WHO IS GINGERBEARDMAN?

“Who is GINGERBEARDMAN?  What does he stand for? Where does he come from? And why is he cluttering up the internet with his inane babbling masquerading as a blog?”

I am a Muslim from the UK, a revert (convert) to Islam, someone trying his best to be a good father, son and husband to those I love, an aspiring writer and a campaigner for ginger rights!

OK one of the above is not serious, strictly speaking  it’s untrue. I don’t really do much campaigning for ginger rights at all, well other than the odd meme posted here or elsewhere online.

In fact I didn’t even know I was ginger until I got to about age of 11 and started growing my beard out to intimidate other school level rugby players and found that my beard grew a different colour to the rest the hair on my head.

Does that even make me ginger at all? Or am I half ginger? Does it make a difference if I shave my balding sweed and so the only hair people see is my huge ginger beard and don’t know I secretly have brown hair? (ok sort of greyish brown with bald bits)

It does annoy me a great deal though that the mockery of ginger people is the last socially acceptable form of prejudice (outside of far right social circles). I mean everyone is allowed to have a go, not just comedians. Comedians are expected to mock that which is different to the societal norm but us ginger folk just can’t catch a break even from regular people.

To make matters worse, given the number of people accepting Islam the ‘ginger Muslim convert’ is actually becoming a stereotype in the UK society with Tommy Robinson, the EDL’s former leader even noticing and joking about it on national TV, that every revert seems to be ginger, that Islam accepts ginger people and so we only become Muslim for some form of acceptance.

I mean I became Muslim fourteen years ago, there were not that many of us around back then but even I saw four other ginger bearded reverts just whilst doing tawaf when I went on Umrah a couple of years ago and makes you envy the ginger revert sisters out there who get to hide themselves away under the Hijab.

The thing is if you complain about all this evil prejudice you get accused of having a chip on your shoulder, of just being another angry ginger, like being angry and ginger are synonymous or something but I am actually quite mellow and chilled out when people meet me and very rarely get angry, even when being mocked for being ginger.

There is of-course a perfectly logical explanation as to why so many ginger Muslim converts / reverts out there, Islam has always appealed to the poor and marginalized in society around the world who have less to lose by looking at such a radically different way of life. In the UK that’s often people from the Celtic nations and it is these peoples who have a greater propensity towards being ginger.

And being Irish by decent by my fathers side of the family, and red haired English genes being present in some parts of my mothers side of the family I didn’t really have much hope of being anything but ginger, or half ginger anyway.