and the payments for deceptive conversions are now higher. Today the average payment for an ordinary girl is ten thousand Egyptian pounds and payments can be as high as two hundred thousand Egyptian pounds if the girl is from a well-known Christian family, or is the daughter of a university professor, a deputy minister, or related to someone from the clergy.

Like my father, I, too was involved with a proselytizing association. After we succeeded in converting a Christian woman, we would antagonize the Christians by parading the converted girl through the streets. We played loud music and waved flags while shouting “
Allah Akbar
” to declare the victory of Islam. We would also chant slogans to shame the Christians. No Christian would stand in the way of these parades, which were safeguarded by the police.

This was a normal practice until 1985, when such parades were banned. Nevertheless, we continued in our campaign to convert Christian women. We were focused on converting Christian girls and women because we believed this was a greater form of humiliation for Christians. In the East, a man’s honor is in his daughter, sister, or wife, and so disgracing any of them is the ultimate humiliation for him.

We used all kinds of tricks to get Christian women. We primarily sought to appeal to their emotions and impulses. We would also get these women involved in moral scandals and use that to
coerce them to do whatever we wanted. This is what I did while I was involved with a proselytizing association. Besides receiving payment for this work, I was convinced I received an additional reward because each time I caused a Christian woman to convert to Islam I would be awarded with an acre of land in heaven.

The following accounts are of the women that I lured into Islam through deceptive methods.

Fatima was originally from Cairo and went to college in the city where my family lived. I was in my first year of college at the time, and this was my first case of proselytizing.

She was very pretty. She had a few Muslim girlfriends who told me that she was an easy catch. They arranged for me to meet her and I practiced pretending that I was madly in love, staring at her with desire and faking a quivering voice.

When Fatima and I first started talking, I asked her some questions about the Christian faith. I realized I had to change my tactics if I was going to trap her. I started to convince her that I loved her and I worked on her until she fell for me. Her girlfriends were aware of what was happening and helped me by talking to her about my love for her. I told her that we could marry and keep our different faiths, as Islam allows Muslims to marry the People of the Book because they believe in God. I had my way with her and she became pregnant.

I secretly went to church with her a few times and I even bought Christian books, icons, and the fellowship bread to convince her that I was an admirer of Christianity. I told her that I would have gladly converted to Christianity, but could not do it because I would be killed. I then told her that I loved her and could not live without her and if she converted to Islam, she would not be killed, as she was carrying our baby—the fruit of our love.

She was scared and did not know what to do. At that time, I asked her not to sever her relation with the church, to act as she normally would, and as a camouflage go to church on Thursday for confession, on Friday for communion, and again on Sunday for Mass. She followed my instructions and one day, as per my instructions, she arrived with her suitcase and gold jewelry, and we spent the night at my home in Gameat El Dewal El Arabia
Street. On Saturday morning, she had an appointment with the person in charge at El Azhar. I arranged for her escape to the city where she attended college and where I lived until she finished her studies. I then had her name changed to Fatima El Zahra Mohammad Ali El Mahdi.

The efforts of her family and other Christians to take her back were in vain. I made sure she was the one who adamantly refused to go back after my colleagues and I brainwashed her. My efforts were successful as she became completely convinced that she was now worshipping the true God of Islam.

After five weeks of achieving this victory for Islam and receiving my financial reward, I decided that I did not want to keep this faithless whore as my wife. She was cheap to me and was merely an object for sensual pleasure.
How could I have a son with her who has in him the blood of those Christian infidels
, I reasoned. I ordered her to have an abortion and I used my legitimate right to beat her. I also obliged her to work for her food. I told her she had to serve her Muslim masters who put a roof over her head and she had to be grateful that I married her and saved her from her shame.

I started to think about repeating the same game again with other women, so that I could serve my life, my religion, and my afterlife. I believed by doing this I would serve my religion by making the infidels embrace Islam; I would serve my life by getting financial rewards; and I would serve my afterlife by having many acres written in my name in heaven. I would also have a housecleaner for free. She would work for her food and when I wanted to use her for pleasure, she would be my
odalisque
.

I enjoyed hurting, beating, and humiliating Fatima. I was positive she did not truly convert to Islam and that she was only surrendering to her female instincts. All this made me more inclined to take revenge on her. Fatima stayed with me for three years, seven months, and twelve days. During those three years, seven months, and twelve days that Fatima stayed with me, I made eight girls convert to Islam.

When I met Abir, she was studying in a college located one and a half hours from her home. She came from a wealthy family. Her father and mother were physicians and her brothers were physicians
in the Egyptian armed forces. Though she was a churchgoer, she was not religious. Abir was outgoing in her friendships with both Muslims and Christians. Despite her congeniality, we did not find it easy to get to her and had to resort to foul play. As Muslim men, we believed we were in a perpetual war with the “filthy infidels,” and therefore it was okay to trick them.

One day I received a visit from a young Muslim man who told me he wanted to marry Abir and asked me to help him convince her to convert to Islam. After much planning, I found out that this girl’s best friend was a religious Muslim. However, she still considered the Christian girl her sister and I was disturbed by this. So I paid a visit to the Muslim girl and talked to her about the corrupt beliefs of Christianity and reminded her of what Allah says in the Qur’an: “Ye believers do not take Jews and Christians as friends and those who befriend them are from them, as Allah does not show the right path to the unjust” (
Qur’an 5:51
). I told her that
jihad
against them is the duty of every Muslim and she should contribute to the victory of Islam. The Muslim girl was convinced that I was right and asked what was required of her. I told her not to show hatred toward her Christian friend, but to treat her as usual and even try to strengthen their friendship and follow all of my instructions.

I then went to a Muslim pharmacist who is a member of our association and asked him for a drug to induce hallucinations. I told him why I needed the drug. He told me he wanted to contribute to the victory of Islam and therefore he agreed to provide it. I then gave the drug to the Muslim girl and told her to dissolve two tablets in a glass of milk and give it to Abir to drink, and then call us as soon as she noticed any changes in the girl.

The Muslim girl called us as soon as Abir started to hallucinate and lose control in her apartment. When my friend and I arrived, we had a camera and a video recorder. We started joking with Abir and she was responding, not realizing what we were doing until my friend managed to strip her of her clothes and took her to the bedroom.

I recorded everything on video and took pictures for about three hours. When Abir came around, she realized what had
happened and started screaming and crying. She insulted us, Islam, and the Prophet of Islam, and tried to tear up the Qur’an, which was with her girlfriend. I showed her the videotape and the photos and threatened to make copies and distribute them to her family, as well as to other Christian families. I reminded her that she would be humiliated by the scandal. She cried and fell to the ground, kissing our shoes and pleading with us not to do this, but we insisted that she had to do whatever we told her to do, as she knew her brothers and relatives might even kill her if they were to see that video.