Channel 4 went big on Britz, describing it as must-see, water-cooler television for the post-7/7 generation. I was happy to give up four hours to see anything that Peter Kosminsky had written and directed. The Government Inspector, his thoughtful, sparse telling of the death of David Kelly was one of the highlights of 2005.
But I was disappointed by Britz—on three levels. Continue reading ‘The failure of Britz (2)’
Meeting an old colleague from the BBC for coffee, I was forewarned about what Peter Kosminsky was planning for his latest dramatic offering, Britz. So, when Channel 4 admitted that the show would upset some people, I considered myself well prepared—but alas, I wasn’t.
Kosminsky’s attempt to make us empathise with Nasima—one of the central characters, who later becomes a suicide bomber—is nonsensical. She is “radicalised” not by British foreign policy—the cause de jour often favoured by the left—but instead by “control orders,” which allow the government to restrict the liberty of terror suspects. There is clearly something about the existence of control orders in a liberal democracy that makes most of us uneasy, but let’s put this in perspective. The measures are used very sparingly (no more than around 15 people are on them), the courts continually monitor their effectiveness and, ironically, while Britz was airing, the House of Lords ruled that suspects under control orders must be told why the order has been imposed.
Nasima seems to have everything to live for: she is attractive, integrated and studying to be a doctor. But the evil British state and its draconian anti-terror laws drive her into the arms of the much more reasonable terrorists. As if to ram home the point home, when Nasima’s “fixer” leaves shortly before her bombing, he tells her, “you will sit at God’s right hand.” “That’s not why I’m doing this,” she replies. Kosminsky’s take-home message: suicide bombing is nothing more than an expression of political desperation. That’s not a message I’m inclined to believe, and Britz didn’t persuade me otherwise. People can obviously be motivated by a burning sense of injustice—but it takes an ideology to push them over the edge. That’s something Kosminsky conveniently chooses to ignore.
Nasima’s story is preceded by that of her brother Sohail, who as a Bradford lad joins MI5 to “give something back.” Again, Kosminsky’s portrayal of Sohail is unconvincing. Too contrived to be credible, Sohail ends up spying on his friends, experiencing racism at the hands of overzealous police officers, and being whisked off to eastern Europe where he interviews a badly beaten terror suspect. Always in tow is his mentor, a clichéd attractive blonde who he inevitably sleeps with. But the most disappointing aspect of the Sohail story is the unsubtle set-pieces Kosminsky creates to illustrate the tensions between Sohail’s Muslim identity and British policy.
One of the few successes to emerge from this film is the sterling performance given by lead actors Riz Ahmed and Manjinder Virk. The duo achieve a synchronicity on screen which lets them give an honest portrayal of otherwise unconvincing characters.
Although Britz does try to consider the sense of injustice felt by large swathes of the Muslim community, Kosminsky’s focus on control orders and neglect of the ideological element is a dishonest portrayal of the debate. He misses the opportunity to provoke debate through a gritty observational drama which unpacks the tensions between normative Muslim values and British society—which so many find unmanageable.
It’s 60 years today since India was born as an independent nation, and 60 years and one day since Pakistan was. The history of the divided subcontinent has been a troubled one—to say the least—which is perhaps why our latest web exclusive has, for me, a double poignancy. It is taken from the writings of Horace Alexander (1889-1989), one of a group of English Quakers closely associated with Mahatma Gandhi. Alexander spent the day of independence itself with the Mahatma in a group that contained Christians, Muslims and Hindus, and that brought an all-too-brief peace to one of India’s most religiously divided regions. In his words, we see both the fierce hopefulness that attended the birth of the largest democracy in history, and the awareness that its triumphs and failures would be the fruits of struggling self-mastery rather than sudden miracles.
Alexander’s writing also reminds me of another great Quaker who made his life in India (and there have been several)—Laurie Baker, who died in April this year. Also a friend of Gandhi, Baker embodied much that is finest about India as a home of authentically popular idealism—an architect by training as well as a missionary, he designed hundreds of buildings that attempted to combine simplicity and affordability with a sensitivity to local environments. A resident of Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum) in Kerala for much of his life, his creations include one of my favourite of all Indian buildings—a humble coffee house near the bus station that serves delicious, inexpensive food and drink, within which I have passed more time than almost any other public space in southern India.
And for those who believe that faith in humanity is a vanishing part of the world, take a look at our review of Jonathan Power’s new book—as clear a testament as you’ll ever find to those parts of our nature that may be, perhaps, a little less difficult to see or believe in at this time of anniversaries.
If, as Nietzsche put it, a witticism is an epitaph on the death of a feeling, it’s always interesting to look at where feelings are running too strong for jokes—something that has been an uncomfortably live topic for editors these last few years.
For reasons I cannot quite fathom, Prospect has recently gained a review copy of Jonathan Swan’s Man Walks into a Bar 2: the ultimate collection of jokes and one-liners. It’s cheap and cheerful, and operates in the well-worn tradition of quips alphabetised by subject from accidents to zebras (”What is a zebra? 26 sizes larger than an ‘A’ bra”), but my eye was caught by an intriguingly hesitant section near the middle marked ethnic.
It rather gives the game away that the first one-liner in this section goes, “How does every ethnic joke start? With a look over your shoulder.” In order, then, the individual “ethnic” topics are—American, Australian, Chinese, Chinese phrasebook, Eskimo, French, German, Iraqi, Irish (by far the longest), Japanese, Jewish, Mexican, Scottish, Welsh. These are hardly ethnicities in the conventional sense, but what I found striking was just how narrow and predictable a spectrum of inhabitants this joke-land has: its Americans are brash, its Chinese mangle English to comic effect, its French are cowardly (”How many Frenchmen does it take to defend France? Don’t know, never been tried”), its Germans are dull, its Irish are stupid. Arab, Afro-Caribbean and Indian categories are notable by their absence, with the dubious exception of Iraq (”What is Iraq’s national bird? Duck”). Far less of the world is thought generically amusing than it used to be, and most of these efforts smack of desperation rather than relish—surely a good thing.
Also interesting are the 53 entries under religion. According to my count, these divide into 34 about Christianity, 12 generic “god” gags, five about Judaism or the Old Testament, one about Taoism, and one about Buddhism (”What did the Dalai Lama say to the hotdog vendor? ‘Make me one with everything’”). Islam, clearly, is not remotely funny at the moment—and I’m far from convinced this is a good thing.
Finally, there are no less than 23 entries under chavs (”What do you say to a chav in a suit? ‘Will the defendant please stand’”). I remember when—unthinkable today, at least in print—that joke was doing the rounds with its butt as “a black man.” But it’s disconcerting to see that there’s still nothing taboo about pouring contempt on one’s social inferiors.
In the new issue of Prospect, Roger Scruton responds to the recent spate of atheist polemics from the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Arguing that these books fail to comprehend the human need for the sacred, Scruton draws upon the insights of the “anthropology of religion,” and in particular the French critic René Girard, to argue that religion is not, contra Hitchens et al, the cause of violence, but actually the solution to it. Let us know what you think below.
Orthodox paradox. In 2005, Bartle Bull wrote about the new Iraqi constitution and Noah Feldman, an American law professor who helped to write it (subscribers can read it here). As it turns out, Feldman has personal experience of trying to combine religious tradition and modernity himself, as he reveals in this thoughtful article.
Jews of Iraq. Playwright (and former Prospect cultural editor) Samantha Ellis reviews two recent books by Marina Benjamin and Naim Kattan in the Jewish Quarterly.
Klezmer Idol. Don’t forget to vote in the Jewish Chronicle competition.
The Hitchens brothers, Christopher and Peter, made a rare public appearance together this morning on the Today programme, debating Christopher’s new book about religion, God is Not Great. For an earlier Hitchens brothers clash, see their Prospect debate, in March 1998, about the legacy of the 1960s. Christopher kicked things off this morning by describing a challenge he has been issuing to religious types recently: “Name an ethical statement made by, or act performed by, a believer that could not have been performed by a non-believer.” Not surprisingly, he said, no one has been able to come up with one. So—we are presumably meant to conclude—that’s 1-0 to atheism then. Well, no, actually. Christopher’s challenge may show that it is perfectly possible for non-believers to behave ethically (which few religious people would deny) but surely the more important question is whether non-believers are as likely to behave ethically—and on this score the challenge proves nothing. It was, in other words, a typical manoeuvre: superficially bamboozling, but also slightly missing the point. However, encountering such rhetorical slipperiness at so early an hour did have one beneficial effect: it roused me instantly from my slumbers, and ensured that I got to work (sort of) on time.
Bertrand Russell famously wrote, at the age of 15, that “the search for truth has shattered most of my old beliefs”—at least according to the diary extracts he reproduces in My Philosophical Development, which detail his departure from the comfortable, Christian teachings of his youth into the realm of rigorous enquiry. “My thinking,” he adds, “was, in a crude form, along lines very similar to that of Descartes.”
15 may seem a precocious age for the commencement of questing as a full-blown philosopher, but it’s beginning to look positively geriatric in comparison to the more recent British, intellectual and faithless crop. Martin Amis, for one, describes in his 2002 essay “The voice of the lonely crowd” his apotheosis at the age of just 12:
Later - we were now in Cambridge - I gave a school speech in which I rejected all belief as an affront to common sense. I was an atheist, and I was 12: it seemed open-and-shut.
Even this pales in comparison to Christopher Hitchens, however, whose intellectual atheism was fully achieved before he even hit double figures. As he tells it in the opening pages of his (sensationally irate) new book, God is not Great:
At the age of nine… I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher [explaining why it was obvious the world was made by God] had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences… There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking. I do not think it arrogant of me to claim that I had already discovered these four objections… before my boyish voice had broken.
Eat your heart out, Bertrand.
Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-Egyptian philosopher in the vanguard of the Islamic modernisation movement, is no stranger to controversy. A substantial body of opinion, particularly in France and the US, views him as a dangerous figure who flirts with radicalism and delivers different messages depending on whether he is speaking to north African immigrants to France or senior European politicians. The debate has been reopened in the last couple of weeks by Paul Berman’s sceptical (and extremely lengthy) profile of Ramadan in the New Republic.
A year ago, Prospect published an interview with Ramadan in which he expressed his support for integration of Muslim minorities in European countries. Prospect’s editor David Goodhart wrote then that it was “vital for Europe’s future” that Ramadan’s attempt to modernise the faith and to reconcile it with Europe succeed. But last week, Ramadan argued in the Guardian that British society needed to stop insisting on Muslim integration and instead start putting its own house in order.
David wonders if this is some sort of “complicated piece of political manoeuvring,” or if the Ramadan he interviewed last year has turned towards what he calls the “beleaguered, paranoid worldview” of some sections of British Islam. You can read his open letter to Ramadan here.
So, as you probably know by now, when the variant spellings of the name Muhammad are combined, it rises from 22nd place to become the second most popular name for baby boys in Britain.
This is, of course, not a matter of sheer numbers. Muslims only make up 3 per cent of the British population. It is also not wholly explainable by the fact that Muslims have a higher birthrate than non-Muslims. After all, the most popular girl’s name among Muslim parents, Aisha (Aisha was one of Muhammad’s wives) is in 110th place, outside of the top 100 — although the Times don’t seem to have looked for variant spellings for that name. Instead, it is because, while non-Muslims choose a variety of names (and often actively look for less popular ones), a huge number of Muslims choose to call their sons after the Prophet.
What I want to know is, what percentage of Muslim baby boys are called Muhammad? And is this only such a strong trend among Muslim parents in Western countries, or, in Islamic countries, is every Tom, Dick or Harry called Muhammad?
Recent Comments