FORMER IMAM TO HOST PRO-ISRAEL RALLY

by LEO HOHMANN

Dr. Mark Christian grew up in Egypt the son of a Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader, physician and military officer, with all the privileges and pressures that came with that elite status.

By the age of 12 he’d memorized more than 70 percent of the Quran. He was a child imam who studied in Cairo’s best madrasas and was being groomed for his own career in medicine.

He idolized his father and earned his trust by studying the Quran day and night. He attended mosque regularly and soon found himself answering religious questions from men more than twice his age.

Snaking through the vast stacks of Quranic knowledge stored up in the boy’s mind was the asp of anti-Semitism, the idea that Jews were a festering problem, a hindrance to Allah and Islam. To Mark, as with his father, Israel was a cancer in the Middle East that needed to be removed.