Imran Ahmad was born in Pakistan and grew up in London. At the age of seven, he was severely traumatised when Michael Swallow pushed in front of him in the school lunch queue and secured the last plate of fish and chips leaving Imran no choice but a horrid egg flan. He still feels angry about this.
Too lazy to get the grades he needed for medical school, he ended up at Stirling University in Scotland, studying Chemistry, learning about Islam and trying to impress women. Ultimately he was quite successful in Chemistry and became quite knowledgeable about Islam as well, but he didnt impress any women despite having an Alfa Romeo and a microwave oven (quite possibly the only privately owned microwave on campus at that time).
In careers brochures, he saw people in business suits, travelling and having meetings. (This looked like fun to him, but he wasn’t sure what the people in suits actually did.) He persuaded one of those big global companies to hire him and he ended up working all over the world, including five years living in the United States.
His book, Unimagined — a Muslim boy meets the West, was selected by three major newspapers (The Independent, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald) in their books of the year lists, and was the Number One bestseller at the recent Byron Byron Writers Festival 2009. The Indonesian version will be launched at UWRF 2009.
Imran is a trustee of British Muslims for Secular Democracy, which opposes the imposition of theological or regressive cultural values on any individual, group or gender.
