Q: Can you tell us briefly about your time during high school and up until now?

Q: Did your experiences at young age shape your current view on Islam and Muslims in the West?

A: Yes and no. At that time I knew very little about Islam. The official view on Islam, portrayed by our academic institutions teaches us that Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion. I had no knowledge about the concepts of Jihad, Dhimmitude, Jizya, Ummah, Taqiyya, Quranic abrogation, Wahhabism, Salafism, and Saudi Arabia’s role in spreading the latter. However, my friendship with Muslims triggered an interest for Islam and politics in general. This was the deciding factor why I chose to study the topics further.

A: I broke with the hiphop movement and my network when I was 16 and later joined the Progress Party youth movement, a moderate cultural conservative youth movement of the Progress Party. This became the period where I decided I wanted to dedicate my life to politics in order to contribute to change the system.

I identified myself, during this time, as a cultural conservative, economical liberalist (from age 16 to 21). During this time I studied all the major ideologies in depth, everything from Marxism, socialism, Islam, fascism, nationalism, capitalism etc. I became increasingly interested in the libertarian school of thought (extreme liberalism and laissez faire capitalism) due to, my then capitalistic/self serving mindset”. This mindset completely collided with my increasing interest for cultural identity and a more traditionalist conservative school of thought. At this point I had a hard time deciding what would be the driving force in the rest of his life – self interest or nation/cultural identity? Could it be combined? I understood early that libertarianism was not a sustainable political concept. If everyone acted in an egotistical manner in combination with the doctrines of multiculturalism the nation and people would wither and society would eventually fracture and seize to function.

I was politically active within the cultural conservative Progress Party/Progress Party Youth from the age of 16-21(22). I eventually concluded that it would be impossible to change the system democratically and left conventional politics.

I was very ambitious early on. When I started high school I had already decided to choose economics as my main academic direction. I was inclined on pursuing a career within business and finance. After my first year of high school I decided to step up the pace so I completed half of my third year courses during my second year. I was quite happy with my grades and got 6 (A+) on certain subjects. This left me with a lot of spare hours during my last year which was a bit frustrating. There were no high school courses for gifted individuals who wanted to take the courses in two years.

At this point I was already trying to decide which higher education to pursue. The problem was that I wanted “Small Business Administration”, which under US standards goes under Bachelor of Business Administration. Unfortunately, no such “entrepreneurial” degree existed in Norway and the only equivalent is “Siviløkonom” (BBA + 1 year). As a result, I decided to pursue and complete my higher education informally, acquiring my personally composed curriculum, consisting of economics, finance, sales and marketing, e-commerce, web site development etc. This way I could compress my studies avoiding subjects that weren’t relevant in “entrepreneurial activity”. My new curriculum was a hybrid between AIU and BI business courses and I would use the next three years to focus on these studies.

Дата добавления: 2015-05-31