Abdulmutallab: The Other Side to It

Once upon a time in my life, I might have carried a suicide bomb. Fortunately no-one asked me to.

I had just given my life to Jesus Christ and I was absolutely in love with Him. I was in University then and I remember really great times when I would skip happily along the road all by myself, singing and laughing with my new-found love.

My gang of back benchers in class always used to tease me about a secret boyfriend I had who I would always rush home to rather than hang out with them for drinks or other extra-curricular activities after classes.

Truth was I just used to rush home to go and lock myself up in my room to spend quality time with the Lord. I loved Him with everything that I had and couldn’t imagine any moment not spent with Him.

During that period, I started going to a church around my house. Because of my insatiable hunger for anything even remotely God-related, I absorbed everything I was told in church, hook, line and fish itself.

Even some of the rather questionable doctrines such as females not wearing trousers, and others I really can’t remember right now, were not a problem for me. I just accepted everything I was told believing that it’s what God Himself wants…..who am I to do differently?

I stopped hanging out with my friends, stopped going for parties or to the clubs, stopped drinking and smoking (well, although that was for the best) didn’t even want to have anything to do with the opposite sex (hmmnn…might just begin reconsidering that one again), in truth, really just stopped being me.

I became a clone; a robot….just another human being’s idea of who or what a ‘Christian’ should be. I call those days my days of being Institutionalised.

I thank God for saving me from that. All I really wanted at the time was to be right by God and I thought… believed that was the way.

I was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

“I have no friend. Not because I do not socialise, etc but because either people do not want to get too close to me as they go partying and stuff while I don’t, or they are bad people who befriend me and influence me to do bad things.”

That was one of Farouk’s posts on an Islamic social networking site. I completely understand what he was feeling because I remember feeling the same way at that point in my life. I would watch my friends going out to have fun and condemn them in my heart for their lifestyle, but honestly I was really just envious of them because they could have fun and I couldn’t.

I totally condemn Farouk's act of terrorism; however, I identify with him as a human being.


Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab

Abdulmuttalab is just a regular Naija boy who wanted to do right. People who knew better than him took advantage of his naivety and desire to please God, and used him as the sacrificial lamb in the execution of their selfish schemes.

Let’s not crucify him for that.