Amed Sherwan starts running when the traffic light at Hermannplatz switches to red. It is 12.30 p.m., Tuesday lunchtime, he is walking south on Kottbusser Damm, before that he had eaten rice with okra pods at his favourite Kurdish restaurant and now he wants to go on towards Sonnenallee, to drink Arabic coffee, with cardamom. As he runs through the traffic lights, a man overtakes him and starts shouting at him: “I saw you in the documentary on Arte, how dare you insult the Prophet!” This is how Sherwan tells it on the phone the next day.
Sherwan’s life story is well-known, he wrote it down in a book: “Kafir: Thank Allah I’m an Atheist”. At the age of 15, the Iraqi Kurd wrote on Facebook that he wanted to live as an atheist, when he was still living in the capital Erbil. His father denounced him, Amed Sherwan was sent to prison, tortured, convicted of blasphemy – and finally fled to Flensburg via detours. He has lived there since 2014 and also visits Berlin from time to time.
Normally, he says, the capital is a place where he is submerged in the crowd. “I am one of many here,” he says. “I never have the thought that anyone could recognise me here.” He likes drinking Arabic coffee in Sonnenallee, he says, but that’s over for now. “The man accused me of inciting against Muslims,” Sherwan says, “I was in shock and couldn’t say anything.” He began to react as he was used to in his torture prison: “I apologised.
For a while, Sherwan was frequently invited to appear on platforms and talk shows, where he was able to do well for a 23-year-old who does not even speak German as his mother tongue. But in the past few months, he had noticed that after these performances, he struggled to shake off the memories as easily as he would have wished. He therefore wrote a month ago that he wanted to withdraw from the public eye for a while.
“Situations like the one on Sonnenallee always make me very concerned,” he says the day after the incident. “On the one hand I want to de-escalate, but on the other hand it annoys me that it is impossible to criticise Islam without it immediately being considered an insult.” In addition, the man had mentioned a knife, he said. “I apologised to him and hoped that more people would not recognise me and join in.” He was afraid, he said.
Sherwan knows Berlin. Four years ago, he marched during the CSD wearing a T-shirt that read: “Allah is gay”. He himself lives in a relationship with a woman, but shows solidarity with the LGBT community’s fight for tolerance.After the CSD, he had to endure a lot of hostility from fundamentalist groups, both online and offline, he says. It happened that cars slowed down next to him, people rolled down their windows and threatened him.
The incident at Herrmannplatz lasted only five minutes. “I put on a mask and then got on the next bus that was stopping there and drove away.” He said he would avoid Neukölln for the next few days, the district that actually reminded him so much of home. “That was my last day in Sonnenallee.” He visits friends in the north of the city, and soon returns to Flensburg. A life without publicity awaits him there. “I want to move to another city and then start an apprenticeship.”
One thought on “Ex-Muslim threatened in Berlin: “How dare you insult the Prophet!””
Comments are closed.