I’m loving Big Brother at the moment. It’s very funny to watch, and I’m fascinated by the way that the editors manage to forge a narrative out of 24 hours of material: creating order from life’s chaos.
If you’ve been watching you may remember the row between chilled-out Mohammed and the crazed Alex De Gale, later removed from the house for making sinister threats against the other contestants.
It was Mohammed’s birthday and he had a cross-dressing party. Alex upbraided him for this, saying it was against their religion – is there a Koranic line on tranvestism?
This is Johann Hari’s take:
If you were told the biographies of Big Brother contestants Mohamed Mohamed and Alex De-Gale, you wouldn’t find it hard to guess which one is the fundamentalist. Mohamed was born in Somalia in 1985. When he was five years old, he saw his mother being held at gunpoint, and thought she was going to die. Since then, he has spent most of his life fleeing from one civil war to another – until, finally, he was granted asylum in Britain. De-Gale was born in the same year in south London, to black British parents. She is now a lithe accounts executive with high cheekbones, short skirts, a BMW, and a seven-year old daughter she brings up on her own.
You guessed wrong. They wouldn’t use these terms, but Mohamed became a convinced secularist on the run from Somalia, while Alex learned a Wahhabbi interpretation of Islam on the streets of Tottenham. This emerged, as everything does on Big Brother, through a thicket of trivia. Mohamed’s birthday fell a week into his stay in the Big Brother house, so the producers threw him a party, and let him pick the theme. Remembering a fun night he’d had at university, he said he wanted the male housemates to dress as women, and vice versa. Everyone cheered and howled for alcohol.
Except Alex. ‘First and foremost,’ she said, ‘I am a Muslim.’ And that meant the idea of a man dressing as a woman ‘made me feel sick’. Jabbing her finger and shouting, she said to Mohamed: ‘Tell it to Allah [that] it’s all in the name of fun. It’s bad enough that we drink and smoke … You’re supposed to be a Muslim man, someone I can look up to for guidance. You will have my friends and family in uproar. I am disgraced by you … 85 per cent of the people I know are Muslims. And trust me – the sheer horror they would have experienced … [You have] disgraced Islam.’
‘You can’t tell me I’m a bad Muslim,’ Mohamed replied. ’I am old enough to be responsible for myself. Don’t bring religion into it!’ She snapped back: ‘It is! There’s nothing else!’
Alex believes that Islam offers Absolute Judgements, immutably cast in stone in the Koran. These are (of course) hellishly patriarchal, since they were formulated by illiterate desert merchants in the seventh century AD. She has been taught there is ‘nothing else’. Later, she explained to another housemate that Islam forbids drinking and smoking. ‘What can you do then?’ he asked. ‘Pray.’ That’s all. If you see somebody acting in a way your pre-modern system judges to be ’sick’ is it perfectly moral to threaten to kill them?
Mohamed, by contrast, sees the religion as consisting of metaphors and moral guidance – and he thinks it has limits. There are places it shouldn’t go. ‘She always brings religion into an equation that religion has nothing to do [with],’ he said angrily.
This reminds me of an article on the ‘Muslim refuseniks’ Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. While they6 have similar positions, Manji is still a practicing Muslim while Hirsi Ali is a fierce unbeliever. Paul Berman has said that this is because Manji was brought up in liberal, secular British Columbia, whereas Hirsi Ali (like Mohammed) fled fundamentalist Somalia: ‘Ms. Manji offers her own support for Mr. Berman’s conjecture: ‘Had I grown up in a Muslim country, I’d probably be an atheist in my heart.’
All this may not prove anything, except that religion is perhaps best appreciated at a distance.
