By Sean Toomey –
As Muslim in England bashed his head with baseball bats, Shokit Ali did nothing to defend himself. They were punishing him for leaving Islam. Jesus told him to NOT fight back: “Don’t touch them, for I am with you.”
Shokit was left for dead. When he woke up in the hospital, doctors told him he would never walk. Jesus had other ideas. The miracle came when he walked to the bathroom unassisted. “They checked me and came back scratching their heads. This is unbelievable, they said. There’s no trace, no sign of trauma. You can go home.”
Born to Sunni Muslim parents in Keighley Town, Yorkshire, England, Shokit spent his childhood between England and Pakistan. In either place, he was sexually assaulted by Pakistani men. Everywhere he went, he got beaten up. This led him to suffer extreme confusion.
While he grew up going to mosque praying and washing himself for prayer, he fell into pornography, alcohol and drugs. He pleaded with Allah to deliver him from his addictions; there was no reply.
“Allah, why did you create me? Why am I here?” he asked.
Shokit got married, had children and ran a business. He participated in fraud, did scams, played sports, used steroids. The cognitive dissonance of his life engendered despair. He wanted a way out and looked for it in Islam.
”You read and studying and when you see that you get 72 virgins and you get to paradise if you kill non-believers,” Shokit says on an Isa-al-Massih video. “So I used to talk to some friends, Why can’t we just get that underground training and just go do this and go straight to heaven?”
Fortunately, he didn’t carry out the plan to commit terrorism.
Depression sank him. The doctors told him he was paranoid schizophrenic and prescribed pills, but he saw demons. He couldn’t look at himself in the mirror for two years.
One day he was sitting in a van with flags of England to support the national soccer team when Steve came and struck up a conversation, starting with soccer. Later, Steve invited him to watch matches on his big screen TV and began to talk about Jesus.
He’s just a prophet, Shokit pushed back, reaching into his upbringing in Islam. He appreciated the friendship but wouldn’t abandon his faith, he said.
“He kept talking to me and praying for me,” Shokit says. “ I’m feeling all this overwhelming beautiful presence when he talks to me.”
One day, he was visiting Steve and they were praying and God came down.
“I saw flickering light and was overwhelmed with this love,” he remembers. “I ran outside to the garden and I fell on my knees. I looked up and I said, God, you knew me from the beginning. I felt the presence of the Lord talking to me with this beautiful sweet voice.”
With time, his apostasy to Islam became evident to his family and community. His wife divorced him. The community threatened him. Islamic jurisprudence calls for the death penalty for those who refuse to repent of leaving Islam.
The baseball bat boys were simply doing what Islam commands. With the third smack to the head, his eye and ear stopped working. He woke up in the hospital. He would never walk, he was told. God healed him anyway.
Shokit was attending church. But he still had traumas from his childhood that made him prone to falling in sin. He met a girl named Lima from Latvia and hooked up with her. He was living in sin with her. As the church tried to help him get out of sin, he retrenched. His backsliding brought him back to drugs and porn. Lima left for Latvia.
He wound up in the hospital and began to return to Jesus. He prayed and patients were healed: a guy on life support, an HIV positive patient, a person with cancer. God was doing extraordinary miracles and was using Shokit with extraordinary grace.
Eventually, Lima returned from Latvia. This time, Shokit decided to do it proper: he married her. They have kids and are serving in the church.
