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What we can learn from cricket
Published 06 November 2006
Over the past two weeks or so I have been sofa-bound, and will continue to be so until the International Cricket Council championship is over. The time spent watching games, ball by ball, for me means an escape from the ritualistic abuse of our Pakistani communities in particular.
In between innings and overs, I roamed through the speeches of the ancient parliamentarian Edmund Burke, who bestrode parliament like a colossus through the 18th century. I do not share his views, but it is beyond question that his oratorical skills bordered on greatness, his philosophical musings were profound, and his political analyses were at one and the same time rigorous and imaginative.
Compare and contrast the speeches and writings of Burke with those of our current crop of parliamentarians: ranters and ravers who seem to enjoy turning their guns on Muslims. Not in my wildest dreams can I imagine Burke indulging in what is sheer babble about a square yard of black cloth hanging off a woman's face, or categorising that as discourse or debate. I can't imagine Burke and his contemporaries calling for a young woman barely out of her teens to be fired from her teaching job because she wears a veil, as the government minister Phil Woolas has done.
There is more, much more, to this degenerative process. Feminists, both within parliament and out, have poured scorn on Muslim women as backward and subservient to men solely because they wear veils.
In my last column, I warned that beneath these veils there exists a militant feminism which, if allowed to develop, would extend the boundaries of feminist theory and politics. Within a week of the publication of my column, Channel 4 treated us to a documentary featuring a group of Asian women.
These women, young and old, charged through the door of a Lancashire mosque, dressed in a range of Islamic garb and demanding equality, physically jostling a ragbag of old and young men for equal representation on the ruling committees of all mosques in the UK, and the inclusion of women's issues on their agendas.
I have yet to read or hear a retreat from those feminists who raised their pens and voices in hostility to what they described as the backwardness of Pakistani females. These women, mostly white, are monumentally wrong in their categorisation of Asian Muslim women as doormats for Asian Muslim men.
One gets a whiff of anti-Muslim sentiment even from the commentaries on the game of cricket, more so because the current Pakistani national team has declared its strict adherence to Islam. And the captain, Inzamam-ul-Haq, raises hackles when he announces to his interviewer at the end of a game, in victory or defeat: "Bismillahi Rahmani Rahim."
There are glimpses of the opposite in cricket; there always are. Mushtaq Ahmed is one of the finest leg-spinners in the game. During a period of loose living his game deteriorated. He returned to Islam. He is not only back to his best, but bowls better than he has ever done.
Robin Martin-Jenkins, his captain at Sussex, writes in the current issue of the Wisden Cricketer that the discipline of Islam is the sole reason for Mushtaq's improvement. More than that, fellow team members make physical space for his ablutions and prayer, and question him respectfully about his faith and its practices. Sussex won trophies in consecutive years largely due to his presence. The team roll along merrily, not having or needing to isolate and persecute their Muslim fellow cricketer.
Maybe here lies the road ahead: the unrelenting pursuit of multiculturalism.
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