The Man Who Chose the Mosque Over the Mansion: An Interview with ‘The Unlikely Leader’ Author Abdurahman Afia

Abdurahman Afia’s new book, The Unlikely Leader, is on the shelf, and it is not the leadership book you are expecting.

There is a particular type of leadership book that gets written by people who were, it turns out, always going to be leaders. The confident early bloomer. The natural communicator. The one who was captain of something, early. You know the archetype. You have probably seen it on a shelf.

The Unlikely Leader is not that book, and Abdurahman Afia, executive, educator, leadership consultant, and now author, is not that person.

“Almost every leader I have worked with, from government ministers to CEOs of large organisations, started by feeling out of place,” he says, when we sit down to talk about the book in the week of its launch. “The confident, born-to-lead figure is largely a story we tell after the fact. It is tidy. It is marketable. It is also mostly false.”

He says this with the ease of someone who has thought about it for a long time, and, as it turns out, someone who has lived it.

Early Years in London

The story that anchors the book, and the one you keep returning to long after the conversation ends, begins on a Friday evening in London. Afia was eighteen, and he had just reverted to Islam. His father, a man he describes as someone he loves and is close to today, invited him to the Italian restaurant the family went to every week.

Over dinner, his father gave him a choice. Leave the faith, or leave the family. No inheritance. No share in the business he had been groomed his entire life to take over. Nothing.

“I told him, ‘I love you. But I love the One who made you more.'”

His family left him sitting in the restaurant. He walked out onto a cold London street with nothing in his pockets and kept walking until he reached the nearest mosque, because he knew it would open for the morning prayer. He had grown up on one of the most expensive streets in London. In a single evening, all of it was gone.

“That night I stood in front of a mirror in the mosque and said the sentence that actually made me a leader, long before I had a title or a team. I said, for the first time in your life, it is all on you. Nobody is coming to save you. You have to make something out of nothing.”

He pauses. “That was the moment. Not a boardroom. Not a promotion. A mirror in a mosque at eighteen, with nothing in my pockets.”

What makes The Unlikely Leader unusual is not the story of adversity, though the adversity is real and considerable; it is the framework Afia builds on top of it. Because this is not, ultimately, a book about surviving hardship. It is a book about what hardship teaches you about the actual mechanism of leadership, if you are paying attention.

Central to that framework is a point that is almost aggressively unfashionable in an age of confidence culture and personal brand.

“Confidence without competence is one of the most dangerous things you can put in a position of authority,” he says. “‘Fake it till you make it’ is, in my experience, terrible advice. Fake it and you do not make it. You break it. You break trust, you break teams, and eventually you break yourself.”

He is not performing humility here; he is making a technical argument. Self-doubt, he contends, is not a weakness to be overcome. Handled correctly, it is a diagnostic tool. “It is the signal that tells you where you need to grow.”

For years, he ran universities and led teams while privately feeling like a fraud about to be found out. “I used to watch someone on television receive a round of applause and feel a strange ache, because I wanted to be competent enough to deserve that kind of respect. That ache became fuel.” The doubt quietened not because he silenced it, but because he earned his way past it. “Competence first, confidence second. And competence is not a destination; it is a loop. You learn about leadership. You implement what you have learnt. You learn from that implementation, whether it went right or wrong. Then you reflect and improve, so that next time is better than the last.”

Three Month’s in Jeddah: Lessons Learned

The moment he understood the difference between authority and leadership arrived in 2001, in Jeddah, during a three-month management posting that he describes, with characteristic directness, as a disaster.

“I spent those three months doing exactly what I thought a manager was supposed to do. I gave instructions. I made sure things were efficient. I was, by the end of it, the most hated person in the organisation. Nobody would listen to me. Nobody would do what I asked.”

Then the franchise support manager for the Middle East, a man named Mr Campbell, flew down from Riyadh unannounced. Afia was convinced he was being fired. Instead, Campbell said something that changed his life. “He said, it is a disaster. But it is not your mistake. It is our mistake for putting you in this position without giving you the tools to succeed.”

Campbell then built a leadership development programme specifically for him.

“That was the moment I fell in love with leadership,” Afia says. “Because that was the moment I understood two things. One, leadership can be learnt. Two, leadership is not about telling people what to do. It is about creating the conditions in which they actually want to do it.”

The three months in Jeddah also delivered a second lesson, one he describes as the distinction that changed everything. “Authority is given. Influence is earned. You can be handed an organisational chart where the arrows all point in your direction and still not move a single person. Because people do not follow arrows. They follow behaviour.”

Social Media & Entrepreneurship

Spend any time on Afia’s social media, and you encounter a man who seems to operate in two registers simultaneously, one moment dissecting organisational behaviour with precision, the next messing about with his sons on camera. The contrast is striking. It is also, he insists, entirely deliberate.

“One of the biggest lies in modern leadership is that you need to split yourself in half to be credible. The serious half goes to work. The human half stays home. I have lived the cost of that split and I do not buy it.”

He has been married to the same woman since he was nineteen. He prays five times a day. He trains in the gym at five in the morning. His children are now his business partners. “If you are not leading by example, you are really not leading at all. That is true at work, and it is true at home. My sons will never remember the speeches I gave. They will remember whether I lived the things I said.”

It is worth noting, for context, that Afia was expelled from every school he attended. He failed every exam until he was eighteen. He was diagnosed with ADHD and dyspraxia at a time when, as he puts it, “those words were closer to insults than diagnoses.” The gap between that beginning and where he sits today is not incidental to the book. It is the book.

“People with unlimited resources tend to build fragile things, because they never had to question their first idea. People with real constraints build resilient things, because every step had to justify itself. I am not romanticising hardship. Hardship is hard. But the leaders I respect most have almost all been sharpened by something, not protected from it.”

Abdurahman Afia’s Advice

There is one question I want to ask before we finish, because it sits at the heart of what the book is really doing. Not the tactical content, not the frameworks, but the thing underneath all of it.

What would he say to someone who feels overlooked right now? Who is sitting at the beginning of a version of his story, in a restaurant, a mosque, or some equivalent place, wondering if this is as far as it goes?

He doesn’t hesitate.

“Stop waiting to be picked.” A pause. “Your story is not over at the worst chapter. It is genuinely not. The people you admire almost all have a chapter that looked like yours. The difference is they did not stop there. They got competent at one thing. Then another. Then another. And slowly, without fanfare, they rewrote the ending.”

“Nobody can overlook competence forever. Nobody.” Another pause, this one longer. “Hope is not a feeling you wait for. It is what you build on the other side of doing the work nobody asked you to do.”

He has been, he says, exactly where that person is, and the view from the other side, he promises, is worth every hard step it takes to get there.

The Unlikely Leader by Abdurahman Afia is available now.