At the moment he accepted that he was going to die on the cold bathroom tile of his college apartment, a life that had revolved around football for Qasim Hatem found a familiar and yet entirely new focus.

In the spring of 2001, Qasim Hatem was a 20-year-old defensive lineman at the University of Washington, a 6-foot-3, 285-pound force in the trenches for the reigning Rose Bowl champions. Going into his redshirt junior season for the Huskies, Hatem was beginning to draw the attention of NFL scouts and college football kingmakers.

And then one morning, Qasim Hatem woke up experiencing sharp chest pains. With each abbreviated breath he took into his massive chest, he found it harder to get oxygen. Making his way to the bathroom, he was physically unable to call for help from his roommates.

Hatem realized he was about to die. He looked into the mirror and told himself that was it. He was done.

“The most valuable things to me crossed my heart at this moment of death and only one stuck,” Hatem recalls about that morning. “I thought that I couldn’t die yet because I have school, football, friends, family, my mother, religion … It was religion that stuck with me and was the most important and valuable thing to me.

“So at the point of death, I dropped to my knees in the bathroom and I recited the first and most important pillar of Islam called the shahadah: ‘I bear witness that there is no God except Allah and that Muhammad is His messenger.‘”

Crawling out of the bathroom, the young and extraordinarily fit athlete who had been breaking school records in the Husky weight room just weeks earlier couldn’t muster the strength to climb a flight of stairs. Hatem was finally discovered by a roommate and rushed to the hospital.

After bringing Hatem back from the brink, doctors ran tests and eventually found three large blood clots—pulmonary embolisms—in his lungs. They said the chance of surviving an attack like Hatem had survived, given the size of the clots, was one in a million.

Hatem would have to miss the upcoming football season while being placed on blood-thinning medication. When a nurse told him to prepare himself for the reality that he may never play the sport again, Hatem cried uncontrollably.

“I thought my life was over because I could not play football,” Hatem says.

Hatem focused on school while sitting out the 2001 season and was eventually given medical clearance to return to the field in 2002. But in his time away from the game, Hatem had expanded his worldview and began to see football for just that —a game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCEU8XkcPg4

“I was so caught up with the fame and glory of football that I didn’t have much time for religion,” says Hatem, who was raised Muslim during his early childhood in Iowa and practiced semi-seriously as a three-sport high school star in Spokane, WA.

“It did cross my mind though that there is more to life than this,” Hatem says of his mindset during his scheduled hiatus. “Still though, I had been playing football since I was 11 years old. It was my life. It was what I loved and put most of my time into. I thought it was my purpose.”

With two years of college eligibility remaining, Hatem decided to quit football. He finished his undergraduate degree in psychology and, trying to figure out the next step, had another religious epiphany that inspired him to travel to Yemen and study abroad.

At the Badr Language Institute in Tarim, Hatem studied Arabic. He then enrolled at the prestigious Dar al-Mustafa school for an intensive study of Islam and the Quran. He stayed in Yemen for seven years before returning to the U.S. with licenses to teach Islamic jurisprudence (Shafi’i fiqh), Islamic creed (aqeedah), the Arabic language, Quranic recitation (tajweed) and methodology of inviting others to Islam (dawah).

“I came back [from Yemen],” Hatem says, “with the intention to show people who the Prophet Muhammad really is and what Islam really says.”

Today, Hatem is recognized as a leader in the Pacific Northwest’s Muslim community. He is the executive director and resident scholar for the Mihraab Foundation in Seattle. He counsels hospital patients and prison inmates, mentors teenagers and teaches elementary-school kids.

Taking some rare down time to sit for an interview at the Islamic Center of Eastside in Bellevue, WA, Hatem talks about the value of what’s he has been doing since he walked away from a million-dollar opportunity: