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Tried by Fire: Finding Faith in a Troubled Land

By STEPHANIE TRACY
HERALD Editorial Assistant
(From the Issue of 7/19/07)

Daniel Ali spent a large part of his adult life living under the threat of torture and death. For 17 years, he fought against the oppression of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
He survived bombings, torture, eight imprisonments, and the March 1988 chemical attacks on the Kurdish city of Halabja, regarded as the largest modern chemical weapons attack on a civilian population.
In the midst of such turmoil, the intellectual Muslim Kurd embarked on a journey that brought him to the Catholic Church.
Growing up, Ali’s family was surrounded by the diversity of religions and cultures typical in Kurdistan. A neighbor’s son, a priest of the Armenian Church, gave the 7-year-old Ali a book about the early Christian martyrs, which he devoured.
“I loved that book. It struck me as odd,” said Ali, 48, a parishioner at St. John Neumann Church in Reston. “These guys didn’t fight. These guys did not shed anybody’s blood. … They went voluntarily, willing to suffer and they did not denounce the faith. … That was in stark contrast to what I read about my own faith, the martyrs, that they were heroes on the battlefield, were killed in the process of killing.”
Ali studied the Quran better than most. His study of the Muslim holy book and the tradition of Mohammed, the Hadith, however, piqued his interest in Jesus.
“I did not have a reason to doubt my faith. I had every reason to love it,” he said. “This was the faith of my father and my father’s father. … (But) this Jesus in the Quran is a very unique individual.”
Ali said he was intrigued by passages that contradicted the Muslim assertion that Jesus was only a man and not divine. He couldn’t understand how Jesus could be present on earth while, in other passages, He was said to be watching over the world. And he wondered why the Quran said Jesus would come at the end of the world if Muslims believed Mohammed was the last prophet.
By 15, Ali was reading the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. By 1982, he had intellectually rejected the faith of his family.
After working as a linguist for the U.S. military during the Gulf War, Ali met and married his American Christian wife, Sara, who was surprised that he did not want her to convert to Islam. Ali confessed he no longer believed in the faith of his fathers, but he also insisted he would not convert to Christianity.
The Alis moved to the United States in 1993, and through Sara’s influence and that of other friends, Daniel was baptized Sept. 17, 1995, in Sara’s non-denominational Christian church.
Attracted by the coherency of the Scriptures, in contrast to the Quran, Ali began his daily habit of spending up to eight hours studying the Bible. But it was a televised Mass that brought the Alis to the doorstep of Catholicism.
“Sara was watching EWTN, and I was watching, too, and we saw the priest elevating the Host,” said Ali, wiping away tears. “That speaks volumes. Even if this Jesus is not there, just to put that much reverence into elevating Him was enough.”
A Catholic neighbor who attended the Alis’ non-denominational Bible study also intrigued them, and put them in touch with the late Father William Most.
For more than two years, Father Most, a retired priest from the Diocese of Dubuque, Iowa, who taught at Christendom College’s Notre Dame Graduate School in Alexandria, catechized Daniel and Sara. He welcomed the pair into the Catholic Church at a private Mass at All Saints Church in Manassas on July 13, 1998.
Making the jump from a faith that, in varying degrees, denies the existence of free will in favor of blind obedience to a harsh God, to one that believes in a loving Triune God who respects human choice, wasn’t the hardest part of conversion, according to Ali.
“Living the doctrine is another thing,” he said. “To pray for your enemy, to turn the other cheek and to have humility were the hardest. The hardest thing to let go of from Islam was pride.”
Ali’s family, while tolerant of his choice because they knew he “didn’t take sides easily,” didn’t take his conversion very well. But Ali said he still speaks to his parents every day, and three of his siblings are now Christian.
He takes every opportunity to share his faith with Muslims, and educate Christians about Islam, even if those attempts at dialogue lead to rejection.
“When you call yourself Christian, you must evangelize,” he said. “If we do not personify the life of the Trinity in our life, we cease to be Christians.”
From 2001-03, Ali organized and ran the Christian Islamic Forum in an effort to promote dialogue between the two faiths. In 2003, he co-authored Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics, a primer on Islam in question and answer format. And this past March, he published his first solo book, Out of Islam, Free at Last, the story of his own conversion and an argument for Christianity from an Islamic perspective.
Eventually, Ali would like to earn a doctorate in theology. In the meantime, he continues to reach out to Muslims and encourage Christians to do the same, noting that he was never openly evangelized by a Christian during his own conversion.
“Everyone says Muslims are difficult to convert. … When was the last time you tried? Don’t be afraid — go and make disciples of all nations,” he said. “Christ will not care about how many times you fall.”
Stephanie Tracy can be reached at stracy@catholicherald.com