Abid Qayyum Raja (born 5 November 1975) is a Norwegian lawyer and Liberal Party politician who served as Minister of Culture from 2020 to 2021. He was elected to the Storting as representative for Akershus in 2013 where he served as second deputy chair of the Standing Committee on Transport and Communications and also is a member of the Standing Committee on Scrutiny and Constitutional Affairs. In October 2017, Raja was elected as the vice-president of the Storting, the second time in Norway's history that a Muslim has been elected to that office. Early life Born in Oslo into a family of Pakistani descent, he was raised in the St. Hanshaugen neighborhood in Oslo. His father Abdul Qayyum Raja (1937– ) was a factory worker who worked at the Christiania Spigerverk steel plant in Nydalen, while his mother Akthar Nasim (1949–2021) was a homemaker. Raja describes his parents as someone who "used violence as a part of the parenting, violence was relatively common in my community". In 1992, at age 15 he was taken away from home due to the ongoing violence in the household. He was subsequently placed in a hospice for recovering drug-addicts, which he later would describe as a "hellish dump". After being relocated to a nearby orphanage, he dropped out of high school. After six months at the orphanage, he was allowed to move back home, after which his parents sent him to Pakistan. Upon his return to Norway, he re-enrolled in high-school and according to him "had his mind set on becoming a lawyer" after seeing Kevin Costner in the film JFK. Education After graduating from Foss Upper Secondary School, he enrolled at University of Southampton, and graduated with a degree in Human Rights and Behavioural Sciences in Law. Raja was in 2003 the first non-ethnic Norwegian to receive the Norway Scholarship that have been rewarded since 1920 at University of Oxford, Wadham College and there he studied for the MSc degree in Psychology. He holds also an undergraduate degree in Criminology and Master of Law degree Cand.jur. degree from University of Oslo cum laude. Career Lawyer He has worked as a criminal defence lawyer for four years and been civil case litigator for two. During his years as criminal defense lawyer he was appointed by the court to be lead defence lawyer on several murder-cases, in and abroad of the country, and he also