Mustafa Faakhtaa is born in a well-to-do suburb of Karachi into a good, religious Sunni Muslim family. He is a good boy and a model of what a good Muslim should be. But Mustafa has a secret — he is gay.

Mustafa believes that he cannot be both a Muslim and a homosexual and so his quest is to find a cure for his homosexuality. During his search, he meets different people along the way who create a great impact on his thinking: Rubasha, his Shiite girlfriend at school, Taheer, a classmate oat Mustafa’s school, Yusuf, a friend from university and a follower of the sect of Ibrahimi Islam, Rameez, Mustafa’s gym instructor who later becomes a Lashkari Muslim, and Maaz, the university friend with whom Mustafa shares a dorm room and who is for a time Mustafa’s lover.

During his quest, Mustafa learns about the literature associated with Islam, the Koran, the Hadiths, and even the Christian Bible, and tries to determine which forms of literature should be accepted as the basis of his religion and which should be discarded as unreliable. Mustafa eventually stumbles across a secret association of people who share forbidden books. From this, Mustafa discovers that while the Koran uses great people in history as an example for correct living, one of these great historical figures which the Koran hails as a great man of Allah was in fact gay. This leads Mustafa to accept his homosexuality in the great universal scheme of things, and realise the real origins of the Koran and the true identity of Muhammad.

Mark Frew

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