How An ex-Muslim Man Gave Me Faith To Become An ex-Mormon

In 2020, I was tiptoeing up to the edge of my faith crisis much like I tiptoe to the edge of a rope course platform. My “shelf” had broken over 6 months ago (that’s not a sexual euphemism–it means that I stopped being able to assume that everything was fine behind the Ozian curtain of the LDS Church) but I was nervous. I was also shrinking back from actually leaping over the edge, much like I do on rope course platforms.

Unlike the rope course platforms, though, there was no friendly guide around to quell my sudden nerves and remind me that the drop is only 30 feet and I have a harness on and really the jump is very safe and they’ve already helped at least 300 people down this week.

No. At the edge of my faith crisis, there was no one. I didn’t even know if I had a harness. I could think critically. I had a Master’s degree and had been through several rounds of “deconstructing” other areas of my life already. But in the space between realizing that something wasn’t making sense about my religion and the moment that I actually plunged into finding out what that was, there was just me on the edge of a platform wondering if I could survive this jump into the void.

That’s when Nabeel Quereshi showed up. Well, figuratively at least.

Nabeel’s book Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus had been popping up in my algorithms for a while already because I was reading all kinds of Christian apologetics at the time. I had been meaning to read his book too but just never found the right time. One warm summer weekend in July though, my husband sat down next to me at the beach and asked if I was interested in listening to a new audiobook he had just downloaded.

“What book?” I asked.

He pulled out his phone and showed me a picture. There was Nabeel.

I was and am a very spiritual person so this synchronistic reveal felt like a great cosmic highlighter squeaking across my vision saying: “READ ME.”

So yes, I wanted to listen with him.

That beach visit was the last my husband saw of the book. When he went back to work, I took his phone and listened to it constantly over the next two or three days. It is only about nine hours long, but it took me more like fifteen hours to get through it because I was constantly rewinding, writing down quotes, stopping to just breathe through my own intense emotions, and listening to key passages again and again and again. It was one of those live-with-the-author more than listen-to-the-author kind of experiences.

At the beginning of the book, Nabeel describes his love for Islam, his devout close-knit family, the traditions and specialized language of faith that he loved. As he combed through his tender memories, I was moved. I had never been Muslim but I was Mormon. I recognized the devotion, the ritual, the value of religious community, the in-speak, the apologetics, the superiority complex, the sweet belonging. Beyond the Arabic and the Islamic specifics, I felt a profound kinship with Nabeel. We had both found great value in our upbringing, loved our families, and wanted to do what was right. We also both felt called into learning more about our origin faith traditions.

Through the course of the book, Nabeel engages in religious discussions and debates with his friend. For a while, they end in a friendly stand-off, but things get a little dicey when, the friend asks some questions that Nabeel knows Islam can’t answer. He brushes off the questions initially but he keeps thinking and praying over the problems. Eventually, he comes to this extraordinary question:

“Would an objective observer come to the conclusion that Islam was true?”

Nabeel asks this of his own religion. Then he asked it of Christianity.

As the title tells, he felt that Christianity was a more objectively true.

This question and Nabeel’s raw, crazy courage in asking it gave me something I desperately needed at the edge of my own faith crisis abyss: hope.

…Hope that the void was not empty.

…Hope that doubt was not an enemy, but a light beckoning me out of a tunnel.

…Hope that God would not be so cruel or strange as to punish me or my family for asking sincere questions.

…Hope that truth was knowable.

…Hope that I could be led too.

There’s actually another name for this hope. It’s called faith.

I decided to call my faith crisis a “Reinvestigation of the Church.” I had taught women in Russia as a missionary that the Church could handle their questions. I had taught them that they could expect God to answer their sincere prayers. I had them that they could know if it was true. I had taught them that God would speak to their minds and their hearts–that he actually loved to prove himself.

I had called those women investigators.

But had I really investigated the Church? Of course, I had observed it for a long time. I had insider knowledge. But it struck me as strange that I felt so much fear around allowing myself to ask the same questions I had been encouraging others to ask while I was a missionary. Why was I so anxious about asking if I knew the Church was true? Why should I stop sleuthing out the truthfulness of the church just because I had been born into it? Why did it feel forbidden to be an investigator myself?

Being born into Mormonism meant that I was always surrounded (literally) by family, friends, teachers, church leaders, neighbors who expected me to keep showing up and saying the right things. It was not value-neutral in these circles to question anything Joseph Smith had done or said. It was not reasonable discourse to poke at the foundations of how the “translation” of the Book of Mormon actually happened. It was not a sign of robust understanding to say that Church Leaders were guessing about the future. To question Joseph’s polygamy, to express discomfort with the Church’s treatment of minority groups, to grimace when others gushed over Brigham Young–these were signals of nonconformity. It was socially risky to have anything but positive feelings about the Church. And if you continued down that slippery slope of asking questions, it could lead to spiritual death in which you were separated from your family in the after life forever because you were too stubborn to accept that everything Church leaders said or did was divine.

So, I avoided my real questions. I said the right things. I did all the free labor. I believed all the right things. I believed the polygamy and the Moon quakers and the stigmas against gay people would all make sense…eventually. I assumed that negative feelings towards the Church were because of wicked Anti-Mormons and that God would never let us be led astray. I thought that if I just framed more pictures of temples and kept singing hymns to my babies, my depression would be healed, the logic would be explained, and I would stop feeling so hollow and lonely and so gross when I read about Church polygamy.

I had real faith too of course, and real reasons to believe. But I also wasn’t sure that Mormonism was the only spiritual solution that could account for the experiences I had. Still, I believed that the Church could prove itself correct and that if I asked real questions, I could expect real answers just as I had told women on my mission to expect answers for their questions.

I finished Nabeel’s book. The end of that story gave me the harness I needed. It gave me the faith I needed.

It was a crazy bet with impossibly high stakes. It was a surrender to a divine order far bigger than my small life. It was a wild act of trust that I too could use my mind and heart to know the truth of all things. It was a leap into the dark.

Would an objective observer come to the conclusion that Mormonism was true?

And then I jumped.