Meet Marduk Malik, Muslim lucha libre star
Malik Waseem has carefully crafted a unique persona. Now he wants to be king of the Mexican wrestling ring
Inside the Garage, a live music and event space in north London, a rectangular wrestling ring sits in the middle of the room. It’s a Thursday night and the room is filled with an excited audience, gathered to witness the stars of Lucha Britannia bring the theatricality of Mexican wrestling to Highbury.
It’s been 18 months since the promotion’s last event in the capital and the sense of anticipation is palpable. Off to the side, fans are lined up at a stall selling T-shirts bearing images of the luchadors on tonight’s bill. The atmosphere is buzzing, but there’s enough room to move around — and out of the way — when the “oof!” and “ouch!” moments come.
Soon, compere Jerry Bakewell takes to the microphone. Face covered with a Burberry-check mask, he announces a three-way bout. From the wings emerge the moustachioed Peregrine Kelly, clad in a distinctive pink and blue leotard, Picante Vaquero in red trousers, and Dragon Extrano in a horned mask, furry loincloth and boots.
Within minutes Picante Vaquero is thrown from the ring into the wall next to me — a carefully choreographed and extraordinarily convincing move. Soon after, he launches himself on to Peregrine Kelly from above, wrapping his legs around him and hurling him to the floor. It’s a spectacular scene.
Bakewell announces two more bouts before arriving at the headline event — a six-person “chaos match” to decide who will be crowned champion. One of the competitors cuts a particularly imperious figure. Marduk Malik steps out, tall and lean with long black hair and a short beard, in golden wrestling shorts and black legwarmers with golden hieroglyphics on the front. He is bathed in strobe lights and soundtracked by a remix of Queen’s Princes of the Universe.
The chaos match lives up to its billing. It’s a frenetic melee featuring, among others, the brilliantly named and suitably masked Patito Peligroso (Spanish for Dangerous Duck), Disco Diablo, whose outfit includes bright red hotpants and horns, and K-Rod, resplendent in a leather jacket studded with electric lights.
The fighters initially pair off, but the action soon descends into a full-cast battle. The ring proves too small and the action spills out on to the floor. At one point a fighter hurls himself from the ropes, knocking all the other wrestlers to the ground. Then Malik launches a two-footed kick at the chest of another opponent. His acrobatics, however, prove fruitless and he eventually goes down in defeat to Patito Peligroso.
Like all good stars of the ring, Marduk Malik has a fantastical backstory. The character is a modern-day incarnation of an all-powerful and ancient Mesopotamian god. He won and held the title of Lucha Britannia World Champion from 2023 to 2024. In real life, however, the 32-year-old British-Pakistani man behind the persona goes by the name of Malik Waseem and lives in Ruislip, west London, where he runs a property management business.
A match wrestler since 2015, Malik explains the pressure and the sense of liberation he gets from lucha libre. “You want to do well and you want to put on the best match of the night. You want to put on a performance for the people,” he says. “The moment that you step through that, it’s so freeing. It’s like you’re somebody else. You step into another body, another element, another side of yourself.”
Lucha libre distinguishes itself from other forms of professional wrestling with a lighter, fast style, filled with gravity-defying aerial flourishes. In Mexico, it is more of a cultural phenomenon than a sport and its narratives of good and evil frequently act as allegories for the country’s politics. Its often masked stars are household names, events pack stadiums across the country and its stories fuel a long-established film industry.
Lucha Britannia, founded in 2006 by Garry Vanderhorne and Greg Burridge, draws somewhat smaller crowds, but aims to bring at least some of the same thrills to UK audiences.
Waseem was a law student at the University of West London and had trained in boxing, freestyle wrestling and other martial arts when he first came across the sport during a conversation at an on-campus promotional stall.
“Growing up I always loved professional wrestling. I was obsessed with it,” he explains. He went to a training session with the London School of Lucha Libre, run by Vanderhorne, and was immediately hooked.
Of equal importance to learning the skills to fight professionally was developing the character of Marduk Malik.
“I’ve always been interested in that kind of stuff,” he says of the historical inspiration for his pugilistic alter-ego. “I worked with Garry and Greg and London School Lucha Libre to come up with a character that meant something to me, but that also had a bigger meaning that could be translated into wrestling with his own story arc.”
Each element of the Malik Marduk persona is carefully thought through, including the fact that he wrestles unmasked. “It’s part of the character, part of the mythology,” Waseem says.
He explains that while wearing a mask allows wrestlers and superheroes such as Batman to transcend their everyday identities, Malik Marduk, as an ancient deity, has no need to.
Showing his face also allows Waseem to claim a place in lucha libre for people who look like him. Younger Muslim wrestlers have told him that his presence in the sport has helped to open the door for them too. “That’s something really special to me,” he says.
After the fight, Waseem is in a reflective mood. “It’s weird to say, but you find a lot of peace just being in the ring,” he says.
“You might do a crazy sequence of moves. You’re both down and you look in the crowd and you see somebody sitting there, and they’ve got the biggest smile on their face, no matter what’s going on in their lives… They pay their hard-earned money to see you and you’ve been able to share that and give them that emotion. Then they give in turn back to you. That’s the craziest rush in the world.”
Waseem recently got married. He admits that his passionate attachment to lucha libre was, at first, a tough sell for his wife. “She was a bit like, ‘That’s crazy!’” he says. “When I’ve brought her to shows and she’s seen me in the ring, it’s resonated, though. It’s really cool to see that she’s supportive and that she understands it.”
His wife is not the only one who has embraced the high-octane spectacle of the sport. While the UK lucha libre scene is small, its audience is growing steadily and the commitment of its stars is clear. One thing is for certain, Waseem is dead set on reclaiming the title for Marduk Malik — and keeping it. “That belt means everything. It means you’re the head of the kingdom,” he says.
