Have you visited Muslim countries?

Gary did: Bahrain, Turkey and the Emirates.

And this is his story.

Like a lot of regular English guys, I would have said I was Christian.

Then if someone would have said when did you last read the Bible, I would have said I don’t remember reading it at all.

Or maybe I did at school.

You know the Lord’s prayer, and maybe I went to church for somebody’s wedding or funeral, and that’s about all you know.

And that’s what most Christians are in the UK, the majority of so-called Christians.

So I was one of those …

I arrived in Bahrain in the first of June 1984, which was also the first of Ramadan.

So one of my first experiences was to see people fasting.

But the first thing I really noticed was to hear the call to prayer coming from a nearby mosque.

I heard this voice, singing out over the streets, and I heard another one, … you could hear a stereophonic sound, …

And I asked somebody, what is that guy saying?

And actually the guy I asked didn’t know.

But after a couple of tries, I found somebody that told me what the guy was saying.

I said, that’s interesting. That’s a very straight forward thing to say!

It’s not something that’s weird and poetic, it’s just a straight forward “come to the prayer.”

That’s what it’s saying.

Interesting.

OK, never mind.

I didn’t give it too much more thought.

But I was working with Muslims that were fasting in that first month, and they could see I was interested, so they started to give me answers to simple questions.

You know, so you pray, how often do you pray?

What do you say when you pray?

Oh, OK…

I can’t say I was overly excited about that, I just thought that’s interesting, that’s something different…

What happens next?

Check this video as Gary, now brother Suleyman, continues his interesting story of his journey to Islam and the Muslim countries he visited.