Montaz Ali has just become pastor at Trinty Baptist Church, Tenterden, in Kent. Here he tells us how, from a Muslim background, he found Christ.
I was born in 1973 into a Muslim home in a farming village in Sylhet, Bangladesh. We lived on a compound with my grandparents, uncles and their families (in Bangladeshi culture sons continue to live with their parents post-marriage). Since my uncles lived next door to us we thought of them as second parents and our cousins as siblings.
Going to the mosque for prayer was a regular and normal thing for me. As a Muslim I was taught to pray five times a day. Friday prayers were particularly important and the mosque would be at its most full. After school we used to have an Islamic teacher come to our home to teach us the Qur’an. We learned to recite it in Arabic although we didn’t understand the language. The teacher would explain what it meant, which was enough for us. I accepted what I was taught and never questioned the existence of Allah. Although the Qur’an speaks of Jesus, his virgin birth and the miracles he did, I was never taught that. Since I accepted the teaching of the Qur’an, that there is only one god, Allah, and that Muhammad is his prophet, that made me a Muslim. The hope of every Muslim is that at the end of life, Allah will weigh up the good that they’ve done against the bad and on that ground accept them into paradise.
