SO CERTAIN moderate Muslims are now suggesting that devout women can take off their shrouds and walk free in God’s sunshine. How very magnanimous of them. It turns out that rigging yourself up like a parrot’s cage with the covering on is less to do with flaunting your devilish female charms and thus inflaming bestial male passion, as we were told, than allowing Muslim women to go “unmolested”. So now, if wearing the hijab means women will be molested by us nasty infidels, they can go without.
I don’t know which theory is the most rubbish; the first implies that all women in their natural states — ie, when not shrouding the bodies God gave them from head to toe — are sluts, and all men sex-crazed savages.
And as for allowing women to go unmolested . . . words fail me. The fact is that most Muslim women who are beaten, raped or killed — as with all women — are beaten, raped and killed by their own husbands, in their own homes, not by slavering strangers up dark alleyways. And on top of that, Muslim women also have to contend with so-called “honour” killings from their male cousins, brothers, sons and fathers. Yep, the hijab really does a great job of protecting them there! Further afield, the word of women in Sharia courts is worth exactly half that of men, even in rape cases. In Iran 9-year-old girls may be hanged — the age is 12 for boys. It’s great how the hijab stops its wearers from being unfairly put upon, innit!
Of course the profoundly creepy-sounding Assembly for the Protection of Hijab has rejected Dr Zaki Badawi’s suggestion. And no doubt the usual Western apologists for Islamofascism will now be pointing out with great excitement that “Muslim women choose to wear the veil”. So what! Women choose lots of dumb and wicked things, as men do. Women preside over the genital mutilation of baby girls in many countries. There are women who stay in abusive relationships for decades, and women who exchange passionate correspondence with brutal serial killers. That doesn’t make it big or right.
I would like to think that the female Uncle Toms — Aunt Fatimas? — who espouse the half-life of the hijab are far less representative of brave, compassionate Muslim womanhood than the brilliant comic Shazia Mirza, who jokes that the veil comes in very handy for those days when a girl just doesn’t have time to Immac her moustache. Or of Bushra Nasir, the headmistress of an Islamic school in East London, responding to the the findings of a recent YouGov poll that claimed that 32 per cent of British Muslims questioned thought that British society was immoral and sexually decadent, and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end: “If 32 per cent of young Muslim men really do believe that British society is immoral and must be brought to an end, then I ask myself, if they hate it so much, why do they live here?”
Muslim women seem blessed with great strength and fortitude, not to mention modesty — a fine quality, so long as it does not become mania or smugness. But what a view Islam has of its own women, and what a sad gap between the genders there seems to be, that some young men consider their female co-religionists such shocking bores that they would rather blow themselves up and die in order to hang out with 72 virgins rather than stay alive and enjoy the pleasures of living, breathing, imperfect female companionship. Looking at it that way, the drunken high-jinks of the lads and lassies of Faliraki doesn’t seem half so bad. Better to die decadent than moribund any day; better to pig out on life than to choose death. And far, far better to feel the sun on your face than live your life in the shadows of some imagined sin.
Kick that labrador puppy
I CAN’T BELIEVE there was once a time when I liked Jamie Oliver. “Ooo, isn’t he lovely! Like a big gorgeous golden labrador puppy!” I’d simper sickeningly whenever he faffed his way across the TV screen, flirting with his granny and hanging out in a loft so achingly hip that it obviously couldn’t belong to a semi-detached bourgeois cornball like him. Now every time I see him shove that ham sandwich down his big fat yap, I hope it chokes him.
Preferably in front of his lovely wife and kiddies. Look at that tongue on him — talk about helping the poor, you could feed the five thousand with that thing alone.
Oliver basically passed on any right to be taken seriously the day he took the Sainsbury’s shilling; it sounds puritanical, but I’m of the same opinion as Bill Hicks that the day you are first paid to advertise something, you lose the right to be believed on anything, ever again. And now the clown goes and points out that children in South African townships eat better than British schoolkids. He doesn’t appear to notice that this contradicts his message that you are what you eat, and that good eating habits somehow go hand in hand with success in life.
South African children may well eat better than ours — but will their lives be better? No. Where you get to and what you achieve in life is still, shamefully, largely dependent on where you start off, and this is as true of social class as it is of race or of the global pecking order. And the quality of what you eat is neither here nor there; the menu at our top public schools wouldn’t pass muster in Wormwood Scrubs, yet the boys who eat it go on to rule this country, as they always have. And when we look at our greatest sportsmen, particularly footballers, they are to a man working-class boys who have grown up eating the same stodge as everyone else on their estate.
The simple fact is that you are not what you eat. You are where you’re born, you are how rich your parents are, you are where you went to school, what you are lucky enough to be handed on a plate. Only last week Ruth Kelly admitted that the gap of achievement between the richest and poorest children was bigger than ever. The idea that all that is stopping working-class children from achieving is that their dumb working-class parents are stuffing them with Turkey Twizzlers — rather than the whole rotten system of class, privilege and nepotism — is a sickening and dangerous lie.
