“I was born in Pakistan and I moved to the United States when I was very young. When I was about six years old in Pakistan I remember my mother telling me that we’re going to go home now. I spent the next three days under my grandmother’s bed crying that I don’t ever want to leave this place. That sort of feeling has not left me since then. I’ve always wanted to come back and do something for Pakistan. Ever since a young age, I didn’t know how, but I knew I would be coming back to Pakistan.

“I grew up in America and visited Pakistan regularly. I lived for five years in Malaysia between the ages of 11 and 16 and came back to the United States. When I was in university I attended a class which was called a Military Science class.

“I thought it would be about military history and cool stuff like that. It ended up being a recruiting class trying to convince college students to join the army. At that point in time, they were going to pay for university; I didn’t have to join the army full time, I was going to do something called the National Guard. So I was a part of the state, not a part of the federal government. I thought if there was a hurricane or something I would be helping out with that.

“My roommate joined. I thought about it, I considered it. In the end I decided I didn’t want to wake up when I was 40 years old and think, what would it have been like to be in the army? So I joined as a medic.

“At that time the Iraq war hadn’t started but I did know that I didn’t want to be in a position where I might have to harm anybody else. I didn’t expect to be sent overseas at any point. In fact, when I went to my unit, I asked them, ‘Have we ever been deployed anywhere?’ and they all started laughing. If you’ve seen the movie Police Academy it was like that — a bunch of misfits who didn’t take anything seriously.

“But we did get deployed. After the Iraq war started, it was a very historic moment in military history, because it hadn’t been since World War 2 that so many US soldiers had been deployed. We went to Mosul. I got detached from my main unit and got sent to an Explosives Ordinance Disposal (EOD) unit. If you’ve seen the movie The Hurt Locker, that’s what my job was, except I was the medic. I didn’t do any of the bomb stuff.

“The whole time there, I started reading about the Civil Rights Movement in America, Malcom X’s biography, more about Mohammad Ali whom I’ve always been a fan of. I started questioning my place in American society. We had a gym where they put a speed bag. I would go there and I started hitting that and to me that was a way of blowing off steam and a form of internal rebellion. I would spend hours in there, skin up my knuckles. That was therapy for me.

“Around the same time I started reading about martial arts and martial arts philosophy. The first thing I did when I got back home was join a Jiu-Jitsu class which was run by a very influential person in my life. His father had been stationed in post-World War 2 Japan. He also grew up there and that’s where he learned martial arts. He was very much into the martial arts philosophy.

“I saw the positive influence he had on me and I wanted to be like him.

I thought one day, when I get older, I’ll go to Pakistan, I’ll open a martial arts gym and I’ll be a positive role model for the people there.

“Around then same time, I saw my first MMA fight on DVD and thought I needed to do that, at least to see how I would do in a high-pressure situation.

I went to Thailand to a Muay Thai camp for at least a week and I knew immediately that I wanted to do this.

“I graduated from university, spent a year in Thailand and the idea of retiring in Pakistan and opening a martial arts school had morphed into ‘How about I introduce MMA now?’.

“I thought I’d come to Pakistan, train a few people for about two months and then go back to the United States and do my nine-to-five. That was back in December 2009. Those potential two months ended up becoming four and a half years.

On the initial backlash: “I went to a Jitsu instructor here and he said ‘You know, I got an email about you two months ago.’ Apparently it was an email warning all other martial arts federations that I was Blackwater agent that was using MMA in Pakistan to conduct sabotage operations around the country. It was ridiculous.

But that scared me really bad because you don’t know if some people might take it seriously. I think that people are over it now.

Has the local community accepted you as their own now? “Oh, absolutely. And I think I’ve kind of accepted my place as being in between two worlds — it took me a while to realise that I am Pakistani but I am also very much American. And there are a lot of people like me. — M.S.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, November 23rd, 2014