Former Islamic Imam Finds Christ, Faces Constant Death Threats

Once filled with hate for Christians, today this former imam cannot stop sharing Christ’s love despite death threats.

Mahad Birik moves to a new rental house every month. His phone buzzes continually with text messages from unknown numbers: “We will get you!”

Mahad was born into a Somali family in a predominantly Muslim part of northeastern Kenya. After receiving an intensive education in Wahhabi Islam, he was appointed as an imam, or Islamic teacher, at age 9.

“I learned easily, and in the area where we lived many people are illiterate,” he said. “Because I could read and write, they found me suitable as an imam.”

The young imam chose a popular target for his Friday sermons — Christians. “I hated Christians,” he said. “I expressed the wish that Allah would send all Christians to hell.”

A Providential Meeting

At age 10, Mahad’s parents moved the family to Somalia. In this Islamic stronghold, Mahad had an unlikely encounter with an American missionary in a Mogadishu tea house. Mahad instantly hated the man. “Damn you,” he snapped at him, “tell me what you believe about Jesus!”

The Christian missionary gave him a Bible and challenged him to read it.

Although the Bible remained unopened for some time, Mahad said at age 12 he began to read from the Gospel of Matthew. “I read the words of Jesus: ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’

“Slowly but surely, I found out that I was lost and needed a savior,” he said. “As a Muslim you have to earn your salvation by faith, praying five times a day and fasting during Ramadan. With Jesus it is grace, only grace.”

Mahad accepted Christ, fearlessly deciding to tell his family immediately. Upon hearing that he had abandoned his Islamic faith, Mahad’s family kicked him out of the house and sent him to Saudi Arabia to study at the prestigious King Fahd University. They hoped that he would recover his senses while surrounded by Muslim students there. “If you are still a Christian when you come back,” they warned, “we’ll kill you!”

As soon as Mahad arrived in Saudi Arabia, he turned around and flew back to Somalia. “I definitely didn’t want to study Islam, because I was a Christian,” he said. Although his parents didn’t carry out their threat to kill him, they disowned him, telling him they never wanted to see him again.

It was a painful period for Mahad, and at times he even thought about suicide. “I thought, ‘If this is God’s plan for me, I’d rather die,’” he recalled. “At the same time, I never doubted my decision to become a Christian. I didn’t hide my faith.”

Eventually, Mahad met another Somali Christian, who took him in and introduced him to other underground believers. While religious freedom was constitutionally protected in Somalia at the time, Somali intelligence services began tracking him as he continued boldly sharing his new faith. Every time they caught him evangelizing, they arrested him; he was detained six times in two years. “I was arrested and placed in a dark underground cell,” he said. “At night sometimes they would pour cold water up to my neck trying to break me down.”

Each time Mahad was arrested, Christian officials in Somalia were able to get him released. After his sixth arrest, however, fellow believers suggested he return to Kenya for his own safety.

An Eternal Hope

After returning to Kenya in 1990, Mahad began reaching out to young Somali men with some missionaries he had met. “We played basketball, but also told them about Jesus,” he said.

Within a year, 16 Somali Muslims had converted to Christianity. And once again, his evangelistic efforts began to draw attention, this time from Islamists who were active in the area.

Local Somali imams and community leaders living in Kenya conspired to have Mahad arrested and jailed. Two weeks later, he was expelled from the area.

After settling in Nairobi, Mahad earned a theology degree and started a small church for Somalis in the city. “We started with six people,” he said, “but within a few years it grew into a group of about 175 people.”

Even in Nairobi, however, Mahad could not escape persecution. “I was beaten several times,” he said. “Both my hands broke, and three times they left me to die after beating [me] badly.”

Despite repeated threats and beatings, Mahad continued to preach at underground Somali churches around Nairobi. Then, in 2009, Somali Islamists broke into his house, held a knife to his throat and demanded that he convert back to Islam. He was rescued by a neighbor who also happened to be a policeman.

In another incident, a petrol bomb was thrown into his house, only to land in a water barrel where it failed to explode. “Through all these troubles, I have increasingly experienced the presence of God,” he said. “Persecution and the grace of God can go together.”

The threats against Mahad became even more intense in 2014 after a video of him sharing his conversion story — he had recently helped produce a Somali audio Bible — was picked up by Muslim media all over the world. An al-Shabab leader who saw the video issued a fatwa, an Islamic legal decree, against him and offered his killers a reward equal to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mahad then lost his job because he was considered too much of a risk for his employer.

At this low point in his life, Mahad again began to question God. “I asked God, ‘Why? What’s your plan? Have you called me to be killed by my own people?’”

With help from VOM, he continues his outreach and pastoral work, leading a Somali fellowship and occasionally preaching in other areas. He moves to a new rental house each month for security reasons, and life remains difficult for him. Yet, he says, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

Life has been hard for Mahad ever since he became a Christian. But his hope rests in eternity with Christ, and his goal is to see as many of his Somali brothers and sisters as possible enter His kingdom.