I thought you were, I found the stash of your Qur’ans
This was my coming out story. Not in the traditional sense of coming out of the closet. I had done that when I was 18, as a proud bisexual man. This time, I was coming out as a Muslim.
I was born in an ex-mining town in Northumberland that was largely white, not particularly religious and where people are proud and the sense of being in a community was always there as I grew up.
After studying sociology at university, I became a secondary school teacher specialising in religious education (RE), a job I loved. At the time, I taught in a school in a community similar to the one where I had grown up, except for one distinction – a mosque. When teaching RE, it was my job to educate the children of the surrounding neighbourhood so that they could counteract some of the narratives and hate speech that they encountered.
My problem was that Islam was not a religion I understood well. I made it my aim to find out more as we introduced it into the curriculum. This was the starting point of my fascination, albeit a fledgling academic interest at this point.
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