RUTHFULLY YOURS

The noble American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which has been supporting the defense efforts for Youcef Nadarkhani, has helped a Moroccan “apostate” to Christianity (a young man identified as “Z”) obtain asylum in the US.

Raised in a “purely traditional, Islamic way,” Z “had a burning desire since adolescence to be a good Muslim in the eye of Allah and to make his family proud of him.” However, despite being sent at a very young age to a Moroccan mosque to study the Quran for four years, Z maintained that “the more I tried to know Allah, the more I became afraid of him.”

Inspired by an encounter with a young Christian to perform a comparative study of the Quran and the Bible, after analyzing the latter, Z became convinced,

…that no one can ever be good enough to deserve God’s favor, to win God’s heaven, because from birth we are all pre-disposed to rejecting God and living our lives our own way. That’s why it was necessary for God himself to shrink into a human body and die on the cross, dying the death we deserve.

Subsequently, Z apostasized from Islam and began living clandestinely as a Christian. The ACLJ describes the harrowing events that led to his exile from Morocco, and eventual asylum in the US.

In 2010, when he was attending a secret house church in Morocco and going to an internet cafe to fulfill his need to listen to worship songs and sermons, he was approached by four men as he left his house. The men surrounded him and said they knew that he had left Islam and dishonored his family and Islam by becoming a kafir (infidel). The men stabbed Z multiple times and left him for dead. One of Z’s neighbors saw him lying on the ground, bleeding. He took Z to the hospital where he underwent two surgeries. He gained consciousness after three days and thanked God for saving his life. Z came to the United States and contacted the ACLJ. Our legal team filed for asylum and within just four months, Z was interviewed and granted asylum. Z is currently attending a Bible school where he is continuously growing in his Christian faith.

During April 2010 nearly 7,000 Muslim religious leaders backed the deportation of foreign Christians by signing a document describing their work within Morocco as “moral rape” and “religious terrorism.” The pronouncement came amid a national campaign designed to vilify Christians in putatively “moderate” Morocco for the Sharia-based “crime” of proselytism. Given this moral environment in Morocco — already hostile to freedom of conscience — the brutal assault upon a Muslim apostate to Christianity, such as Z, is hardly surprising.