By Abigail Aguilar —
She didn’t like Islam because it was unfair to Christians. She didn’t like Christianity because the Christians were Russians, who had taken over her country, Tajikistan.
“This is the first time I’m meeting Christians. And immediately I sense that there was something different about them,” Fariza says. “They were just very kind to me. They were very welcoming. They were so nice. It just melted my heart. ‘I looked at them and I was like, “‘Oh my gosh, there’s something different about these people.'”
But when her cousin straightened up, got out of drinking and drugs and started going to a Baptist church, Fariza Gulomikova paid attention. One days, she went to church with her cousin.
At a church camp, Fariza received Jesus into her heart when she was 11.
“I could just feel the powerful the the power of the Holy Spirit come over me,” she says. “It was so powerful that I like I fell on my knees and I started crying and weeping and and just repenting and you know it was it was such a supernatural experience.
She got confronted by her dad when she was 17.
She learned a Christianity different to the one she grew up believing: the Russian Christians who conquered Tajikistan. Actually, the Soviets were far from Christian. They were atheists and communists.
But the Muslims stayed the same. After the USSR collapsed and relinquished control of Tajikistan, fighting erupted between rival groups fighting for power. Fariza belonged to the minority Muslim group, the Shia Ismailis that got hunted down by the Sunnis. Her uncle was taken and killed, never to be heard from again.
The uninviting harshness of Islam was brought to bear by force upon her when her father confronted her for leaving Islam (an unpardonable sin called apostasy by Muslims).
It became so bad that Fariza applied for and was granted asylum in the United States. She took up residence in New York, where she went to college.
But sharing her testimony on TikTok during Covid moved her into the influencer space. The video blew up with views (and also generated a hate backlash among Muslims).
“I got a lot of hate as we all do,” she says. “You know ex-Muslims get extra extra love from the Muslim community. We are like the most hated people.”
