Muslim author announces conversion to Catholicism after murder of priest in France

Sohrab Ahmari, an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, recounted his spiritual journey from being a Muslim-born Iranian who started doubting God as a boy to his conversion to Catholicism.

Ahmari announced his conversion last July after learning about the murder of Fr. Jacques Hamel in France.

In his article for The Catholic Herald, Ahmari revealed that he started doubting God at the age of 12. Although he no longer believed in religion, he still had to participate in religious rituals in public to avoid attracting the attention of religious authorities.

He soon immigrated to America with his mother. Upon encountering the Mormons, he joked to himself that he had "moved from one theocracy to another." He discovered Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and went on the read the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and other existentialist philosophers.

Ahmari started flirting with Marxism and even joined a Trotskyite group called Socialist Alternative, but he soon found that it offered no answers to life's questions.

"It didn't banish my personal demons, or give a satisfying account of what I now would call fallenness – my own and others'," he wrote.

He had to give up his leftist ideology after he became a teacher.

"As a committed leftist, I had to believe that the achievement gap between rich and poor students was purely a problem of redistributive justice," he recalled. "My teaching career quickly disabused me of these notions. Even in the direst classrooms, great teachers – I wasn't one, by the way – could make tremendous gains with students by setting high expectations and emphasising hard work, honesty and tough discipline."

This realization did not lead him to God right away, but he started to recognize the contributions of faith to society. Although he was successful in his career, he still felt a hunger for God. He eventually found himself attending Catholic mass.

Ahmari said that he dabbled in evangelical Christianity for a few years but he found it lacking. He noted that his mother became a Born Again Christian and one of his sources as a journalist was an Evangelical activist who encouraged him in his journey to faith.

Explaining his decision to choose Catholicism over other denominations, Ahmari stated that the Catholic liturgy appealed to him. "I longed for worship that gave full expression to the mysteries of the Christian faith," he wrote.

Ahmari's new book, "The New Philistines," in which he shares his insights on the art world's obsession with identity politics, will be released on Oct. 20.