Few things have moved so many, for so long, and so powerfully, as the need for God. This is the story of a young American Catholic university student who became a Muslim interpreter in the Middle East. A spiritual odyssey of philosophical readings, working at sea, and traveling abroad, it is above all an encounter with people, from weathered fishermen, to worldly professors, to veiled women in Egypt. In a world in which men are deemed bound by their earliest enculturation, it tells the unforgettable tale of a one man's farewell to Christianity, passage through atheism, and finding of the Divine Reality in an Arabic revelation sent down in Mecca fourteen centuries ago.