Infidel

When Tariq Osman, a Libyan civil engineer, takes a one-day trucking job on the coastal road from Benghazi to Misrata, he expects a routine delivery and a much-needed paycheck. Instead, he finds himself captured by Islamic militants and thrown into a livestock pen with twenty Coptic Christian workers awaiting execution. Tariq is Muslim. He expects to be released. He is not. Over twelve days, he watches twenty men face the worst that can happen to a human being — and refuse to shrink. He watches them pray for their captors. Share their last water. Sing at midnight. Comfort each other under torture. Refuse, again and again, to deny the God they believe in. When the day of execution arrives, Tariq is offered his freedom. All he has to do is walk away. He turns around instead. *"Their God is my God."* Five words. A declaration. A prayer. The beginning of everything. What follows is a story of survival in the Saharan interior, a desert wilderness that becomes something more than survival, a baptism in a metal trough in Sebha, and three years of dangerous, costly work moving persecuted believers toward safety across North Africa. It is also the story of Commander Yusuf Al-Rashid — the man who ordered the executions — and what happens to a man who cannot stop dreaming about the people he has killed. INFIDEL is a novel about faith that costs everything, forgiveness that defies explanation, and the unstoppable movement of a single cup of water given away in a pen because someone was thirsty. Inspired by the martyrdom of twenty-one Coptic Christians in Libya, February 2015. "They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death." — Revelation 12:11