Stacy Long
AFA – Charisma News
"Many people in
Islamic countries, especially young Muslims, are exhausted and
overwhelmed. They are tired. They want to take shelter in a peaceful
belief. But if you do not have peace with God, you will not be able to
have peace with others, no matter how much you would love to. So, with
Christianity, there is an open door for us to touch the hearts of
millions of Muslims all over the world." -Daniel Shayesteh
"Many times I cried, 'Allah, I
want to
kill Christians, I want to kill Jews.' We planned a lot of things, evil
things for the Christian world, cruel things for the Jewish world.
...It is by the grace of God that I am here."
(Photo via Charisma News)
So
begins the testimony of Daniel Shayesteh, formerly an Islamic terrorist
and Iranian revolutionary; now a Christian evangelist.
"I was a famous boy," Shayesteh recalls. "By the age of 9, I was able to do Islamic rituals and recite the Quran."
Picked out from the 12 children of his
father's two wives to do Islamic studies from his earliest years,
Shayesteh's fame carried him to a position of power among Islamic
extremists. With two others he founded Hezbollah, in its earliest days
as the revolutionary army in Iran. The army overthrew Mohammed Reza
Shah, the king of Iran, in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and Shayesteh
became a political leader helping to institute the rule of Sharia law.
It didn't take long, however, for Shayesteh
and other revolutionaries to become dissatisfied with Ayatollah
Khomeini, the man they had brought into power to be the country's
"Supreme Leader." After Shayesteh's colleague, Abolhassan Beni Sadr, was
elected president in 1980, tensions escalated, and in 1989 Khomeini
used his influence with Hezbollah to form a military coup against the
government with the intent of killing the president. President Sadr and
others in his political camp were able to escape the country alive, but
Shayesteh was not among them. He was captured and put in prison, which
he describes as "a painful place, a place where you beg to die." Even as
he waited in a cell on death row, expecting to be executed, God
providentially stepped in.
"By the grace of Jesus, I escaped," he says. "Even though I didn't know Him, He had a plan for me."
In an unbelievable and difficult escape,
Shayesteh made it to Turkey, where he continued to seek a channel of
influence. He enrolled in a university and obtained a doctorate in
international management with a thesis on how religions, cultures and
philosophies impact the human attitude. Even as he formulated that
thesis, the conclusions that forced themselves into his mind startled
and unsettled him.
Read the rest of this article at - http://www.breakingchristiannews.com/articles/display_art.html?ID=15789
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