The Story of a Muslim Who Became a Christian

Geschichte eines Muhammedaners, der Christ wurde (1905; expanded 1930) — “The Story of a Muhammadan Who Became a Christian, told by himself” — is the autobiography of Johannes Avetaranian. Born Mehmet Şükri in Erzurum in 1861, he was raised a Muslim and became a mullah in the Ottoman Empire, a teacher of Islam who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad.

He recounts how reading the Gospels turned him toward Christ, and how he was shaken by the drowning execution of twelve Turkish converts to Christianity in Constantinople in the 1880s. He converted at genuine risk of death and did not keep quiet about it: he became a missionary translator and a lifelong evangelist among Muslims, living under threat for decades.

His labors carried him far from home. With the Swedish mission in Kashgar he produced the first New Testament in the Uyghur language, and he later based himself in Plovdiv, Bulgaria — Ottoman Europe — where he ran a Turkish-language Christian publishing and Bible-revision ministry aimed at Balkan Muslims until 1918; he died in Germany the following year. The book is his own telling of how that life began.

The original is German. Ours is a new English translation of the expanded 1930 text — the printing Richard Schäfer completed after the author’s death, which carries the story past 1900 to the Kashgar years and the end of his life — set in a clean, readable modern format with clear type, and we link the free German scan as well. Scripture is quoted from the Berean Standard Bible rather than translated afresh, and the author’s Qur’an citations are given in modern Cairo numbering; both are stated in the edition’s acknowledgements. A separate modern English translation exists but is under copyright, so we neither reproduce nor link it.

This is a new English translation of Geschichte eines Mohammedaners, der Christ wurde ("The Story of a Muslim Who Became a Christian"), the autobiography of Johannes Avetaranian. He told his own story; after his death in 1919 his colleague Richard Schäfer completed and expanded it, and that fuller second edition was published in Potsdam in 1930. This translation is made from that 1930 text, which is in the public domain in the United States. The translation itself is our own work, not public domain.

The German was set in Fraktur. Ordinary optical character recognition reads Fraktur letterforms as if they were roman type and confuses them — most damagingly G with B, which turns the word Gott, "God", into nonsense wherever it appears. We therefore re-read the page images with Fraktur-aware recognition and checked the result specifically for that failure before translating a word of it.

The translation was produced by T.S. Baker Books using machine translation, checked section by section against the German, with flagged passages retranslated and reviewed editorially. We have aimed at a faithful, readable rendering — keeping the author's first-person voice, his imagery, and the order of his narrative — not a paraphrase. Names and recurring terms were fixed to a single English form throughout, so that a person or place is never called two different things in two different chapters. Where the author quotes Scripture, we have given the verse in standard English wording rather than translating his German quotation back into fresh English.

Dated vocabulary has been given its ordinary modern English form: Muhammedaner is rendered "Muslim" and Koran "Quran". Place and personal names follow the spellings a present-day reader will recognise.

What this edition contains, and what it leaves out. Avetaranian told his own story down to about 1900, and that is the book that was published in 1905. He went on writing — letters, articles, a long account in 1911 of the Kashgar New Testament and the quarrel that followed it — and after his death in 1919 Richard Schäfer gathered all of it, added chapters of his own about the last years, and published the whole in 1930.

This edition is the part of that book in Avetaranian's own voice: the foreword, his narrative, and the two late chapters in which Schäfer prints his own writing at length — 80,485 words. Four chapters are not here, about eleven thousand words in which Schäfer writes about Avetaranian in the third person: the years of struggle after 1903, the newspaper for Muslims he proposed to Johannes Lepsius in 1908, an assessment of his character, and the close. They are good and sober pages and we have not thrown them away, but this library is first-person accounts, and a biography of a man is a different book from the one he wrote about himself.

Against the 1905 first edition, which is the text usually met in English, this is about thirty thousand words more of his own writing: the mission conference at Stockholm in 1898, the years at Varna in Bulgaria, the death of Muchtar the printer, and his own account of the Uyghur New Testament he had made at Kashgar.

The German original is freely available at the source linked on this book's page, and we encourage any reader who wants the author's exact words to consult it. If you find an error in the translation, we would be glad to hear of it and correct it.