He prays for the right opportunities
by Ann Graham Price

"The true believer rejoices in what God has done." – Sultan Samatov Photo: Ryan Miller/Mennonite Mission Network

Sultan Samatov’s trip to the capital city of Bishkek, Kyrgystan, had one clear purpose: to rescue his brother from the clutches of Christianity.

Little did he know his brother would be the light that would illuminate Samatov's own path to Jesus. "I thought he was just experimenting," said Samatov, who was raised as a devout Muslim. When he set out for Bishkek to save his brother, in fact, he was in his second year of training to become a mullah, or Muslim priest.

In many ways, the family’s honor with respect to its faith rested on his young shoulders.

When Kyrgystan was part of the former Soviet Union, which enforced atheism as its official doctrine, Samatov's family could not practice the Muslim faith. After the collapse of Soviet rule, Islam regained a comfortable foothold in Kyrgystan. At present, the country is about 80 percent Muslim.

With Kyrgystan’s new independence, Samatov was enrolled in a madrasah, a school where students learn the basic tenets of Islam in addition to academic fundamentals. He was about 14 or 15 then.

"My father was hoping to justify himself by having me become a Muslim priest," Samatov said.

Christianity, on the other hand, remained on the outer fringes of religious life in Kyrgystan, little understood and even less respected by most people there. It was a view Sultan had accepted without question.

So it came as a shock when he learned from a distant relative that his brother was evangelizing in the streets.

"I was so angry," he said. "I felt he had disgraced our family."

‘Some kind of light’
When Samatov met with his brother, he could see right away that something was different.

"It was early in the morning, and when I saw him I just didn’t recognize him," he said. "He was the same person, but there was some kind of light within him. He was totally different."

During that meeting, Samatov didn’t initiate any conversation about religion. But for the next month, every time he thought about the light he had seen in his brother, he wondered about it.

Finally he went to a church to find out "who these Christians were."

There he met others who had the same kind of light. They were friendly and joyous, and they sang songs that lifted his heart.

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