A Dutiful Boy: A Memoir of a Gay Muslim’s Journey to Acceptance
MOHSIN ZAIDI
(SQUARE PEG, 288 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

Religion springs – at least in part – from an innate human need to believe and belong. That combination results in our attachment to family and community being wrapped up in our attachment to faith. As Mohsin Zaidi knows all too well.

One of our leading criminal barristers, having worked at the UN War Crimes Tribunal and the UK Supreme Court, he grew up in a tight-knit Shia Muslim community in east London. His childhood combined the Pakistani traditions imbibed from his parents, and an insistent, unrelenting commitment to excellence at school and beyond.

The “golden boy” of his schoolteacher mother, he won a place to read law at Oxford, and was a largely unquestioning conformist when he attended the local mosque with his remote, ascetic postmaster father. But from an early age Zaidi knew he was gay. He feared horror and banishment from his parents.