Twelve years ago Bashir Ahmad, the "Godfather of Pakistani MMA," was shipped off to the Middle East to fight in the Iraq War.Two years earlier the then-aimless college student, who was born in Pakistan before moving to the U.S. when he was 2, had joined the National Guard on the spur of the moment, looking for some direction and never thinking his unit would ever actually be sent to war, a safe bet considering the National Guard hadn't been used in combat since World War II. But by the spring of 2004, the insurgency was starting to heat up in Iraq, things were starting to look dicey for the American mission there, and the Pentagon needed more soldiers, which meant the National Guard, with its weekend training sessions, was all of a sudden an international fighting force. Ahmad and his ramshackle unit were sent to the insurgent hotbed of Mosul, where he worked as a medic in an explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) unit and acted as an unofficial ambassador between American soldiers and the local Muslim population, defusing tension and earning sympathy for the American cause in a very unsympathetic environment."Iraqis would see the name 'Ahmad' on my uniform and ask if I was Muslim—then they would be OK with me," Ahmad said.Today, in a story published on CNN.com, Ahmad, who fights Jimmy "The Silencer" Yabo this Saturday at One Championship 38 in Jakarta, Indonesia, said he mourns the fact that the same name that once helped smooth the way for the U.S. mission in Iraq would now be a cause for controversy and fear in his adopted country, a country currently suffering from a deep and pernicious bout of anti-Muslim nativism in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.Though Ahmad is now based out of Lahore, Pakistan, where he opened the country's first-ever MMA gym just a few years ago, he says he's been keeping up with the 2016 presidential primary and is shocked by the anti-Muslim rhetoric coming out of the Republican side of the debate, rhetoric, he says, that has left him feeling "isolated" and "degraded.""I couldn't believe it was 2015 and I was listening to stuff like this—you wonder how much of U.S. society is being influenced by thinking like this," Ahmad said. "It was like, 'Who hates Muslims more?'"Of course, like all wary Muslims and all reasonable human beings, Ahmad saves his gravest concern for the candidacy of Donald Trump, the reality TV star, heavyweight–champion narcissist, and clown prince of 21st-century American nativism who has built his campaign largely on stoking fears of Islam. Following the mass shooting in San Bernardino by suspected Islamic State sympathizers two months ago, Trump even called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States," a proposal supported by an unsurprisingly high percentage of Republican primary voters. "We want to be very fair, but too many bad things are happening and the percentage of true hatred is too great," Trump said at the time. "People that are looking to destroy our country must be reported and turned in by the good people who love our country and want America to be great again."Relying on rhetoric like that, Donald Trump has leapt to the lead in national Republican primary polls and stayed there, which would be comical if it weren't so depressing. No wonder then that Bashir Ahmad, an adopted son of the United States, who served his country in wartime, and who has made it his life's work to provide opportunities to impoverished youth in Pakistan through MMA (opportunities that will likely decrease the possibility of future terrorism in Pakistan, the Middle East, and the United States), would use the occasion of his fight this weekend in Jakarta to call out what he calls the "cult of Donald Trump.""When I hear somebody like Trump, it's like a comedy," Ahmad told CNN. "It's frightening that he has taken control of the American mob—that's what his whole campaign is based on.""The fact Trump gets support hurts my heart a bit."Check out Fightland's documentary about Bashir Ahmad and Pakistani MMA here.
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