Comments

You have commented 339 times on Rantburg.

Your Name

Your e-mail (optional)

Website (optional)

	My Original Nic Pic-a-Nic Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Foto

Submit your comments on this article

Britain

Muslim stand-up act in Edinburgh

2005-08-13

Very long Independent article on political comedy right now in Britain. I'm including the part on just one comedian, a Muslim woman here. Hat tip to the Interested Participant, for all your one-stop female-teacher-having sex-with-underage-boy stories.

But the best Muslim stand-up - and perhaps the best stand-up on the fringe - is Shazia Mirza. A tinder-dry woman from Birmingham, she lives trapped in a pincer movement between two prejudices: those of the wider society against Muslims, and those of many Muslim men against an independent, brilliant woman who earns her living by daring to stand in front of clumps of white men, unveiled and laughing. Her breakthrough set last year toyed with the first set of prejudices. She would introduce herself with the words, "My name is Shazia Mirza. At least, that's what it says on my pilot's license." Later, she would ask, "Does my bomb look big in this?"

But this year - in an even more powerful show - she delivers a long comedic howl against the way Muslim women are treated as second-class citizens, both within their own community and by many well-meaning liberals deferring to what they think of as a fixed and unchanging Muslim culture.

She explains how, as a girl, she was taught by her parents to fear and dread sex. "My mother would constantly say, 'Don't go out after 4pm - you will be raped.' Do all rapists come out a 4.01pm? Do they say, 'Oy, Ahmed, let's get her before Countdown?' And she would say, 'Don't have a parting in your hair.' As if men go, 'Phwoar, look at the parting on that.' I always wanted to be like my white friends, who had abortions, herpes and chlamydia. And my mother would say, 'Wait until you are married, your husband will give you all of that.'"

Mirza tells us about scores of disastrous "arranged dates", in which educated Muslim men who have always lived in the West express their contempt for a woman who fails to show them "respect". One man says simply, "do you realise if we were still in Pakistan, you would be beheaded?" Another writes to her father saying, "in a lesser family, she would be killed." But Mirza refuses to submit to this militant misogyny. "If men are the ones with no self-control, why do we have to be covered head to toe?" she demands. "Surely it's them who should be covered up - or, better yet, chained."

Mirza takes her audience on a tour of the sexual dysfunctions that are thrown up by her community's conservative morality. One joke runs: "My dad has sex with prostitutes. It's OK - my mum pays. She hates sex." She has a Turkish friend who has been told constantly that she must have her hymen intact on her wedding night, so she only has anal sex on dates. "'I'll be a virgin on my honeymoon,' she says. Yeah, a virgin with haemorrhoids." She was constantly being told that any hint of a nipple through a woman's top can "bring a devout Muslim man crumbling into a state of total moral collapse." "So," she says, "these tough suicide-bombers can strike fear into the heart of London - so long as nobody opens a copy of the Sun newspaper."

She explains softly, "I'm terrified I'll die a virgin. Not because I'm obsessed with sex. I'm not, I don't think it's that big a deal. But I don't want to get to Paradise and have to sleep with one of the suicide bombers."