Multiculturalism and the melting pot are two very different things. The latter is a mash and a mess, whereby everything gets mushed together and the result is different from all of the original elements. The former, though, puts people into boxes. You might respect the existence of other boxes wholeheartedly, and even peer outside your own, but a box is a box is a box.
Muslims Like Us, a quite superb reality TV documentary on BBC Two, felt a lot like it was coming from the melting pot end of that spectrum. The idea was to fill a house in York, Big Brother style, with a collection of British Muslims. Had they not been Muslim, most of them would have had nothing in common. Which meant, ironically enough, they ended up in a box. Ah, the paradox. Nobody ever said that liberalism was easy.
The set-up created its own dramas. The first person we met was Mehreen, a blonde Cheryl Cole lookalike from London who works as an English teacher. She was joined, swiftly, by Abdul Haqq, a former boxer and convert, who immediately gave her a leaflet about the moral, un-Islamic dangers of free mixing between the sexes before going to sit at the far end of the kitchen, facing the other way. Mehreen spoke to him in a very careful teacher voice. He tried hard to pretend she wasn’t there.
You could tell Abdul Haqq was going to be a flashpoint, although he wasn’t the only one. Saba, 76, was a convert like him, but she was also a white former hippy and a Bob Dylan fan. She clashed often with Nabil, an initially loveable and very funny 31-year-old British-Nigerian stand-up comedian from Croydon. Nabil also clashed early on with Barra, who came from Syria, after Barra met a guy from the English Defence League and was intrigued, rather than horrified. Then, later, he clashed with Ferhan, from Scotland, about who touched whose onion. Feasibly, that wasn’t quite about religion either. Although it might have been. There were subtexts.
Ferhan quickly came out as gay, which some of the housemates really cared about and some didn’t. Fascinatingly — appallingly, really — there were far greater evident tensions later on, when another housemate, Zohra, came out as Shia. Abdul Haqq more or less told her that it would be perfectly acceptable if she were killed as an apostate. “I want to know,” said Zohra, “that the rest of the Muslim community also thinks he’s batshit crazy.” And they did, at least in the house, but there was an edginess there. You could tell.
Advertisement
He was the key to it all, really, Abdul Haqq. Absurd when not frightening, and often both, he spent his time shouting garbled scripture or quoting Scarface, before storming off into the garden when he came under fire, especially if from a woman. According to the Daily Mail and, apparently, quite a lot of viewers, he shouldn’t have been there at all. A chum of the jailed hate-preacher Anjem Choudary, he spent nine months in Belmarsh thanks to suspicions (although he was later found not guilty) that he was planning to travel to Syria to fight with Islamic State. Given there are 2.9 million Muslims in Britain, and Abdul Haqq resembles closely what many people quite wrongly think about them, you could rather see their point.
“Abdul Haqq was the key to it all, absurd when not frightening, and often both
You could say the same, though, about Jason, one of the four non-Muslims from York, drafted in to spice things up. Thirtyish and resplendent in a linen suit and bow tie, a priggish parody of white Britain. A tame little taste for the rest of us, perhaps, of how many Muslims must be made to feel all the time.
What both of these extremes did, though, was imbue the whole thing with an inescapable honesty. Had Abdul Haqq not been there, we would not have been able to see the extent to which the others disagreed with him. Or sometimes, and far more quietly, sort of didn’t. This was particularly striking when another non-Muslim guest suggested that they should visit a war memorial and pay their respects to British troops. Abdul Haqq immediately said he wasn’t going, while the rest looked mortified. When he walked off, though, Saba went with him. Then Nabil. Then Humaira, a smart young woman in a headscarf.
Overall, to vast degree, the message here was positive. We do not often get to see how distant some Muslims — even ones in lipstick, who go to pubs and do karaoke — can feel from all sorts of aspects of the British state, from the army to cathedrals. You can build your own theories about why that wall is there, but it is and there’s no point pretending otherwise. Many of the clashes here were not quite to do with Islam, but to do with immigration, and race, and sexism, even age. Possibly the religious aspect made it worse. Possibly, at times, it did the opposite.
You could also see that, with proximity, in time, the melting pot starts to work. Even Abdul Haqq chilled out towards the end, changing out of his kaftan into a T-shirt, albeit a black one with “TEAM ISLAM” on it. One striking, understated scene took place when some of the others — Mehreen among them — confronted him and told him to apologise to Zohra. They were in a bedroom at the time, cosy amid duvets and pillows, as though at a sleepover. This, a few short days after he had not even been able to countenance sharing a kitchen table.
Advertisement
It wasn’t all so rosy. Nabil’s journey was particularly depressing. At first he was the moral centre. When others went out for karaoke, he politely explained that he wouldn’t like it if his wife had a night out like that with other men, so he would hold himself to the same standards.
By the end, though, the balancing act was beyond him and he had turned into a bully and a boor. Had the project run longer, you could imagine him becoming far more comfortable in Abdul Haqq’s world than in Ferhan’s. Not everybody can cope with the melting pot, was the message here. And not all of the people who can’t are the ones you would quite expect. Everybody should watch this. If you didn’t, do.
Very little space, after all that, to tell you about Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which just dropped on Netflix. The book, by Douglas Adams, might well be one of my favourite novels. It starts with a malfunctioning Electric Monk, on a horse, on a distant planet that he cannot navigate on account of wrongly believing that it, and he, and the horse, are a uniform shade of pale pink. And just how the hell, I wondered, would they film that?
The answer is, they didn’t bother. Stephen Mangan starred in an earlier adaptation, although this one is nothing like that either, but is instead in Seattle, with a wholly different plot. Quite often with new dramas, I have no idea what is going on, but that’s normally because it’s terribly convoluted. This time, though, it’s because it’s just screamingly insane.
Three episodes in, I still can’t decide if it’s one of the best things I’ve seen, or a harebrained car crash of bilge. Maybe I’ll come back to it another week. If I don’t, it’ll mean I’m none the wiser.
