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This appears today in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal.
No Offense
By SALIL TRIPATHI
Special to the Wall Street Journal
August 11, 2006
LONDON -- On a balmy Sunday afternoon, nearly 60 men and two women
marched down the most famous street in this city's East End, Brick
Lane. A man called Abdus Salique led their chants of protest:
Maro maro jota maro
Monica-ke gaaler maro
(Hit hard, use your shoes to hit hard
Slap Monica's cheeks, hit her hard)
"Monica" is Monica Ali, author of "Brick Lane," which was short-listed
for the 2003 Booker Prize and the National Book Critics' Circle Award.
Its popularity has brought tourists to Brick Lane, and London-based
Ruby Films is making the novel into a movie. These protesters want to
stop them. Mr. Salique says the book has insulted the lane's
hardworking Bangladeshis: Ms. Ali knew nothing about them, since she
was only half-Bangladeshi and married to "a white man."
The Bangladeshis are certainly industrious. They own nearly 90% of the
12,000 "Indian" restaurants in Britain. Commerce flows through Brick
Lane freely, rejuvenating this depressed area, which has been home to
immigrants since the 16th century -- first the French Huguenots, then
Jews, who converted a church into a synagogue. Now the Jews have gone;
the synagogue has become a mosque for Bangladeshi Muslims; French
street names are written in elegant Bengali script.
Yet while the Huguenots and the Jews became part of the British
landscape, the self-appointed Bangladeshi leaders are demonstrating
that they're not willing to -- chiefly by rejecting a core British
value, tolerance. At the protest, some wanted to burn Ms. Ali's book,
which would have been a first in Britain since a Muslim group in
Bradford burned Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" back in 1989.
At first, London's establishment ignored the grumbling, but at the
first threat of marches and potential violence its mood shifted
quickly to appease the community that feels itself insulted. As
advised by the police and authorities, Ruby Films packed up and left
for another, yet-to-be determined filming location. Protesters pledged
to follow.
For some time now, liberal acquiescence has strengthened the most
radical attention-seekers in Britain. This is not only about Islam:
Hundreds of Sikhs attacked the Birmingham Repertory, closing "Behzti"
(Dishonor), a play written by a British Sikh, because its theme, of
rape in a Sikh temple, upset them. Hindu fundamentalists charged into
a central London art gallery that was showing the paintings of Maqbool
Fida Husain, India's foremost artist and a Muslim, because he had
painted Hindu goddesses in the nude. An irate lecturer from northern
England toppled wax statues of soccer star David Beckham and his pop
singer wife, Victoria Beckham, that depicted them as Joseph and Mary
at a nativity scene at Madame Tussauds.
The offended can switch off their TV sets, not buy the book they don't
like, even call for a boycott, and picket the play or filming. But
when a mob drives filmmakers away, closes an exhibition or a play,
threatens violence and scares the artist to go into hiding, that has
no small impact on everyone else's freedoms.
* * *
There is another reason Ms. Ali is so hated. Her novel's protagonist,
19-year-old Nazneen, comes to London in an arranged marriage. Her
husband wants her to stay at home and bear children. Ultimately, he
leaves Britain, but she chooses to stay. The predominantly male
protesters on Brick Lane are troubled by this portrait of an
emancipated woman. "This is England," a friend, Razia, tells Nazneen.
"You can do whatever you like."
Mr. Tripathi is a writer in London.
posted by Oblique Poet at 11:43 AM
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