https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/men...dir-ein-den-propheten-zu-beleidigen-li.248510
Amed Sherwan starts to run when the traffic light at Hermannplatz turns red. It’s 12:30 p.m., Tuesday afternoon, he’s walking south on Kottbusser Damm, before that he ate rice with okra pods at his favorite Kurdish restaurant and now he wants to continue towards Sonnenallee, drinking Arabic coffee with cardamom. As he runs through the traffic light, a man overtakes him and immediately starts yelling at him: “I saw you in the documentary on Arte, how dare you insult the Prophet!” This is what Sherwan says 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 would like to live as an atheist when he was still living in the capital Erbil. His father reported him, Amed Sherwan was imprisoned, tortured, convicted of blasphemy – and finally fled to Flensburg via detours. He has lived there since 2014 and also comes to Berlin from time to time.
For him, the capital is usually a place where he gets lost in the crowd. “I’m one of many here,” he says. “I never thought that anyone could recognize me here.” He likes to drink Arabic coffee in Sonnenallee, but that’s over for now. “The man accused me of inciting hatred against Muslims,” says Sherwan. “I was in shock and couldn’t say anything.” He began to react as he was used to from his torture prison: “I apologized.”
At the CSD he wore the T-shirt: “Allah is gay”
For a while, Sherwan was a frequent guest on stage and talk shows, and he held his own there for a 23-year-old who doesn’t even speak German as his first language. But in the past few months he has noticed that after these performances, he could not shake off the memories as easily as he would have liked. That’s why he 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 sad,” he said the day after the incident. “On the one hand I want to de-escalate, but on the other hand it annoys me that it’s impossible to criticize Islam without it being considered an insult.” The man also spoke of a knife. “I apologized to him and hoped that no more people would recognize me and join in.” He felt afraid.
Sherwan knows Berlin. Four years ago he walked across the CSD with a T-shirt that said: “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 conservative groups, both online and offline, he says. It happened that cars drove slower next to him, rolled down the windows and threatened him.
The situation at Herrmannplatz only lasted five minutes. “I put on a mask and then got on the next bus that just stopped there and drove away.” He will avoid Neukölln in the coming days, the district that actually reminds him so much of his homeland. “That was my last day in the Sonnenallee.” He visits friends in the north of the city and soon returns to Flensburg. A life without public awaits him there. “I want to move to another city and then start an apprenticeship.”
Amed Sherwan starts to run when the traffic light at Hermannplatz turns red. It’s 12:30 p.m., Tuesday afternoon, he’s walking south on Kottbusser Damm, before that he ate rice with okra pods at his favorite Kurdish restaurant and now he wants to continue towards Sonnenallee, drinking Arabic coffee with cardamom. As he runs through the traffic light, a man overtakes him and immediately starts yelling at him: “I saw you in the documentary on Arte, how dare you insult the Prophet!” This is what Sherwan says 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 would like to live as an atheist when he was still living in the capital Erbil. His father reported him, Amed Sherwan was imprisoned, tortured, convicted of blasphemy – and finally fled to Flensburg via detours. He has lived there since 2014 and also comes to Berlin from time to time.
For him, the capital is usually a place where he gets lost in the crowd. “I’m one of many here,” he says. “I never thought that anyone could recognize me here.” He likes to drink Arabic coffee in Sonnenallee, but that’s over for now. “The man accused me of inciting hatred against Muslims,” says Sherwan. “I was in shock and couldn’t say anything.” He began to react as he was used to from his torture prison: “I apologized.”
At the CSD he wore the T-shirt: “Allah is gay”
For a while, Sherwan was a frequent guest on stage and talk shows, and he held his own there for a 23-year-old who doesn’t even speak German as his first language. But in the past few months he has noticed that after these performances, he could not shake off the memories as easily as he would have liked. That’s why he 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 sad,” he said the day after the incident. “On the one hand I want to de-escalate, but on the other hand it annoys me that it’s impossible to criticize Islam without it being considered an insult.” The man also spoke of a knife. “I apologized to him and hoped that no more people would recognize me and join in.” He felt afraid.
Sherwan knows Berlin. Four years ago he walked across the CSD with a T-shirt that said: “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 conservative groups, both online and offline, he says. It happened that cars drove slower next to him, rolled down the windows and threatened him.
The situation at Herrmannplatz only lasted five minutes. “I put on a mask and then got on the next bus that just stopped there and drove away.” He will avoid Neukölln in the coming days, the district that actually reminds him so much of his homeland. “That was my last day in the Sonnenallee.” He visits friends in the north of the city and soon returns to Flensburg. A life without public awaits him there. “I want to move to another city and then start an apprenticeship.”
