John Mohammed Butt is an Islamic scholar and broadcaster, known as the first Westerner to graduate from Darul Uloom Deoband.
[1] Born in Trinidad in 1950, Butt spent his early life in Walton-on-Thames, England, and attended boarding school at Stonyhurst College before becoming a hippie and traveling to Pakistan.
[2] Arriving in Swat in 1969, he was impressed by the tribal way of life and (unlike most of his fellow hippies) settled in the area, learning Pashto and Dari (he speaks a total of seven languages).
[3] Although he continued to live mainly in Swat, he began spending part of each year as the Muslim chaplain at Cambridge University.
In response, he established the Pak/Afghan Cross-border Radio Training and Production (Pact) project in 2004, producing the Da Pulay Poray (Across the Border) programme to confront what he saw as Islamic extremism.