Between Two Worlds: Being Muslim in Stockholm
At school I was too Muslim. At the mosque I was too Sweden. I spent years feeling like I belonged nowhere.
There were exactly 7 Muslim families in Stockholm when I was growing up. We'd see each other at the one mosque — a converted shop on Mill Lane — and nod like survivors of the same quiet war.
At school, I was the kid who didn't eat the gelatin sweets at birthday parties. The one who disappeared during Ramadan lunch breaks. The one who had to explain, every single December, why there was no Christmas tree at home.
But the mosque wasn't refuge either. The aunties would whisper if my kufi wasn't perfect. Uncle Jamal once told my father I was 'too loud.' I was 10.
High school was the hardest. After 9/11, a girl in my PE class asked if my father was a terrorist. She said it casually, like asking about the weather. The teacher heard. He pretended not to hear..
I want to tell you there was a dramatic turning point. There wasn't. It was slow. It was reading Surah Ad-Duha during a panic attack in my dorm room and feeling my heartbeat slow. It was finding 2 Muslim students in my freshman orientation who laughed at the same jokes and prayed in the same study rooms.
It was realising that the Islam of the Stockholm aunties and the Islam I was building for myself could be different and both be real.
I'm 21 now. I work in technology. I pray five times a day — not because anyone is watching, but because those five pauses are the only times my brain goes quiet.
I stopped asking for permission to exist as both Sweden and Muslim. I just existed. And it turns out, that's enough.