Sarfraz Manzoor

Letter from America, well a review actually

2008-04-13T22:41:00.002+01:00

the first full length non-trade review from the US was published today in the Miami Herald and, God love them, they liked it. The review was written by Lisa Arthur. Lessons from the Boss As a Pakistani-born Muslim raised in Britain by oldworld parents, Sarfraz Manzoor would seem unlikely to write a love letter to the music of Bruce Springsteen. But the British journalist's charming and affectionate memoir is exactly that, chronicling his struggles to navigate the territory between the expectations of his strict parents and his own hopes and dreams. At the center of the story is the iconic American rock star whose teenage struggles with a strict working-class father inspired the music that Manzoor would cling to throughout his adolescence in the neighborhood of Bury Park. Greetings From Bury Park (the title is an homage to Springsteen's first album, Greetings From Asbury Park) rises above the predictable coming-of-age genre on the strength of Manzoor's unflinching honesty and his unique world view. He rejects his father's blind allegiance to religious rules and Pakistani traditions, but he never rejects his father. His rebellion is quiet and respectful -- no drug or alcohol binges, no rehab, no destructive behavior. And he poignantly shows how he comes to admire the life his father led even though it wasn't what he chose. In Springsteen's lyrics, Manzoor discovered the courage to want something different and the wisdom that he could forge his own path and still be a good son. He recounts the night, at 16, when he lay in bed, headphones on, and listened to Springsteen for the first time. 'A piercing harmonica announced the start of the first song. `I come from down in the valley,' it began, 'where mister, when you're young, they bring you up to do just like your daddy done.' From those opening words I wanted to know what happened next.'' You don't have to be a Springsteen fan to enjoy this book or understand Manzoor's devotion. You just have to recall a time when you were still open enough that music had the power to shatter the world view you inherited. Manzoor takes us back to that tender place in a vivid way. But he doesn't abandon us there. He takes us along as he journeys to manhood and makes sense of all that teen angst. And he doesn't reject his adolescent obsession from the middle-aged cynicism that sometimes rewrites our personal histories. He embraces the geeky ''nutter'' of a university student who slept on the sidewalk to buy tickets for a Springsteen show as enthusiastically as he embraces the thirtysomething man who overcame his terror of being a Muslim traveling to the U.S. after the 9/11 attacks by taking a trip to see The Rising tour. He celebrates his past and his present equally, honoring one's relation to the other. Ultimately, that's his lesson, and it's a good one.

its just a matter of when

2008-03-29T20:40:00.001Z

from the BBC news website

A fireman has told how he escaped death in a paragliding accident only for a scan to reveal he had terminal cancer. Steve Phillips was a father-to-be when he fell 40ft after his paraglider collapsed at the White Horse in Osmington, Dorset, on 31 July. His then pregnant partner, Becky Taylor, saw the Dorset Fire and Rescue watch manager land on his back. Mr Phillips' daughter was born days later. A tumour in his stomach was diagnosed as Hodgkin's lymphoma two weeks later. The 42-year-old watch manager at Weymouth fire station said he went to hospital for X-rays, which came back clear but "there must have been something [in the X-rays] they didn't like, some sort of shadow". Following the scan, doctors broke the news to Mr Phillips, from Broadwey in Weymouth, that he had terminal lymphatic cancer throughout his body. He has been told there is no cure and has between five and eight years to live.

they dont make 'em like that anymore part 213

2008-03-23T18:56:00.000Z

http://youtube.com/watch?v=pn7TI6iwpqo

if you think that I am a touch Bruce obsessed...

2008-03-14T01:50:00.001Z

A woman snapped and stabbed her partner to death after he objected to her listening to Bruce Springsteen music, a court has been told. The Supreme Court in Brisbane today heard Karen Lee Cooper, 50, used a long-bladed kitchen knife to stab 49-year-old Kevin Watson once in the chest because she "just got tired" of him bossing her around. She pleaded guilty today to manslaughter and was sentenced to eight years in jail. The court was told the pair had been drinking at their rented home at Cedar Vale, south of Brisbane, on July 8, 2006, when an argument broke out over Cooper's choice of music. Defence lawyer Greg Maguire said Cooper experienced a "brain snap" and ran to the kitchen and grabbed a knife, which she used to stab Mr Watson after he said he didn't want to listen to a Bruce Springsteen CD. "I mean, who the hell doesn't like Bruce Springsteen, for God's sake?" she later told arresting police.

on 'redacted'

2008-03-12T12:44:00.000Z

Brian De Palma has described his latest film ‘Redacted’ as ‘a fictional documentary’. It is a term which while seemingly oxymoronic also feels grimly appropriate since it is set in Iraq and depicts a war that many would argue was itself based on an untruth. ‘Redacted’ refers to the process of editing to prepare for publishing, the verb ‘redacted’ is often used to describe documents or imagers from which sensitive information has been removed. The film was inspired by the true story (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abeer_Qassim_Hamza) of a fourteen year old Iraqi girl who was raped, shot in the face and burned along with other members of her family by American soldiers two years ago. In plotline at least ‘Redacted’ recalls De Palma’s Vietnam era ‘Casualties of War’ but that film was made fourteen years after the end of the conflict. The films that Hollywood made about Vietnam- Apocalypse Now, Platoon, First Blood- served to provide some historical perspective to that particular military misadventure. ‘Redacted’ is one of a clutch of films- Paul Haggis’ ‘In the Valley of Elah’ and Nick Broomfield’s (http://www.nickbroomfield.com/haditha.html) ‘Battle for Haditha’ are others- that are being released in the midst of a continuing war and one which is the first major military conflict to have unfolded in the multimedia age. The young soldiers who came to Baghdad and Basra arrived armed with weapons of mass communication: mobile phones that could record video footage and internet enabled laptops. If television brought the Vietnam war into the living room, the Iraq war is being brought home through mobile phone footage uploaded onto YouTube and the soldiers blogs. It is the preponderance of such material online and its paucity in the mainstream media which inspired Brian De Palma. ‘Redacted’ is then like Paul Haggis’ ‘In the Valley of Elah’ an example how film-makers are borrowing from other genres and media. The mockumentary is not new as those who recall Spinal Tap and The Blair Witch Project will confirm and more recently ‘Cloverfield’ and ‘Diary of the Dead’ have both strained for authenticity by claiming to be the products of found footage. But what De Palma and to a lesser degree Haggis have done is different. In Haggis’ film mobile phone footage recorded by Tommy Lee Jones’ soldier son in Iraq brought the brutal truth about the war home to his father. De Palma’s film owes something to the 2006 documentary The War Tapes which gave a soldier’s eye view of Iraq thorugh footage that three troopers filmed themselves. In ‘Redacted’ De Palma offers a collage of styles and clips: a soldier’s personal video, news footage, Iraqi insurgent website and even the beheading of an American soldier. Since the film’s backers were worried about legal problems the director was forced to change some details about the actual events. De Palma had wanted to end the film with a photograph of the actual young girl who had been raped but was forced to show a staged photograph prompting complaints that his own film had been ‘redacted’. In order to get the film made De Palma filmed on a budget of only five million dollars using unknown actors. The director has been utterly unequivoval as to his reasons for why he made the film telling journalists ‘I did this film because I believe that if we as a country are going to cause such disorder we must also be prepared to face the horrendous images that result from these events.’ He must wonder if he should have bothered as the critical and commerical response (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/dec/02/iraq.film) in the United States has been, to say the least mixed with one right wing critic (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP6_Dm9gLzU) dubbing it as ‘the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I mean, the out and out worst, most disgusting, most hateful, most incompetent, most revolting, most loathsome, most reprehensible cinematic work I’ve ever encountered.’ I saw the film earlier this week. Having read advance notices I knew that I should expect ‘Redacted’ to be distressing viewing and I imagined that it might be a film to admire for its directorial flair. But while it is unquestionably distressing ‘Redacted’ is not only an indictment of how war can brutalise young minds, it also offers a damming verdict on the mainstream media’s reporting from Iraq. In part this is because the use of embedded journalists which while perhaps necessary given the dangerous situation (http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/Iraq/Iraq_danger.html) in Iraq means that the media has to rely on the military for access. In Vietnam the media was not controlled to that same degree and thus the media’s reporting from that war was, some claim, influential in turning the American public against the war. ‘In Vietnam we saw the images and the sorrow of the people we were traumatizing and killing’ De Palma has said ‘we saw soldiers wounded and brought back in body bags. We see none of that in this war.’ The US Army also recently forbade its soldiers access to YouTube (emails and videophone messages still get through) but even now there are some disturbing clips available online. In one clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq5_vG3cYGM) a couple of American soldiers persuade young Iraqi children to say ‘Fuck Iraq’ and ‘I love pork’. ‘Aren’t you a Muslim’ asks one of the soldiers to a young boy. ‘I thought Muslims weren’t allowed to eat pork.. doesn’t that make you a dirty little heathen bastard Muslim?’ Elsewhere on the internet (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1ync1wDIec) you can watch Corporal Joshua Belile singing a self-penned song called ‘Hadji Girl’ about a soldier who falls in love with an Iraqi girl, but then is ambushed by the family when he goes to meet them. In the song Belile sings that ‘hid behind the TV/ And I locked and loaded my M-16/ And I blew those little fuckers to eternity.’ James Blunt this ain’t. De Palma’s film concerns a group of soldiers who one night, drunk, high and horny, leave their compound and with pre-planned precision rape and kill a teenage Iraqi girl. I had worried that using a collage of different styles would make it hard to emotionally engage with the film but in fact the technique works brilliantly well not least because as well as the US soldiers’s video footage De Palma also recreates Islamist websites where the kidnapping and killing of Americans is celebrated. ‘What I’m trying to do’ the director has said ‘is to make the viewer aware of the techniques that are used to present supposedly the truth to them. They sit there and watch their television screens, and see these embedded reporters and infomercials from Iraq, and how well things are going in Iraq, and they think that’s the truth. In anything on television, somebody is selling something – whether it’s a product, whether it’s a policy.’ Colby Buzzell is a 31 year old former soldier in the US Army whose My War blog (http://cbftw.blogspot.com/) has been turned into an acclaimed book. When I spoke to him from his home in California he told me that during his time in Iraq he had witnessed similar incidents to the one with the Iraqi boys being made to say ‘I love pork’ but that it was mostly a function of being bored and also ‘sometimes you don’t even know what you are doing, what you have become.’ It is that process of dehumanisation that De Palma captures in ‘Redacted’. ‘The media has just got lazy’ Buzzell told me ‘so you have the soldiers doing the job that the reporters should be doing’. De Palma’s critics have claimed that his film gives succour to America’s enemies. The Fox News presenter Bill O’Reilly (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPn-TD9-VBM) claimed that the film ‘will incite young Muslim men…to act on their hatred. If just one of those men straps on a bomb vest and murders people, that is on Brian De Palma.’ Buzzell, who spent one year in Iraq for the army, disagrees saying ‘there is nothing more American than questioning our government’ while De Palma himself has said that ‘the true story of the war in Iraq has been redacted from the mainstream corporate media. The pictures are what will stop the war. If we get these pictures and stories in front of a mass audience, maybe it will do something.’ ‘Redacted’ is not a perfect film but it is essential viewing for it reminds us that five years on from the invasion of Iraq we are still not being given the full picture.

news you're unlikely to see on the front page

2008-03-11T09:23:00.001Z

(from BBC News website) The number of fatal stabbings in London has dropped by 15%, figures have shown. There were 68 knife murders carried out between April 2006 to January 2007, compared with 58 during the same period in 2007/8. Overall knife crime was down by 15.7% with 10,200 offences recorded in 2006/7 compared with 8,600 the year after, the Metropolitan Police (Met) data showed. Last year, 26 teenagers were killed on the streets of London - 17 of them were stabbed to death.

the kindness of strangers (Dutch TV version)

2008-03-07T11:49:00.000Z

Dutch public broadcaster BNN deliberately misled viewers in a film clip about a woman in a burqa. The station's youth channel showed a woman who dropped a bag of oranges being helped immediately by passers-by. Then the same woman, when wearing a burqa, was shown receiving no help. But rival Amsterdam broadcaster AT5 filmed the incident and proved deception. Many passers-by who did offer help the woman in the burqa were asked to walk on by. (Via NisNews)

mumbai- Matthew D'Ancona's Spectator diary

2008-03-07T08:41:00.002Z

This is from the current issue of the Spectator. Its by Matthew D'Ancona, editor of the magazine and someone whom I met and had a great time with in Mumbai. A city where the children dash from car to car selling novels is the perfect place for a literary festival: on the way from the airport, snaking past shantytowns and catching my first glimpse of the Arabian Sea, I am offered The Kite Runner by street urchins knocking on the window of my taxi. It is a good location for another reason, which is that, like New York or Rome, Mumbai is a place one visits in literature and film many times before setting foot on the island city itself. In its crush of people, colour, sensuality, surrealism and politics, it is Midnight's Children or a Bollywood double-bill suddenly made flesh. I am here to talk about British politics and fiction, doing my best not to confuse the two. A few days before departure, I see the PM at No. 10 and mention my impending trip. True to form, the big clunking bibliomane reels off a list of books I should read before I go. In Mumbai, I unpack my suitcase and look out of the window to the Gateway of India, through which, in 1947, the last British troop left the Empire. A copy of Gordon's top recommendation, Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi, sits reproachfully on the table, still pristine and unread. The Kitab festival is the latest brainchild of Pablo Ganguli, a 24-year-old wunderkind and cultural entrepreneur who occasionally wears blue contact lenses: think young Oscar meets Malcolm McLaren. On the first night we are whisked off to see a new play by Meher Pestonji, Feeding Crows, which deals artfully with the tensions between religious devotion and social ambition. Specifically, the Parsi characters agonise over the Zoroastrian belief that the dead bodies should be left exposed to the elements for the vultures to pick clean: barbarous superstition or a mystical way of returning the body to nature? Over biryani after the show, an elderly guest shows me her Parsi amulet and explains that the ritual is still very important to her people. As one of the play's characters says, Mumbai is a 'very civilised jungle'. To Chandri Villa, once a home to the Gandhian movement in Bombay, now scheduled for demolition. One of its occupants, the Hindustani singer and poet Anand Thakore, recites a beautiful poem about the villa. 'And the very stillness of these trees carries me past an April, ' he intones. 'Long dead, newly strewn with banyan-leaves.' We are silent and thoughtful: the ghosts of the past swirl in the room. Then one of our mobiles fizzes into life with a text: Liverpool 3, Middlesbrough 2! Game over for the poetry, I'm afraid. Supper at Leopold's on Colaba Causeway, where I eat the best fish curry I have ever tasted. This is the old gangster hang-out made famous by Gregory Roberts in his autobiographical novel Shantaram, and it hovers now, in the true spirit of Mumbai, between edgy authenticity and the make-believe of a film set. Splendidly, there is a tiny corner of the café set aside with the scornful sign: 'This is for non-smokers'. Then it's back to the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, which is the loveliest hotel I have ever stayed in. Late coffee by the pool with Adrian Gill and Nicola Formby, who explain the wonders and hazards of street food. I had not realised that Adrian is the model for the scary restaurant critic, Anton Ego, in Ratatouille. Excellent: this will give me Pixar cred with my young sons. I do my bit on Sunday, in a session moderated by star broadcaster Nikki Bedi (nicknamed the 'glocal girl' because of her Anglo-Indian heritage). There's a high level of political knowledge in the audience. Thatcher, Blair, Brown: these are names that resonate in the world's largest democracy. So too, I'm delighted to discover, does the masthead of The Spectator, and it is a privilege to meet several long-term subscribers to the magazine, Mumbaikers who want to know more about Taki, Rod Liddle and Tamzin Lightwater. Before the session Nikki threatens to invite all the contributors to sum up their lives in six words. Luckily, we run out of time before she gets to ask me. (I was going to suggest as my six-word summation: 'Can You Repeat the Question, Please?') Sarfraz Manzoor of the Guardian is more candid during his Q&A with Nikki, suggesting: 'Born in Pakistan, Made in Britain.' His memoir, Greetings from Bury Park, is the best book I have read on modern British identity, and explores its theme through the unexpected prism of Bruce Springsteen's music. This leads to much late-night discussion on pop culture and identity. I end up spending a fortune on Springsteen downloads. 'No one said wisdom came cheap, ' says my new guru. Speaking of identity, Indra Sinha, the Bookernominated author of Animal's People, has heard I have co-written two books on early Christianity, and asks: 'Is it true you are a member of Opus Dei?' I am tempted to point to an imaginary cilice and wince, but decide instead to put Indra's mind at rest. He tells me about the remarkable campaigning work he is doing for the victims of Bhopal, many of whom still suffer horribly, 24 years after the Union Carbide disaster. There is something in the idea that India has simply leapfrogged the 20th century. Astonishing wealth and technological brilliance sit cheek-by-jowl with unspeakable poverty, nowhere more so than in Mumbai. Real estate is more expensive than in Manhattan; yet a walk to the nearest cashpoint is a pageant in human misery as beggars and amputees plead for pitiful sums. There are Ferraris under floodlights. But you look at the terrible roads and wonder where you could drive them. Many such questions assail the first-time visitor. But easily the most pressing is: when will I be back?

the white season

2008-03-03T18:56:00.000Z

British television tends to treat the white working class as one might a wealthy but embarrassing relative: it is both reliant on and rather mortified by it. Perhaps because television remains essentially a middle-class industry, the depiction of white working-class lives can often be almost hateful. See a working-class person depicted on television, and they are most likely to be either a slut, stupid or a slob - think Little Britain's Vicky Pollard. Television controllers want their channels to be aspirational, forward-looking and youthful; the lives of, say, the members of a working men's club outside Bradford are not lives that commissioning editors are usually interested in. In the past few years, however, with the orthodoxy on multiculturalism unravelling, and the arrival of a new wave of immigrants from eastern Europe, their grumblings have begun to be noticed. In recognition of both their increased political significance and their relative invisibility on television, BBC2 is devoting a series of programmes, the White season, to the lives of the white working class. According to the commissioning editor Richard Klein, the aim of the season is to "question what has happened to Britain's white working class during a sustained period of great change which has swept the country ... there is a clear mood that their voices aren't being heard." The uncredited inspiration for the season is Michael Collins's acclaimed biography of the white working class, The Likes of Us, in which the writer, himself from a working-class background, set out to explore how a community went from being the salt of the earth to being considered the scum of the earth. Collins followed his award-winning book with an excellent Channel 4 documentary. But while the BBC season may not be wholly original it is nonetheless brave and compelling viewing. Among the programmes in it are White Girl, a one-off drama written by Abi Morgan, and Rivers of Blood, which reassesses Enoch Powell's controversial speech. There are also documentaries on the impact of Polish immigrants and about a Birmingham primary school that has pupils from 17 different ethnic backgrounds. The recurring theme throughout the different programmes is a sense of unease and apprehension at the rapid changes that immigration has had on long-established white communities. The films in the season tend to portray the white working class as resolutely illiberal, but this is a fashionable but selective interpretation of modern history. In Rivers of Blood, for example, we are told about all those who marched in support of Enoch Powell but the working-class whites who protested against him receive less attention. As was shown by the fallout from Powell's speech and the demonstrations against the National Front in the 70s, there is a long and proud tradition of white working-class activism, but this story of solidarity and support is rarely heard and it is a disappointing omission from the White season. The undoubted highlights of the season are two brilliant documentaries that focus on two communities in Bradford and Barking. Henry Singer's Last Orders is a sensitive, elegiac film that follows the members of Wibsey Working Men's Club outside Bradford. The US director, best known for his acclaimed Channel 4 documentary 9/11: The Falling Man, spent six months in Yorkshire and the result is a rich, complex depiction of lives rarely shown on television. The members of the working men's club were once staunch Labour voters, now they flirt with the BNP. They call themselves "the forgotten people" and although they are referring to politics, they could also be talking about the media. Because he spent so much time at the club, and not always with his camera, Singer's film is extraordinarily intimate and moving; we see how vital such clubs are to fostering a community's identity and the potential dangers when those ties are severed. The young in Wibsey do not attend the club, and in searching for an identity they settle upon racism, just as a few miles from them young Asians, also anchorless, are locking on to an Islamic identity. Singer's great skill is in ensuring that even though we know that the characters hold repellent views, we still have some sympathy for them. Although he is not onscreen there is no doubt that Last Orders is an authored documentary. Singer never challenges any of the interviewees while he is filming and he often makes his contribution in commentary rather than confrontation. Marc Isaacs, by contrast, has no qualms about questioning, interrupting and even constructing events for his Storyville documentary All White in Barking. Isaacs spent a year filming in east London and the film, more optimistic and wittier than Last Orders, skilfully illuminates the absurdity of racism. We meet one character who is happy to admit that he would rather not live next door to a black family and then we learn that his own grandson is mixed-race, while another daughter is dating a mixed-race boyfriend. Isaacs is not afraid to challenge and provoke the characters, and even organises a dinner party for a white couple to meet their black neighbours. Although we know that many of the characters in his documentary are BNP sympathisers, he reveals how thin the crust of racism can be; it is often not racism at all but rather bewilderment, ignorance and frustration. These are communities that have seen huge changes, changes that the local whites were not consulted about and now, as they try to negotiate their way in this new reality, they find themselves abandoned by their political leaders and largely invisible in the media. Isaac told me that he did not think anyone other than the BBC would have commissioned All White in Barking, and Singer paid tribute to Richard Klein's willingness to give Last Orders a running time of 90 minutes. While the BBC should be congratulated for taking a risk in commissioning these documentaries, the White season also represents some missed opportunities. Isaacs may claim that Channel 4 would not commission a film such as his on Barking, but when they did commission a documentary on the white working class they did at least ask someone from that tribe - Collins - to write and present it. The BBC's season looks suspiciously like yet another example of middle-class people making programmes about the working class. Abi Morgan's White Girl is especially troubling in this respect. The drama is about an 11-year-old girl who belongs to the last white family in a Bradford neighbourhood and shocks them by being drawn towards Islam. White Girl is essentially a dramatised version of a Channel 4 documentary The Last White Kids, which was broadcast five years ago and featured a young white girl who lived in an overwhelmingly Asian area and started showing an interest in Islam. It is hard to know what purpose dramatising this true story serves and indeed it feels a touch exploitative; to make a full-length drama that borrows so blatantly from real life leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth. It is also unnecessary; as both Last Orders and All White in Barking prove, reality is more powerful, moving and funny than any fiction.

mumbai- a conversation

2008-02-27T19:23:00.002Z

I walk into a store selling old stuff, statuues of many-armed Hindu gods and cracked fading Buddhas. Where did you get all this stuff, I ask the owner. Don't ask, he says. Seriously though, how old is this stuff. He looks at me, nods me inside the store. See this one here, its fifth century he says pointing at an old stone statue. How much, I ask. Five hundred dollars. Where did you get it all from. Archeological digs. Much of this stuff ends up in Europe. There is a lot of Hindu and Buddhist stuff here, and I see you have some Christian statues too. Yes, those Jesus statues are from Goa. How old are they? About nineteenth century. So pretty old then? Yes but you wanted really old that was why I showed those Hindu items. Do you have any Islamic stuff? Are you Muslim? Yes, I am. Then forget about all this bullshit. Don't buy it, I won't even sell it to you. I am in the wrong business, I need to get out. Don't even think about putting this into your house. I had no idea you were Muslim. Listen, this life is bullshit. The only thing that matters is that happens next. This is just the waiting room to the next life. They say its death but its not, its just a transfer my friend. Don't fear death, its the door that opens to the next life. All this you see in this life, its bullshit. Its the next life you need to be preparing for. How could you even think about buying this stuff?

mumbai photographs

2008-02-25T12:26:00.003Z

maximum city part 1

2008-02-23T22:19:00.002Z

An invitation to appear at the Kitab book festival has given me the opportunity to visit Mumbai for the first time. Some years ago I spent New Year in Goa and until now that was my only taste of India. I arrived yesterday lunchtime after a flight which left London just after eight in the evening Thursday. Rather disconcertingly I only got my visa allowing me to travel at four in the afternoon; being of Pakistani origin is not especially helpful when trying to travel to India. The festival organisers arranged accomodation in the fabulous Taj Mahal hotel which is on the very southern edge of the city. Wandering around the city by foot today what struck me was how comfortable it felt to here, I had expected traffic madness and noise and hustle and bustle and all of that is present and correct. But having spent time in Lahore and Karachi it doesnt feel like hard work having to negotiate crossing the road and, in my very limited experience of Mumbai so far, some of the things I saw in Pakistan are noticeable by their absence. Its interesting for example to see Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs all in one city- I did not see that in Pakistan. There are also many more European and American- lets me blunt, white- visitors than I saw in Pakistan. The other key difference is that here you see women on the streets and in mixed sex groups. In Pakistan there are far more women in purdah, not all by any means but the idea of mixing between men and women is more difficult in public and that seemed to create an unhealthy tension in the air. Mumbai has the biggest slum in Asia, so i have been told, and I am hoping to take a look at that while I am in the city.

on Amis

2008-02-03T14:00:00.000Z

Dangerous things, thought experiments. It was, after all, during a thought experiment that Martin Amis’ unreined mind ventured into territory that led to accusations that the author was guilty of racism. ‘There is a definite urge- don’t you have it?- to say that the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’ Amis told an interviewer. ‘What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan…discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.’ Amis protested that he was not advocating such measures, only conducting a ‘thought experiment’ but not everyone was persuaded of the distinction. The author was denounced by Terry Eagleton who likened his comments to the ‘ramblings of a BNP thug’, he was accused by the columnist Yasmin Alibai Brown for ‘being with.. the Muslim baiters and haters’ and he was attacked by the novelist Ronan Benett for 'as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time'. So, dangerous things, thought experiments. It is impossible then to read Martin Amis’ newly published collection of essays, fiction and reviews about September 11 and its consequences, without acknowledging the toxic fallout from Amis’ radioactive musings. ‘The Second Plane’ does not land on our desks from a clear and blue sky; it arrives from a sky fuggy with ugly accusations and denials. How one feels about the book rather depends on how one feels about Martin Amis and how one feels about Martin Amis partly depends on whether one thinks he is a racist. When Amis says that he is not a racist, I believe him. That is, I believe that he believes he is not a racist. But while Amis may not be a bigot, he does appear, on the evidence of his writings in ‘The Second Plane’ to view the world through binary lenses. ‘Weirdly, the world suddenly feels bipolar’ he notes in the first piece in the book, written only a week after the attacks on New York and Washington. This bipolarity- between religion and reason, terror and boredom- suits Amis the novellist as it provides him with a subject almost grand enough to withstand his glinting prose. Indeed, as I mentioned recently on Newsnight Review, Amis treats September 11 as if it were primarily a literary challenge, as if the duty of this supremely gifted author was to find and if necessary create words equal to the task of conveying the magnitude of the event. And so there is much elaborate phrase making in ‘The Second Plane’; September 11 was, we learn, ‘the worldflash of the coming future’, elsewhere we meet ‘molten mullahs’, a ‘cake in the rain’ handsome Ian Paisley and Amis describes sensing a ‘new vibration or frequency from a planetary shimmer.’ September 11 may have provided him with a fresh subject towards which to direct his formidable talent but it also exposed the two sides of Martin Amis. As Johann Hari noted in his excellent interview with the author there is one Martin Amis who is ‘the nuclear-disarming multiracialist who remembers his Muslim girlfriends with a sweet smile’. This is the author who can tell Hari that ‘I am protective of our multi-racial society..look at London, this amazing multiracial city, but there’s a few miserable bastards, who through an absolutely vile brew of dreams of impotence, or omnipotence, and sadism, and the love of blood and sadism and horror, are going to ruin it for us.’ I like this Amis, I think we would get on. This Amis told the Independent last year that ‘a Pakistani immigrant, in Boston, can say "I am an American", and all he is doing is stating the obvious. Can his equivalent, in Bradford, say the equivalent thing in the equivalent way? Britain needs to become what America has always been - an immigrant society.’ And I can agree and applaud every word. But there is another nastier Amis, and he appears to have written most of ‘The Second Plane’; this Amis wants airport security officals to ‘stick to young men who look like they’re from the Middle East’. (I have news for you Martin- I have spent enough time in secondary inspection in a room that is filled with dreary predictability with dark skinned men to know that they usually do exactly that.) The nasty Marty claims that ‘religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful’ but as David Sexton pointed out in his Evening Standard review ‘this prevents him from discriminating properly between people of faith, between moderate Muslims and extreme Islamists.’ Parviz Khan, who is accused of plotting to behead a British Muslim soldier clearly represents one version of British Islam. It has been his scowling face that has been plastered across the newspapers. But the young soldier who he was planning to execute, he too was a Muslim and his version of Islam led him to join the British army. Who is the truer Muslim? For Amis faith is inherently inferior to rationality. Intellecually one could argue that facts do indeed trump superstition. But I am less convinced that a lack of religious faith makes one less partial to violence, I am not sure history bears this out. Religion may be irrational but, as Jim Al-Khalili argued recently, it can also be progressive. Religion is often the excuse for why individuals are willing to commit atrocity but it is also provided the moral foundation for why millions choose to do good. Amis is keen to remind us that it is not Islam he despises but Islamism but this would be more persuasive if he had more to say on moderate Islam, or indeed believed such a thing existed. He is happy to share his fears about the demographic implications of an increasing Muslim population, and he has claimed that ‘the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male’. But how does he know this? One searches in vain in the pages of ‘The Second Plane’ for any clues that Amis has spent any time talking to Muslims at all; he liberally quotes Lord Rochester, Larkin and FR Leavis but none of these esteemed gentlemen were renowned for their knowledge of the mindset of young Muslims. In a novel such a lack of research has only literary consequences- in the case of John Updike’s novel ‘Terrorist’ the consequence is that the book reeks of inauthenticity- but in a work of non-fiction when the author is aspiring to say important things this failure is more serious and highlights the final bipolarity in Martin Amis- between the literary author and the political analyst. The author can thrive and survive on style but a political analyst must have substance; contrast Amis’ efforts with Jason Burke’s recent piece in the Observer- the first is attention seeking phrase-making, the second heavily researched reportage. The author can employ complicated words but the analyst must offer complex thinking. As a political analyst Amis is disappointing: in an early piece he argues for the development of what he calls ‘species consciousness’ but this appears simply to be a long winded way of saying can’t we all just get along. If only this ‘species consciousness’ could apply more liberally to non jihadist Muslims; time and time again as I read ‘The Second Plane’ with its reference to ‘us’ and ‘we’ I wondered whether Amis could imagine a Muslim in his ‘us’. Although the reviewers have given ‘The Second Plane’ a critical kicking I do not believe Martin Amis is a lost cause and in some important ways he is right. He is right in arguing, as he did in his Newsnight Review that the ideology of multiculturalism had had some damaging consequences and he is surely right in warning of the dangers of Islamism. But in the midst of a war as well as identifying the enemy it is useful to be able to recognise one’s allies. And so when he conflates Islam with the oppression of women, telling the Daily Mail last October that ‘the Koran recommends the beating of women’ or when his friend Christopher Hitchens, in a letter defending Amis, fails to recognise that honour killings and forced marriages are not sanctioned by the Koran but rather are the result of male-biased cultural misinterpretations, its hard to not feel that ‘The Second Plane’ constitutes a missed opportunity. For me the saddest aspect to reading his book was Amis’ failure to comprehend that amongst those who abhor jihadism, who detest it’s ‘irrationalist, misogynist, homophobic, inquisitional, totalitarian and imperialist’ tendencies are many Muslims. Some of them even look like they’re from the Middle East.‘Religion, viewed from a sociological angle, is whatever people make of it. Parts of the Old Testament are full of blood and fire, but they’re not most of Judaism. The New Testament was sometimes imposed on the point of an imperialist sword, but this story isn’t most of Christianity…Islam too..is what its practitioners make of it.’ How encouraging it would have been to reveal that those words were from ‘The Second Plane’ but they are not: they are from an under-reported but thoughtful speech to the New Culture Forum by the Conservative Shadow Minister for Communities and Cohesion Paul Goodman in which he explored what the Government could do to persuade young British Muslims to reject terror. His analysis was rooted in the real world, whereas Amis’ appears second hand. In a letter to the Independent columnist Yasmin Alibai Brown Amis wrote that we (that word again) must ‘build all the bridges we can between ourselves and the Muslim majority, which we know to be moderate. Moderate, and mute.’ To which I can only respond by saying that they are appeared mute Martin because you were too busy reading books to spend any time listening to them. Tempting things, thought experiments. Whilst reading ‘The Second Plane’ I found myself conducting my own thought experiment. What would Martin Amis make if he was to spend any evening with me and some of my Muslim friends? He claimed in an interview with The Times two years ago that ‘moderate Islam is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere it is supine and inaudible.' How would he feel to see the faces of moderate Islam, loud and proud, sitting around him at the dinner table as he ate with my mother and the rest of my family? How would be process the actuality of the time spent? Would he dismiss us as not real Muslims because we do not fanatically cite Koranic verses and are not furiously plotting for the restoration of the Caliphate? I would hope it might persuade Martin Amis that, in the end, the only bipolarities that matter are not between reason and religion but between the reasonable and the unreasonable, the moderates and extremists. Muslims can be reasonable moderates and, sadly, sometimes acclaimed authors can resemble unreasonable extremists.

paperback cover: sneak preview

2008-01-31T20:54:00.000Z

the funny thing about Muslims

2008-01-24T20:13:00.001Z

It is Wednesday evening and inside London’s Hammersmith Apollo the African American comedian Chris Rock is sharing his theory for why black women dislike black men dating white women. ‘Its very simple: black women don’t find white men attractive’ he says ‘a black women will not sleep with most white guys but a black man will near enough f**k any white woman.’ The audience takes a collective intake of breath. ‘A black man won’t even care if the woman is fat’ continues Rock ‘he’s just thinking there’s more white to f**k!’ The crowd shriek and whoop. Amongst those cheering are more than a few black men sitting with their white girlfriends. This, it strikes me, is why Chris Rock is a comedy genius: he uses humour to take audiences where they might otherwise fear to tread. He is utterly fearless in his subject matter and is willing to smash taboos and say the unsayable and in so doing he not only makes us laugh he also makes us think. Having the chance to witness Chris Rock was thrilling but it was also rather depressing as it made me wonder why it was that some minorities have managed to produce great comedians while others have not. The African American community for example has produced Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor and Chris Rock while the impact of Jewish comedy barely needs to be stated- everyone from Lenny Bruce to Woody Allen to Jerry Seinfeld. And then you have Muslims. They don’t, it is fair to say have a huge reputation for mirth-making. You only need to think back to the riots that greeted the publication of the Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad or more recently the case of British school teacher Gill Gibbons who was threatened with 40 lashes by the Sudanese government for naming a teddy bear Mohammed. And just this week we hear that a story based on the Three Little Pigs has been turned down from a government agency's annual awards because the subject matter could offend Muslims. You would be forgiven for thinking Muslims were a pretty sour-faced lot who are quick to take offence. But I know, from growing up in a Muslim family who were hysterical in both senses of the word, that this just isn’t true. That was why I set out in a BBC Radio 4 programme to be broadcast on Friday to try and find out why Muslims have this humourless reputation and meet some of those who are trying to challenge this image. Muslim comedy may not be the oxymoron some may suspect but it is still in its infancy. The success of shows such as Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at Number 42 may have pushed British Asian comedy into the mainstream but none of the comedians was Muslim. In Britain Shazia Mirza achieved some notoriety following September 11 with her line ‘my name is Shazia Mirza- or at least that’s what it says on my pilots licence’. She has since been reluctant to describe herself as a Muslim comedienne. She refused to participate in the radio programme. Instead I spoke to Jeff Mirza who is not related but is also a British Muslim comedian. Although he is a Muslim his material isn’t really about the faith, its more gentle observational comedy about coming from a particular culture which just happens to be Muslim; if anything I thought his humour was very British. He isn’t out to shock or satirise or break any boundaries but actually the very fact that he’s a Muslim and trying to make people laugh is pretty ground-breaking. British Muslim comedians may still be thin on the ground but across the Atlantic there are more signs of a growing confidence in Muslim comedy. In Canada one of the highest rated sitcoms is called ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie’ and depicts the lives of the Muslim population of a fictional prairie town in rural Canada. In a piece for G2 last year I interviewed Azhar Usman, one of the American Muslim stand-ups in a travelling tour called Allah Made Me Funny. Curious to see how a British audience would take to Azhar and his fellow comics, I went to see the Allah Made Me Funny show in London for myself. Outside the main hall I saw a man selling t-shirts saying ‘Muslims do it 5 times a day’ and inside the audience were doing something you would think Muslims never do: laughing and having a good time. It shouldn’t have surprised me to see Muslims having a good time, but to be honest it did a little. As a Muslim myself I know Muslims aren’t like they are sometimes depicted. It is not as if have a less entertaining or amusing time with my Muslim friends than with non-Muslim ones. All the Muslim comedians I spoke to were keen to assure me that Islam was not incompatible with laughter, that Muslims were allowed to have a sense of humour. And yet the common thread running through ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie’ and the comedy of Jeff Mirza and Azhar Usman was that it was all rather gentle. It preferred to concentrate on easy targets such as the public perception of Islam and the treatment of Muslims at airports rather than tackling more daring subjects. According to one of the imams featured in the programme this was because while Islam does encourage humour Islamic humour has very particular characteristics, the main one being that it doesn’t look too favourably on jokes which may be insulting. That sort of humour is unacceptable. This distinction between acceptable and unacceptable humour is an important one. The power of the comedy of Chris Rock, Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor comes from its fearlessness, a willingness to say the unsayable as a means of shining a light on our deepest prejudices and thus exposing hidden truths. Its that same fearlessness one can find in Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Jerry Springer the opera. When the BBC broadcast Jerry Springer the opera on television is sparked huge protests, including 55,000 emails, from some Christian groups for whom the production was deeply offensive- but it was still broadcast. It is hard to imagine that the corporation or anyone else would risk incurring Islamic wrath by doing anything which, as one imam told me, aimed to ‘sneeze in the face of Muslims.’ Now you could say this is a welcome sign of cultural sensitivity and that communities need to feel confident within themselves before they can start telling jokes against themselves. This, the argument goes, explains why there are so many Jewish comedians and so few Muslim ones. It isn’t that Islam doesn’t have a sense of humour or that Muslims can’t be funny but rather that the British Muslim community has only really been around for four decades and many still feel too vulnerable to be cracking gags. Although this argument is not without merit it seems to me that there is a danger that if everyone else is too sensitive Muslims are not being encouraged to adapt to the cultural norms of the country they live in. That is why comedy is so important because humour can make some very serious points. Which is where we return to Chris Rock in Hammersmith. His greatness lies in the fact that his humour is not afraid to offend the very people who are paying to see him. That, it seems to me, is what it currently missing from much of the discourse and discussion amongst Muslims and it is largely absent from Muslim humour. Muslims have been dismayingly successful in being offended, it would be encouraging if more demonstrated the confidence to dare offending each other.

the spices of life

2008-01-20T16:57:00.001Z

Reality went on the run in 2007. This was the year when the Queen did not storm out of a photoshoot but was edited to appear otherwise, the year John Darwin was revealed not to have really died four years ago in a canoeing accident. This was the year of a virtual general election campaign that was fought but not called and, of course, it was the year of Facebook. Few had heard of the social networking site 12 months ago but today more than seven million Britons are busily poking and posting. Four in 10 British adults have signed up with social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, making us the biggest users in Europe. The science-fiction author Philip K Dick defined reality as "that which when you stop believing in it does not go away" - but even Dick's dystopian imagination could not have dreamed up Second Life, where those disenchanted by reality can pretend they live in another world. Meanwhile, in the real world, four million bloggers blurred the borders between the private and the personal, and every concert you attend is marred by the sight of outstretched hands holding phone cameras recording songs for imminent posting on YouTube. You don't need to be Jean Baudrillard to appreciate the cultural significance of this obsession, and one does not need to be a technophobe to believe we should be concerned about this triumph of the virtual over the visceral. New year resolutions may be as fragile as a dandelion in a hurricane, but my resolution for 2008 is to resist this retreat from reality. My phone doesn't have a camera, and the last time I played a computer game was when the Commodore 64 represented the bleeding edge of technology. And despite the best efforts of those who should know better, I have not signed up on Facebook - I am not interested in minute-by-minute updates on the lives of others, and I prefer conversation to communication. The lure of social network sites like Facebook is that they claim to help us stay in touch; blogging offers everyone a voice; user-generated sites like YouTube allow us all to broadcast to the world. Its an enticing pitch but it comes with a price: the danger that we become spectators to our lives, too busy recording the concert to enjoy the music, too busy chatting online to talk to our families. It is not enough to desist from the bland virtual embrace, my aspiration for this coming year is to live more fully in the moment. This means spending less time online and more time in the kitchen. I used to consider food to be little more than fuel; takeaways and pasta were the dull but reassuringly time-efficient staples of my diet. The only time I ate well was when I returned home and feasted on my mother's cooking. Having tired of the rubbish I was eating, I resolved to start learning some of my mother's recipes. I used to believe that cooking was a waste of my valuable time, but now it is the process I enjoy most. Rather than being the dull utilitarian practice I imagined, cooking is in fact the most creative all art forms. And there is something deeply satisfying about taking separate ingredients and creating something new and unique, which is then instantly consumed. The great appeal of cooking is that while you can have a virtual friend and play online scrabble, you cannot cook a virtual saag aloo. The sensation of chopping and slicing and stirring, the smell of chilli powder and tandoori masala as it simmers with the olive oil and chopped tomatoes and onions and potatoes are all so gloriously real - and they demand one is engaged in the living moment. Admittedly, I am fortunate because for me cooking is a choice rather than a chore or responsibility; my mother has spent the best part of her life feeding others and I suspect she would be less persuaded that cooking is as liberating as I claim. Nonetheless, cooking can be one of the best defences against encroaching virtuality. It is not only creative, it also encourages social interaction: when I ate takeaways I ate alone, now that I cook I want to invite others to share my food. When so much of modern life is passive, cooking demands an active engagement with the present, and it reminds us that life is not a spectator sport - it is there to be savoured.

who are these men?

2008-01-20T16:55:00.000Z

Let me begin with an admission: yes, it is true - I am a man. This is a dangerous admission to make on Cif, where it seems open season on men has been declared. In the minds of some recent female contributors to these pages there is not a problem in the world that cannot be handily blamed on the nearest passing male. The country described by these writers, which I like to refer to as Cif-land, is a forbidding frightening land where possessing a penis is tantamount to confessing to being a raging cauldron of lust and misogyny. Fear stalks this inhospitable country and the likes of Abby O'Reilly and Bidisha cannot step of outside their front doors without being accosted by leering men with malign intentions. In this terrifying place, Julie Bindel warns us, male violence against women is pandemic and all women must stand together to prevent men continuing to rape, beat and abuse. Sad and pitiful are the men who live in Cif-land; shallow-minded morons who, Tanya Gold learns after one evening's speed dating, would prefer to date a stupid girl than an intelligent one. In the few minutes when they are not lusting after a silicon-enhanced airhead or leering and lunging after defenceless women, men have been pouring woman-hating bile in the direction of Hillary Clinton, almost derailing her presidential hopes, until the brave, resilient women of America rallied to her side. The cumulative effect of reading how men are depicted by these writers is similar to reading the Daily Express on a regular basis: you begin to question what you have always held to be true. Maybe the death of Diana is still interesting, maybe this country really is being overrun by scrounging asylum seekers and maybe men really are as pathetic and hateful and misogynistic as these female writers suggest. I don't read the Daily Express so I can remain confident that Diana's death is no longer interesting and that asylum seekers are not taking over the country. But it is hard to read the articles and not wonder if this is what most men are really like? If that is the case it prompts a follow-up enquiry: why is it that no man I know has ever behaved even remotely like the men in these articles? Do I live in some rarefied community of enlightened males who are utterly unrepresentative of the rest of society? That might be plausible were it not for the fact that I visit Luton on a regular basis. In all my 36 years I have never followed a girl or approached someone on the underground and I would not dream of making a lewd suggestion to someone I did not know. This does not make me some paragon of chivalry, it makes me normal. The greatest danger any girl would have from me was that I would be so reticent in revealing my feelings that they would never even realise I liked them. In the depictions I have read about men, they are ruled by their base passions, uncaring of normal social conventions. And yet most of the men I know are paralysed by the fear of doing or saying the wrong thing around women. It is not that they do not care about offending women, they care too much. Trying to satisfy the often-conflicting demands of what women want from men is the almost impossible challenge facing men today. If you are too diffident and polite you are dismissed as wet and insipid or, worse, have to settle for friendship. If you are too direct and straightforward it may be interpreted as unwelcome attention and prompt an article on Cif. And yet despite these difficulties all the men I know are in relationships, whereas I know countless women in their 30s who are unhappily single. This only goes to demonstrate the truth of the observation that the woman who thinks no man is good enough for her may well be right, but she may also be left. Nor is it the case, in my experience, that men prefer stupidity over intelligence in a potential partner. It's not because they are trying to be admirable, but simply because thick people are boring. I do not believe that I am a rarity in preferring a confident and intelligent woman over a simpering blank-eyed nonentity who thinks that Bhutto was Popeye's nemesis. There is nothing sexier than dating a woman who you consider to be your equal - someone whom you not only find attractive but also respect and admire. It is generally accepted that pornography is a distortion of reality, with its evocation of a world populated by dead-eyed pneumatic women who are relentlessly and constantly up for it. But it seems to me that a depiction of men that paints them as sex-crazed monsters who have nothing to offer women but fear is also a distortion of reality. That some men behave badly is not in doubt and those who cross the line of acceptability should rightly be condemned. But while I agree that there are some men who act inappropriately, what I find less persuasive is that this unacceptable behaviour is endemic, that most women literally cannot go about their daily lives without an intolerable degree of harassment. The truth is that men do not have the monopoly on questionable behaviour: it is easy to despair at the men who buy magazines such as Nuts and Zoo, but what about the thousands of young women who send topless photographs to those very publications, in the hope of being discovered? Or the women who happily attend dubious parties, hoping to become a wag? "The past is a foreign country", observed LP Hartley, "they do things differently there." If the past is a foreign country one can only conclude that anyone who believes that women are always the victims and men are inevitably the callous culprits is living on another planet entirely.

talking crap

2007-12-31T10:35:00.000Z

It may be more common to end the year by celebrating the great but you don’t have to be Gillian McKeith to believe that examining crap also has its benefits. It’s a curious feeling to see an article published that you rather regret having written. It has not happened often in my case but each time the reasons and context have the same. Inspiration strikes and an email is sent to the editor who says ‘can I have 700 words as soon as possible?’ Panic ensues as that embryonic idea now needs to be teased and expanded; an argument has to be advanced and developed, examples and evidence sited. With ideas buzzing in the brain fingers jab at the keyboard, words racing to keep up with thoughts. At random intervals and for no good reasons fonts are changed, the colour and size of the text altered. More hammering on the keyboard. Check word count. And then the first stirring of the fear begins to rise from the depths of your stomach: the fear that actually the original idea wasn’t actually all that funny or original or, worst of all, true. Suddenly the column begins to feel less an opportunity to contribute to the national conversation and more of a punishment; 700 words starts to sound like a very long sentence. Like a swimmer floundering in deep waters the only thing that begins to matter is to get to dry land at whatever price. Tenuous digressions are explored, lengthy quotes employed, anything to reach the other side. Once completed there is relief but it is heavily laced with a punishing self-hate. Seeing a piece published that you are unhappy with is akin to a sleazy one-night stand; no matter how good it might have appeared in theory in practise it only leaves you feeling dirty and ashamed. You hope no one notices but fear what people might say; you worry about where it leaves your reputation. So why does it happen? (Not the sleazy one night stands- I don’t have that sort of luck.) ‘In heaven I yearn for knowledge, account all else inanity’ wrote Robert Browning ‘on earth I confess an itch for the praise of fools - that's vanity.’ Browning would have sympathised with the plight of the columnist in the blogging age. All columnists are egoists; they have to be vain enough to believe that their opinions deserve to be shared with the rest of the world. In the case of bloggers this vanity is tempered by the reality that few are reading their work but with sites such as CiF and the print version of The Guardian it is possible for a column to reach a large audience. And so the temptation rises to, in Browning’s words, scratch ‘the itch for the praise of fools’. Ideas which perhaps do not merit entire columns are developed anyway, columns that could have benefited with more time and thought are written hurriedly to reach the deadline. In the old days a poorly written piece that one was unhappy with only meant lying low for the day of publication. These days when everything one has written lives on in cyberspace and when the nameless masses can give their judgements below the black line in bracingly honest terms you can no longer run or hide. One lesson I have learnt during the past year is that readers do not make allowances for the circumstances in which an article is written. They do not know or care that it might have been written hurriedly or in-between arguments with a loved one or whilst negotiating the break-up of a relationship. Readers assume, rightly, that the published piece represents the clearest articulation of your ideas and they expect you to be judged by them. That expectation implies that the writer has a responsibility to always offer their best. There are some who argue that when a writer composes a blog, such as this one, they should operate on different rules than when they are writing for the printed newspaper. I am not so sure. The articles I am most disappointed with this year were written hurriedly and without sufficient care because I fooled myself into thinking that they did not matter. The truth is everything matters. As the new year starts let others pray for a peaceful Pakistan and the Democrats securing the White House- me, I just want to try and write less crap.

food for thought

2007-12-31T10:34:00.000Z

Reality went on the run in 2007. This was the year when the Queen did not storm out of a photo-shoot but was edited to appear otherwise, the year that John Darwin was revealed not to have really died four years ago in a canoeing accident. This was the year of a virtual general election campaign that was fought but not called and, of course, it was the year of Facebook. Few had heard of the social networking site twelve months ago but today more than seven million Britons are busily poking and posting; four in ten British adults have signed up with social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace making us the biggers users in Europe. The science fiction author Philip K Dick defined reality as ‘that which when you stop believing in it does not go away’ but even Dick’s dystopian imagination could not have dreamed up Second Life where those disenchanted by reality can pretend they live in another world. Meanwhile in the real world 4 million bloggers blurred the borders between the private and the personal and every concert you attend is marred by the sight of outstretched hands holding mobile phone cameras recording songs for imminent download onto YouTube. You don’t need to be Jean Baudrillard to appreciate the cultural significance of this obsession and one does not need to be a technophobe to believe we should be concerned about this triumph of the virtual over the visceral. New Year resolutions may be as fragile as a dandelion in a hurricane but my resolution for 2008 is to resist this retreat from reality. My phone doesn’t have a camera and the last time I played a computer game was when the Commodore 64 represented the bleeding edge of technology. And despite the best efforts of those who should no better I have not signed up on Facebook as I am not sufficently interested in minute by minute updates on the lives of others. Social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace claim to help us stay in touch, blogging offers the chance for everyone to have a voice, user generated sites like YouTube allow us all to broadcast to the world. Its an enticing pitch but it comes with a price: the danger that we become spectators to our lives, too busy recording the concert to enjoy the music, too busy chatting online to talk to our families. It is not enough to desist from the bland virtual embrace, my aspiration for this coming year is to live more fully in the moment. This means spending less time online and more time in the kitchen. I used to consider food to be little more than fuel; takeaways and pasta were the dull but reassuringly time-efficient staples of my diet. The only time I ate well was when I returned home and feasted on my mother’s cooking. Having tired of the rubbish I was eating I resolved to start learning my mothers recipes. Where I used to believe the process of cooking was a waste of my valuable time now it is the very process I enjoy most. There is something deeply satisfying about taking separate ingredients and creating something new and unique which is then consumed. The great appeal of cooking is that while you can have a virtual friend and play online scrabble you cannot cook a virtual saag aloo. The sensation of chopping and slicing and stirring, the smell of chilli powder and tandoori masala as it simmers with the olive oil and chopped tomatoes and onions are all gloriously real and they demand one is engaged in the living moment. I am admittedly fortunate because for me cooking is a choice rather than a chore or responsibility; my mother has spent the best part of her life feeding others and I suspect she would be less persuaded that cooking is as liberating as I am claiming. Nonetheless cooking can be one of the best defences against encroaching virtuality. It is creative, it encourages social interaction, it demands active engagement with the present and it reminds us that life is not a spectator sport: it is there to be savoured.

post envy

2007-12-09T01:38:00.001Z

There was a time, now only dimly recalled, when journalists could publish their work happily ignorant of who was reading or what anyone thought of their stories. The worth of a story and the value of the journalist was determined by where it featured in the newspaper and what the writer was paid. This was a simpler time. As budgets are slashed at the BBC and newspapers increasingly invest in and promote their online presence, the criteria by which journalists are valued is changing. Two very different formulations for what a journalist is worth were offered this week. At the British Comedy Awards, we learned that Jonathan Ross believes he is worth 1,000 BBC journalists while in New York half the editorial staff of the media gossip website Gawker resigned in protest at a new pay scale that pays writers according to the number of times people view their blog posts rather than the number of posts they write. The risk with this performance-related compensation system, the departing editors claimed, was that it pitted writers against one another. "It really gets in your head in this weird way because you're getting so conscious of how many people are reading what," one former staffer admitted. "You get focused on being sensational and even more brain-candyish." The Gawker story particularly intrigued me as it led me to speculate how such a pay scale would impact on what we read on Comment is Free. The emergence of sites such as Cif has not only expanded the range and number of commentators; it has also allowed all of us to know which writers and which articles are provoking the most responses. As a contributor, it is hard not to remain unaffected by this information; in fact, it can become irrationally addictive to constantly be checking to see how active one's thread is. I spent the last week in the US, but in between travelling from Washington to Mississippi to Tennessee to Florida. I somehow still managed to keep across the comments on my Morrissey article. More worryingly, I have begun developing symptoms of a condition best described as "post envy". Telltale signs include envy about the lengths of other people's threads and a great respect for the work of Inayat Bunglawala. I try to persuade myself that it's not the length of the threads that is important but the quality. But no matter how hard I try to focus on the main Cif front page, my eyes cannot help wandering. They inevitably catch sight of the "most active" list, and I am overcome with ugly emotions of inadequacy. I have taken to playing a game where I try to dream up a headline that I think would attract the most comments on Cif. Still, I think with a bit of imagination I could top Seth Freedman's 400-plus comments for his recent piece "There is a Holocaust industry", maybe if I wrote something that asked: "Why is there a Holocaust industry?" And who knows how many comments a piece that asked "Was there a Holocaust?" would prompt. Sadly, I'm not that kind of Muslim, though being one does put me at an unfair advantage. Stories that are about Islam and by Muslim contributors, such as Soumaya Ghannoushi, Ed Husain and Inayat Bunglawala, regularly get more than 200 comments. The ideal Cif story would probably combine Islam, Israel and 9/11 conspiracy theories with immigration, feminism and Boris Johnson. And it would be written by Richard Dawkins and Mike Read. Since I am on contract with the Guardian, I am not technically paid by the article. Nevertheless, when I write a piece I am proud of but it does not gain many comments, part of me feels I have somehow failed; and by inverse logic, if an article attracts a huge amount of comments, this implies that I have somehow succeeded. How much more tempting must it be for those paid for each posting to write about issues they know will provoke the bloggers, or to espouse opinions they know will be certain to be controversial? The more strident the opinion, the more shrill the tone the more comments it is likely to inspire. Which is why I hope the type of pay scale currently in operation at Gawker does not reach our shores - not if we want spaces such as Cif to illuminate debate rather than merely to amplify it. Comment is free, but sanity, rationality and moderation, well, they're priceless.

what difference does it make?

2007-12-09T01:36:00.000Z

"The only thing worse than being talked about," claimed Oscar Wilde "is not being talked about." As he finds himself once again facing accusations of racism one wonders whether Morrissey would agree with his great hero's observation. This week's big question, "Is Morrissey a racist?" (not to be confused with last week's big question, "Is Martin Amis a racist?") has been ignited by an interview that Morrissey gave to the NME in which he appeared to mourn the impact that immigration and multiculturalism have had to the loss of British identity. "England is a memory now," he tells the music paper "the gates are flooded in ... whatever England is now, it's not what it was and it's lamentable that we've lost so much." Morrissey's lawyers have threatened legal action against the NME unless the magazine publishes an apology but this is not the first time that Morrissey has waded into this territory. It is therefore hard to detach these latest comments from the baggage that the Mancunian miserabilist carries: wrapping himself in the Union Flag in Finsbury Park, recordings songs entitled Bengali in Platforms and The National Front Disco with its lyrics of "England for the English". It would be naive to then assume that one's comments on immigration would not be seized and analysed for racist undertones. But to return to the remarks made to the NME- a magazine incidentally that also has past form in its relations with the Smiths frontman- was Morrissey being racist to express concern that something of the England he knew and loved, before he left for Los Angeles and Rome, was being eroded by immigration? I do not think it is racist to ask such questions and I do not think Morrissey is a racist.When I was a teenager I dismissed Morrissey as a daffodil-waving tosser with a persecution complex. In recent years I have come to appreciate the Smiths' recorded output more and have enjoyed seeing Morrissey a number of times in concert but my defence of him is not based on blind fanaticism. It is rather because I admire him as a working-class hero and an English original - although one born to Irish parents. His England is one populated by Oscar Wilde and George Formby, Billy Liar and Pat Phoenix. Carry On films and A Taste of Honey. It is an England, which if it ever existed, has certainly vanished now for good. It is also a resolutely conservative vision of England, one not far removed from John Major's evocation of an England of "long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers". It was easy, almost compulsory, to laugh at John Major but I do not think Morrissey deserves a similar fate."If you travel to Germany, it's still absolutely Germany," Morrissey says in the NME interview, "if you travel to Sweden, it still has a Swedish identity. But travel to England and you have no idea where you are." One can dispute whether this is racist but it is also manifestly true. I have recently spent time with young refugees for a piece for G2. The refugees, from Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries are now living in East Ham in east London. When I asked them how it felt to be in a foreign country, how it felt to be surrounded by white people they laughed, saying that living in East Ham one never saw white people. Now one can argue that this is a good thing, that it shows the richness of living in a diverse multicultural community, or one can argue that is a regrettable state of affairs. But it is plain silly to claim that even registering the reality that there are places where it is hard to tell one is in England should be dismissed as racism. The greater danger with hurling such accusations at anyone - and in this I include, albeit with some hesitation, Martin Amis - is that we risk alienating what I suspect is a substantial portion of the public who have such concerns but are not actually racist. By saying everyone who challenges the orthodoxy about the untramelled benefits of multiculturalism and immigration is racist we devalue the term to the point of rendering it meaningless. Those who believe that modern life is not rubbish, that the benefits of immigration outweigh the alleged drawbacks should surely have enough confidence in their arguments to make the case rather throwing the R-word around. The case for a modern British identity, one composed of many colours and cultures cannot be very strong if it cannot even withstand the sceptism of Stephen Patrick Morrissey.

the (female) Boss

2007-11-29T11:19:00.000Z

Being a man has its benefits. Men can dash out of the house in the morning within seconds of waking up without worrying how we look, we can survive with only one pair of shoes and, best of all, we get to pee standing up. There is another benefit to being male which I had not even appreciated until recently which is that I have never worried whether my boss was male or female. Throughout my working life I have worked for men and women and, to me, their gender made no difference at all. But is this true for women working for other women? A female friend of mine who works in the media recently contacted a number of people to explore employment opportunities. She emailed one man, in a very senior position, who was very encouraging and passed on her details to someone who worked for him. This person took considerably longer to respond and when my friend was finally granted an audience with her the woman proceeded to use the supposed interview to be patronising and bullying. ‘I knew I didn’t stand a chance’ my friend later told me ‘all the opportunities I have ever had have been when my bosses have been men’. I was reminded of this story on hearing of the all-female shortlist for the job of controller of BBC1. Incidentally among those on the shortlist is Jane Root, the woman who as controller of BBC 2 did as much as anyone to destroy quality documentary making by axing such acclaimed strands as Modern Times and Under the Sun and replacing them with vacuous lifestyle programming and pointless docusoaps. Root left to work in the United States but has, we are told, left her post at the Discovery Channel and is returning to the UK to join Emma Swain and Jane Tranter as mooted candidates for running BBC1. This short list is unlikely to impress Michael Buerk who got himself into some trouble a couple of years ago when he complained about the impact of having women in senior roles in television. ‘Almost all the big jobs in broadcasting’ he said at the time ‘are held by women and they decide what we see and hear.’ Buerk’s argument, which was derided at the time, was that modern life was now being lived according to women’s rules and that the traits which had traditionally been associated with men- reticence, stoicism, single-mindedness- had been marginalised. The shift in the balance of power between the sexes had gone too far, he suggested, and it was necessary to admit the problem. Buerk’s rather grumpy analysis depicted men as the losers in this vision of all powerful women and men reduced to sperm donors. But I rather suspect that the bigger losers may well be other women. I will readily admit that, without any direct personal experience to base my conclusions on, I am largely relying on the evidence from female friends. When I start asking around I was shocked at just how many women had stories of women bosses being particularly nasty to women employees. One woman was hounded out of her job by the poisonous campaigning of a female colleague, others related anecdotes about women bosses ignoring other women and giving breaks only to men. The same themes kept recurring: male bosses are more likely to give you a break, they don’t feel quite so threatened, that women bosses are more liable to be jealous of younger, more attractive women and that the worst bosses were bitter middle aged single women. These may only be anecdotal but they do seem to reflect research: one recent report found that women who do not have children are considerably less sympathetic than men to mothers trying to juggle home and career. No wonder another survey found that given a choice 63% of respondents would rather not have a woman as a boss. I am not suggesting that all women bosses are bitchy tyrants and without direct experience I am not even able to personally confirm what my friends related to me. But if even a fraction of my friends’ comments are confirmed more widely it seems to be something that ought to be discussed. My friend will not be given an opportunity to work in job she applied to because another woman actively sabotaged her efforts. We don’t tolerate sex discrimination when men are being accused of discriminating against women so why should it be overlooked when it is women who are discriminating against other women?

words are not enough

2007-11-26T22:38:00.000Z

When Amir arrived in Britain last December he was 16, fleeing Iraq on a false passport after the kidnap and murder of his father. He landed at Heathrow with nothing except a scrap of paper on which his name was scribbled in English. "I did not know where I was; I could not speak English," Amir recalls, his hands fidgeting nervously. "I was scared - I had no family, no friends. Who is going to help me? Who is going to give me support?" In the stark terminology of Home Office bureaucracy, Amir is one of an estimated 4,000 "unaccompanied young refugees" who arrive in Britain each year from everywhere from Iraq and Afghanistan to the Congo and Rwanda. Separated from their families and far from home, many suffer from depression, insomnia and anxiety. The vast majority - 80% - settle in London and their experiences are rarely understood. "Mainstream society only hears certain things about immigration," says Tiffany Fairey. "They never hear direct stories from the people who are coming here or what they are dealing with." Fairey is the co-founder of PhotoVoice, a charity that uses photography to enable marginalised groups to tell their stories. It has been working with young refugees since 2002, most recently on New Londoners, in which 15 of them have been mentored by professional photographers. The photographs can be viewed online and a book is being planned for next summer. "The biggest barrier to integration is misunderstanding," says Fairey. New Londoners enables the young people "to tell their own stories from their own perspective". PhotoVoice was helped in the project by Dost, a London charity that supports young refugees. Dost is based in Trinity Centre, a converted redbrick church in East Ham in east London. On one of the afternoons that I visit the centre, a group of elderly Sikh men are playing cards while four young refugees are immersed in Connect 4. Among them is Sacha, who arrived as a 13-year-old from Ukraine five years ago. "It was like a bad dream," he recalls, "like taking too many painkillers." Since leaving eastern Europe, Sacha has had no contact with his parents. "It isn't easy, it takes a lot out of you having to get by without parents," he says sadly. "You need lots of emotional support, you need stimulation, spiritual and physical contact with people." "People don't live in a vacuum," adds Yesim Deveci, who set up Dost. "If everyone who has been part of your life does not exist any more you need to feel that someone cares about you." For the young refugees who visit Dost, most of their interactions with mainstream society are institutional - social workers, the Home Office, their housing office and their solicitor; the New Londoners project allows the young people to transcend their refugee identity. The recurring themes in New Londoners' images are, perhaps unsurprisingly, being far from home, and the contradictory emotions that come from being in Britain. Mussie, a 17-year-old from Eritrea, photographed food that he had cooked. "This picture is about my new life in England," he says. "In my country I had never cooked before." Amir also photographed one of his meals. "For someone here, it's just my breakfast," he explains. "Two eggs, some bread, tea. But if I showed this picture to someone in Iraq they wouldn't believe it because in Iraq we imagined English breakfasts to be tables full of lots of food." Another of Amir's photographs shows dinner being eaten by candlelight. "They hadn't been able to pay for electricity so it had been cut off," he tells me. "In Iraq we don't believe things like this happen in England." Many of Amir's photographs are taken in the dark; like many young refugees, he finds it hard to sleep at night. "Many of the kids are so anxious," explains Liz Orton of PhotoVoice. "When we first gave them cameras, they came back after a week with dozens of images of each other taken during the night. You could just see the time passing." Rosalita is a sad-eyed 18-year-old who arrived in Britain two years ago after fleeing the Congo following the death of both her parents. Her father was Rwandan and her mother Congolese, and as a young girl Rosalita was raped by Congolese soldiers who thought she was Rwandan and Rwandan soldiers who accused her of being Congolese. Even though she is sitting less than two feet from me, I have to strain to hear her speak and her whispery voice tapers off into silence. Having arrived unable to speak English, she is now fluent in English and Spanish as well as Swahili. She says she wants to work for a charity after leaving university. I ask her to tell me about her favourite photograph from those she took. "I saw an old woman lying on the street," she murmurs. "She was so old and no one cared about her - it was Liverpool Street, where there are lots of banks and big buildings. I don't know if she had any children but everyone was ignoring her. It made me sad; in Congo, families live with their grandmothers and grandfathers. Not like here." Chen, 18, photographed another old person. "I felt the strangeness of the old man lying on the ground," he says. "He was not Chinese but he was asleep in China Town." Chen's mentor was the artist and photographer Gayle Chong Kwan, who found that working with the young refugee opened her eyes to her own Chinese heritage. "It was not about me teaching, so much as having a conversation," she says. "With photography there is none of the frustration of having a limited language. These young people can express thoughts that they could not do in English." It is almost impossible to imagine the journeys that have led these young refugees to Britain. Many have been orphaned by war; most of them are having to grow up without things the average Briton takes for granted. Their photographs are hopeful, but tinged with loss and uncertainty. Many of the refugees are still awaiting Home Office decisions on whether they will be allowed to remain in this country. Those who have been granted the right to remain have complicated feelings about the prospect. "I feel safe here and I have a chance to do something with my life," says Amir, "but life here is not easy. I want to use my photographs to tell people in Iraq, 'Don't think that living in England is easy, don't think this country is better than Iraq. Life here is very hard.' I would like one day to return to Iraq, my country, and when I go I will take a camera". Some names have been changed.

the muslims and the media

2007-11-15T17:01:00.000Z

Some time ago I was contacted by a BBC researcher on a politics programme who wanted my reaction to something relating to British Muslims. I gave my thoughts and was told that she would get back to me. When no call came I contacted her and was told that my opinions were too moderate and not quite what the discussion required. In the event Yvonne Ridley was booked and was suitably outraged and furious and no doubt the producers were delighted. I was reminded of this story- and Inayat Bunglawala recounted a similar anecdote recently- when I read this week’s reports suggesting that media coverage about Muslims was overwhelmingly negative. As Laura Smith reported earlier this week research into seven days news coverage showed that 91% of articles in national newspapers about Muslims were negative. Only 4% of the 352 articles studied were positive. London mayor Ken Livingstone compared this to how the left was depicted during the eighties and, rather more controversially, the chair of the MCB likened the treatment of Muslims in the media to the way that Jews were demonised in Nazi Germany. The fact that the analysis was only for one week’s national press and that amongst the authors were members of the MCB might weaken the credibility of the report but it is hard to contest that the depiction of Muslims in the media does tend to range from the sceptical to the downright hostile. The question is why is that and who is responsible. Anyone who has worked in journalism will confirm that the media thrives on conflict and disagreement. This can be valuable in holding the powerful to account but it carries the danger of an excessive dependency on reinforcing certain narratives for exampe that all politicians are liars and everything from Europe is suspect. With Muslims the narrative suggests that they are ‘the other’- reluctant to fit in and a dangerous influence on mainstream British society. Any news stories which confirm this narrative are easily commissioned and published. The story need only need a germ of truth- an easily outraged councillor demanding all pig images be removed, a conveniently disgusted community leader demanding a film be banned- and the story will race to the front pages. By contrast anything which challenges this prevailing narrative struggles to be reported. A few months ago the Pakistan High Commission organised a celebration of Pakistan’s 60th independence. The Pakistan Festival centred around Trafalger Square, there were live drummers, colourful floats, music, food and more than 15,000 British Pakistanis of all ages having a wonderful day out. The event barely rated a mention in the media; if the celebration had descended into violence or been hijacked by extremists does anyone seriously doubt it would be made the front pages? It would then have confirmed the narrative rather than confounded it. Similarly surveys which suggest support for sharia law are given widespread coverage but who recalls last month’s survey that suggested Muslims felt more British than rest of population or the Gallup poll in April which found that Muslims are more likely to identify with Britain and have confidence in its institutions than the population of the country as a whole? This can partly be explained by the old adage that ‘if it bleeds it leads’ and thus no one is interested in good news. That may be the inevitable consequence of how the media behaves but it is legitimate to ask what the cumulative consequences of this relentless reinforcing of one particular narrative might be. Day after day papers like the Express spew out hateful bile aimed at Muslims. Meanwhile Ministry of Justice statistics point to a 12 percent rise in the number of attacks on people because of their race or religion. Is it conceivable that there is no connection? Some newspapers may have an explicit political agenda but more broadly the way that Muslims are represented is not, I think, politically motivated. It is in part, as mentioned earlier, conflict makes better news. It’s also because the vast majority of journalist are not Muslims and thus do not have to live with the impact their words might have. Incidentally I think this also explains why the white working class are so often treated with such contempt by the media. It also explains why places like my hometown Luton are so mercilessly mocked in the media- the people who work in the media don’t come on the whole from towns like that nor are they from working class backgrounds and they sure as hell aren’t Muslim. They can therefore be mocked, exploited, mistreated and demonised with little fear of any comeback. If the media doesn’t really understand Muslims the opposite is also true. I have lost count of the number of times I meet Muslims whose first impulse is to complain about the media as if the negative image of Muslims was entirely a media construct and had nothing whatsoever to do with Muslims themselves. Only last month at an Eid event I was approached by Dr Bari and urged to do something to counteract the negative portrayal of Muslims in the media. When I asked him what his suggestion was to do this he proposed that I write more articles about the Muslim Council of Britain. With all due respect to the good doctor I suspect that if more features on the MCB are the answer we are asking the wrong question. For what it is worth I have two suggestions on how to counter the torrent of negative depictions. Firstly there is too much about Muslims in the media. Alongside the acres given to Islam in the print media we have to add the seemingly endless blogs and posts on websites. This continual focus on Muslims- do they have a sense of humour, should they be allowed to write mad, bad and dangerous poetry- reinforces the suggestion that they are different. This is not healthy or helpful. My second suggestion is directed towards Muslims. I was in Bradford last week speaking to two hundred college students, the vast majority of whom were Muslim. I asked the audience who thought that their future prospects would be adversely influenced by their colour, race or religion. Only two people put their hands up. That these young Muslims did not think that racism or Islamophobia would blight their futures was, I thought, deeply encouraging and yet the most common stories we hear from Muslims is one where the entire world is conspiring against them. Just as the media needs to find another narrative for Muslims so Muslims should be reframing their own narratives away from the familiar role of the victim. After a while it just gets boring. Oh and the two people who raised their hands? They were both white.

paperback writer

2007-11-02T18:03:00.000Z

a fascinating meeting with my publishers yesterday about the publication of the paperback editiion of my book. we looked through possible covers, all of which were interesting but i didnt feel they were quite right. the question we are wrestling with is whether the way to push the book is by stressing the Springsteen angle or my making it more a classic father/son/family memoir. each direction implies a different cover. so by making it explicitly about Springsteen one could give it a bold subtitle like 'how bruce springsteen changed my life' and that might make some people pick it up but it might also put loads of people off. make it all about the family story and then the danger is the book just melts into all the other memoirs out there. you wouldnt think that these questions were all that important but it turns out they are hugely important because it determines whether the big chain stores decide to stock the book. last time round places like WHSmith didnt even sell the book and so this time I am really hoping that supermarkets like tescos and sainsburys will want to sell the book, i totally think its a mainstream book but its just about persuading other people. and there isnt really much more i can do to help that along as the book is written so now its all about the marketing. no decisions were made and everyone is going to have another think as to whether we should be stressing the family side or the music side. any thoughts?