Africa
In the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa on July 28, in the first ever speech given by an American president to the African Union, Barrack Obama said, "Many of these groups claim the banner of religion, but hundreds of millions of African Muslims know that Islam means peace.” Though that may be true for millions of Muslims, for one Muslim cleric, it was not. This is his story:
Tofik* grew up attending Islamic schools and rose to the position of an imam in his East African village. Several deeply personal revelations brought him to faith in Christ, at the risk of his life.
Tofik trained to become an imam for 24 years at an Islamic madrasa school in Africa. “In school, I only learned about Islam,” he said. “Parts of our teaching were about destroying Christianity. So we did what we learned, by attacking Christians once we finished our training.” He said he was taught that Christians are bad people. He and the other students were also encouraged to steal from and kill non-Muslims. “Our teachers would tell us every time there was a new church in town, and we were told to go and attack the people and destroy the church. So that’s what we did,” Tofik said. “We beat them, attacked the church and burned their Bibles.”’
Tofik was later selected by the local mosque to be trained in Saudi Arabia for further Islamic studies. After finishing his education in Saudi Arabia, he returned to become an imam in his village. He led the construction of 16 mosques in his area. He also imposed a rule—no village leaders or visitors could preach Christianity in his town.
One night, in the midst of his zeal for Islam, his journey to Christ unexpectedly began. “There was an incident in 2002 where I had a vision from the Lord early in the morning around 3 a.m.,” he said. “In the vision, I saw Jesus very clearly telling me to follow Him.”
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