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family remained fond of me. The possibility of having her as a partner made me reconsider the Bandidos. Exhaustion had seeped into my soul. For all the highs my life in the gang had become meaningless.
    We spent the night of my twenty-first birthday together, and I was happy: a feeling so rare that it almost shocked me. I was frightened of losing it. In the following weeks, when I wasn’t with Samar, I would lie awake at night. I imagined getting into another fight that would land me behind bars again, or overdosing or getting stabbed. There wereplenty of ways to be taken out of circulation. And then Samar would be gone.
    On an unusually bright morning a few weeks after my birthday, I found myself in the town’s library. I felt empty and needed sanctuary.
    The library, a two-storey building of corrugated steel and concrete, was close to the water’s edge. That morning it provided warmth from the chill breeze that found every corner of Korsør. For a while I stared at the choppy waters and the span of the Great Belt Bridge. I browsed aimlessly among the shelves, vaguely aware of the chatter from the children’s section, but gravitated towards history and religion, subjects that had always fascinated me despite my wasted school days.
    I had never felt religious – I had even been expelled from confirmation classes. The priest had told my mother that I was too much of a troublemaker, even for God. But I thought there must be some sort of afterlife. I had had some contact with Islam through my immigrant friends – Palestinians, Iranians and Turks – and had always envied the strength of their families, the way they always had dinner together, the bonds that united them while facing poverty and discrimination.
    Perhaps that was why I sat down in an alcove with a book about the life of the Prophet Mohammed. Within minutes I was so absorbed in the story that the world outside evaporated.
    The book laid out the tenets of Islam and the life of its founder with seductive simplicity. Mohammed’s father had died before he was born. As his mother, Aminah, gazed at her first son, she heard a voice. ‘The best of mankind has been born, so name him Mohammed.’
    She had sent him into the desert to learn self-reliance and to master Arabic as spoken by the Bedouin. But Aminah had died when Mohammed was just seven, and he was passed into the care first of his grandfather and then of his uncle.
    What immediately appealed about his life was its dignity and simplicity. As a young man, Mohammed would be called ‘al-Saadiq’ (the Truthful One) and ‘al-Amin’ (the Trustworthy One). He had granted freedom to a slave who had been given to him and declared him his own son.
    I learned Mohammed was a successful trader who travelled through Arabia and as far as Syria. But he was also a deeply spiritual man, and in his thirties he would retreat to meditate in a cave on Mount Hira near Mecca. It was there that the Archangel Gabriel visited him and declared he was God’s messenger.
    ‘ Proclaim in the name of your Lord who created! / Created man from a clot of blood. ’
    As the sun slanted across the Scandinavian sky, I became immersed in the events of the seventh century. I imagined Mohammed taking refuge in a cave as his enemies, the Quraish of Mecca, searched for him. By a divine miracle, it was said, a spider had spun its web over the mouth of the cave and a bird had laid eggs nearby, so the place looked undisturbed and was not searched. The episode was recounted in the Koran. ‘When Disbelievers drove him out, he had no more than one companion; they were two in the cave and he said to his companion, “Have no fear, (for) Allah is with us .” ’
    I did not notice the approach of dusk. Mohammed’s story was one of battling the odds, as he sought to propagate Islam in the face of persecution. Here was a man – with his small band of followers – prepared to fight for his beliefs. In the words of the Koran:
    ‘Permission to fight is