Her Blonde Hair

Of all the things I've heard  about what some  Asian/Muslim men will say to get control over an unsuspecting white girl/woman, this takes the biscuit...

So here's this 16 year old, Charlotte,  who starts working in a pizza shop.  She is ever so young and slim and pretty, blonde hair, blue eyes, a perfect complexion... Her parents separated when she was in primary school and growing up, she felt very much emotionally neglected...  Living with her grandparents who were often ill, she became their carer.  Both mother and father went on to find new partners and so she had an abiding feeling of abandonment.

Charlotte is brave and has initiative. Even before she finishes secondary school, she has got some part-time work at a pizza  takeaway in the town centre. The owner of the pizza takeaway is of Pakistani origin,  some 12 years older than her, in his late twenties. He's kind to her.  He asks her why she doesn't  eat any of the fast food which is available to all the staff and she answers she prefers healthy food... so he brings fruit for her and leaves it in the fridge.  He drops  her off in the evenings.  He's so kind and  caring when her grandpa dies... some member of his family also passes away around the same time... an uncle , he told her... he actually cried...  and .... they are united in their grief.

They become lovers... and it is the girl, who moves things in that direction, not he...

She is telling me all this, 5 years on.

Now she is 21, with a 2 year old daughter.  She is the carer sent by the council, to spend  an hour each morning for the next three weeks or so, helping my elderly mother who has just had a major operation. This blonde, heavily made-up girl,  and I have become friends, it seems.  On the days I can visit my mother, I have already laid the table, and we all have breakfast together.

 'Oh, you treat me like a guest', she says.  But I'm happy to. I like her care and sincerity and how she is cheering up my parents.

On the first day she'd arrived, my parents were quite nervous about this  'carer' coming to their house, but she had been so bright and down to earth and chirpy, she'd put them at ease.  She'd asked, 'Is there anything else I can do' after sorting out the bathing and the breakfast... and my father had asked her to bring his Urdu newspaper for him, on her way to the house each morning!  She had taken that in her stride.  So of course, I was impressed.

 Having experienced first hand, lazy, incompetent and fraudulent professionals in my workplace, now, anyone in any role is impressive to me, when they go beyond the call of duty alone and actually care and extend themselves a bit. So on my third visit,  I have brought her a little thank you present, a bag of  organic toiletries, complete with candles.  'Pampering Bath Time', says the wooden box the items come in.  Charlotte works hard,  taking care of others but she needs some pampering herself, is what I think.

On my next visit to my parents, I am invited to her house. She keeps everything immaculate, and I am again, impressed.  Unlike my habitual messiness, she has everything neat and tidy and in its place. She is keen for me to help her make chicken and rice, Asian style. She wants to impress her Muslim husband to be, and his family.  I tell her I am vegetarian, and happy to make lentils to go with the rice. Charlotte also wants to learn to speak Punjabi, and we have a laugh together as she tries to flollow me in saying , kee hal ah', ' How are you?

Now, I must say, I have my misgivings about older men, persuading young girls to go with them... But who am I to judge? Maybe this disgusting grooming business is happening in Yorkshire and the Blackpool and  Blackburn areas... particular sets of men, with their particular sets of freinds...  but one cannot tar everyone with the same brush, I tell myself severely.  And maybe it is true, that I am becoming a bit obsessed, even racist as some of my wjhite liberal friends tell me, some jokingly (but serious) others, by their polite silences and increasingly sparse contact.

The beautiful blonde girl is into designer clothes and celebrity culture. Her kitchen has black marble surfaces and gold-coloured picture frames on the floral black wall, above the glass dining table.  I ask her, 'Who is that girl with the dark hair?'

She laughs, a bit nervously. 'Oh, that is me, when I dyed my hair.  My boyfriend said it was more respectful to have dark hair and blonde hair is not respected... that I 'd sort of... fit in more.

I start to feel a prickly sense of anger rising in my throat.

She looks at me, embarrassed and continues... it seems she's sort of asking me...  is this normal, what he is doing? She needs to confer, but there is no-one for her to talk to , but me..   She coughs as if the words are choking her, but ploughs on... 'I might as well tell you now... urm...we were together a whole year, but he couldn't face his parents about me being with him, you know, because I wasn't Asian and Muslim... and I used to wait outside his mother's house in the car, when he went there to eat. Then finally one day  his older brother who lived next door,  came by and literally took me  into the house.'

'Oh , that was nice of him', I hear myself saying,  unintentionally sounding sarcastic.  'My own brother also could not face telling our mother about his white girlfriend and in fact he never did..'.
The food is nearly ready now and she desperately wants me to tell her more....  I know I am breakin gthe rule of keeping family secrets, and do i really want her to know? The kitech clock with its metallic chime interrupts us. She needs to go to see a client for a half hour care slot. But her boyfriend  has got her car. He was due to bring it back over two  hours ago, well before my arrival.

'Why doesn't he have his own car?' I ask.
'Oh, he got caught drunk-driving and was banned a couple of years ago'.

 I am quite shocked but try not to show it.  I decide that I don't want to meet this guy so I offer to drive her. 'I don't mind waiting in the car' I assure her. quickly, we turn everything off in the kitchen ... rice is cooked, the lentils are nearly ready...  and we set off.

'How come you changed your hair back to your natural blonde then', I ask.

She looks a bit nervous... she pauses... Then she launches into her explanation.
'Well, you see, I found he was seeing someone for six months, just around the time I was ill after the birth of my baby'... so I moved out, and I set up on my own... It's only a few weeks that I have got back with him, on a trial basis.

Oh, damn!  I was right ...  I decide to be truthful.  I decide,  sometimes it is better to be cruel, and truthful, than kind and let a person carry on with their illusions. Who else is going to tell her, warn her, if not me?

''Charlotte, I hope you don't mind me saying this.. but  I really could not ever trust again, someone who lied to me for months, and not only that, you were pregnant with his child.  And he... he wants to tell you what is respect worthy ! The God-given colour of your hair is not respect worthy, but his drink-driving and being unfaithful is?'

Little Tyrants who are the traditionalists of Islam

Little Tyrants who are the traditionalists of Islam

do you think Mohammad Shafia, is a Virtuous  Man?

It is quite shocking that Sharia law is becoming an acceptable alternative to the legal system in the U.K particularly for resolving domestic issues within Muslim families.  In this context, how are  ‘honour’ crimes understood in the Western democracies?  Year after year,  we are seeing rising levels of conflict most often between the young females in migrant Muslim families, and their more traditional male relatives. When  blood  is shed, it is almost always by the males in the family, with older females aiding and abetting.  

Of the trial reported widely in Canadian media last week, It is clear that Mohammed Shafia, the Muslim father from Afghanistan, settled in Canada since 2007,   has absolutely no feelings of remorse for his actions in murdering  his 3 teenage daughters and his wife.  Not only has he repeatedly been labelling them ‘whores’, he is reported to have also said he hopes the devil shits on their graves.  We are left wondering, is this man really 58 years old? When did he lose all human feeling? All sense of decency? Indeed we wonder,  what has made him lose all sense?  And what are we to make of his sneering, equally unrepentant polygamous second wife who is clearly his accomplice in these horrific murders?  What are we to make of their son, brought up in Canadian society, who yet obeyed the father’s tribal/religious /freakishly controlling personality? 

 As we hear about Mohammed Shafia’s volatile temper , his petty tyrannical demands,  his rages when his wishes were not being obeyed , we can see that like many men of his ilk,  his psychological state and emotional development has really not passed beyond the toddler stage of human development.   Shifting focus from him and his reprehensible acts, it is legitimate to ask, (in the interests of truthful analysis, and for the sake of preventing further such murders, come on, let’s not fear being labelled racist)  what is it about Middle-Eastern/Afghani/Pakistani /Turkish/ Iranian origin  men that can make them feel totally justified in murdering female members of their family?  In what sort of mindset, can such acts of extreme violence, be equated with restoring  men’s ‘honour?’

The girls or adult women might want to go to university, develop a career, or they might wish to dress to please themselves, or they might want freedom as to who they meet, or who they marry. Underneath these range of desires is the desire to think, feel and express themselves, ultimately, to determine the course of their life for themselves.  This is what men such as Shafia cannot stand.  It is loss of control over what are defined as their possessions: female relatives are defined as the possessions of ‘their’ men.  

We who do not accept that women are men’s possessions, whether on religious, moral or legal justifications,  are the ones who find it hard to understand Shafia’s crime against his own wife and children, the youngest only thirteen.   Last week, as I read various commentators it is clear they were struggling to  comprehend the  disgust and hatred he has expressed, underlying his horrific violence. 

But what if our mind set was different? What if our mindset was derived from Islam? I wish to show that the rationale for Shafia’s conduct lies, fairly and squarely,  on the ideology of Islam as promulgated in the Koran,  also, the teachings of its eminent scholars since its inception and most importantly, on the example of the life of the founder of Islam himself, Muhammed.

Much is being said about the distinction between honour killings,  and whether there is any difference between these and domestic violence in general. Of course it is a lamentable truth that domestic violence occurs in the homes of people of all classes and nationalities.  The difference is that only in Muslim households,  is the suppression and  control of girls and women defined as a religious duty of the males, whatever their age.   Only in Islam is violence legitimated in order to exact obedience from the wayward wife or daughter.  The founder of Islam, whom it is every good Muslim ‘s religious duty respect and to obey, helpfully  defines in one sentence, the limits of what the good woman ‘s entire aspiration should be:  ‘When a woman observes the five times prayer , fasts during Ramadan, preserves her chastity and obeys her husband, she may enter by any of the gates of paradise she wishes’.  And here is what the  good man of Islam should aspire for: ‘After fear of God, a believer gains nothing better for him than a good wife who obeys him if he gives her a command, pleases him if he looks at her,  is true to him if he adjures her to do something, and is sincere towards him regarding her person and his property if he is absent’.  Both these quotes are from the book ‘Sayings of Muhammed’ 1968, translated from Arabic into English by Ghazi Ahmed. It is the cultural expectations of pleasing and obeying men, that all Muslim women are familiar with.

So here we have the ugly tragedy played out on the minds and bodies of countless generations of women since the inception of Islam.  ‘Obey Me, please Me…’, demands each Muhammad and in his domain, his home, on pain of death, he must be obeyed.  Islam places the man as the god of the household.  Each man should have the wife and children essentially, obeying him, pleasing him and when they do  not, the moral fabric of the Muslim man’s Universe is torn. When these men emigrate to the Western countries with their laws on individual freedom and women’s rights, they do not drop the beliefs that shaped their consciousness from birth.   So all across the world, where there are such households headed by such men – such good believers of Islam – we hear of women being beheaded, being burnt, being buried alive, being strangled, being stabbed and being drowned. 

For generations upon generations, such acts occurred – a recalcitrant wife or daughter disappeared and it was no-one’s else’s business, thank you very much. The owner of his property can dispense with it how he likes.  The most that might happen is that the parents of the diseased wife might protest, but even then, not very much.  The husband held all the power.  What else is the marriage  ceremony but about giving away the daughter to the other household?  Even to this day, some good Muslim parents say, the good daughter leaves home once, on the day of her marriage, and then the second time  she leaves the home, is from her husband’s house, to be buried.  

 These men ( is it surprising so many of them  are called  Muhammad?)  must live up to their forebears’ example of what it mean to be a good Muslim man. Above all else, above the injunction to provide  for your family, above the injunction to pray five times, or to keep the fast, or to give to the poor, above all these religious duties is the duty to be seen to be in control of  your women.  If you are not, your very masculinity, that which gives you the right to be in charge of the household, sit with pride in the community of Muslim men in the mosque, is in jeopardy.  Thus we see these murderers, brazenly unrepentant, with head held high.

 The fear provoked by the cold-bloodied rage of these men is such  that most  right thinking people who wish to interpret Islam in gentler more humane ways, have cowered before them. Cowered and complied in the self-serving definition of  ‘honour’, and so generation after generation, in all Muslim societies, established as they were by force, ( over many centuries, the invaders gave three choices to the vanquished) convert, die or work to death paying high taxes)  the free thinkers, the brave, the true and the beautiful have been sacrificed. They have been murdered and their bodies left in unmarked graves. Their desire to live their life according to their own truth, their refusal to live as obedient slaves marked them as  deviant,  dangerous and disgusting.  Thus defined, there is no one to remember them, no one to cherish their memory, no one to be inspired by their acts of defiance to a code that gives men all power, that makes women the slaves of men’s arbitrary, often cruel double standards.   

Shame on the wives and mothers and sisters that collaborate.  Shame on the brothers, sons, uncles who kowtow to such fathers as Shafia and do not defend the girls and women in the family, who desire to live with dignity and honour as humans, not as the servants and playthings of depraved, and morally repugnant men such as Muhammad Shafia.

Written in honour of the memory of Rona (52) Zeinab (19)  Sahar (17) and Geeti (13). Rest in Peace. 

May the cultish thinking that justified your killing, itself soon die instead of spreading as it currently is, like a cancer, across the globe.  

May those who bully, coerce and use force and violence to silence others, whether in private or public life, themselves become disgraced, and their memory turn to dust. 

May all people who value equality and justice,  join together and refuse to bow to intimidation and the cowardice that, under the guise of cultural relativism, excuses such murderers as ‘followers of a different tradition’. 

We global citizens who are true democrats and who love justice, know that every tyrant seeks to legitimise his tyranny.  The traditionalists of Islam are no different.

Deadening Tentacles of Fossilised Minds

There are degrees of tyranny, as well as degrees of freedom and when Kant, the philospher of Prussia, writing in 1784, asked, 'Do we now live in an enlightened age?', his answer if I may paraphrase it, was along the lines of, 'No, but we are heading in that direction'.  And now, some 328 years on, people in the Western countries can speak their minds on most matters without getting excommunicated, burnt at the stake or exiled.

But the situation remains exactly the opposite in the Muslim-controlled  countries.  Last week, a young journalist from Saudi Arabia, Hamza Kashgari, sent a few short tweets basically saying he does not wish to deify Mohammed, the founder of Islam, but would shake hands with him on his birthday, as an equal.

These simple words claiming equality as human beings (nothing in their content, that is actually insulting or degrading )  have provoked many thousands of his fellow citizens to call for the death penalty for Kashgari.

Despite attempts to mollify his compatriots, (rather like Galileo, reneging on his discovery that the sun  goes around the earth)  the voices baying  for this young journalists's blood, only grew louder. So he escaped out of the country.  But en route to New Zealand,  he has been sent back to Saudi Arabia by the Malaysian authorities even though there is no extradition treaty between the two countries. What a shame and a disgrace! To collaborate with those who would use naked force - indeed, the ultimate santion - death  and for what? Not for murder, or rape,  but merely, the expression of an opinion...

As Kant said, for enlightenment to develop, '... nothing is required but freedom, and indeed, the most harmless among all the things to which this term can be properly applied. It is the freedom to make public use of one's reason at every point'.  We can see the fruits of this idea, as we look around at the phenomenal level of inventions, discoveries, in every field of human endeavour, but surprise, surprise,  there are few if any Muslim names who have made any discoveries of any note whatsoever...

Because for the little tyrants dominating households, communities and entire nations, the public use of one's reason is the most feared of ideas for it strikes at the heart of the fossilised, out of date rules and traditions that  Mohammed sanctified by his words and example. And they wish to continue to slobber over, oppressions unninterrupted, some1,400 later:  their right to 'marry' 9 year old girls, to hold the power of life and death over youth, to debase and control half the population in the name of their 'honour'.  Hardly an environment in which creativity is fostered ! Are we to give in to this fossilised creed, mouthed mindlessly by fossilised thinking?

Let's call for sanctions against Saudi Arabia and a condemnation of Malaysia. We need to have actions taking place all across the world, on an even bigger scale than against the human rights violations that the system of apartheid which South Africa was governed by.  Why? Because the Africaaners did not attempt to impose their laws on the rest of the world. But hey, guess what? This is Saudi Arabia's goal.  With  Saudi money, as I write this, mosques are being built on street corners all across Europe and America. The fossilised minds of Muslims are attempting to take everyone back into the age of sharia law.  It is not only Hamza Kashgari who is at risk. 

Freethinkers of the world, unite.  Defend him and our human right to dialogue and debate without fear for our lives.