Hamed Abdel-Samad was born in 1972, the third of five children, in Giza, not far from Cairo. His father is a Sunni imam. As a child Hamed Abdel-Samad experienced violence and suffering. He was raped twice by other boys when he was five and eight. His sister was forced to undergo genital mutilation, and he was keenly aware of the repressive character of the society he lived in. While growing up, he sought escape, first in Marxism and then in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. In 1995 he came to Germany, studying political science in Augsburg. At this point he was, by his own admission, an anti-Semite by conviction and sceptical of the West. Only after a long search and painful disorientation did he finally free himself from those views.