My name is Prince Abdullah.

I’m 24 years old.

And on March 15th, 2018, my life changed forever.

That was the night I was supposed to marry my own sister in a forced Islamic ceremony.

Instead, Jesus Christ saved my soul and shattered every chain that bound me.

I stand before you today as a former member of the Saudi royal family, speaking from a secure location in exile.

It’s been two and a half years since my conversion to Christianity, and I need you to hear what God can do in the darkest circumstances.

Ask yourself this question.

What would you sacrifice to escape a fate worse than death? I was born in Riyad in 1996 into a world that most people can only imagine.

Golden marble floors stretched endlessly through our palace.

servants attended to my every need before I even knew I had needs.

My father, Prince Khaled, be commanded respect from world leaders and controlled oil revenues that could fund entire countries.

To the outside world, I lived in paradise.

But luxury became my prison and wealth became the bars that kept me trapped.

My sister Amira arrived two years after me in 1998.

From our earliest memories, we were inseparable companions in that vast echoing palace.

While other children played in neighborhoods and attended schools, we lived behind walls that were 20 ft high and guarded by men with automatic weapons.

Private tutors came to us.

The world never came to us.

Amamira and I created our own universe within those walls, playing games in empty ballrooms and racing through corridors that seemed to stretch forever.

Father was a strict adherent to Wahhabi Islam, the most conservative interpretation of the faith.

Every morning at dawn, his voice would boom through the palace speakers calling us to fajure prayer.

I learned to recite Quranic verses before I could properly read Arabic.

By age seven, I was performing all five daily prayers without question.

The ritual became as automatic as breathing.

But even as a child, something felt hollow about the repetitive motions and memorized words.

Our religious training went far beyond normal Islamic education.

Father hired private clerics who taught us about family honor, bloodline purity, and the absolute authority of the patriarch.

They spoke about women as possessions to be protected and controlled.

They taught that questioning family decisions was questioning Allah himself.

I memorized these teachings perfectly, but they left my heart feeling empty and confused.

The strange conversation started when I was around 10 years old.

Father would meet with his brothers in his private office and their voices would uh carry through the ventilation system into my room.

They spoke about keeping bloodlines strong and maintaining family purity.

They discussed arrangements and traditions that I didn’t understand.

Sometimes they mentioned Amamira and me in the same breath, but their words were coded in language that made no sense to my young mind.

Mother was a ghost in our palace.

She moved silently through the halls, beautiful but always sad.

I often caught her crying in her private sitting room, staring out windows at gardens she was forbidden to walk through alone.

When I asked why she cried, she would quickly wipe her tears and tell me they were tears of joy for Allah’s blessings.

But even as a child, I knew the difference between happy tears and the tears of a caged bird.

The servants whispered when they thought we couldn’t hear them.

They spoke in Arabic dialects from their home countries, thinking we wouldn’t understand.

But I learned to pick up fragments of their conversations.

They called us the chosen ones and spoke about the arrangement with pity in their voices.

When they looked at Amira and me playing together, their expressions held a sadness that I couldn’t comprehend.

During my teenage years, father granted me limited internet access for educational purposes.

That small window to the outside world changed everything.

I discovered that normal families didn’t live like ours.

brothers and sisters in other royal families married outside their immediate bloodlines.

They attended universities with other students.

They had friends who weren’t servants or tutors.

They lived in the same world we did, but somehow their lives looked completely different.

I began noticing how we were kept separate from our extended royal cousins.

During rare family gatherings, other princes our age would attend with friends or even girlfriends.

Amamira and I always arrived together and left together like a matched set.

The adults would watch us with knowing expressions that made my skin crawl.

I started understanding that we weren’t just different because of our father’s extra conservatism.

We were different because we were being prepared for something specific.

By age 16, Amira’s natural cheerfulness began fading into anxiety and depression.

She stopped laughing at my jokes and spent hours staring silently out her bedroom window.

When I asked what was wrong, she would just shake her head and say she had strange feelings about our future.

She had nightmares that she couldn’t explain and panic attacks that seemed to come from nowhere.

The Islamic teachings about women and marriage started disturbing me deeply.

The clerics spoke about wives as property and described marriage as a transaction between men.

They thought that a woman’s highest purpose was serving her husband and producing sons.

When they looked at Amira during these lessons, something in their expressions made me want to protect her from their words.

Have you ever felt trapped by the very people supposed to protect you? That feeling started growing in me around age 18.

The people who claimed to love me most were the ones controlling every aspect of my life.

The religion that promised peace left me feeling anxious and empty.

The family that uh should have been my refuge felt more like a beautiful prison where the guards wore expensive robes and spoke about honor while planning something that filled me with dread.

I performed all the Islamic rituals perfectly.

But my heart felt increasingly distant from Allah.

The prayers became mechanical recitations.

The Quranic verses felt like chains around my mind rather than sources of comfort.

I was drowning in tradition, suffocating under the weight of expectations I didn’t understand and desperately searching for something real in a world that felt completely artificial.

January 15th, 2017 changed everything.

I remember the date because it was the day my childhood officially died.

Father summoned me to his private office after Margar prayer.

The evening called to worship that usually brought our family together for dinner.

Instead of joining the others, I walked down that long marble corridor toward his heavy wooden doors.

My footsteps echoing in the silence.

His office was a monument to power and tradition.

Persian carpets worth millions covered the floor.

Gold frame portraits of Saudi kings lined the walls.

The massive desk where he conducted business with oil ministers and foreign diplomats dominated the room.

He sat behind it like a judge preparing to deliver a verdict.

His traditional white soap immaculate, his beard perfectly groomed, his eyes cold and calculating.

Abdullah, he said without any warmth in his voice.

You are 21 years old now.

It is time for you to fulfill your destiny and honor your family.

I stood before him like a soldier awaiting orders.

My hands clasped behind my back in the respectful posture he had demanded since childhood.

I expected him to announce my engagement to some distant royal cousin or wealthy merchants’s daughter.

Arranged marriages were normal in our world.

I had mentally prepared myself for that possibility.

“You will marry Amir in 18 months,” he said as casually as if he were discussing the weather.

The words hit me like a physical blow.

I actually laughed out loud because my brain refused to process what he had said.

It was so impossible, so completely insane that laughter seemed like the only rational response.

Father, I don’t understand.

Did you say Amira? My sister Amira.

His expression didn’t change.

Yes, your sister.

This marriage will preserve our bloodline and ensure that our family’s wealth remains concentrated within our direct lineage.

It is a tradition that goes back generations in the purest royal families.

The room started spinning.

I gripped the back of the leather chair in front of his desk to keep from falling.

Father, you cannot be serious.

She is my sister.

This is against Islamic law.

This is against nature itself.

Do not lecture me about Islamic law.

Boy, his voice turned dangerous.

I have consulted with the most respected clerics in exceptional circumstances to preserve royal bloodlines.

Such arrangements are permissible.

Your greatgrandfather married his halfsister.

Their union produced the strongest leaders in our family history.

I felt like I was drowning in a nightmare.

The man I had respected and obeyed my entire life was revealing himself to be a monster.

The religion I had practiced faithfully was being twisted to justify something that made my soul scream in horror.

Father, please, there must be another way.

I can marry someone else.

I can sign legal documents to protect the family wealth.

The decision is made, he said with finality.

You will marry Amira on March 15th, 2018.

The ceremony will be private, conducted by our family clerics.

You will produce sons to continue our pure lineage.

This is your duty as my heir and as a faithful Muslim.

I stumbled out of his office in complete shock.

The palace hallways that had been my entire world suddenly felt like the corridors of a tomb.

Every servant, every guard.

Every family member I passed seemed to be part of a conspiracy that had been growing around me for 21 years.

I was not a son or a prince.

I was a breeding animal being prepared for a task that horrified every fiber of my being.

Finding a mirror that night was the hardest thing I had ever done.

She was in her sitting room reading a romance novel about normal people who fell in love and married by choice.

When I told her what father had announced, she didn’t laugh like I had.

She just stared at me with growing horror until her face went completely white.

I knew it, she whispered.

Deep down, I always knew.

The way the adults looked at us, the way we were never allowed to form relationships outside the family, the way they kept us so isolated.

Then she broke down completely, sobbing with a desperation that broke my heart.

We held each other and cried that night, but not as future husband and wife.

We cried as brother and sister, facing the destruction of everything pure and good in our relationship.

She kept repeating, “We’re not children anymore, Abdullah.

We’re sacrifices.

” The next months were psychological torture.

father began involving me in wedding preparations like I was an eager groom instead of a condemned prisoner.

He showed me architectural plans for the private ceremony hall being constructed in our compound.

He discussed honeymoon arrangements to a secluded palace in the desert.

He spoke about the genetic advantages our children would have because of their concentrated royal blood.

sleep became impossible.

I would lie in bed staring at the ceiling, my mind racing through escape scenarios that all seemed hopeless.

The palace walls that had protected me as a child now felt like prison walls.

The guards who had kept threats out were now keeping me in.

I lost 30 lbs because food tasted like ash in my mouth.

Amamira’s depression deepened every day.

She stopped eating meals with the family.

She stopped participating in conversations.

She moved through the palace like a ghost.

Her beautiful smile replaced by hollow eyes and trembling hands.

Sometimes I caught her staring at herself in mirrors with an expression of such profound sadness that I wanted to scream.

My attempts at resistance were pathetic and futile.

I researched Islamic law obsessively, finding scholars who condemned sibling marriage, but father dismissed them as weak moderates who didn’t understand royal necessity.

I begged mother to intervene, but she just cried and said she had no power to change father’s decisions.

I considered running away, but where could a Saudi prince hide? I briefly thought about suicide, but I couldn’t abandon air to face this alone.

So, I’m asking you, as someone who’s been in absolute darkness, have you ever felt completely hopeless? Have you ever faced a situation where every door seemed locked and every window seemed barred? That was my life in early 2018.

Watching the calendar countdown to March 15th, like it was marking the days until my execution.

December 2017 brought the darkest spiritual crisis of my life.

I had performed Islamic prayers faithfully for 14 years.

But suddenly the words felt like stones in my mouth.

When I prostrated myself toward Mecca five times each day instead of finding peace, I found myself crying out in desperation.

If Allah truly loved me, I whispered into my prayer rug.

Why would he demand this abomination from me? The questions that had been growing in my mind for months became impossible to ignore.

I had memorized the Quran’s teachings about family honor and obedience to parents, but nothing in those verses felt like love anymore.

They felt like chains designed to bind me to a fate that made my soul recoil in horror.

During fajar prayer at dawn, when the palace was still and quiet, I found myself asking Allah why he had created me only to destroy me.

My Islamic prayers transformed from worship into desperate bargaining sessions with a God who seemed increasingly distant and silent.

I would perform the ritual washing face toward Mecca and then pour out my heart in Arabic that became more frantic each day.

Please Allah show me another way.

Give father a different vision.

Let me serve you in some other manner.

But the ceiling of my room remained silent and March 15th kept approaching like an unstoppable train.

The breaking point came on a sleepless night in January 2008.

I was researching Islamic marriage laws on my computer.

Desperately searching for some religious precedent that might free me from this nightmare, I typed Islamic law sibling marriage forbidden into the search engine, hoping to find scholarly opinions that father might respect.

Instead, one of the results took me to a Christian website that was discussing biblical views on family relationships.

I should have closed that browser window immediately.

In Saudi Arabia, accessing Christian content could be considered apostasy punishable by death.

But something about the pages header stopped me.

It said Jesus loves you unconditionally.

Not Jesus demands your obedience or Jesus requires your sacrifice.

Just simple unconditional love.

I had never heard God described that way in 21 years of Islamic teaching.

I spent the next hour reading testimonies from people who claimed Jesus had rescued them from impossible situations.

Their stories were nothing like the formal ritualistic language I was accustomed to uh in Islamic texts.

These people wrote about Jesus as if he was their friend, their protector, their loving father who actually cared about their happiness and well-being.

It was like seeing color after a lifetime of black and white.

The next night, I downloaded a Bible app under a fake name and began reading the Gospel of Matthew.

Jesus’s words jumped off the screen with a power that Quranic verses had never held for me.

Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

I was definitely weary and burdened.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.

For I am gentle and humble in heart.

Gentle and humble.

These were not qualities I associated with the demanding Allah of my upbringing.

I became obsessed with the stories of Jesus defending women and children from religious leaders who wanted to use them for their own purposes.

When the Pharisees brought him the woman caught in adultery, he protected her instead of condemning her.

When people tried to prevent children from approaching him, he welcomed them with open arms.

This Jesus seemed to oppose exactly the kind of religious manipulation that was destroying my life.

Reading the gospels late at night under my covers, using my phone’s demest setting to avoid detection became my secret refuge.

Jesus’s words about setting captives free resonated in my soul like nothing ever had before.

The spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.

I was definitely oppressed, definitely a prisoner, definitely in need of freedom.

But the internal war was brutal.

21 years of Islamic indoctrination fought against every page I read.

The voice of my father, my clerics, my entire culture screamed that I was committing the ultimate betrayal by even considering Christianity.

There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.

Echoed in my mind like a warning siren.

The penalty for apostasy in Saudi Arabia was death.

And I was dancing on the edge of treason against everything I had been taught to revere.

Yet something deeper than fear was stirring in my heart.

When I read Jesus’s words, I felt a presence that was completely different from anything I had experienced during Islamic prayer.

Instead of the fear and obligation that characterized my relationship with Allah, I sensed warmth, acceptance, and genuine love.

It was as if someone was actually listening to my thoughts and caring about my pain.

February 2018 became a month of secret spiritual exploration.

I started praying to Jesus tentatively, afraid that Allah might strike me down for approaching a different God.

Jesus, I would whisper.

If you are real, if you truly care about people like me, please help me understand what to do.

Instead of the silence that had met my Islamic prayers, I began sensing gentle guidance and unexplainable peace.

The more I read about Jesus, the more I understood that God’s character was nothing like what I had been taught.

The Jesus of the Bible didn’t demand human sacrifices or family destruction to prove devotion.

He sacrificed himself to spare people from exactly the kind of bondage I was experiencing.

He came to set prisoners free, not to create more elaborate prisons disguised as religious duty.

Two voices were waring in my soul by early March.

Duty screamed at me to submit to family tradition and Islamic law to accept that Allah’s will sometimes required terrible sacrifices.

But truth whispered that the God who created families would never design them for destruction.

that real love would never demand the perversion of the most precious relationships.

Look inside your own heart right now.

Have you ever felt God calling you towards something that seemed impossible? Something that required abandoning everything familiar and safe.

That was my position.

As March 15th approached, Jesus was calling me to trust him completely.

But answering that call meant risking everything I had ever known, including my life itself.

March 14th, 2018 was supposed to be my last night as a single man.

Instead, it became my last night as a Muslim.

The palace buzzed with final wedding preparations that felt more like funeral arrangements to me.

servants hung white silk drapes throughout the ceremonial hall.

The family clerics arrived to perform the Islamic na ceremony that would legally bind me to my own sister.

Flowers were arranged in patterns that spelled out our names in Arabic calligraphy.

Everything was beautiful and everything was wrong.

I couldn’t eat the elaborate dinner father had ordered from the finest restaurant in Riyad.

The lamb tasted like cardboard in my mouth.

The saffron rice felt like sand.

Amira sat across from me at the formal dining table, her face pale as winter snow, her hands shaking so badly she couldn’t hold her water glass steady.

We exchanged glances that communicated volumes of shared horror, but neither of us spoke.

What words could possibly capture the nightmare we were about to enter? After dinner, I retreated to my room and tried to sleep, but rest was impossible.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw images of tomorrow’s ceremony.

Father leading Amira to me like a lamb to slaughter.

the cleric raiding Quranic verses about marriage.

While my soul screamed in protest, Amira’s tears as she was forced to speak vows that would destroy everything pure about our relationship as siblings.

The nightmare played on repeat in my mind until I felt like I was losing my sanity.

At midnight, I gave up trying to sleep and began pacing my room like a caged animal.

The marble floors that had once seemed luxurious now felt like prison stones beneath my bare feet.

Through my window, I could see the lights of a riad stretching to the horizon.

Millions of people living normal lives while I prepared for an act that would haunt me forever.

I was drowning in despair, suffocating under the weight of tradition and family honor and religious obligation.

By 2:00 a.

m.

, the palace had fallen completely silent.

Even the guards had settled into their nighttime routines.

Amira’s muffled crying drifted through the walls from her adjacent room.

The sound of a broken heart that matched my own.

I could hear her moving restlessly, probably experiencing the same sleepless torment that was consuming me.

tomorrow would destroy both of us and there seemed to be absolutely nothing either of us could do to stop it.

That was when I reached the end of my rope and fell to my knees in complete desperation.

But instead of facing toward Mecca as I had been trained since childhood, I looked up toward the ceiling and cried out to Jesus with every fiber of my being.

Jesus, if you’re real.

If you truly love me like your book says, save us.

I surrender everything to you.

I don’t know how to pray to you properly, but I’m begging you to help us.

I poured out 21 years of pain and confusion in that prayer.

I told Jesus about the emptiness I had felt during Islamic worship.

About the questions that had tormented me for months, about my growing certainty that the God who created love would never demand its destruction.

I wept as I confessed my secret reading of the Bible and my growing belief that Jesus was the true king I had been searching for my entire life.

The room began to change around 2:30 a.

m.

A warm light started filling the space, but it wasn’t coming from my lamps or from the moonlight streaming through the windows.

It seemed to emanate from everywhere at once, gentle and golden and completely supernatural.

The temperature shifted from the cool desert night to something that felt like a perfect spring morning.

The very air seemed to shimmer with a presence that made my heart race with recognition rather than fear.

Then Jesus appeared not as the distant prophet Isa that Islamic teaching had described but as the living savior I had been reading about in the gospels.

His presence filled the room with love so powerful that I understood immediately why people throughout history had been willing to die for him.

His eyes held all the compassion I had been desperately seeking, all the understanding I had never found in Islamic prayer, all the acceptance my soul had been craving.

My son, he said, and his voice was like water to a man dying of thirst.

I have not created you for this bondage.

You were made for freedom, made to love and be loved in the way I designed from the beginning.

I wanted to speak, but words seemed inadequate in in his presence.

He continued, “I have come to set the captives free, and you are my captive now.

The chains that your family has placed on you have no power over my love for you.

” The overwhelming sensation was one of coming home after being lost for 21 years.

Every Islamic prayer I had ever recited, every verse I had ever memorized, every ritual I had ever performed had been searching for this moment of connection with the true God.

Jesus was not demanding my submission through fear and obligation.

He was offering me relationship through love and sacrifice.

But what about tomorrow? I managed to whisper.

How can I escape something that has been planned for so long? Trust me completely, Jesus replied.

I will provide a way where there seems to be no way.

I will give you courage where you have only known fear.

I will turn this night of despair into the first day of your real life.

” The vision continued for what felt like hours, but probably lasted only minutes.

Jesus showed me that true worship was not about ritual and tradition, but about relationship and love.

He revealed that my growing revulsion toward the forced marriage was actually his spirit within me.

Recognizing the perversion of his design for families, he promised that following him would cost me everything I had known, but would give me everything I truly needed.

When the vision ended, I was still kneeling on my bedroom floor, but everything had changed.

The supernatural peace that filled my heart was stronger than 21 years of fear and conditioning.

I knew with absolute certainty that I belong to Jesus Christ now that I was born again in that moment that the old Abdullah who had lived in bondage to Islamic law was dead and buried.

Have you ever experienced a moment when God completely changed your perspective overnight? When everything you thought you knew about life and faith and purpose suddenly made perfect sense in an entirely new way.

That was my experience on March 15th, 2018 at 2:30 a.

m.

I stood up from that prayer as a completely different person, ready to face whatever consequences came from choosing Jesus over family tradition, ready to trust the God who had just revealed himself as my true father and king.

March 15, 2018 arrived with all the pageantry of a royal celebration and all the dread of an execution day.

I woke at dawn not to perform the Islamic fajar prayer as I had for 14 years, but to kneel beside my bed and talk to Jesus like he was sitting right there with me.

The supernatural peace from the night before remained with me like armor.

protecting my heart from the fear that should have been consuming me.

Jesus, I whispered, “Today I choose you over everything else.

Give me the courage to do what’s right, no matter the cost.

” As I prayed, I could hear the palace coming alive around me.

Servants preparing the ceremonial hall.

Cooks preparing the wedding feast.

Guards receiving special security instructions for the private ceremony.

Everyone was playing their part in a tradition that I was about to shatter completely.

At 10:00 a.

m.

, father summoned me to his office for what he called final preparations.

I walked down that familiar marble corridor with Jesus-given courage flowing through my veins, knowing that this conversation would change everything forever.

Father sat behind his massive desk wearing his most formal white threing documents with our family lawyer, marriage contracts, financial arrangements, plans for the honeymoon suite that had been prepared in our desert palace, all the legal machinery of a union that would never happen.

Abdullah, he said without looking up from his papers, “The ceremony begins at 2 p.

m.

The clerics are here.

The contracts are ready.

Your bride is being prepared.

Are you ready to fulfill your destiny and honor your family? I stood before him one final time as his obedient son, drawing strength from the memory of Jesus’s presence the night before.

Father, I said with a steadiness that surprised even me, I will not marry Amira.

I cannot and will not participate in this ceremony.

His head snapped up from the documents, his eyes flashing with immediate anger.

What did you say? I said I will not marry my sister.

What you are asking me to do is against God’s design for families.

It is wrong and I will not be part of it.

The words came out with a conviction that I had never possessed before my encounter with Christ.

Father’s face turned red with rage.

He stood up so violently that his chair rolled backward into the wall behind him.

You ungrateful, disobedient boy.

Do you think you can humiliate me on the day of the ceremony? Do you think you can destroy months of preparation because of some childish rebellion? This is not rebellion, father.

This is obedience to the true God who created families for love, not for the kind of arrangement you have planned.

I had never spoken to him with such boldness in my entire life.

But Jesus’s strength was flowing through me like electricity.

You will marry Amira today or you will be dead by tomorrow.

Father threatened his voice becoming dangerously quiet.

I will not allow you to bring shame on our family name.

I will not permit you to mock our traditions.

I would rather die than dishonor God and destroy my sister through this abomination.

I replied, and I meant every word.

Death seemed preferable to participating in something that would violate everything Jesus had shown me about love and family.

Father stared at me in complete shock.

In 21 years, I had never refused a direct command from him.

I had been the perfect obedient son, following every instruction without question.

Seeing me stand firm against his ultimate demand left him speechless for several moments.

Then, as if orchestrated by divine intervention, his phone rang with an emergency tone that cut through our confrontation like a sword.

He answered it with obvious irritation, but his expression quickly changed to alarm as he listened to the caller.

A political crisis was unfolding in Riyad.

Key oil ministers were threatening to resign over a policy dispute.

International contracts worth billions of dollars were in jeopardy.

His immediate presence was required in the capital to prevent an economic disaster.

This conversation is not over, he told me coldly after ending the call.

The wedding is postponed for 48 hours while I handle this crisis.

But when I return, you will marry your sister or you will face consequences worse than death.

As father rushed out of the office to arrange his emergency travel, I realized that Jesus had orchestrated circumstances that I couldn’t have planned or predicted.

The political crisis that seemed like a disaster for my family was actually God providing an unexpected window of escape.

I had less than 48 hours to get away before father returned with renewed determination to force the marriage.

Within an hour of father’s departure for Riyad, my phone buzzed with a text message from an unknown number.

Prince Abdullah, I represent people who want to help you find freedom.

If you are serious about leaving your current situation, meet me at the coffee shop in the Al-Rashid Mall at 3 p.

m.

today.

Come alone.

Look for the man reading a newspaper in English.

My hands shook as I read the message.

How did this person know about my situation? How had they gotten my private phone number? Were they government agents testing my loyalty? Or were they genuine allies sent by God? I had no way of knowing, but the supernatural peace in my heart told me this was part of Jesus’s plan unfolding.

Before leaving the palace, I found Amir in her room, still wearing the white dress that had been prepared for our ceremony.

She looked up at me with eyes full of confusion and hope.

Abdullah, the servants are saying the wedding is postponed.

What happened? I refuse to marry you.

I told her simply.

I told father that what he was planning for us is wrong and I will not be part of it.

Her face transformed with amazement.

But you could be killed for defying him like that.

Why would you take such a risk? Because Jesus Christ showed me last night that we were created for freedom, not bondage.

We were made to be brother and sister who love and protect each other, not husband and wife, trapped in a nightmare.

I knelt beside her chair and took her hands.

Amira, I may have to leave soon.

I may not be able to take you with me immediately, but I promise you this.

I will find a way to help you escape this life, too.

Tears streamed down her face, but for the first time in months, they were tears of hope.

rather than despair.

“I always knew you would save me somehow,” she whispered, even when everything seemed impossible.

I believed my big brother would find a way.

At 300 p.

m.

, I walked into that coffee shop with nothing but the clothes on my back and the heart full of trust in Jesus Christ.

The man with the English newspaper was exactly where he had said he would be.

When I approached his table, he looked up with kind eyes and said, “Prince Abdullah, my name is David.

I work with people who help religious refugees find freedom.

Are you ready to trade a palace for liberation? So, I’m asking you, what would you be willing to lose to gain your soul? What earthly treasures would you sacrifice to follow the God who created you for genuine love and purpose? That afternoon in the coffee shop, I made the choice to leave behind billions in inheritance, royal privileges, and everything I had ever known.

Because Jesus had shown me that real wealth comes from relationship with him, not from the golden chains that had held me prisoner for 21 years.

David’s underground network moved with precision that could only have been orchestrated by God himself.

Within six hours of our coffee shop meeting, I was hidden in a safe house on the outskirts of Riyad.

My royal identity buried under forged documents and common clothes.

The next morning, March 16th, while father was still dealing with his political crisis, I was smuggled across the Saudi border into Jordan in the back of a produce truck, lying beneath crates of oranges and praying to Jesus for protection every mile of the journey.

The physical escape was terrifying, but the emotional weight of leaving everything behind was almost unbearable.

I carried nothing but the clothes David had given me and a cheap smartphone with a Bible app hidden under a fake name.

21 years of luxury privilege and royal identity were abandoned in a single day.

The billions in inheritance that should have been mine.

The palace that had been my entire world.

The servants who had attended my every need since childhood.

All of it vanished as if it had never existed.

But the hardest part was leaving Amir behind.

As our truck pulled away from the border checkpoint and I realized I was truly free, I also realized that my sister remained trapped in the nightmare I had escaped.

The image of her tear stained face when I said goodbye haunted me for months afterward.

I had promised to find a way to help her.

But from my position as a religious refugee with no resources, that promise seemed impossibly difficult to keep.

I arrived in Aman, Jordan on March the 17th, 2018.

Exhausted, traumatized, and completely overwhelmed by culture shock.

David’s contacts connected me with a small Christian community that specialized in helping former Muslims who had converted to Christianity.

Pastor Michael, a gentle Jordanian man who spoke fluent Arabic, became my first real friend in this new world.

His church was nothing like the grand mosques I had known.

Just a simple building filled with people who welcome me like family despite knowing nothing about my royal background.

On April 8th, 2018, I made the most important public declaration of my life.

Standing waste deep in the Jordan River, the same waters where Jesus himself had been baptized, I proclaimed before God and witnesses that I was choosing to follow Christ for the rest of my days.

Pastor Michael lowered me completely under the muddy water and I felt the weight of 21 years of Islamic bondage washing away from my soul.

Going under that water, I buried Prince Abdullah the Muslim, the obedient son who had lived in fear and performed empty rituals.

Rising up, gasping for breath in the bright Jordanian sunshine, I was Abdullah, the son of the living God, born again into a freedom I had never known existed.

The baptism was witnessed by 12 other former Muslims who had made similar journeys from Islam to Christianity and their tears of joy mixed with mine as I emerged from the river completely transformed.

Learning to live as a Christian was like learning to walk again after a lifetime of crawling.

Everything was different.

Instead of five daily prayers facing Mecca, I could talk to Jesus anytime, anywhere, in any language.

Instead of fearing God’s wrath for minor infractions, I experienced his love even when I made mistakes.

Instead of trying to earn salvation through good works and ritual purity, I rested in the knowledge that Jesus had already paid the price for my freedom.

Pastor Michael connected me with an intensive Bible study program uh designed for new converts from Islamic backgrounds.

For 6 months, I studied the scripture 8 hours a day, hungry to understand everything about this God who had rescued me from the darkest night of my life.

The Bible came alive in ways that the Quran never had.

Each page revealing more about God’s character and his heart for broken people like me.

The practical challenges were enormous.

I had never worked a day in my life.

Never handled money.

Never lived without servants attending my needs.

Learning to cook, clean, shop for groceries, and manage basic adult responsibilities was humbling and sometimes embarrassing.

But God provided for every need through the generosity of my Christian brothers and sisters who treated this former prince like their own son.

Within a year, my English had improved enough for me to begin sharing my testimony with international Christian organizations.

My story spread through networks of believers who work with persecuted Christians in Muslim countries.

Donations began coming in to support my ministry, not because people wanted to help a former prince, but because they were moved by what Jesus had done in my life.

By early 2020, I was working full-time with a religious freedom organization, counseling other Muslim refugees who were questioning Islam and considering Christianity.

My royal background actually became useful in these conversations because I could relate to people who were afraid of losing family culture and identity by following Jesus.

I understood the fear of apostasy laws and cultural rejection because I had faced those same terrors.

The most amazing development came in late 2019 when I received a secret message through encrypted channels from Amira.

She had been following my journey through contacts who remain sympathetic to our situation.

Her message was brief but life-changing.

Brother, I have been reading the same book you were reading before you left.

I think I understand now why you had to go.

Pray for me.

I love you.

My sister was discovering Jesus on her own.

Asking the same questions that had led me out of Islam and into the arms of Christ through carefully arranged communications, I was able to guide her towards Christian resources and pray with her as she began her own spiritual journey.

She remains in Saudi Arabia for now, but she is no longer trapped in despair because she has found hope in the same savior who rescued me.

In November 2020, as I shared this testimony with you, I am engaged to Sarah, a beautiful Christian woman I met through my church in Aman.

She knows my entire story and loves me not because of my royal blood or my dramatic testimony but because she sees Jesus reflected in my life.

Our relationship is everything that God designed marriage to be voluntary, loving, built on mutual respect and shared faith in Christ.

I live in an undisclosed location for security reasons.

But I wake up every morning with joy that I never experienced in the palace.

I am poor in worldly terms, supporting myself through ministry donations and part-time work.

But I am rich beyond measure in the love of Christ.

The golden prison of my childhood has been replaced by the glorious freedom of life in Jesus.

If Jesus could save a soda prince from the darkest family tradition, he can save anyone from anything.

No cultural bondage is too strong for Christ to break.

No religious system is too entrenched for God to overcome.

No family pressure is too intense for the Lord to handle.

Ask yourself this final question.

What is Jesus calling you to surrender to him today? What chains of tradition, family expectation or religious obligation is he asking you to break? What prison of fear or cultural conformity is he inviting you to leave behind.

May you know the freedom that only Jesus can give.

May you experience the love that casts out all fear.

And may you discover as I did in my darkest hour that Christ is always ready to set the captives