Never write off the Daily Mail. It always has the capacity to confound. Evidence? Patrick French’s piece on Islamic Rage Boy. French, a writer rather than a reporter, has done what no one in the global village seems to have bothered to do – travel to Indian-ruled Kashmir to meet 29 year old Shakeel Ahmad Bhat.

French discovers that Bhat is illiterate, the product of a Sufi Muslim family in Kashmir. There are many details of banal violence in his life story, from beatings at school to this:

While searching for militants, police raided Shakeel’s home and threw his 18-year-old sister Shareefa out of an upstairs window. She broke her spine and died from her injuries four years later.

And yet despite that, and being tortured himself, Bhat has set aside militancy (he doesn’t seem to have been particularly successful) for peaceful – if angry – protesting.

Now he’s the poster boy not for freedom of speech advocates (“You can’t bring peace by beating the drums or killing people,” he tells French), but for anyone wanting to demonise Islam.

This, by the way, is what he says happened to him whilst under arrest:

He was stripped, doused with water and given electric shocks. A nail was pushed through his jaw (he showed me the scar). His head was immersed in water.

When he was released, he remained under police surveillance. An injury to his right arm as a result of the torture had left him unable to lift anything and he has relied on his brothers to support him since then.

So, Islamic Rage Boy is a mild-mannered human being with a penchant for demonstrating. Hats off to the Daily Mail for telling us about him and his life in Kashmir and perhaps – just perhaps – making people think.

But then again you shouldn’t ask too much of journalism – or its consumers.