A story about a sister reverting to Islaam, beautiful masha Allah!

I, Michelle Krebs, was born on the 22nd of December 1985, into a Christian family. I was born prematurely at 24 weeks, while my parents were on holiday in Brisbane, in fact I was born so early that the doctors told my parents that I probably wouldn’t survive. But Allah Subhanahu wa Ta ‘aala had other plans for my life, as I obviously did live. My parents at this stage in their lives were Assemblies of God Christians of the Protestant sub division, and from my birth we attended church on a weekly basis. My father was a carpenter and furniture maker, and my mother was his secretary. Two years after I was born my brother David was born and 18 months after that Andrew was born. I miss my brothers so much, as almost all my good childhood memories go back to playing with them, they were my best friends.

By the time my sister Rebeckah was born when I was seven years old, my father wasn’t really going to church very much any more. I can remember my father and mother arguing about him not going to church as my mother was worried and upset with him becoming less religious. Finally my mother gave in, and this is when their beliefs really started to change. Up until this point in time, they had been pretty normal Christians, but as they slipped further and further away from the normal, they slipped into a form of Christianity that few people have ever heard of. My life at this stage was pretty tough, I was nine years old, and working in my father’s business, beatings and being yelled at was a normal part of my life then, I suffered from the beatings and being yelled at and to this day when I remember it, it hurts my heart, but I know that they were only trying their best to be good parents. My mother had lost two babies in pregnancy that year, and my father got drunk sometimes and beat my mother. My parents were considering divorce. I never went to school as my parents religious beliefs prohibited the education of children, instead I cooked and cleaned the house and looked after the farm animals, and worked in my father’s business.

My father ran his own church by this time and my parents no longer followed any particular religious order in the church, instead my father would read the Bible and command us what we had to do. My parents got rid of the television, as they believed it was full of evil, and once I reached the age of twelve, we moved thousands of kilometers from our house in Cairns to a large farm in Bundaberg, joining a New Covenant group there.

I woke up to religion at a very early age, and by the time of puberty, I had some very hard questions to ask of Christianity. I wanted to know why the Bible had so many contradictions, how Jesus could be God and the Son of God when he was a man and ate and used the toilet and even died? I couldn’t accept that God the Almighty could behave in such ways, and how if God says in one part of the Bible that if man sees God he will die how can Jesus be God then? And how can Jesus be God or the Son of God if he pleaded with God before his alleged crucifixion to spare him from death? And how does God pray to himself? And how come God had to trick Satan when He is the Almighty One, and Satan was created by Him? On and on my questions went, but no one could answer them apart from saying that it is a mystery of God and we just have to accept it as it is or otherwise you will go to hell. So I searched deeper into Christianity, thinking that maybe there was something I was missing, maybe I was misunderstanding the whole matter, maybe there was something in Christianity that would explain to me how a man could be God. But instead of answering my questions and quelling my doubt, my search actually fired it up, and my questions grew. Why did the Christian bible have so many books that had been removed from it, and certain books added to it, and whole chapters added to it ect… and how come no one questioned this? WHY? I wanted to know, I had to know. Why was the Catholic Bible different to ours? Why were the Jews commanded in the Bible to commit genocide? How could King David, peace and blessings be upon him, commit adultery and murder if he was such a holy man of God? The sheer amount of evil and sin in the Bible shocked me, and I read it as much as possible to try to find answers to my questions.

I studied Greek and Hebrew, so that I would be able to read the Bible in its original language, or what I thought was the original language at the time. I soon discovered however, that Greek was not the original language of the New Testament, instead that the New Testament consisted of a mixture of Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew, and that no consensus had been arrived to as what the Bible actually consisted of until 300 years after Jesus died, when one Christian group became by Constantine’s decision to be the only acceptable form of Christianity, all other Bibles were destroyed other then the ones that conformed with the codex that the leading party had decided was the correct version. How could this be the truth then, I thought, how can the Bible be the True word of God when no one even really knows what it originally was, and when there is so much proof to show that so much had been added and removed from its texts. I even found evidence from the modern times of Biblical corruption in the Thomas Jefferson Bible, where Thomas Jefferson had corrupted the Bible, making his own Bible removing anything he disagreed on and adding anything he wished. When I showed my parents about the Thomas Jefferson Bible, they laughed about it, saying that corruption had taken place many times in the history of the Bible.I gave up Christianity, and started my search of the other religions.

My mother was losing a baby every year in pregnancy by this stage, as they didn’t believe that any form of contraception was allowable in Christianity, even though my mother would get cirrhosis of the liver and sever kidney problems due to pregnancy. They also believed that medical intervention of any sort is evil, so my mother gave birth at home, with me delivering my dead brothers and sisters.

At our new farm, we lived in tents, and ate in the open air, and bathed in the creek. Our toilet was a hole in the ground, and we had no privacy. We used to get up early to farm the earth for our food, and then I would come back to the tent to cook the porridge that we would eat for breakfast. We had little time to do anything else apart from farming, cooking, cleaning and clearing trees from the land. We were also building a house out of trees we cut down, and it was very hard work. I remember I was proud as my father would tell people who visited us that I worked like a man, and that in the building of the house, I was worth a man’s labor. I don’t think I was a lazy person, as I always tried to make my mother and father happy by working as hard and fast as I could.

My father was a very good man in that he had high morals, but when he lost his temper, he was really dangerous to be around. One time, my brother David was working in the field mowing the grass, and my father suddenly lost his temper because my brother wasn’t working hard enough. So my father grabbed my brother by the head and dragged him over to a tree and started bashing David’s head against the tree over and over again, eventually my brother managed to escape, and ran as fast as he could to get away from my dad, my brother screaming and crying. My father, grabbed a long thick stick and jumped on his motorbike, and chased after him. My father beat my brother all the way home with that stick, while on his motorbike, my brother running ahead. When they got to the tents, I ran out to stop my father, standing in front of him to protect my brother. So I got the beating instead.

One time, my father threw a very dangerous machine at my brother because he made a mistake in his work, another time he threw a pizza knife at us, just missing us by centimeters. He used to be very cruel to the animals, beating them very badly, one of our dogs he hated so much because he said it was a coward dog. So he used to kick it over and over again just for fun, while the poor dog would be yelping out extremely loud. That dog was very scared of my father, but saying all this, my father was also a very good man, he always loved me very much, and was very proud of me upuntil I became muslim.

My mother also had a very bad temper, but she was angry almost all the time. All day every day, you had to be careful not to say or do anything, because she might get angry at you. Even if I said, “I love you Mummy”, or “I’m sorry Mummy”, or anything nice, if she was angry she would make you suffer by beating or yelling. I think though that she was angry because she was always sick from the pregnancies. She was very good to my father, and she was a very intelligent person and I miss her so much.By the time I turned 15 years old, I had looked through all the religions I could find except Islam. They all had problems with them, as they all committed shirk in one form or another, and I could tell that they were defected. For example Hinduism has over 3000 gods, Mormonism believes that God has wives, Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Jesus came to forgive our sins (and according to logic only God forgives sins), Buddhism in it original beliefs holds that there is no god, Taoism has no real god, and on and on the list goes.

I didn’t even want to consider Islam as I thought that all muslims raped women, and chopped off the finger tips of Christians and Jews, etc… and my father when I told him at the age of twelve that I wanted to marry an Arab when I grew up (I didn’t even know of such a thing as Islam or muslims at that age), he started yelling, saying that muslim men beat their wives and treated their wives worse then dogs, implying that all Arabs are muslim.

Although I thought that Islam was a bad religion I thought that it would only be fair and just and right for me to investigate into it and see if it was the true religion or not. Besides, I thought, maybe they were all lying to me when they told me all that stuff about how evil Islam is, they told me so many lies about Christianity so why wouldn’t they tell me lies about Islam too. So early march 2001 I took down two books on my parents’ bookshelf about Islam and an encyclopedia letter I. And I read them all. The two books on Islam were truly evil, the Christian books lying through their teeth about Islam. They used stupid silly arguments to prove that Islam couldn’t possibly be the true religion, such as saying that the Prophet Muhammed peace and blessings be upon him, was a womanizer because he had nine wives. What a stupid argument I thought, King David had 22 wives and yet you would never say that about him. And that Islam is a terrorist religion simply because it has such a thing as warfare in it, however I noted the hypocrisy in this statement as the Bible has numerous accounts of genocide and God telling them supposedly to commit genocide. I didn’t accept their pointless baseless arguments and instead read through the lies in the book to try to understand what Islam really was about. Instead what I found was a religion that joined no partners with God, a religion free of defect. A religion that accepted God as being the Creator and not the created.

So I accepted Islam there and then in my bedroom on the 24th of March 2001. I tried to find out as much about Islam as possible, and seeing as I didn’t know any muslims or have any other books about Islam, nor did I have internet access, I had to find out about Islam through articles in books. It was very hard, as I had never told my family about my giving up of Christianity, and never told them I was looking through other religions and I had definitely never told them I had converted up until this stage. But I couldn’t keep it a secret as I hated lying so much especially when I was keeping this religion a secret.

So a month after I had become muslim, I told my mother and father I had become muslim. They were furious, and at first they thought that I was just going through a phase. But after a couple of weeks they realized that I was serious, so they started to try to get me back to Christianity. They started a campaign against me, first by threatening me and mocking muslims and Islam, and by mocking me saying that I was being so immature and babyish by becoming muslim, and that I could never be a true muslim as I was Australian and white, not an Arab. And that this was just some stupid game I was playing. Then they became really mean, starving me for a week to get me to give up and depriving me of sleep and threatening to kick me out of home. So I decided to hide my Islam and pretend to be Christian, as I was scared that I would give Islam up altogether if I kept on trying to be strong in front of them. I was really scared that Allah subhanahu wa ta ‘Ala would be very angry at me for not showing Islam on the outside and for pretending to be Christian and for saying all the evil things I had to say in order to make my family think I was Christian, but I didn’t know what to do and I thought that hiding my Islam until I was old enough to be muslim in public without being tortured for it was better than losing Islam altogether.

So began my long three years pretending to be Christian. I tried desperately to learn as much as I could about Islam but it was increasingly difficult to find any information on islam, as my parents watched my every move like a hawk. But I did manage to find some things about Islam. For example I had known that muslims have to pray five times every day. But how do they pray, and how long for? I couldn’t find any information at all for a long time, so I tried my best. I divided my day up into fifths and would spend fifth teen minutes five times a day praying in my own words, and I felt guilty for not spending more time praying as I thought real muslims must spend hours every day praying. As I learnt more through different non-muslim literature, I found out that muslims put their heads on the ground during prayer, so I would spend the whole fifth teen minutes five times a day with my head on the ground praying in my own words.

One time my sister caught me praying and said, “What are you doing with your head on the ground, Michelle?” I told her that I was exercising. Slowly but surely I picked up more information, learning more and more. For some reason I thought that muslims prayed only two rakahs in each prayer, so I would pray dhur and asr and maghrib and isha as two rakah. I didn’t know about wudhu for along time, and when I found out it was a bit of aproblem as the only water I had access to in the mornings was the dam water, and the walls of the dam were so steep that I couldn’t wash my face or hands or feet in there without falling in, so I fixed my problem by taking an early morning swim each morning for wudhu. Imagine, the middle of winter when there was ice on the ground, and I used to take a swim every morning in the dark. My family were impressed as I told them that there are health benefits to swimming in freezing cold water early in the morning, little did they know that I was actually trying to prepare for prayer.

I also managed to get an English interpretation of the meanings of the Qu’ran when I was 17 years old. How I got hold of it is a miracle in itself, Allah subhanahu wa ta ‘aala was so kind to me giving it to me, but it is a long story to tell so I will shorten it somewhat. What happened was that I was really desperate to get a Qu’ran to read, so I prayed to Allah subhanahu wa ta'aala that if He gave me an English Qu’ran I would memorize the whole of it. The next day, I was allowed to go into Bundaberg alone for the first time in my life, and I got my Qu’ran for $17.95. I had to hide it,and as my mother did a search of my room daily, I found it hard to think of anywhere to hide it. So I prayed, and I thought of a great place to hide it, my mattress. My mattress was an army mattress, so it was plastic and thin and hard, so I undid some of the threads between two of the seams at the end, and exposed the foam. I then took a knife and cut out a cube shaped hole big enough to fit my Qu’ran, cutting myself several times in the process by an accident, and then covered it back up with the mattress. My parents never found my Qu’ran even when the turned my bedroom upside down looking for it later on just before they kicked me out.

I was becoming such a good person because of Islam, and my whole family were amazed at my transformation. I read in the Qu’ran that you have to be kind to my parents, so I tried to be the kindest I could ever be. I would spend time with my mum now, instead of trying to run off like I used to. I would clean the house the best I could, doing extra than what I was told to do. I would try to work triply hard in my fathers business, trying to make as much money for him as possible. I no longer spoke back to my mum and dad, and tried to make them happy. My brothers and sister were very happy with me as I now cleaned their rooms for them to try to make them happy as the Qu’ran tells us to keep ties of kinship. And I read somewhere about the Ansari who offered a muhajireen half of everything he owned, and offered to divorce his wife so the other guy could marry her, so I tried to do that too. I would give half of every meal to my brothers, and half of my possessions away, and half of my money. I read in the Qu’ran about how you have to give charity, so I gave away all of my possessions except for my Qu’ran and notebooks and china doll. My actions although not really correct in totality in Islam were done because I was trying my best to be the best muslim I could be and please Allah Almighty as much as possible....

26th November 2004.

4:00am
I got up and took my daily washing in the dam, prayed, read my Qu’ran, chopped the firewood, made the fire, and put on the porridge to cook. Then I went to work in the shed. Had breakfast, swept floors, washed dishes, cleaned table, and went out to work again.

11:30am
Told my dad about me being muslim, “ I believe that Islam is the true religion dad. I’m really sorry dad, I love you so much and don’t want to hurt you, but I can’t believe that Jesus is the Son of God any more.”He didn’t say anything, he just looked white with anger, and he finished his work quietly and walked away. He went to the house, Oh My God, he went to the house. My heart is beating so fast, I can’t breathe, what is going to happen? What are they going to do this time? I cry to Allah silent tears of help. My sister comes running to the shed from the house looking pale and scared. “Mum and Dad want you all” she yells to my brothers and I. We walk over to the house with my sister. “Did they say anything to you?” I ask my sister, “No” she says, “Mum just trashed our room and they both look very angry”. I walk into the house, seeing my bedroom door open as I do so. All the cupboards are tipped over, all my papers and books and everything is everywhere. My bed is all messed up, the curtains ripped down. I give a little gasp, its bad really bad, they are going to kill me.

My mum and dad are seated at the table, looking serious. “Sit down all of you” my dad barks at us. We all sit down, my brothers questioning each other with their eyes. My father stands up, “Michelle, I command you to renounce Allah” he says to me in a strong tone . My brothers give a gasp, so this is what has happened, our sister has become an infidel. “I’m sorry Daddy but I can’t do that, there is no one worthy of worship but God, and Mohammad is His Servant and Messenger” I say, and I’m shocked at how calm I’m feeling. My father takes a step towards me, and slaps me hard across the ear, “Say that Jesus is the Son of God” He yells, “No daddy, I’m sorry, but there is no one worthy of worship except God and I can’t say that Jesus is the Son of God anymore”. He hits me again, hitting me and hitting me, repeating the same command, and when I fall silent hoping that he won’t hit me, he hits me yelling “ Answer me Michelle, who’s God, Allah or Jesus?”, “Answer me!!!” So I answer him, “ There is no one worthy of worship except God”. I can hear my brothers in the background yelling for me to give up, and asking me why I have done this to them. My mother is screaming at me that I am a lying Muslim #####, screaming that I have betrayed the family by becoming muslim. My sister is screaming because she thinks they are going to kill me. My sister, I’m so sorry my darling little sister. My father grabs me by both my wrists in one hand, and drags me over to the wood stove and opens it with the other. The fire is blazing, and he trys to shove both my hands in the flames, I am screaming, “ALLAH!!!ALLAH!!!ALLAH!!” with all my might. I can feel the tip of the flames touching my hands, I am struggling with all my strength to get away, but he has my hands firmly in his grip and wont let go. He is yelling at me to give in to say that Jesus is God, and I refuse and he is trying to put my hands in the fire, but my crying out to Allah seems to have shocked him, and he lets go. I run for he door, but my mother runs in the way, so I turn around and go for the window, I get up on the bench, and am about to jump down even though I know I might break my leg as it is a long way down the hill. My father grabs my legs, and pulls me to the floor, kicking me and kicking me.

I can’t breathe, I can’t cry, all I can do is try to protect my face and stomach. My mother is kicking me as well now, they are both at it, and my brothers are yelling at me “Infidel! Infidel!” I think I’m going to die, I try to escape once more, but they keep grabbing my legs and kicking me. My father puts his foot on my neck, and starts to press down, I can’t breathe, I think I am going to die today, but I don’t mind, I feel this sense of peace come over me. Islam is all that matters, Allah, make Him happy, dying, what is that when Allah the Almighty is happy with you and you speak the truth. I will not give in, I will not blaspheme against God the Almighty by ascribing Him a Son. So I refuse their commands to go back to speaking disbelief, and they keep on with the kicking. Nothing works anymore, I feel I am going unconscious, my hands and arms are refusing to work anymore, I don’t have any strength left, all I have is Islam. “GET UP! GET UP YOU MORON!” My father yells at me, I try but my legs don’t work anymore, “GET UP!” He yells again, but now he knows that either I can’t get up or won’t get up, so he grabs me by my shoulders and yanks me up against the bench, leaning onto me so I can’t move. “Its either Jesus or Mohammed, you can stay here if you come back to Christianity, or you can get out if you are muslim.” So I choose Islam, there being no point in me explaining to him that muslims love Jesus, and that we don’t worship Mohammed peace and blessings be upon him, as I had tried countless times before to no avail.

They beat me a lot more after that, and organized for me to go and live with some Pakistani orientalist Christians in Brisbane. My mother made me show her where my Qu’ran was and then burnt it. My mother also came to the toilet to further humiliate me saying that I deserved no respect, and she watched.The hardest moment of all that day, was when my father and I left in the four wheel drive and my sister was wailing outside the car, crying, “Michelle! Michelle! Michelle! When are you coming back?” and my mother told her, “When she becomes Christian again.” And my sister was trying to grab onto my window of the car as we drove away, crying and pleading with me to stay, but she never asked me to give up Islam. They let me leave with my handbag (no money inside though), the clothes I was wearing, and a Bible (they made me take that). My father and I didn’t speak the whole journey.Indeed this story reminds us of the same fate faced by great sahaba such as Bilal and Ammar and Sumaya, when they chose to follow the right path, and paid the price for it, not giving up and not stepping back a millimetre from the way of truth. I would recommend everyone who reads this to pass it on to everyone they know.

Here's the last part of sister Michelles' (or Humeyra) story, may Allah reward her for her patience, and guide on her hands, her family insha Allah.

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I arrived at Daniel and Mariat Scots’ house that night. They were orientalist Christians, whose career, was to put fear and hatred into the hearts of Christians towards Islam, and to cause any weak muslims or new converts who didn’t know anything about Islam to apostate. I lived with them until the 24th of December when they kicked me out, because I wasn’t responding the way they wanted to their brainwashing. Instead of causing me to apostate, they cause me to get stronger in Islam, because now I had a wealth of knowledge at my finger tips. They had every hadith book, Islamic book, Qu’ran you can imagine, but they used to lie about Islam and twist hadith and Qu’ran to try to make me go back. But I knew not to trust someone without proof, and I knew they would lie to me. They quoted Qu’ran to me saying that homosexuality is condoned in Islam because the Qu’ran speaks about how there will be servant boys in Jannah to serve the people and that they will look like pearls in beauty, but they didn’t know however that I knew that the Qu’ran actually says that they will be there to serve the wine to the people, not to perform homosexual acts. They lied to me so much, and were so rude, that Daniel Scots’ children and the other young people at his house were becoming interested in Islam. They hated the way he would talk about muslims and Islam, and he never stopped.

I put on hijab two weeks after I moved there, and a week after that I put on niqab. Daniel and Mariat and my family were furious with me, but I told them that to obey God is better then pleasing man. I loved covering up, and it was the best day when I put on niqab, to please Allah, what more can you want?Daniel was so rude that one day he even overstepped the physical line. I was in the kitchen having a drink of water, when he stepped in behind me and put his arms around me, I was wearing hijab and he knew that Islam prohibits such a thing as a non-mahram touching a woman, but he continued to hug me anyway saying that he loved me so much. I was horrified, and I told him off for touching me and removed his arms and ran out of the house.

He was so rude, I couldn’t believe it. On the 22nd of December 2004, my birthday, My mum gave birth to a baby boy, my 19th sibling, and he was also dead, but I never got to see him, nor them, and my father told me over the phone that I had brought the Spirit of death over the family.

Then they kicked me out because instead of getting weaker I became stronger in Islam. I found a muslim sister to stay with, and lived with her until I got married. That sister was like the Ansar to me because she was so kind to me to open up her own home to let me live with her, may Allah reward her with Firdous al ‘alaa. Amin.

I got married on the 15th of February 2005 to a young Palestinian man, named Wael Hamad. All praise is due to Allah, who has given me a man who fears Allah so much, and tries so hard to please Him, and Allah knows best his character. May Allah reward him and grant him Firdous al a'laa and to die as a Mutaqee (someone who fears Allah) .

I have the most wonderful little girl now, masha’Allah tabarakAllah, who makes each day easier, and I hope and pray that she will be of the righteous, and an ‘aalimah (a scholar).Life is hard, and my family refuse to speak with me, calling me the darkness, and shout at me and hang up the phone, but I pray for them of course, and hope they will soften in time insha’Allah. I have been able to overcome my lack of schooling problem, and have started a bachelor of Communications, and I hope insha’Allah that I will do well in it and please the Most High Almighty in it. I am studying two Islamic Shariah Courses at the moment, and am trying to learn Arabic and Tajweed so that I can memorise the Qu’ran as I promised Allah subhanahu wa ta ‘aala, insha Allah. I hope to become an Alimah like the great scholars, and pray for such, but I know that it isn’t likely, as I am now 21 years old (almost anyway), and I am a woman, and Saudi Arabia and such countries are hard to get into. But anyway, my dearest hope of hopes, is that I please my Creator, and die Pleased with Him and Pleasing Him.

Ameen.

Respectfully yours,
Humeyra Bint Paul Krebs (Michelle Krebs).

All praises and thanks be to Allah, Lord of everything that exists.The most Gracious, the Most Merciful.Master of the Day of Judgment You (alone) we worship, and You (alone) we ask for help.Guide us to the Straight Way The Way of of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (the way) of those who earned Your Anger, nor those who went astray. Ameen