Meet Nemat Sadat

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nemat Sadat. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nemat below.

Nemat, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

I believe I get my resilience from my can-do attitude and telling myself to never give up. There were many times when I didn’t have a support network to get me through my darkest and loneliest days—particularly after my historical coming gay on Facebook in August 2013. I was disowned by most of my relatives, received curses and threats numbering in the thousands, and a fatwa by the mullahs of Afghanistan. What kept me alive was continuing my activism for LGBT+ rights in the Afghan community and writing my first novel The Carpet Weaver with any spare time that I had. I faced many setbacks but I continued to fight for my own acceptance and for the people in my homeland who yearned for a chance to be free and live their truth.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I have been campaigning for LGBT+ rights in Afghanistan as an activist, journalist, novelist, and humanitarian for the past 12 years. In 2012, while teaching at the American University of Afghanistan, I secretly mobilized a gay movement off campus but was then persecuted by the Afghan authorities and deemed a national security threat. A year later, I became the first person from Afghanistan to come out gay and campaign for LGBT+ rights. In 2019, Penguin Random House India published my debut novel The Carpet Weaver, which is groundbreaking since it was the first depiction of LGBT+ people in literature to come out of any country in Central Asia.

After the Taliban returned to power in 2021, I started Roshaniya, which is a US-based nonprofit that champions human rights for LGBT+ people in Afghanistan and helps them to obtain the documents and resources they need to evacuate. To date, Roshaniya has supported the safe passage of 250 LGBT+ Afghans to Oman and to western countries across four continents.

I also co-founded Behesht, a queer and trans collective based in Afghanistan that provides humanitarian relief, psycho-social support, and advocates for equality in all spheres of life. Behesht works at the grassroots level to mobilize LGBT+ Afghans while Roshaniya emphasizes the campaigning and lobbying for LGBT+ Afghans on the international stage.

I am training a platoon of LGBT+ Afghan Human Rights Defenders with the aim of overpowering tyranny and dismantling the culture of corruption and “cannibalism” that plagues Afghanistan. My vision is to empower LGBT+ Afghans so that they can emancipate themselves and be a shining example for people everywhere who are still struggling for their freedom.

I have previously worked at ABC News Nightline, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, and the UN Chronicle, and have earned seven university degrees, including graduate degrees from Harvard, Columbia, Oxford, and Johns Hopkins.

I’m currently based in San Diego but considers myself a vegan vagabond.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Even amidst the ugliness one encounters in life, it is important to cherish the beauty of life and the necessity of hope.

To develop the courage to break free from whatever it is that is holding you back from accepting who you truly are.

Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?

Reading novels and taking the leap to write one myself. I was drawn to writing fiction first and foremost as a radical escapist fantasy. I languished both in the closet and the shadows and felt that I needed an outlet for my suffering. Writing seemed like a sure way to satisfy an emotional void in my heart and liberate myself from the mental shackles forged by both homophobia and homesickness. Overtime though, I realized what my novel The Carpet Weaver meant for the world.

I started seeing the protagonist Kanishka as something more than just a hero in the story or a pioneer in his troubled nation. I had started to envision The Carpet Weaver as a petition for the hundreds of millions of LGBT+ people who live in one of the 64 where they are still criminalized and struggling for their liberation.

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