Deborah Orr: Stop lumping all Muslims together as either our destroyers or our saviours

Saturday 11 November 2006 01:00 GMT
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MI5's Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller tells us not to panic, but mentions that 200 British-based networks are currently hatching at least 30 major terrorist plots in Britain. The BNP clearly does want us to panic, so it wades in and says that July 2005 would never have happened if only the police had listened to it.

One member of the force, though, has his own perspective on this hair-raising terror-security badinage. Constable Amjad Farooq now wants police protection at his secret location, after suing the Met for race and religious discrimination. The inevitable publicity attracted by his legal action has in turn brought unwelcome attention from an "unnamed person". Which is a regrettable but not surprising development in a complex socio-political situation whose only hard-and-fast rule appears to be "everything escalates".

The firearms officer was removed from Scotland Yard's Diplomatic Protection Group, after a security check found that his children attended the same mosque as an imam suspected of having links to terrorism. This does, admittedly, seem to err on the cautious side. But in the light of the dodgy situation we find ourselves in, it would be quite helpful surely if we could all make a few allowances for can't-be-too-careful overreaction, instead of overreacting in turn to every real or imagined slight.

I abhor, I really do, the rhetorical tendency towards lumping all Muslims in Britain together as both the only architects and the only saviours of the increasingly wearisome "war on terror". The Muslims I know feel they are innocent bystanders in all this just as much as most of us do, so the endless beratings by the Government for them to Do Something - Margaret Beckett joined the fray this week - tend to fall on unfertile ground.

But the Muslims I know are highly westernised and clear about what they accept and what they reject about Islam. They are also, usually, just as concerned as so many non-Muslims about conspicuous displays of traditionalist devotion, whether merely sartorial or more hysterically offence-taking.

The grey areas start emerging because it is actually very difficult to work out exactly what separates cuddly old "literal" Islam, with its modest niqabs, Victorian beards, fondness for Sharia, and determined failure to understand that Bush isn't seem by all of the west as an infallible prophet, from the kind who want to kill all the rest of us, including moderate Muslims.

There are plenty of words for this kind of Islam, routinely described as a "perversion" thereof, often unless it's being acted out in Iraq or Afghanistan. Fanatical, fundamentalist, extremist, political, radical, take your pick. And be comforted, as I am, by Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan's wise counsel that whether you're "a literalist, a Sufi mystic, a reformist" you "must never say that terrorism or violence is part of the accepted diversity". When you've done so, according to him, then what you have to demand for your beliefs, however routinely they are refuted by the law of the land, is not mere tolerance, but meaningful "respect".

As modernist reforming goes, Ramadan's directives seem to me rather demanding. Respect for all beliefs as long as they don't promote violence certainly comes under the category "broad church". And since "taqqiya", or the telling of a lie to gain advantage over the infidel, is presumably seen by fundamentalist Islam as permissible, it's not that foolproof either.

Boring, boring Borat...

A strange thing happened as I watched Sacha Baron Cohen's latest opus, Borat, and I can't for the life of me track down another soul who shared my experience. I laughed like a drain at early set pieces, and even managed shock at the film's hyper-anti-Semitic poke at anti-Semitism in the Running of the Jews.

I was charmed as Borat, left, was borne away from his village to the States in a car that was yoked to a donkey, and engaged by his early encounters with the American Way. But gradually, as the Kazakh reporter moved further into satirising the soft targets of the US cultural landscape - rednecks, bible-belters, idiot teenage boys, we all know the drill - I just began to feel utterly, totally, please-let-it-end-soon bored.

Satire works best when it afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted. Part of the joke, presumably, is that Cohen's genuine US citizens are as afflicted as his fictitious peasants in the post-Soviet mountains. But a lot of them just seemed polite in the face of idiocy they did not know was manufactured. Which is commendable, if dull, and a distant cousin of the political correctness Cohen is lionised for lambasting.

Sometimes it's hard to be a man...

The story of Donald Crowhurst, who was presumed to have committed suicide while taking part in a 1968 round-the-world yacht race, has already been told to great effect in a number of books and plays. Yet a new feature-length documentary, Deep Water, to be released next month, manages to add new resonance to the mesmeric narrative.

Ill-advisedly setting out on the highly publicised circumnavigation, Crowhurst staked his financial future and his reputation on building a vessel of his own design to win the race. From the start, though, it was apparent that neither he or his boat was up to the job.

When, far out into the Atlantic, this became obvious to Crowhurst as well, he decided that he couldn't face the ignominy of returning home, and decided instead to fake his journey, then rejoin the race at the end. When it came to the crunch, though, he couldn't face doing that either. Most of what we know of his last months is contained in log books detailing his fake journey and his fearsome descent into insanity.

What the new documentary brings to the fore, however, is an aspect to this extraordinary story that has so far been little discussed. What comes to the fore is a sense that Crowhurst felt pressure to be a hero in a very prescriptive masculine way. He felt obliged to make a great gesture to define his life, instead of enjoying the simpler responsibilities of work and family.

God knows we've heard enough about the impossible straitjacket of mid-20th-century idealised womanhood. Crowhurst's story is the ultimate illustration of how tragically hard such stereotypes were and are for men as well.

* It comes to something when the planet is threatened by politically repressive flora. But I'm inspired, nonetheless, by Jon Snow's plucky stand against "poppy fascism". I only like the really fancy oriental-style poppies that the royals get to wear on Remembrance Day, even though, strictly speaking, the sad little ones reserved for the paying customer bear a closer resemblance to the ones that grow on Flanders Fields. But what I really don't like about wearing poppies is the way they are promoted as honouring those who fought for Britain when really they're a reminder that the state is more slippery about caring for veterans than it really ought to be. This year, give to Combat Stress as well, and buy some much-needed therapy for our boys who have returned from Iraq.

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