Police beat me and said 'Where is your God now?' - Behind the Scenes
Babar Ahmad :: War on Terror :: Episode #13
As’salamu alaikum Friends
I have decided to upload some of the early Desert Island Gems interviews to our YouTube channel - please do subscribe if you have not done so already ! The first one I ever released was with Babar Ahmad and the story behind it is intriguing.
Who is Babar ?
Babar is a British Muslim from London who was arrested by the Met Police in 2003. During the ordeal, described in this article, they forced him on the floor and cuffed him.
“They twisted the handcuffs until I cried out in pain. Two of the officers punched me repeatedly on the head, face, ears and back. On two occasions the officers sexually abused me by tugging at and fondling my genitals. And then the officers stamped on my bare feet with their boots.”
During the attack, the officers mocked Ahmad’s religious beliefs. After placing him in a Muslim prayer position, one officer sarcastically asked:
“Where is your god now?”
He later spent 11 years in prison in the UK and US, detained without charge during the War on Terror after 9/11, and released in 2015. He tells his story in this Guardian article.
Interviewing Babar
I did not know Babar but we had a mutual friend. Babar was kind enough to do the interview so I flew to London to meet him. I did not know what to expect, having never met someone who had been imprisoned for so long. He said he had somewhere where we could record so we agreed to meet outside a Tube station. I stood there in anticipation and was quite nervous. He then appeared from round the corner and we exchanged salam before getting in his car. We drove a short distance and headed towards an industrial unit. My anxiety rose and the thought popped in my mind briefly, ‘What if he really is a dangerous person?’. We pulled up to a storage unit and he asked me to follow him in. There were some dark corridors and he led me to a door with a padlock. He opened it up and all I saw was….boxes and boxes of honey !
Much to my relief, Babar had taken me to his business (Latin Honey Shop) that he set up after leaving prison - selling honey from South America. He had met Latino inmates who told him about this amazing honey so he decided to research it and sell it upon his release.
I balanced my laptop and microphone on top of some of these boxes and we perched ourselves on the other boxes. Thankfully, it was a quiet place for the recording but the lights were on a motion-sensor timer so the lights would go off every so often as we were doing the interview and we would have to move to trigger them.
Enjoy the interview
I hope you enjoy listening to the interview as you visualise Babar and I in a storage unit in the dark, sitting on boxes of honey as we discuss his experiences.
You can watch the interview on YouTube and use the timestamps to jump to the relevant section.
Below are some of the Desert Island Gems Babar would take with him on a desert island.
💎 Gem
Do you suppose that you will enter the Garden without first having suffered like those before you?
They were afflicted by misfortune and hardship, and they were so shaken that even [their] messenger and the believers with him cried,
‘When will God’s help arrive?’
Truly, God’s help is near.
Quran 2:214
💎 Gem
Everything can be taken away from a man except his choice on how he reacts to that.
Dr. Viktor Frankl. Holocaust survivor and author of 'Man’s Search for Meaning'
💎 Gem
Be happy for this moment. For this moment is your life.
Omar Khayyam. 11th century Persian poet
💎 Gem
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world;
there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more.
He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.
We must have felt what it is to die that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
Live, then, and be happy, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope'.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Feel free to leave a comment below and share your thoughts on the interview itself.
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Look after yourself and your family.
Wa'alaikum Salam
Dr Aman
Host
The MuslimCentric Podcast
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