Four Lions and the right to offend

Some Muslims are gearing up to be offended by Chris Morris’ Four Lions. Others will be having a good old laugh

“Muslim Protest at Jihadist Film” – I can see the headlines already. Despite no release date having been fixed, the predictions of a furore around Four Lions have already begun. For those that have not yet seen the clip or heard about the plot, Four Lions is a British farce about four suicide bombers from Sheffield.

It isn’t surprising that one expects there to be a backlash from the “angry Muslim” brigade. In this age of instant digital media, the tools to generate anger are readily available. There is now a regular cottage industry of forwarding texts and emails with the latest “insult to Islam”. The unfortunate trend is led by a minority who use social networking to whip up anger at trivial things like a New York store front being shaped like a cube (They Are Insulting Mecca!). If one examines these topics of “Muslim anger” they are not all the same. Some are geopolitical or local conflicts that have a religious dimension. Others are incidents of attacks on Muslims. The globalised context means that riots in Nigeria or mosque attacks in Moscow are instantly in our inbox. It doesn’t help that the right-wing tabloids continue to highlight stories of the latest heinous act committed by Muslims/migrants/Asians/asylum seekers/terrorists (it is all the same to them). Whether a tabloid editor or a generator of Muslim spam, each group is taking part a self-reinforcing cycle of outrage.

Four Lions doesn’t challenge any fundamental principle of Islam. The film deals with Muslims who have a deviant interpretation of the religion; it satirises those who kill themselves in order to murder others. If some fear that the film will demonise Muslims, my perspective is that suicide bombers and their extremist cheerleaders have already done that rather well.

But Muslims groups on the whole are getting more sophisticated at reacting, or not, to the latest manufactured controversy. They are beginning to understand that with freedom of speech comes the freedom to offend. Alongside this, there is also an awareness that culture, as well as reflecting reality, is meant to challenge us. Gilbert and George have exhibitions of photos of excrement and are expected to be taken seriously. Four Lions should be seen more in the tradition of “The Great Dictator” by Chaplin rather than “The Life of Brian”.

Personally I predict Chris Morris’s use of comedy and satire to undermine jihadi extremism will be so successful the government will try to co-opt this as a strand in its counter-extremism strategy. As well as prevent and pursue, we may also have piss-take.

At its core, Four Lions does deal with a sinister topic, and some will feel uncomfortable at it being satirised. However, this is what Chris Morris does. I asked a Muslim friend who had seen the film what he thought and he said “I have mixed feeling about it, its laugh-out-loud funny, but you sort of feel sad that these sort of people [suicide bombers] are around in the first place.”

On Monday, on Radio 4, Screen International critic David D’Arcy said of the film, “It will offend all sorts of people: It will offend the British; it will offend Muslims; it will offend jihadists.”

It takes a certain amount of self confidence to laugh at ourselves, and the coming few months will see how confident, as a community, British Muslims can be.

The title is a reference to Lord of the Rings, where, after having saved Middle Earth from the forces of Evil, our heroes return home to find their own Shire has been laid to waste, and mischief being played.  I live half a mile from the childhood haunts of Tolkien, and the Boras were fed a diet of Tolkien.  [Actually one sister has not finished 'Lord of The Rings', but we sort of ignore that - like having a carnivore in a family of vegans.]

As a preamble, see the article below from the Islamophobia Watch site.

Muslim councillors ‘frozen out’ of extremism fight

Muslim councillors are being frozen out of Birmingham’s efforts to clamp down on Islamist terrorism according to Sparkbrook councillor Salma Yaqoob. The local authority was awarded £500,000 as part of the government’s “pathfinder” Preventing Extremism project last year – and has now been given an additional £2.4 million under the three year Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) programme. Yaqoob’s beef is that all this cash is being spent by city officials without reference to elected Muslim representatives.

She raised the issue at a recent Council meeting where she said, “many projects have taken place in wards without the consultation and participation of ward members and without accountability to the local communities through the ward structures.” And she asked, “How will the existing structures which bring transparency and accountability … be utilised in any planning for this programme?”

The response to her request for “transparency and accountability” was to be told that she “misunderstands” the Council’s role – which could be explained to her in a private meeting with the Cabinet Minister for Equalities Alan Rudge. “This is public money,” said an outraged Yaqoob. “The way it’s being spent should be discussed in public. It should all be transparent.”

A case in point is a major anti-extremism conference organised by Aston-based management consultants Waterhouse in October (see link here). The event includes an address by reformed radical Ed Hussain, who Yaqoob argues is a divisive figure, more likely to stir up anger than heal wounds. “He is somebody who doesn’t want dialogue, he wants to close down dialogue,” she said. She believes that she and her fellow Muslim councillors would have been unlikely to ask him to attend – but of course, they weren’t asked.

Yaqoob again tried to take up the lack of democratic accountability at a cross-party meeting of Muslim councillors and community officials earlier this week – only for one city official to warn her that what she was doing was “against procedure”. He warned that he would “report her” (!) to Mike Whitby and Alan Rudge, and stormed out of the meeting. Although he eventually returned – 15 minutes later – the official is now the subject of a complaint.

“This is really worrying,” Yaqoob said. “Some officers don’t seem to realise that their job is to act in accordance with what councillors want – not the other way around. “The real issue here is that councillors are the elected representatives of the people and we have the contacts and the knowledge.”

Birmingham City Council have been invited to respond.

Interesting feature on Algerian-French author Faïza Guène.

In theory, France follows the republican model of integration where everyone is equal. ….But there’s something more subtle and dangerous, a neo-colonialist feeling that still infuses society … It’s not about racism, it’s about treating people differently.” Having foreign roots is like “a defect, a complex because we’re always being pulled back to that fact, reduced to it”. Being poor plus having foreign roots is a double smear, she says.

The US is also reaching out the French suburbs.

Anulling…
Muslim couple have had a marriage anulled because the lady it seems was not a virgin.
A French Muslim couple have opposed a government decision to contest a court ruling annulling their marriage because the bride lied about being a virgin. This has caused all manner of fuss. Have a read.

Inciting…
Bardot guilty of inciting racial hatred … again
Brigitte Bardot was yesterday found guilty of provoking discrimination and inciting racial hatred with a letter lambasting the influence of Islam on French culture. The 73-year-old former actor was not in the Paris court to hear the ruling and may well have viewed the result as a forgone conclusion. This was her fifth conviction for inciting racial hatred.

The aim of this workshop is to explore the analytical value of Islamophobia and its limitations. To this end, we will address a number of key questions.

• How was the phenomena that Islamophobia seeks to conceptualise dealt with prior to the formation of the concept?
• What is it that the category of Islamophobia brings to the table- is it useful and if so why?
• How would a consistent and clearer understanding of Islamophobia help?
• How does Islamophobia relate to others of social exclusion?
• What is the relationship between Islamophobia and racism?

Chris Allen wrote a piece in preparation last week on his blog.

It is these unaccounted for grey areas that have contributed to a climate where those such as the BNP have found favour and gained an increasingly listened to voice. One result of this was that in 2006′s local elections, where the BNP won 11 of the 13 seats they contested in Barking & Dagenham. Making history through being the first time that a far-right political party has ever been the official opposition in any council chamber in Britain, on the evening of the first Barking and Dagenham council meeting attended by the BNP an Afghan man was repeatedly stabbed outside Barking tube station, his body left on the pavement draped in the union flag.

Since the writing of the above piece, the BNP have gained a seat in the London Assembly, and have kept their seat on the council in Solihull. The BBC have some analysis here.

The tendency for the wider public to ignore academic gatherings can be placed firmly at the publishers of the book Von-IgelFeld trilogy By Alexander McCall Smith. However, I think the symposium above will come out with some interesting findings. It cannot have come at a better time.

There has been a spate of Muslimbashing in the media in the UK following comments made by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The root issue is Muslim arbitration courts, as explained by Riazat Butt here
www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,2254952,00.html

The link to a recent channel 4 programme on shariah courts is here
http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/divorce.html

The BBC radio 4 documentary that was recently repeated, on arbitration courts, has an associated web page here. Please note the podcast download on the page may be for a different episode.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/law_in_action/6191416.stm

Another interesting and relevant paper if one can get hold of it is “UNTYING THE KNOT: Muslim Women,Divorce & the Shariah” by Dr. Sonia Nurin Shah-Kazemi. A review of it is here
http://www.salaam.co.uk/books/show_mini_review.php?book_id=94&review_id=25