Jesus visits dying Muslim in hospital room, brings healing
By Mark Ellis
He had the worst case of shingles in the history of Toronto General Hospital and doctors prepared him for the worst. Raised a devout Muslim, he was stunned when Jesus appeared in his hospital room and brought the kind of healing only Jesus can bring.
“My skin was burning as if someone had doused it with gasoline and then threw a match on it,” says Dr. Nasir Saddiki, the founder of Wisdom Ministries. “I felt like I was on fire from my inside.”
In a sterile room on the eighth floor of the hospital, his doctor informed him “the blisters are multiplying so fast I can literally watch them grow. Your body has stopped fighting back.”
The next day he contracted chicken pox and doctors placed him in strict isolation. His temperature soared to 107.6 degrees, a life-threatening level high enough to leave his brain permanently damaged.
For days he continued to deteriorate. “My nerve endings became so inflamed that even a single hair drifting across my skin sent shock waves of fire rippling through my body,” he says.
At 34, Dr. Saddiki had already earned his first million dollars, but he wasn’t prepared to handle his own mortality. “In facing death I felt nothing but weakness and outright terror. I didn’t have the slightest idea what might await me on the other side. I had been raised as a devout Moslem and I had been taught that Allah was a god who did not heal sickness. I thought that my only hope was in medicine.”
As Dr. Saddiki slipped close to death, he became listless and unresponsive, yet he could hear his doctors’ conversations. ”His immune system has simply shut down” one of them said.”
“He’s dying,” another doctor stated. “His immune system must be compromised by AIDS.”
I don’t have AIDS, Dr. Saddiki wanted to say, but was unable to speak. The full weight of their remarks hit him like a sledgehammer. If they had given up hope, where did that leave him?
Doctors delivered the bad news to his business partner. “In a few hours he’ll be dead,” they informed him. “If by some miracle he lives he’ll be blind in his right eye, deaf in his right ear, paralyzed on his right side and severely brain damaged.” Then they walked out of the room, leaving him alone.
“I suddenly felt like a drowning man going down for the third time,” Dr. Saddiki says. “Gathering what little strength I still had I was barely able to whisper, ‘God if you are real do not let me die.’”
Then in the middle of the night, something remarkable happened. He awoke suddenly to find a man standing at the foot of his bed. “I was shocked because rays of light emanated from him, which allowed me to see his body in my pitch-black room.
But one part of the man’s body blazed with glory. “Amazingly I was unable to see His face. It was too bright to look at it without hurting my eyes.
Even as a Muslim, he had an “inner knowing” that the one who stood there was Jesus Christ.
Dr. Saddiki felt no fear, only profound serenity in the presence of the one called the Prince of Peace. Although he couldn’t speak, he wondered why Jesus would come to a Muslim when everyone else had left him to die.
He didn’t hear an audible voice from Jesus, but these words came into his mind: I am the God of the Christians. I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
“That is all He told me. As suddenly as He had appeared and woke me up, He disappeared.”
The next morning Dr. Saddiki’s doctors returned to examine him. “The blisters have stopped growing,” they almost shouted with amazement. Since he seemed more alert they said, “we don’t know why but your shingles have gone into remission.
The following day, still in severe pain and covered with blisters, Dr. Saddiki was discharged from the hospital with a suitcase full of drugs. “Don’t leave your home,” they cautioned. “It will be months before your blisters disappear and when they do, you will be left with white patches of skin and severe scarring all over your body. The pain that you are experiencing can last for years.”
“I looked like a cross between a leper and the Elephant Man,” Dr. Saddiki notes. “When people saw me they literally fled to the other side of the street because I scared them so much. However I wasn’t concerned about my appearance because I couldn’t stop thinking about Jesus’ appearance. I was certain that His presence in my hospital room had stopped the shingles virus.”
As a result of his unusual encounter with Jesus, questions swirled through his mind. “I knew very little about Jesus. I still had a consuming question in my mind. Is Jesus the Son of God as Christians claim or is He just a prophet as Muslims are taught?”
His first night home he continued to suffer. “In spite of my medication, the pain and itching was so horrible I almost had to tie my hands to a chair to keep from scratching myself to death.” Mercifully, he drifted into a deep sleep.
The next morning he woke up early and turned on the television. “While flipping through the channels I froze when I saw the following words on the screen: ‘Is Jesus the Son of God’? I watched captivated as two men spent the entire program discussing this topic and in the process, answering all of my questions.”
Before the program ended, one of the men led the television audience in a prayer. “My body was aflame with pain but I knelt on my living floor anyway.” As tears streamed down his face, he repeated the prayer and invited Jesus into his heart.
Immediately, the Holy Spirit brought a voracious spiritual hunger that caused him to want to know more about Jesus. In spite of his doctor’s orders to stay inside, he went out and bought a Bible.
He devoured the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”I still felt spiritually ravenous so I then started in Genesis and read through the entire Bible during my sleepless nights.”
His business partner, who happened to be a Christian, brought Dr. Saddiki books and teaching tapes, which further explained the gospel to him.
As his faith began grew, his prayers got bolder. “I dug out a picture of how I looked before I was attacked with shingles. I prayed and asked God to make me look that way again.”
A few days later, something amazing happened. Dr. Saddiki awakened to find his pillow covered with blisters that had fallen off his face. “I crawled out of bed and stepped into the shower. What started on my pillow was finished in the shower.
Dr. Saddiki with wife, after healing
“Every blister fell off my body!” he exclaims. “Instead of being covered with patches of white and scar tissue, my skin turned red. It then slowly healed, returning to its pre-shingles condition. When that occurred I not only looked human, I actually looked like I did before I became ill, except for the scars that I still have on my chest.”
Amazingly, none of the doctor’s dire predictions came true. “My eyesight is now 20/20. My hearing is normal. My speech is unimpaired and I suffered absolutely no brain damage at all.”
“My healing was totally miraculous ,swift and complete. I never suffered from lingering pain or in fact any other complication. I had the most miraculous recovery the Toronto General Hospital has ever experienced.”
Jesus showed up in a hospital room of a dying Muslim and brought healing. “But that wasn’t the greatest miracle that He performed,” Dr. Saddiki notes. “The transformation that occurred in my heart was even more dramatic than the one that occurred in my body.”
From that day forward, Dr. Siddiki’s passion has been to know and serve the Lord Jesus Christ.
An international teacher and evangelist, Dr. Siddiki holds crusades throughout the world. He and his wife, Anita, host a television program on TBN, Winning with Wisdom, which is broadcast to 15,000 stations via satellite reaching millions, including those in the Middle East. The founder of Wisdom Ministries, Dr. Siddiki teaches biblical principles for success at the Wisdom Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For more information, go to his website at www.wisdomministries.org