Sahi Bola..Hanif Bhai

This is a link to a piece written by my favourite author Hanif Kureishi or Hanif Bhai as I prefer calling him...http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1757858,00.html

He talks about his play Borderline which is now 24 years old and still runs in The Royal Court Theatre.

He stresses on the lack of social commentators in the mainstream arts scene today even though there is a great need for such voices to dilute the fear and paranoia that is being bought and sold like wares in a Sunday market.

Like most of his pieces it contains some very poignant points and examples.Brilliant....Here's an excerpt of his article in The Guardian today (These are the last three paras

"Ten years after the Southall riots, in 1989 - the year communism died in Europe - there was another significant demonstration by Asians, this time in Hyde Park, central London. It was not about racial attacks, unemployment or indeed any of the concerns shown in Borderline. It was a demonstration against the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and Muslims had travelled from all over the country to protest. A group of Asian female demonstrators (perhaps from a group not unlike the Southall Black Sisters), who were carrying placards saying "Women Against Fundamentalism", were attacked by Muslim men. As these dissident voices were suppressed, as secular and socialist Asian voices were discouraged across the community, a range of new issues emerged, many to do with the idea of speaking, books, writing, words, and the place of the artist and intellectual as critic.

By January 2006, my two eldest sons and I would be going to Trafalgar Square to watch the community demonstrating against other blasphemies - cartoons, this time. The three of us, with Muslim names and a Muslim history, had no place in what was going on and criticism didn't appear welcome. During the same period one of the young actors who took part in the recent reading - he had appeared in Michael Winterbottom's Guantánamo Bay film - had been arrested, harassed and held under the Anti-Terrorism Act at Heathrow, on his way back from the Berlin film festival, where the movie won the Silver Bear.

During the 10 years between the Southall riots and the demonstration against The Satanic Verses, the community had become politicised by radical Islam, something that had been developing throughout the Muslim world since decolonisation. This version of Islam imposed an identity and solidarity on a besieged community. It came to mean rebellion, purity, integrity. But it was also a trap. Once this ideology had been adopted - and political conversations could only take place within its terms - it entailed numerous constraints, locking the community in, as well as divorcing it from possible sources of creativity: dissidence, criticism, sexuality. Its authoritarianism, stifling to those within, and appearing fascistic to those without, rejected the very liberalism the community required in order to flourish in the modern world. It was tragic: what had protected the community from racism and disintegration came to tyrannise it."