Luai Ahmed (30) is a Swedish journalist, columnist and influencer. He was born in Yemen’s capital Sana’a in 1993. His mother is the multi-awarded peace and women’s rights activist Amal Basha.
Following his mother’s feminist activism, the Al-Qaeda organization threatened his family in 2013, asking in an open letter to the population in Yemen to receive the address where the family lived. In 2014 Luai Ahmed was invited to a lecture at the invitation of the Olof Palme Center in Stockholm to talk about the Yemeni revolution and human rights as a youth activist and writer, and he eventually decided to stay in Sweden as he had been living secretly as a homosexual in Yemen where there is a death penalty for his sexuality.
In Yemen, Ahmed wrote cultural columns for the newspapers Yemen Today, the Yemen Times and the youth magazine YoO Magazine.
Today he is a columnist for the liberal-conservative Swedish newspaper Bulletin, where he writes articles against anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews, Islamic extremism, and the lack of integration in Europe.
He is active on social media, with over 280,000 followers across all his platforms, where his posts accumulate around 30 to 80 million impressions every month.
As of 2024, Ahmed started making content for “Builders of the Middle East,” a Middle East-based organization and movement that aims to fight online extremism, educate people on Middle Eastern affairs, and most importantly abridge cultures and bring peace to the Middle East.
In 2021, he published his first book “Asylum: A Paradoxical Journey of a Refugee from the Sharia of Yemen to the Rainbow in Sweden,” which tells the story about his first five years in Sweden, with a humorous critique of radical Islamism, but also of Swedish politics.
Ahmed studied International Business Studies in the Lebanese International University in Yemen before fleeing to Yemen. He also studied International Migration and Immigration at the University of Malmö.
@JustLuai (Instagram: @justluai)
@BuildersMideast (Instagram: buildersofmideast)
