Morocco, the land of bougainvillea, snow-capped mountains, ochre pise’ walls, water sellers in hats with fuzzy red guy-ropes, sticky black soap, pointy shoes and leather trilbies, is perhaps unique in the Muslim world.
Et Cetera
Since the Second World War, the post-Christian West has tried to solve the old sexual ‘double standard’ by erasing all the bad vibes surrounding it. The answer, where men got their kicks and women got hurt, was to teach women to have sex like men – without conscience.
A list of the type of Muslim men you may encounter in a typical gathering anywhere on the planet.
The Malay Archipelago, or Maritime Southeast Asia, has long provided a spectacular demonstration of societies deeply invested in the ethos of cultural pluralism, and modern-day Malaysia has laid claim to that inheritance by representing itself as one of the world’s more arresting experiments in multiculturalism in recent decades.
‘Malaysia, truly Asia’, declares the advertisement for the Malaysian airline.
Al-Andalus is not a culture and a period that exists simply in a remote past. Its achievements can be experienced when we visit a restaurant, admit ourselves to hospital, travel around the world, yearn for spiritual enlightenment, argue about religion and science, and struggle for a multicultural society.
The clock was running down on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It was time. Resolutely, I stifled the sniffles, pulled myself together and phoned home. I knew instantly something was wrong. It was the way my mother lifted the receiver: ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ I had never heard the like of the wail of utter desolation in which my mother declared: ‘Laurie didn’t marry Jo – again!’ So it was true. We sobbed together, unapologetically.
Muslims have long played a major role in the Indian film industry. The industry has given us many iconic Muslim figures such as actor Dilip Kumar (Yusuf Khan, seen as the actor’s actor in Hindi cinema), actresses Madhubala (Mumtaz Jehan Dehalvi, for many the greatest beauty to grace Bollywood screens) and Waheeda Rehman (often in roles that cast her as a life- and love-tormented female before she was cast as that most quintessential of all Bollywood characters: the even more long-suffering ‘Ma’).
When I was a child, I was really naughty. I used to steal, fight, and tell lots of lies. I was a disruption in the classroom. The only thing that ever scared me was when my mum shouted, ‘If you don’t stop this bad behaviour, I’m going to send you to Pakistan.’ Pakistan must be worse than Coventry, I thought.
A country allegedly and perpetually on the edge of chaos. A nation shrouded in darkness, thanks largely to power cuts, toxic religion, feudal politics, a corporate military and the ever present threat of violence. A state teetering on economic collapse, political fragmentation and imminent breakdown. Is there anything to love about Pakistan? We think there is.