Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
A young man, perhaps the age of 12, decided he didn’t want to go to the Baptist Church anymore.
Rather, he decided to try out Buddhism. He found it more coherent and logical, and he decided to attend a Buddhist temple.
When his church family found out, he was marked for death, literally. He would have only a matter of days to confess his sin and return to the fold.
It may be hard to imagine that happening here in Sweet Home. But that’s the way it worked for Farooq Kaiser, a Nepalese man who converted from Islam to Christianity. Kaiser and his wife, Yasmine, and daughter, Sophia, 15 months, have spent the last two weeks at the Hope Center in Sweet Home, where he told his story.
His own father threw him into a fire, and his Muslim community tried to kill him twice.
Kaiser lost his Muslim faith early, and he explored several religions before learning about Christianity from a radio broadcast.
“I was a Muslim,” Kaiser said. “I was born into a Muslim family, and my father was a Muslim priest.”
He grew up in a small village in eastern Nepal, in the Sunsari District, learning that Islam was the perfect religion and that Allah has mercy only on Muslims.
“As I was observing my religion, I saw the Muslims are bad people,” Kaiser said. “My father used to beat my mother just because she can’t cook good food or sometimes when she didn’t wash his clothes on time.”
Kaiser quit his religion because it did not demonstrate love or forgiveness. Rather, he said, Muslims celebrated when terrorists killed Hindus. His father explained that Islam was in a holy war, and in Nepal that war was against the other major religion of the region, Hinduism. Kaiser was troubled by that mentality.
“If God is love, they should love each other,” he said. “They should not hate each other. These things made me to think about my religion.”
Hindus only hated Muslims because Muslims killed them, he said, so he decided to become Hindu.. But castes are a major part of Hinduism and he saw that as not much better than Islam. As a boy in a Muslim family, he was automatically a member of the low caste.
He came across Buddhism in a textbook and became interested, he said. “I was very impressed by (Buddha’s) teachings, so I decided to become a Buddhist.”
Buddha asked three important questions, Kaiser said. Among them, he wanted to know why people get old, sick and die.
Buddha lost his peace and decided to leave his family, wife and newborn son “in the quest for peace,” Kaiser said, but it didn’t work for Kaiser for long. In Nepal, Buddha is worshipped as a god, and that got Kaiser to thinking.
“I started thinking, if he was a god, he would know why people get old, get sick and die.
“I asked my teacher if Buddha was alive,” he said. When he learned Buddha was dead, he concluded that Buddha was a human and wondered why he should follow him.
By the sixth grade, he learned of evolution, and his teacher explained that “everything in this world exists by evolution,” he said. “I asked him, ‘Is there a God, sir?’ He said, ‘No, there is no God.'”
Kaiser no longer needed to worry about punishment or hell, he said. “I can live my life without God, so I became an atheist.”
Around this time, he saw a poster of a man hanging from some wood by his hands, Kaiser said. He wondered why people would hang him like that. He wondered who he was.
“As I was struggling through these things, this picture, I could not forget it,” he said. “It was something pretty radical.”
The radio is the primary form of entertainment in the area of Nepal he grew up in, Kaiser said, and one day he heard a broadast that would change his life. The program quoted the Bible verse John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes on Him should have everlasting life.”
He heard a brief story about how Jesus Christ came to the world through a virgin birth. He learned that Jesus performed miracles, died to save sinners and will come again.
“And very suddenly, I realized the man I saw on the poster must be Jesus,” Kaiser said. He went through this “horrific death for me.”
He was age 12 at the time.
“I went to my father and asked him who Jesus was, and what was the Bible,” Kaiser said. His father told him he shouldn’t listen to anything about Christianity, Jesus or the Bible. They will twist your mind and make you stray from the path of Islam. I became more curious. I began to listen to the radio broadcast every morning.”
After that, he came to the conclusion that if there were a God, this was it.
“I was just keeping quiet,” Kaiser said. “I knew if I told anyone, they would have killed me.”
He stopped going to the mosque, and he stopped eating meat and fish because he didn’t know if Christianity had any dietary restrictions.
“Several times my father beat me because I was not going to mosque,” he said, and at one point, his father threw him into a fire. A Hindu friend of his father’s rescued Kaiser from the fire.
At 14, he had to leave his home, find a job and support his studies. Kaiser went to India.
He continued to listen to the radio for guidance.
In 1989, at age 17, in New Delhi, he encountered a church called the New Life Church. Many from the church visited him and asked about him.
“People were very loving and caring, something I heard on the radio broadcast.”
After some time, he was baptized as a Christian believer.
He wanted to become a movie director and became an assistant to a director to learn the trade.
In 1992 and 1993, when violence broke out over Kashmir, it affected the Indian film and television industries. He went to Thailand to continue working. He had hoped to go to Australia and produce his own movie.
While in Thailand, he met Sharon Pryor and Esther Bennett of Sweet Home. The two were on a mission there at the time.
“They told me about the mission,” Kaiser said. They suggested I take the message back home.
“I invited them to have some cold drinks in my office,” Kaiser said. They had been to Nepal before and had not found many Christians.
“Their lives are so dedicated to Jesus,” Kaiser said. They were talking about love and peace. “These missionaries left their own comforts to spread God’s Word. That made him forget about being a director and the movie business.
He received training from Youth With a Mission in Nepal. After five months of training, in 1996, he went back to his village “and began to tell my people about my faith: Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.”
That upset the Muslims and his family. They issued a fatwa against him. Under the fatwa, he was to die. At his own risk, a friend warned Kaiser to get out of town. In two days, the Muslims would kill him.
“My mother said, ‘If you’re not going to appear in the mosque, then I’m going to believe I had four sons, and one son is dead to me.”
Kaiser fled to another city in Nepal. A friend warned him again that they had found him, and Kaiser fled to India. He continued communicating with his family, without revealing his address.
“In 1997, I received a letter from my oldest brother, (asking) why do you love us even when we hate you?” He wanted to sit down and hear more about Kaiser’s faith, and “I took him to my Christian friends and family,” Kaiser said. “He also met other Muslim converts. He said, ‘Brother, I would like to apologize for what we’ve done. I was planning to kill you.'”
What impressed his brother was that he was always saying prayers and forgiving his enemies.
As the eldest son, he was a “tough guy” and held influence in the family and community.
He invited him home with nothing to fear, Kaiser said. Over Christmas 1998, Kaiser said he shared his faith with his other two brothers and mother. His father had left home in shame over adultery while he was in India, but the rest of his family became Christians that night. He was soon run out of the village again, and all but his eldest brother reverted to Islam after several attacks by Muslims.
Muslims attempted to kill him twice in the last couple years, he said. When visiting his family, 50 people came for him. They asked him why he didn’t believe in the Koran.
He told them, “If I go to mosque, you teach about killing. You talk about holy war. (Americans, Jews and Christians are the enemy.)”
A member of the mob suggested the mob not touch him because he is a journalist. Kaiser had been working as a TV journalist. The mob broke up but returned the next day after he had gone.
“There was nobody to help,” he said. “I was surrounded by angry people. I was praying in my head, God help me.”
Muslims also made an attempt on his life in India, but his landlord, a Muslim, extended his protection to Kaiser.
Kaiser visited Sweet Home to see Pryor and Bennett on his way to a training center in Colorado. He plans to return to Nepal in November.
He warns that Islam is dangerous.
“I grew up in an environment when any terrorist Muslim was killed, like a suicide bomber, they’d praise that,” Kaiser said, but if a Jew or American killed a Muslim, it was unjust. “They see Americans and Israelis as the enemy.”
Islam is not a religion of peace, he said. The Koran, in Surrah 190-193 says, “slay them where you find them.”
And they praise anyone who lives by that code.
“If you go to the Muslim leaders and say, what’s the true Muslim, they’ll say the true Muslim is the Taliban,” Kaiser said. “They’re doing holy war. They don’t have any mercy for the pagans.”
If no one stops them, “I see they are going to destroy the world,” Kaiser said. “For people in the west, that’s very hard to understand.”
People in Europe and the United States convert to Islam, “but they don’t see the true face of Islam.”
He also cautions Christians to remember, “Jesus said, you have to love your enemies.”