There's Songs of Praise for the Christians every Sunday. There are special messages from the head Rabbi for Passover and Yom Kippur.
There’s Songs of Praise for the Christians every Sunday. There are special messages from the chief Rabbi for Passover and Yom Kippur.
So why not have prayers for Ramadan?
Channel 4 will screen a three minute chant by Hassen Rasool, a prayer call leader, from the start of Ramadan next Tuesday. Thereafter it will mark the first prayer of each day at 3am before resuming it’s regular schedule.
It will, however, interrupt this schedule for 20 seconds at four other prayer times during the day for the 30 days of Ramadan.
In other words, if you’re watching Channel 4 at 3am your programming will be interrupted for three minutes. Later in the day, you will also lose just over a minute of television.
I can see how that could be quite upsetting.
Some perspective is needed, though.
According to the front page of today’s Sun, the actions of Channel 4 in choosing to broadcast Ramadan could “inflame tension”.
In other words, there are people who are so angry they are going to lose around four minutes of television a day that the peace may be compromised.
And as if the Sun actually wanted to inflame community tensions, the paper follows this by quoting an obnoxious Islamist by the name of Abu Zakariyya – of the Islamic Emergency Defence Group – who wants to see Sharia Law in Britain.
You’d think the Sun was implying that all Muslims who will take part in Ramadan prayers want Sharia Law or something.
In the end Channel 4’s decision is down to a mixture of two things.
Firstly, like the Sun it actually wants to “provoke” the wrong sorts of people for the purposes of publicity, much like when it made the atrocious decision to broadcast an ‘alternative message by the Holocaust-denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – although in the case of the latter it would have been wrong not to be provoked.
There’s also a detectable strain of Islamophilia amongst some half-baked progressives, which Channel 4 seems to epitomise. In polite company Christianity can be cursed to the skies, yet criticism of Islam comes with a risk attached – you may be branded Islamophobic; the implication being that you suffer in some way from colour prejudice.
As George Orwell put it in Notes on Nationalism:
“Almost any English intellectual would be scandalised by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it.”
Personally I would like to see a lot less religion on television. But that doesn’t mean I’m the sort of person who is going to be “provoked” by four minutes of Muslim prayer each day for a single week. You should probably worry about anyone who is.
29 Responses to “What sort of person would three minutes of Muslim prayer at 3am ‘provoke’?”
Jacko
In the East End, gay people can now no longer walk the streets without being told that “this is a Muslim area” and “your kind aren’t welcome here”. Don’t believe me? Google it. I know in the kind of middle-class, left-leaning tolerant world you inhabit everyone is all very reasonable and polite and live-and-let-live but the reality of Islam is that it is not a tolerant ideology. They are not prepared to tolerate you in the same way that you are them. They don’t believe in equality for women or gay people. In Saudi Arabia women are not even allowed to drive cars. Cinemas are prohibited. Valentines day is prohibited. Bikinis are prohibited. And if they were able, they would impose those same strictures here.
Don’t believe me?
You might be interested to learn that one of the vice chairman of Unite Against Fascism, Azad Ali, is community affairs organiser of the Islamic Forum of Europe, a group dedicated to changing “the very infrastructure of society, it’s institutions, it’s culture, it’s political order and its creed from ignorance of Islam.” Their words, not mine.
SadButMadLad
I’m against CH4 broadcasting the Muslims call to prayer as much as I am against the BBC broadcasting Songs of Praise. Both are religious programming on state channels. The state and religion should have no connection at all. Keep the religion to the appropriate channels. There are the Christian channels on Sky so should there be Muslim channels. It’s not the length of time, it’s the principle.
Alex Ross
I’m afraid your comments reveal both an ignorance of the reality of the East End and of Muslim life as it is largely **lived** in the UK. It is perfectly possible to go out to gay clubs/bars in the East End and not be harassed by hordes of angry Muslims. I don’t need google. I go there regularly. That isn’t to say that the Islamists who put those disgusting homophobic stickers up aren’t utter dickheads, just that they are no more representative of Muslims than the bizarre collection of thick football casuals and neo-Nazis that make up the EDL is representative of white people.
I’m guessing that you don’t actually know many **actual** Muslims – hence the appeal to stereotypes and internet memes. If you did, you might have a greater understanding of the reality of communities trying to (in the main) rub along with a liberal-democratic culture whist trying to maintain some sense of their identity and all the messy conflicts and contradictions that that entails.
And BTW I’ve no interest in what the (rather loony) UAF have to say about anything…so that is something of a non-sequitur??
NT86
Enough pandering already! Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. How about realising that these are just centuries old fairy tales that have created ignorance, hatred of others and an unwillingness to integrate into non-Muslim societies?
Yet we’re told the fib that this is the religion of peace and tolerance. The biggest joke ever.
bear on the peaks
Mormons, Catholics andJews do not dispatch assassins to silence their critics or anyone who pokes fun at them. To even question Islam, one risks being hunted for the rest of their life by religious maniacs. There is only one religion today that systematically stifles free expression with credible threats of violence. In the west we have already lost our rights to speak freely against Islam because pc-enablers and muslim apologists brand any criticism of Islam a symptom of Islamophobia. As a gay man, I’d be tortured and murdered in many Islamic countries including Mauritania, Iran, Sudan, Saudia Arabia and Yemen. If the people who criticise Islam are racists, then I am calling the people who defend Islam homophobes for putting my life and the lifes of other gay men and women and risk. Defend England now if England means anything at all to you. I support the EDL.