(Hamza)
Hamza, a 19-year-old Muslim boy from Afghanistan, was a product of both faith and culture - not just raised within them, but shaped by them. In his world, religion wasn't a part of life — it was life. From the moment he could walk, he understood what was haram and what was halal, what was shameful and what was pure. In his home, modesty wasn't a suggestion - it was a law, an unspoken yet absolute rule woven into the fabric of daily life.
His mother and sister, like every woman he'd known growing up, wore loose, flowing garments even inside the house - never revealing the shape of their bodies, never letting their hair fall freely around men, not even family. It wasn't strange to him; it was the norm, a reflection of the conservative Afghan culture he'd inherited. Women weren't hidden out of shame, but protected
- sacred, untouchable. And so Hamza grew up surrounded by women, yet utterly blind to the feminine form.
He had never touched a woman, not even accidentally. Never felt the brush of a hand, never been embraced by anyone outside his mother as a child. And beyond the softness of a face - that too only in the privacy of family — he had never seen a woman, not the way boys in other parts of the world casually did. There were no short skirts, no television crushes, no western distractions. Just walls, and rules, and silence.
And yet, within that silence, something stirred.
Hamza wasn't rebellious. He prayed. He fasted. He respected the elders and kept his head down. But deep inside him was a quiet, aching tension - a hunger he didn't fully understand, yet couldn't ignore. It lived in his chest like a shadow, heavy and still. He didn't even know what he longed for, only that there was something missing, something more than the daily routine of obedience and discipline.
Sometimes, he would stare at the ceiling at night, alone in the dark, feeling things he couldn't name - urges, thoughts, guilt. Not because he had seen anything. Not because anyone had touched him. But because he was human, and his body was growing into a man's, even while his mind was still shackled by the fear of sin. He often wondered if anyone else felt this - this quiet war between purity and desire, between control and curiosity. But no one ever spoke of it.
So he didn't either.
In a world that never gave him permission to feel, Hamza was drowning in feelings. And that made him dangerous - not to others, but to himself. Because when you bury something long enough, it doesn't die. It waits.