It can’t be very easy these days if you
were a Muslim living in the West. If you are, say, brown skinned; have a name
like, thinking at random, Osama; have a flowing beard; and if you were, say,
travelling, wearing a flowing robe with a rucksack on your shoulder, muttering
under your breath—if you were, say, a religiously minded individual—whatever it
is that religiously minded Muslims mutter under their breath, in a London
underground, you shouldn’t at all be surprised if the carriage you are
travelling in is less crowded than others.
You would find yourself (if you were a
browned skinned Osama) in this situation because in the last decade or so, a
stereotype of Islam (and Muslims—the two are not the same, as far as my
understanding goes; the former is a religion, the latter denotes the followers)
seems to have taken shape in the Western psyche, which goes something along
these lines: religious fanatics, misogynists, terrorists, barbarians, not
willing to assimilate and adopt Western values (democracy, liberalism etc.), and potential Fifth Element.
Then there are other terms coined such as
Islamists—I am not entirely sure the origin of this term; it may have been
originated in the West to denote those Muslims who fit into some or more of the
above identifiers. (Martin Amis tried to make this distinction in his
intemperate outburst against Muslims a few years ago.)
A few weeks ago I saw a Muslim woman on a
bus I was travelling on, covered from head to toe in a black chador (the woman,
not the bus; the bus was covered in dirt). As I tried to check out whether I
could check out her ass, it struck me that it was precisely men like me that
Muhammad probably had in mind when he decreed (would ‘suggested’ be a better
word?) that women should hide their beauty behind a veil. The veil, Muhammad
probably hoped (I hope I am not causing offence to anyone by daring to guess
what the prophet hoped), would serve two purposes. The first is obvious. The
veil would protect the woman from the dirty gaze of the lecher, although, come
to think of it, would it, really? True, the lecher might not be able to check
out vital statistics, but surely the woman would notice that she is being gazed
at (I am pretty certain that they can see from behind veils, otherwise they
would be bumping into lamp-posts all the time). (This assumption further
assumes that women heartily disapprove of guys ogling them. A friend of mine
recently returned from a weeklong holiday in Rome and declared disappointedly that
Italian men of younger generation were nowhere as lewd as their fathers and
grandfathers, because no one pawed her on the buses and no one spontaneously
exclaimed ‘Carina!’ when she was walking on the streets. I felt it prudent not
to point out to her (because I did not want to disappoint her further) that
that was probably because she was 36 and they like them younger.)
Secondly (we are discussing, in case you
have lost track, why Muhammad thought that a veil was a good idea), if the
lecher had any sense in him he would realise the futility of leching and do
something useful with his time (such as participating in the philosophical
discussion of what is a just punishment for shoplifting: ASBO?, community
service?, probation?, hand-chopping?). However, if the lecher happened to be
living in the decadent and amoral Western society, there would be no pressure
on him to change his infidel ways, as there would be plenty of infidel women
displaying their goodies he could feast his eyes on.
Anyway, as it happened, the chador-clad
woman and I got off at the same stop, and, funnily enough both entered the
local mall (I swear I am not a stalker of chador-clad women). As it happened, I
was behind the chador-clad woman,
and walking—or should I say rolling along?— towards us in the opposite
direction was a woman, pushing a pram in which was a squawking child, and three more children (some of whom, I hoped were hers), ranging in ages from two to
six. The woman was not all that old, but the layers of make-up caked on her
face were totally inadequate to conceal the toll taken by years of unhealthy
living and eating habits, as was the top
(and pink bra) to conceal her mammaries. As she passed us, this fine
specimen of British womanhood cleared her throat and shouted, ‘Oi Paki! Fuck
off back. We don’t want you here.’ Then she walked on, her gut hanging over her
leggings. The mall at that time was fairly crowded, and people walked on as if nothing had happened. This is something we
Brits are very good at. We can give a master-class in how to present a poker
face to the world. (This is not the only skill we have, it would appear. Last
year I read a novel by the 2003 Nobel Laureate, J.M. Coetzee. The narrator of
this novel remarks at one point: ‘There is a certain English manner that
infuriates me, that infuriates many people, where the insults come coated in
pretty words, like sugar on a pill.’ So it seems our other talent lies in
pissing people off by the way we speak. When we think we are being euphemistic
or polite when we criticise, there is a chance that others see us as two-faced
faced hypocrites.)
I thought about the incidence when I read an article in the Guardian about a children’s colouring book recently published in
America.
What is so special about a children’s colouring book
you may wonder.
Well, this book, published by a company called Real
Book Coloring Books, purports to tell children, in a graphic form, about the
attack on the World Trade Centre and subsequent hunt for Osama Bin Laden.
The book, the company declares, is created with ‘integrity,
reverence, respect, and does not shy away from truth’.
And what is the truth? The truth, as the publisher,
one Wayne Bell, eloquently explained on American television, is:
‘19 terrorist
hijackers that came over here under the leadership of a devil worshipper, Osama
bin Laden, to murder our people.’
The narrator of J.M. Coetzee’s novel should approve of
Wayne Bell. Whatever else Bell may be accused of he can’t be accused of coating
his insults in pretty words. He cannot be accused of subtlety or decency
either. Nor can he be accused of giving undue importance to logic in his
arguments. According to Bell it is an incontrovertible, undeniable truth that
Osama was a devil worshipper. How did Bell find out that Osama was a devil
worshipper? Did the devil confirm in writing that Osama was his follower?
As the Guardian article shows, one of the pages of
this book, entitled, unsurprisingly, ‘We Shall Never Forget’, shows Osama hiding
behind a chador clad woman while a US Navy Seal aims his rifle at him. Osama
looks as if he is having an acute attack of gastritis. It is not easy to figure
out the expression on the face of the woman, who is spreading her arms, giving,
in the process, a good impression of a bat, but my guess is that she is not
alarmed (or not having gastritis).
What takes the biscuit is the text that runs with it.
It goes like this:
‘Being the elusive character
that he was, and after hiding out with his terrorist buddies in Pakistan and
Afghanistan, American soldiers finally locate the terrorist leader Osama bin
Laden.’
I don’t know to whom or to what the book, as the
publishing company announced, is showing respect, but, if the above text is
anything to go by, it is not showing much respect to grammar. The sentence,
grammatically, is not just a car-crash, it is a multiple pile-up on a motorway.
In case the American children haven’t cottoned on to
the message that Muslims are enemies of the state, the book goes on to inform:
‘Children, the truth is,
these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim
extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are
FREE and our society is FREE.’
Islamic Muslim extremists? Who are they? They are ‘crazy
people’ (unlike, I suppose, the publishers of the colouring book who come
across as paragons of sense and moderation—oops! I should be careful; it wouldn't do to sugar-coat my insults with figures of speech) who hate freedom and obviously
think syllogistically: we hate freedom; Americans are free (or FREE); so we
hate Americans.
It goes without saying that what happened in September
2001 at the World Trade Centre was horrible. It is also true that (as a Tibor Fischer character might say) that there is little point in tournamentizing miseries;
but the way the American (and frequently British) media go on and on about the
9/11 is enough to turn all healthy stomachs: as if this is the ultimate tragedy—the
mother of all tragedies—against which all others pale into insignificance. When
I last checked, in the history of humankind, so far, only one country dropped
atomic bombs on another country in the full knowledge that tens of thousands of
civilians would be vaporised; and that was not any of the countries of ‘Islamic
Muslim Extremists’. I do not think any Muslim countries napalmed Vietnam and
brought untold miseries to its people. To the best of my knowledge not a single
Muslim country has illegally invaded and destroyed another country, as the
Americans and British did in Iraq. And, if you go back in time, you will
discover that the first ‘concentration camps’ in a war were run by the British
in the Boer War.
I am currently reading a memoir entitled Four Girls from Berlin, of a Jewish American woman named Marianne Meyerhoff.
The book tells the story of Meyerhoff’s mother, who fled Nazi Germany in the
1930s and came to America (the rest of the family was not so lucky) and her
friendship with three other (non-Jewish) German girls which survived the war
and the Holocaust. Inevitably the book describes, in unflinching detail, the
atmosphere of hatred stoked up by the Nazis against the Jews, which, as the
1930s wore on, affected many Germans, who, until that period, had existed
peacefully with the Jews. Meyerhoff’s mother (who, despite living in America
for decades, could never master the ‘foreign tongue’ and preferred to speak in
her native German) used a German word to describe what was happening in Germany
at the time. ‘The Nazis took over,’ she said, ‘and we began to feel, in our
bones, Gleichschaltung.’
Meyerhoff requested her mother to translate Gleichschaltung into English. The mother
had to consult her German-English dictionary and discovered that the word, like
many other German words, packed in complicated concepts for which there was no
equivalent word in English, and could be translated into it only by a long,
train-car type, series of words. This was how Gleichschaltung was translated into English:
‘The forced and mindless
joining in lockstep with the crowd.’
One hopes that the indecent, disrespectful (and agrammatical)
children’s colouring book and its message—despite the protestations of the
publishers—full of distortions, crude generalizations, lies and xenophobia, which
tries to demonize a section of its society, are not a symptom of an underlying
sick society. (There is always the possibility that the Guardian goes out of
its way to ferret out fringe happenings and publishes them, which gives an opportunity to people like me to feel outraged about.)
