Naser Khader - Life

Life

Naser Khader is the son of a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother. He was raised in a small rural town outside Damascus in the traditional Syrian way. As a Palestinian refugee, his father had difficulties getting a good job in Syria, and although they lived in the village of his wife, she was often referred to as "The one who married a stranger".

Naser Khader was named after Egyptian president Nasser, but the name lost an s in transliteration to the Latin alphabet, once Khader's father emigrated to Europe in the 1960s—a period when European countries had begun the call for foreign workers. Naser himself did not join his father until 1974, when he moved from his village in Syria to a flat in central Copenhagen, Denmark. He graduated from the Rysensteen Gymnasium in 1983.

In 2006, he was awarded Danish "Freedom of Expression" award. The prize was awarded by an organisation that counts anti-Muslim writers and Jyllands-Posten (the newspaper that published cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad), and thus, according to Tim Jensen, affects Khader's perception by "practicing Muslims".

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