What It’s Like to Grow Up as a Closeted Gay Extremist Muslim
Words: Sohail Ahmed, as told to Thomas Hornall
2015
On 9/11, my hatred crystallized into something solid and pure. I was nine.
My family is from Kashmir in Pakistan and they raised me, and four younger siblings, in East London. When I was six, they were befriended by another family in our tower block who swiftly turned them from pretty much apolitical into austere, harsh Salafi Islamists.
From then I saw the world through the prism of radical Islam, and every attempt to make sense of reality was analyzed through it. Life was a battle between good and evil, belief and unbelief. There was a huge contradiction between who I truly was and the odious, reactionary views I held. Always the internal voice saying, 'This is wrong,' while being so convinced of my beliefs that they ended up drowning out any semblance of reason.
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