ORPHAN OF ISLAM

A fascinating and compelling account of a young boy caught between two cultures, this book tells the true story of a child desperately searching for his place in the world; the tale of a boy, lost and alone, trying to find a way to repair a life shattered by the shocking event he witnessed through a crack in the door of a house in an isolated village in north-west Pakistan. For readers of "The Kite Runner".

Born in the UK to a Pakistani father and an English mother, Alexander Khan spent his early years as a Muslim in the north of England. But at the age of three his family was torn apart when his Pashtun father took him to north - west Pakistan. Despite his desperate cries, that was the last he saw of his mother – He was told she had walked out and abandoned them. Many years later he learned she was told he’d died in a car crash in Pakistan. Three years on Alexander is brought back to England, but kept hidden at all times. His father disappears to Pakistan again, leaving Alexander in the care of a stepmother and her cruel brother. And it is then that his troubles really begin. Seen as an outsider by both the white kids and the Pakistani kids, Alexander is lost and alone. When his father dies unexpectedly, Alexander is sent back to Pakistan to stay with his ‘family’ and learn to behave like a ‘good Muslim’. Now alone in a strange, hostile country, with nobody to protect him, Alexander realises what it is to be truly orphaned. No one would listen. No one would help. And no one cared when he was kidnapped by men from his own family and sent to a fundamentalist Madrassa (Islamic school) on the Afghanistan border that is famous the world over for having educated many of the Taliban's top leaders. Understandably but incredibly, once Alexander made it back to UK shores he committed the ultimate act of rebellion that completed his utter isolation and severance from his ‘community’: he joined the British army and spent seven years in its 'elite' airborne forces, wearing the coveted ‘maroon-beret’ and serving on active operations in his ancestral Middle Eastern homelands – as an ‘infidel invader’ in his family’s eyes. And, what did happen to His mother?

After serving seven years in HM Forces, Alexander is now a happily-married telecoms engineer. He lives with his wife on the south coast of England.