1507, OH MY!
Sohale Siddiqi is the dude on the couch with Obama
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/03/barack-obama-wild-drugtaking-roommate
When historians look back on Barack Obama’s first and second presidential elections, they may see some commonality. Four years ago, the country’s first black White House candidate was smeared with all sorts of allegations. The would-be president was not born in the US. He was a mole. A socialist – no, make that a communist. Barack was gay. Barack was a Marxist. And a Muslim too.
Now the same myths are rumbling through the country’s bars, online forums and, worryingly, major news outlets. And this time there is a list of failed promises – on Guantánamo, universal healthcare – to add to the attack, while the personal claims seem to be yet more torrid (this week’s most bizarre is that “Obama’s mother was a porn star”).
It is against this backdrop that new playwright Rashid Razaq is staging his debut production, based on Obama’s college days at Columbia, New York. Provocatively titled The President and the Pakistani, it revisits Harlem, 1981, when “Barry” Obama was living with his alleged party-loving, drug-abusing, illegal alien Pakistani friend, Sohale Siddiqi.
“They had an odd-couple relationship,” says Razaq, a reporter for the London Evening Standard, showing me a picture of the pair sprawled on a mustard yellow sofa, a leather-jacketed and polo-sweatered Obama kicking back with an impressively moustached, skinny Pakistani. In the play, Siddiqi has been renamed Salim “Sal” Maqbool; in Obama’s 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, he was recreated as a composite character named Sadik, mentioned in only a few pages.