Patrick French has a fine piece of reportage on the Islamic Rage Boy, Shakeel Ahmad Bhat — the young man whose own name doesn’t appear in most reports and who was declared a “religious nut bag” full of “yells and gibberings” by no less an authority than Christopher Hitchens.

We went to Malik Angan, a poor area that the security forces monitor closely, though they risk being shot at or stoned.

As we arrived, paramilitary policemen were searching a cloth vendor, making him dismantle his cart.

Arriving at a simple, traditional three-storey Kashmiri house, I was taken up steep wooden steps by the light of a gas lamp to the top of the building. There, standing in an empty room, dressed in a salwar kameez and zip-up cardigan, with crooked teeth and a quizzical look on his face, was Islamic Rage Boy.

Shakeel Ahmad Bhat is a 29-year-old failed militant. Over two days, sitting cross-legged at the home he shares with his mother and smiling shyly much of the time, Shakeel told me, through an interpreter, his life story and why he had come to wave his fists at the cameras.

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(Via Ultrabrown)

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