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  Defying Jihad: The Dramatic True Story of a Woman Who Volunteered to Kill Infidels—and Then Faced Death for Becoming One

  Copyright © 2019 by Esther Ahmad. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph of woman copyright © selimaksan/Getty Images. All rights reserved.

  Designed by Dean H. Renninger

  Published in association with the literary agency of D.C. Jacobson & Associates LLC, an Author Management Company. www.dcjacobson.com.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ahmad, Esther, author.

  Title: Defying Jihad : the dramatic true story of a woman who volunteered to kill infidels—and then faced death for becoming one / Esther Ahmad with Craig Borlase.

  Description: Carol Stream, Illinois : Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2019. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018036560| ISBN 9781496425881 (hc) | ISBN 9781496425898 (sc)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ahmad, Esther. | Christian converts from Islam—Pakistan—Biography.

  Classification: LCC BV2626.4.A36 A3 2019 | DDC 248.2/4670092 [B] —dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036560

  Build: 2019-04-15 08:26:25 EPUB 3.0

  This book is dedicated to my husband, John, and my daughter,

  Amiyah. You have risked so much by being with me, and there

  is not a day that passes when I don’t thank God for you.

  I pray that God will continue to bless and protect you.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part 1: Everyone Has to Die Sometime Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 2: You Will Be Hated by Everyone Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part 3: Do Not Worry about What You Will Say Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part 4: Go to Another Land That God Will Give You Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Q and A with Esther Ahmad

  Discussion Questions

  About the Authors

  Author’s Note

  This memoir is the true story of my journey from growing up in a militant Muslim family to my life-changing encounter with Jesus. For the protection of my family—both those who remain in Pakistan and those in the United States—I have changed some of the names and specific locations, and in the case of my children, I have created a composite character to safeguard their identities.

  I would also like to acknowledge that my story is just that—my story. Not all Muslims are extremists, and not all Muslims interpret jihad the way my community did. I hope this book gives you a window into a life you may not know much about, and I hope it encourages dialogue among people of various cultural and religious backgrounds.

  Prologue

  I step back from the window and try to ignore the noise of the mob gathering outside my home. They are even more agitated than the last time they came and shattered the nighttime peace of our quiet, respectable street. They should be agitated. After what I have done and who I have become, it is only a matter of time before their anger turns to rage.

  Standing in the entryway, I close my eyes, but I can still see them bathed in the orange glow of a single streetlight. The young men with their mouths twisted in anger, fists punching in the air. The women, their faces hidden behind burkas, leaning from the windows of neighboring houses. The old men watching from the side, their eyes fixed on the man in the middle of them all. The man with more power than any of them.

  My father.

  I exhale and work harder to still my thoughts. I let the individual cries of “Allahu Akbar!” and “Bring out the girl!” blur and fold into one another. I don’t want to hear their voices, and I don’t want to see their faces. Not because I am scared, though. I am—a little. But fear is the last thing I need right now.

  I just need to be able to think. I want to cast out my anchor and steel my mind against these fierce currents that are pushing past me, trying to drag me down into panic. I want to hold on to what is real. Whatever is coming next, I must hold fast to my faith.

  I bring to mind the book I was given, one of the two books I have kept secret from almost everyone else in my house. Behind its creased and faded cover are tales of men and women who died professing their allegiance to God. The deaths described are brutal, but the power of their stories is enough to make my breath quicken within my chest and my heart swell with hope.

  I have read those stories again and again—so many times that I know them as well as I know the fig trees and guava trees in the courtyard. Right now, they are the only living things separating me from the mob.

  I think about the other book I have hidden—the one with the black leather cover and the pages so thin I am always afraid I will tear them if I do not handle them with the greatest of care. I think about the stories those pages contain. I think about Paul and Stephen and so many others who died a martyr’s death.

  Did they feel this same fear I feel when they faced their mob? Did their minds race and their hearts rage as the end drew near? Did they struggle the way I do now, battling to keep their thoughts on the eternity after death instead of the moments before it? If they did, is there hope for me?

  My life is paper thin right now. My time here on earth is about to end. I am ready to arrive in heaven. But leaving earth behind? That is harder. Will I be erased from my family’s story? Will they forget about me? Will the memory of me be wiped out?

  The noise from outside takes a leap forward, like a tiger pouncing on its prey. Someone has opened the front door. I squeeze my eyes, willing them to remain shut. I can feel the warm summer breeze on my cheek.

  I hear my mother’s voice mingling with the crowd. Is she shouting at someone? I have to ignore her, too.

  Daniel. That is who I choose to think about. I picture him facing the mob calling for his death; I see him being thrown into the den of lions, trusting that God and God alone is in control. I recall Daniel’s three friends, too, as strong hands pushed them closer to the furnace. I do not even have to imagine the heat—I can practically feel it on my own arms.

 
; I remember the fourth man who was seen among the flames—the man nobody could name but everybody could see. The man who turned the mob and the whole kingdom back to God. The man who changed everything.

  I open my eyes to see my mother standing in front of me, her face framed with a veil. She arranges a dupatta on my head, covering my hair and the lower part of my face with the cloth. She is staring into my eyes with tears in her own.

  “Send her out!” says a deep voice behind her. My father’s voice is always the loudest.

  I can tell my mother wants to say something, but the words catch in her throat. We embrace, and I feel her tears on my cheeks.

  “Remember that he is our refuge,” I tell her. “He is our deliverer and our ever-present help in trouble. Whether I live or die, Jesus Christ will come to rescue me. To rescue us both.”

  I follow my father out the door and through the courtyard. I keep my head down, counting the steps that take me past the fig trees and guava trees and into the street.

  Only when my father stops do I look up and take it all in. He turns around to face me, but I know he will not look at me. Instead, his eyes survey the crowd. I let mine follow his.

  The mob is bigger than I thought it would be. There must be two or three hundred people here. Their anger is fiercer than I expected too, and I can feel their hatred, sense it burrowing into me.

  “Shoot her!” one of the young men near me shouts.

  I glance at him briefly. His beard is wispy, barely covering his chin. I wonder if I have ever met him before.

  Soon others join in, adding in cries of “Kafir!”—branding me an infidel. But the noise around me means nothing to me. Something far more powerful is happening within.

  It happens in an instant. Suddenly I am filled with an otherworldly kind of courage. I feel the words churn within me like a chemical reaction. Like phosphorus burning in a lab, they burst into life and force their way out.

  “Yes!” I shout. “Kill me!” My voice is loud, louder than I ever remember it being. And it is strong, too. As new as this voice is, I know it is mine. This is me speaking, from the deepest part of me.

  “If you want to shoot me, then do it,” I spit, looking straight at the boy with the half beard. “But do not do it here. Take me to the main junction and let the whole city know. I want everyone in Pakistan to hear that today I am giving my life to Jesus Christ.”

  There is the briefest moment of silence before a man behind me shouts, “Cut her!”

  “Yes!” I spin around to see him holding a blade as long as his hand. The words are coming faster and louder now, the furnace within me growing hotter and hotter. Even if I wanted to, I could not stop myself from speaking like this. Nothing could silence me right now. “You can cut my throat, but I believe God is powerful and mighty to do incredible things—yesterday, today, and forever! If you kill me, I believe that many people will hear about what happened to me and ask who Jesus is. And when they seek him, they will find him!”

  “Burn her!”

  “Yes!” I say. “Burn me, and I believe I will go with him and he will come down. You will all see his glorious face, and many of you who are standing here will see that he is the true God. However you kill me, many of you will become Christians this very day!”

  Everything slows down as I look around me. In that moment, I see more clearly than I ever have in my life. I can see the blindness in the men shouting their hatred at me. I sense the fear and the pain in the women with their veils, hiding behind walls and windows. I know that not too long ago, I was like them. I was wounded and lost, a lone sheep that had strayed too far and had lost all hope of reaching safety.

  But not now. Now I am ready. My struggle is over. I am ready to die. I close my eyes and exhale a silent prayer of thanks. Soon it will be over. Soon I will be . . .

  “Wait.” My father’s voice cuts through the noise of the crowd. My prayer turns to stone, and my blood becomes lead.

  I open my eyes. He is standing close to me—so close that I can smell the faintest hint of his cologne. If I wanted to, I could reach out and touch him.

  I cannot remember the last time we were this close.

  I cannot remember ever being this close.

  He is looking behind me, but I am staring at him, studying his face the way I used to study samples under a microscope. From this close, the familiar seems strange and foreign. From this close, nothing about my father is the way I remembered. He looks old. Weary.

  “Wait,” he says again. For the first time I can remember in all my twenty-one years, his eyes lock onto mine.

  The look he gives me is not the look of a father. It is not a look of love or kindness or care. It is not the way my mother looks at me. My father stares at me through the eyes of a man who feels nothing for what he sees.

  “I have a better idea,” he says. He blinks twice and turns away.

  I do not know what he is planning, but I know what he is thinking. He sees me differently now. He sees me as his jihad. Somehow, I will have to pay.

  1

  I was wounded the moment I came into this world. Not that there was a problem with my birth—I was born strong and healthy, with a cry loud enough to shake the trees. Nor was there anything wrong with my mother. She cried with delight when she saw me, took me to her breast, and looked with love on my full head of dark hair and my wide-eyed stare. She welcomed me just as she had welcomed her first two babies when they were born one year and two years earlier.

  The wound came from my father.

  He wanted a son. I was his third daughter.

  The first time my mother gave birth to a girl, he had accepted it as the will of Allah. He was a little more reluctant the second time it happened. But to be given three daughters? It was not good. Why had he not yet been blessed with a son? How could a man hold up his head with pride when his wife had given him nothing but daughters?

  And so, instead of coming to visit me and give me a name after my birth as he had done for my sisters, he refused to see me. He didn’t tend to my mother or look at me with pride. He didn’t visit the mosque to pray or invite the ulema to visit us at home as every good father should. Unlike my sisters and the other children born in our neighborhood, I had no visit from a scholar, nobody to whisper the call to prayer into my newborn ears, informing me that there is no god but Allah, that Muhammad is the messenger of God.

  Instead, my father buried himself in his work. From sunrise to sunset, he traveled the city, buying and selling spices just as his father before him had done. When he came home at night, he made a point of avoiding the room where my mother was crying, surrounded by relatives and friends who tried, and failed, to console her. He ignored my mother’s tears and the gentle advice from people who told him not to be angry and to accept that a third daughter was clearly Allah’s will.

  After three days, he finally gave in. He entered the bedroom where my mother was quietly nursing me. “Business has been good,” he said, explaining his change of heart. “Perhaps Allah has chosen to bless me after all.”

  He inquired after my mother’s and my health, then turned to leave.

  “We will call her Zakhira,” he said as he walked out the door.

  †

  Even though I grew up being known by a name that means “wealth,” I felt like a beggar. The story of my first three days followed me around everywhere I went. It was the first thing people would mention when I met them. I lost count of the times I was introduced by my mother at a gathering with extended family and heard, “Oh, so this is the girl your husband refused to look at, eh?”

  The sound of their clicking tongues as they feasted on the gossip twisted the knife within me. It was one thing to be unloved by my father, but the fact that everyone else knew it made the wound even deeper.

  The older I got, the more questions I asked of Allah. At prayers, kneeling alongside my sisters, who taunted me for being the one my father never wanted, I would press my head onto the musty-smelling mat and pray silently wh
ile tears filled my eyes. Why hadn’t my father accepted me? Why had Allah made me a girl? Why punish me from my first breath?

  I never heard any answers.

  Instead, I started to name the feelings that stirred within me. Emptiness. Loneliness. Restlessness. Was there nothing I could do to get my father to see me?

  †

  My mother became pregnant again, delivering into my father’s open arms the son he had always wanted. Another girl came along too, and there were times when it seemed like things were finally changing for me. Like the season when my father would bring one child at a time with him on a trip to the market. He was rigorously fair, and whenever it was my turn, he allowed me to select the chicken we’d eat that night or the spices my mother required at home.

  “I know you will choose well, Zakhira,” he would say to me. “You’re lucky. You brought me a lot of money.”

  Precious as those memories are, what I remember most are the other conversations that occurred in the market. When we bumped into one of his old friends, they would stare at me and ask, “Who is this? Is it the third one? The one you wouldn’t look at?”

  My father never said he was sorry, and I never spoke to him or my mother about it. It was not the kind of conversation a girl in Pakistan could have with her parents. The only choice I had was to deal with the pain myself.

  Prayer helped. I learned to pull the sheet over my head at night and call out to Allah, whispering in my own language, Urdu, as the tears escaped my eyes.

  When I was seven, I enrolled at school, as my older sisters had done before me. That’s when I stumbled across a brand-new way of dealing with my troubles: I discovered I could make my father proud.

  After several weeks of lessons, my parents were called in to a special meeting with my teacher. I sat beside my father and mother, my eyes fixed on my feet as my legs swung from the edge of the chair.