Muhammad's DARK SECRETS: Revealed by an Ex-Muslim.

0:00 You have to understand in Islam, Muslims are raised in a very very oral millu. And so I'm learning things about Muhammad from my parents, from my teachers. I'm receiving all this. And the Muhammad that I was taught about was amazing. The Islam that I had learned was a religion of peace and it was beautiful. But when it came down to verifying the truth and the actual original message that was taught, who was Muhammad really and what did he really teach? When I found how desperate that was from what I had been taught, that caused me enough cognitive dissonance to start approaching God and ask him what his truth was. What if everything you thought you knew about Islam was a carefully constructed lie. Tonight, we dive deep with Nabil Koreshi of Blessed Memory, an ex-Muslim who shattered the narratives he was raised

0:45 on. He confronts the uncomfortable truths about who Muhammad truly was, the historical reality of jihad, and rips apart the myth of Islam as a religion of peace. This is more than a story. It's an intellectual battle for truth. Watch as Nibil reveals how he broke free and found Christ. Muhammad claims to be a prophet around 40 years old, uh, which is 610 AD. And then for the first 13 years, he's preaching a message of monotheism. He's preaching a message of taking care of widows and orphans. He himself was an orphan growing up. His father died before he was born. His mother died shortly thereafter. So he saw the conditions of of the underprivileged and and he argued that we should support them and take care of them. That's what his ministry was like for the first 13 years. But when he ultimately fled to

1:32 Medina, that is when he was able to start fighting. That is when he had an army at his control. And it was that very year that he started launching raids. And from that point till his death, we see a crescendo, an escalation of violence in his life. And and when we talk about violence, you indicate s and I I'm sorry if I'm pronouncing wrong. Sura nine as being one of the most violent books or part of of the uh Quran. Exactly. So uh the Quran is not in chronological order. Um so chapter 1 is not the first chapter is is actually in the '9s is the first one. The last chapter chronologically to have been composed is surah 9. It is bar none the most violent. Uh it's called surah al bar which means the chapter of disavowel

2:18 and it's basically disavowing all treaties with uh polytheists and also with Jews and Christians. Uh and it tells Muslims to fight the unbelievers to slay the infidels wherever you find them. Take them captive and lay them lay siege to them. That's chapter 9:5. Chapter 9 29 says specifically Jews and Christians fight them until they are subjugated and pay you money. Uh why? a few verses later because Islam has been made to prevail over every other religion. Chapter 9:33 uh chapter 9 vers 111 is the one that says if you die in jihad you will go to heaven. So it launches Muslims right before Muhammad dies into this unilimited warfare. There was no end in sight. It was just fight. Uh and that's why Muslims were able to conquer

3:03 onethird of the known world. I'm talking from the shores of the Atlantic to the valleys of India within about 150 years. So where does this idea that this is a religion of peace come from? The words the religion of peace Islam is a religion of peace is found nowhere in the Quran. It's found nowhere in the hadith. It's not even really found in any polyical literature any commentaries until the 20th century. So this is a modern phrase uh that was invented by people in India who were interacting with British folk. Uh this is before India was reverted to its own control. And so that's where we see the phrase Islam is a religion of peace coming up in interactions between western culture and Islam usually when we're talking about pmics and apologetics. So is it

3:49 accurate? Now how do we mean the phrase Islam is religion of peace? If we mean that there are peaceful Muslims, no one can argue with that. I would say the vast majority of Muslims in the world are peaceful. And I would say that without hesitation. But if we say Islam is a religion of peace, that's problematic because again, Muslims are not Islam. Islam is the the system. And like I said, Muhammad had been fighting from the first year that he could until he died. And he launched Muslims into into battles such that they conquered one-third of the known world. And then they kept fighting um from from that time until the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Muslims had a significant degree of military control throughout the world. It's really hard to say in any way that Islam is a religion of peace when we're talking about physical peace. Now, when we talk about jihad, not

4:35 really considered um a violent thing, but more defending a faith. Is that correct? In the west, that's that's what we were told growing up that Muhammad only fought defensive battles. He was trying to protect the ummah, the Muslim people. Uh the fact is though when you get past the modern narratives and you start reading the text of the Quran directly and you start reading the history of Muhammad's life directly, there's no question that's not the case. He launched raids. Even the first battle that the Muslims fought, the battle of Badr was a result of a raid that he launched against a caravan that Muslims fought. Um and so from the beginning there there's no real distinction actually uh in that time between offensive and defensive battles. If you have an enemy, you fight them is basically the way people saw it. And that wasn't just Muslim. That was everyone back then. Uh but you cannot

5:22 argue that Islam conquered one-third of the known world defensively. That doesn't make any sense. In in your book, you also talk about jihad is um a defensive move, you know, or could be seen as a defensive move, but it has to be um kind of claimed by someone in power. There were rules of jihad um that were concretized a few hundred years after Muhammad. So Muhammad didn't lay out these rules per se. Uh after the hadith the the traditions of Muhammad's life were collected. Uh then people systematized codified jihad. Uh and in that codification process it there were conditions listed the you should a jihad should only be launched in defense of the Muslim people or for the purposes of advancing the Islamic faith. So it doesn't have to be just defensive and it

6:07 should be launched by a leader of the Muslim people. So this is why some people argue that after the Ottoman Empire fell, you couldn't have a legitimate jihad until ISIS came because ISIS is establishing its own caliphate. And this is why it's such a big issue across the Islamic world whether to recognize the caliphate of ISIS or not because if so then they could launch officially recognized uh jihad. So it's it's actually yeah these rules are important. I was actually speaking to a pastor in Nigeria the other day um and he said that in his neighborhood in JS Nigeria uh before Muslims attack and it happens quite regularly they will distribute pamphlets saying be forewarned we will be attacking you. Really? Yep. And at sometime within the next two weeks after those pamphlets come and you ask a question why would they do that? Because it is one of the

6:53 rules of jihad. You have to tell a people that they are going to be attacked. Wow. People had asked you to speak into this for a while and you had said no. Well, the issue of jihad is so charged right now that people will question what your motives are when you talk about it. Uh because on the one hand, if you talk about jihad as if it's a reality in Islam, then you can come under accusations of Islamophobia. Whereas, if we don't talk about it at all, we're leaving our borders open or perhaps policies defenseless to what could be future attacks. So, it's a very difficult issue to deal with and I wanted to stay hands off. So, why did you decide to delve in? Because after the attacks in Paris, uh, all of a sudden the tension just rose. Um, I was in England at the time. It reminded me very much of the 77 bombings. And then shortly after that, seven bombings in

7:40 England, right? And then shortly after that, San Bernardino happened and I was back in the States at that time for for Thanksgiving. And then it felt even worse than it felt right after 9/11 where people were just angry and confused. They had just forgiven people after after the Paris attacks. and they didn't know how to handle the situation. And so what I didn't hear in this very charged political climate in the United States was something that was both charitable and also truthful. I heard one or the other, but not both. And so I felt like a voice needed to speak up and that's why I wrote the book. This is an objective look at at Islam basically as as objective as I can be. I was trying not to import my Christian perspective so that it could be useful to people at large. Uh the fact is when you're

8:26 looking at Islam's origins, you have texts. You can just read it and you don't have to put too much of your lens on top of that. How did you become a Christian? You came, as I said, from a developed family. Your mother wears a burka as well as your sister. So that's an, you know, an example of how develop your family uh was a long line of missionaries and you become a Christian. And this is exactly why I feel like this is such an important time for us to engage this issue because for me a large part of the search happened starting September 11th. You see it was kind of like a tectonic shift like an earthquake not in our world but in the Islamic world as well. It was especially in my world because growing up I had been taught that Islam was a religion of peace. I didn't use that phrase as if it were a propaganda or a lie. That's what I was taught as a Muslim and therefore I

9:11 truly believed it. And that's why when I hear Muslims say it today, Islam's a religion of peace. I don't accuse them of lying. But after September 11th happened, people wanted answers. How do you explain what these people did? Clearly, they did in the name of Allah. What about all the other incidents? You know, if it were a one-off thing, maybe that could just be, you know, them. But tons of people are doing this around the Muslim world. So, how do you explain it? And it was through investigating their perspective. Those those terrorists, they don't say, you know, they don't do it silently. They tell you why they do it. um and and going back to the history of Islam, looking at the Quran, looking at Muhammad's life to say, what do these texts actually teach and it was in the course of investigating my faith objectively, as objectively as possible, that I encountered a violent reality of Islam. Muslims are adherent of Islam and

9:58 Islam is the worldview of Muslims, but they are not the same. And you state that Muslims don't believe all the same things. Explain that. Well, you know, it's it's Islam is a religion. It's a system. It's a political, socio-religious, legal system. Uh, Muslims are people. And if we want to understand this, we can think about, for example, Christianity. You've got billions of Christians around the world, but they don't all believe the same thing. Even if the Bible says something, that doesn't mean all Christians believe it. Far from it. People have different interpretations. Some people might never have read the Bible. Some people might be Catholic and import a Catholic tradition. Some people might be Protestant, import a Protestant tradition. Same way with Islam. You've got Islam which is the system and Muslims of all kinds of stripes, denominations, cultural backgrounds, levels of de devotion. And so Muslims

10:44 are all different people. So we should treat them, especially from our perspective as Christians, we should treat Muslims as image bearers of God, broken though they might be. Whereas we can criticize Islam as a system. We should love the people. How do you've received a lot of backlash because you've spoken out about this. Yeah. The problem is that people will see a criticism of Islam as a criticism of Muslims. Uh, and I I actually kind of appreciate that because I like the compassion. I like the idea that we should be looking out for those who might come under the gun for being minorities. So I I appreciate that. The problem is though that uh Islam is not Muslims. And so when I'm when I'm talking about the Islamic faith, the history of Islam, I'm not criticizing Muslims. My mom is a Muslim.

11:30 My father is a Muslim. I love Muslim people, but I worry about some of the things Islam teaches because that can affect those who believe the religion. Explain what jihad is. Now, the term jihad itself means struggle. Uh now, because of that, some people will argue uh from the the Islamic apologetic side that it's an internal struggle, a spiritual striving against oneself. uh and technically it can mean that but in the Quran the majority of the times it is used the vast majority it implies a physical violent struggle and in Muhammad's life we see that very clearly uh when he encourages people to engage in jihad he means to fight physically to be ready to go out and immigrate and fight um and so after Muhammad's life after the Quran as Islamic tradition was

12:16 being concretized into Sharia into Islamic law a very specific meaning of the word jihad came around a legal term term it became a doctrine uh which is fighting physically for the defense of the Islamic faith or for the propagation of the Islamic faith. Uh and so that's what jihad ultimately came to mean but I mean it's not something that all Muslims would take on or say that I'm going to exactly you know not all Muslims are Islamic jurists. They don't know what what the tradition is. So they they will hear what their imam has told them or they'll absorb it from their Islamic environment. For example, when I was raised as a Muslim, I was raised in the west. And so in the west, we say Islam is a religion of peace. And so jihad I interpreted to be a solely defensive

13:01 endeavor. Whereas in parts of the world that have seen Islamic power for for centuries, for example, Arabia, um the word jihad is often understood in a different light because of their context. Their leaders will often give a much more historical account of the term jihad which is one of the things that is enjoined upon Muslims for the sake of the religion. Explain what Sharia law is because that's another buzz word that we hear a lot as well. So Sharia specifically in Arabic means the way or the way to water and imagine in a desert that what that means it's this is how you're supposed to live. This is how you'll receive life from God. So whereas in the Christian faith uh the problem with man is sin uh which has destroyed us, in the Islamic faith it's not. The problem with man in Islam is ignorance.

13:46 Uh and so Islam teaches if you just know the way to live then you will please God and you can earn your way into heaven more or less with God's grace. Uh so that is why Sharia is so important. Muhammad tells people exactly how to live, what to do, uh whether you can wear gold or not as men, how many women you can marry, how many times a day to pray. That's all Sharia. As a part of understanding the codification, the law of Sharia, different schools of Islam developed. Four Sunni schools in one branch of Islam which is called Shia Islam. Uh all of those see Sharia slightly differently. Uh major overlaps. For example, all five schools of Sharia teach that if you leave Islam, you can be killed for it. Okay? All five of them teach that. But then there's differences between the five as well, like how to pray or whether a woman has to give her

14:34 consent before being given into marriage. So that's how Sharia differs and and it's directly related to jihad as well because the extrapolation of jihad from the Quran and the hadith depends upon one's view of Sharia and it depends on what the imam or the jurist of that particular school is teaching. Exactly. So one one school could could teach a certain thing that's different than now. And Maggie, this is an extremely important point. I'm glad you brought this up because what has happened is these schools of thought which were organically developed over centuries uh are now moot. They're more or less obsolete because people can go to the internet and they can read what the Quran says for themselves. They weren't able to do that before. Uh they can go to the Hadith and read the hadith for themselves. And so that people are

15:20 now bypassing all these traditions going straight back to the Quran and the Hadith. They're seeing the tremendous violence that are that are found in Muhammad's life and in the Quran. And that is causing them to do one of three things. It's causing them to either become nominal and say, "I'm hands off. I don't want to do this." It's causing them to become apostates like me. I saw the violence and I said, "This is not the true religion." Or it's causing them to become radicalized. They're saying, "This is what Islam teaches. Well, that's my religion. I have to follow it. And that's why we're seeing this upsurge not just in radicalization, certainly we are, but also in people leaving Islam and in people becoming nominal. You say in the book too that you would encourage a reimagination of Islam. Explain that. Yeah. So when we use the term reformation, we assume that

16:06 means making something peaceful. Whereas in reality, the term reform is is implying to go back to the origins and to reform around that. Uh and so whereas in Christianity when we reformed it meant going to Jesus teachings and seeing that he taught a religion of peace. Jesus did. Uh when people reform Islam is going back to the origins of the Islamic faith and seeing wait a minute it's tremendously violent. So the Muslim Brotherhood established in 1928 their primary goal when it was established was to follow the hadith and the Quran. And look what happened. Offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood are Boo Haram, ISIS, al-Qaeda. This is the Islamic Reformation, the the the violent jihad that we see. The only way to fix this within the Islamic framework, and I'm not sure this is possible, but it

16:51 would be to reimagine Islam, which some people are trying to do. They're called pro progressive Muslims. Uh, but I'm not sure that will work because Islam has always been defined by the Quran and Muhammad's life and it teaches what it teaches. But there was something about Christ that led you towards him. What was that? For me, it was the sheer fact that he claimed to be God in the Islamic faith that strictly denied. Surah ala, chapter 5 of the Quran, verse 72 says, "If you believe Jesus is God, you will go to hell." And I started studying Jesus life and I started seeing what he did and how he lived his life. There's no question there's a stark contrast between Jesus and Muhammad. And Jesus never carries a sword. Not even once in the scripture does he carry a sword. Uh anytime his disciples try to use it on people, he says, "Put away your sword."

17:37 Um, he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. So there's Jesus in contrast to Muhammad. But the reality of it for me was that Jesus claimed to be the I am, that he claimed to be the son of man, that he claimed to sit at the right hand of the power. Um, and we see all three of those in one verse. Mark 14:62. It's powerful uh that God became man. Uh how much God loves us, that he is our father. Islam denies that God is our father. Uh and so it was through this that I began to realize Jesus claimed to be God. He proved it by rising from the dead. I have to be a Christian. I would love for you to speak into the camera to somebody who might be a Muslim that's watching this, has seen your name and thought, I need to stop and listen to what this guy's saying. What would you say to them? My encouragement to you would be to not see Islam versus

18:22 Christianity as uh a battle of people like us versus you. um to not see uh you know this as fighting but a matter of coming to the truth together. Muslims and Christians coming together to find God to to worship him for who he is. If you seek Jesus has told us Matthew 7:7 asks and you shall receive seek and you shall find knock and the door shall be opened. So just pray ask God to reveal himself if you want to know him. In Islam, it says Allah remains behind a veil. Whereas the Christian faith says Allah will uh that God will make himself revealed to you. So pray and ask him to reveal himself to you and he will. In this powerful

19:08 testimony, Nabil Koreshi of blessed memory laid bare the profound cognitive dissonance he faced as a devout Muslim. He courageously exposed the uncomfortable historical realities about Muhammad's life and the true nature of jihad, shattering the religion of peace narrative he was raised to believe. Nabil's journey wasn't just intellectual. It was a deeply personal search for truth, spurred by inconsistencies found directly in Islamic texts. He systematically dismantled the lies he was told, highlighting the stark contrast between traditional narratives and the unvarnished historical record. His powerful account served as a brutal confrontation not just for Islam but for anyone comfortable with unexamined beliefs. This video showed us how

19:54 Nabil's unwavering pursuit of truth ultimately humbled his deepest convictions and led him to the undeniable claims of Christ. This personal exposure is just the beginning. Nabil's testimony underscores the fundamental problems we're dissecting in our investigating Islam series as he found the very foundations of Islam. The man Muhammad, the book, the Quran, and the place Mecca are riddled with inconsistencies that when exposed cause the entire structure to teeter. Stay tuned as we continue to unpack each of these critical areas, revealing the full truth that many have been lied to