A Muslim Man

I was born into a Muslim family in 1961 from a Pathan background. Due to matrimonial problems, my father left my mother when she was six months pregnant with me and came to England, and so I was born and grew up in my maternal grandmother's house in Pakistan.

While my father was in England, he married an Anglo Indian lady who then became a Muslim. In 1968, he came back to Pakistan with his new wife and three children and abducted me from my mother and brought me to my paternal grandmother's house. I stayed there until 1971 when my father returned to England, taking me and my grandmother with him. I was almost ten.

During the following years, I attended the local schools and had lessons in Islam at home. There was no established mosque that we could attend and my father and some members of the local Muslim community bought a house and turned it into a mosque. I can clearly remember that it was my school summer holidays and my father, brother and I and one or two other members of the community took the first steps to demolish a wall to create a hall for the mosque. I grew up as a typical Asian in England. Due to our strict upbringing and my father's stern temperament, we had a thorough education in Islam and the recitation of the Koran after school hours. It gave me a great sense of pride to say that I was a Muslim and that I came from the north-west Frontier region of Pakistan.

As I grew older and became more mature, I started to drift into a typical Western Asian way of thinking. I was a Muslim but could not follow the strict discipline that my father wanted. Like many other younger Muslims growing up in Britain, we had two different lives, one at school and one within an Islamic household. After coming home from school, we were made to catch up on all the missed prayers from the day and due to the distance of the mosque from our house, there were many times when my father would act as the Imam and lead me and my brothers in prayer. Looking back, I can say that my father's main preoccupation in life was that his children should not stray away into a Western way of life. This sometimes caused a lot of bitterness on my part due to my lack of understanding of the way in which he had been brought up.

Like most teenagers, I went along with the flow. In school I would be just like the English students except that I think I respected my teachers more than the others. I also did not become involved in any relationship with girls due to my strict upbringing and cultural background. The relationship between my stepmother and my father was deteriorating at this time because he wanted her to lead a typical Muslim life and though she was a devoted wife, she could not adhere to praying five times a day and reading the Koran.

Between 1975 and 1976, my father went back to Pakistan for a holiday taking my younger step brother and step sister. During that time, my stepmother in England received news from a family friend that my father had got married again in Pakistan. On receiving this news, my stepmother became very upset and wanted a divorce from my father.

Between 1976 and 1978, they were divorced and up until this point, I hadn't had any contact with my own mother due to my father's wishes. In 1982, I decided to go to Pakistan and make contact with my mother. Once there, I met up with all my relatives and re-established ties with them and used to attend the local mosque now and then. One day I was in the mosque when Muslim preachers, (tableagh), were urging youngsters to go on a type of camp where they would spend time in a typical Islamic environment. They spoke with great zeal and passion. Up until this point, I hadn't thought of myself as someone who could live within a strict Islamic way of life. Like many of my contemporaries, I believed that Islam was a true religion and we should follow its ideals, but I always felt short of those ideals. While listening to the speaker, I was overcome by great passion and put my hand up to be included within the group that would be leaving soon for the camp.

After joining the group, (Jamaat), I was introduced to about a dozen people some of whom had been in this type of work for quite some time. The rest of us were new members who promised to give three days to rediscovering Islam and relearning the correct w a