This is not the Islam that I know. The Islam that I know comes with names like Jade, or Rehana, or Abdul or Tariq. It comes in the form of a young man that I tutor, for an hour every week. A young man who in reality is still a small and incredibly vulnerable boy, who is struggling with his GCSEs, who is frustrated because his friends are already shaving and he’s still got the face of a baby, struggling because he is not as big as the other boys in his school, who like so many other young people is struggling to understand himself and his place in the world. He likes football and every week he tells me that he scored a goal, that his team won or lost, that his team is a team. And his mum is a power-house of independence who bucked her cultural background and left her husband, who strode out alone. For her, for her son, there is only one direction in their faith and that is for peace.

The Islam I know comes in the faces of some of the members of the most fantastic ensemble of young people that I was lucky enough to work with over the summer. We explored life and age and death. We created the most sensitive and eloquent contemplation of these subjects in words and photographs. Not my words, theirs, their observations, their understanding. They look through the camera to see. In that group there was no racism, no hatred, no dogma. I watched these young people develop our project in an old people’s home and I was moved to tears by their care and humanity, by their gentleness, by their capacity to love. That is the face of Islam that I know. As an atheist who has no truck with God or faith or religion, I find those faces to be beautiful. They did not show me horror, they gave me hope.