God Collar

by Marcus Brigstocke

  It says in the Bible somewhere that women shouldn’t be allowed to preach, but it says a lot in the Bible, most of which is ignored by absolutely everyone. The Bible was written by powerful men, rewritten by more powerful men and then translated and rewritten by unbelievably powerful men. It is possible that keeping women in their ‘place’ might have suited these men better than it did the God they claimed to represent.

  Sexism is hard-wired into all these faiths. Observant male Jews are required within their faith to wake up every morning and thank their God they are neither a gentile nor a woman. There’s a nice way to begin your day. ‘Morning, God, just me … Thanks for not making me a woman, we’d all have hated that, what with them being not as good as men and everything. Nice gag with the periods by the way – they don’t like them, do they?’ What a horrible way to begin your day. It’s one thing to enjoy who you are and be thankful for the experiences available to you, but to dedicate pre-breakfast gratitude to God for having dodged the girly bullet is foul. Then you don’t even get to cheer yourself up with a bacon sandwich. Because of some outdated piggy-wig rules. I’d hate to have breakfast in a religious Jewish house. Imagine the tension over the porkless table.

  ‘Did you remember to thank God for making you better than me, darling?’

  ‘Yes, darling, I did. How long will you be away for the next time you are unclean?’

  Some Jews are so confused by women and their place in the world that they make love with their partners through a hole in the sheet. The woman lies beneath a sheet with a hole cut out near her vagina and then the man pokes his penis through the hole and with a minimum of fuss gets the vile deed over and done with. No contact, that’s the best way to show someone you love them. I’ve heard of public toilet partition ‘glory holes’ with more romance attached to them than that. I can see as a form of seductive foreplay there might be some appeal in the whole hiding-away thing and only genital contact, but it must make foreplay very tricky indeed. I’m not clear on what the rules are here. Are you allowed to put anything else through the hole? How can you be sure it’s your partner on the other side of the sheet? She might pop out to the shops and leave a warm apple pie under there.

  Muslim men put their women in bags when they go out in public! Like potatoes! They just pop a big cloth bag over their head and off they go. I’m not sure how all that works either. There’s very little indication in the Qur’an that a woman should be treated like a racehorse being led into the stalls. Perhaps it all starts when you get married. The Islamic man stands facing his blushing bride (we’ll leave out whether or not she wants to be there or how old she is for now), and as soon as they are married, the Imam says to the bloke, ‘Would you like a bag with that, sir?’

  ‘Oh, yes please.’

  And bang – the burka goes straight over his wife’s head like a massive degrading condom. Who knows if he ever even sees her again? If he really loves her he’ll cut an eyehole out of the bit where her face is so she can make sure she stays ten metres behind him when they’re walking down the road. Muslims, how dare you? Seriously, how dare you do that to a fellow human being? It may be none of my business as an infidel kafir, and that’s fine, but it’s why I’m not a Muslim. It’s why when your fellow believers blow up a bus in the name of your shared God, I’m less shocked than I should be because I already know they hold over half of the world’s population in such low esteem they can’t even bear for their faces to be seen in public.

  Both mothers and fathers encourage this ugly stupidity. I don’t care if it’s cultural, religious or an elaborate prank where in reality they are all pretending to be Batman. Is that really what God wants? Women in bags? Bags are for things, not for people. Grow up, Muslims. If you were out for a walk one day and I happened to see your wife’s hair – the chances are I wouldn’t have an orgasm. That only ever happened once and I don’t take that bus route any more.

  I’ve heard a few women sing the praises of the jilbab, nikab, burka and all the rest, claiming that the anonymity these garments provide is a relief from the ogling eyes of men. Proof that a person can both flatter and demean themselves in the same thought. How low a view of Allah’s creation must these people have if they think making half the world shuffle about in a tent is the only way to defeat the urges of man? A member of the opposite sex might well find you attractive if he can see you. Does it insult Allah though? Does the behaviour it might lead to offend God? I don’t think so. These coverings were a man’s idea and it’s men who keep the ‘tradition’ alive. It might well suit many women to hide themselves away from the world, there may even be good reasons to do so, but I’ve yet to hear one that explains why all women should be kept in bags. Certainly there are many ways to stop men from looking at you and finding you attractive, but eating disorders, self-harm, agoraphobia and head-to-toe cloth Dalek outfits are not, in this humble infidel’s opinion, healthy or good ones. The covering up of Muslim women is justified by many people in many different ways, but the essential driving force behind it is this – a woman belongs to a man and should not be seen by other men. It’s slavery.

  If there are any veiled Muslim women reading this (if attendance by veiled Muslims at my touring comedy show is anything to go by, I doubt it), if this is one of the rare occasions you’ve been allowed by your husband or father to look at a book like this, and you choose to wear a veil, then go ahead, knock yourselves out. Possibly a poor choice of words, ‘knock yourselves out’, as I imagine that’s one of the pitfalls of not being able to see where you’re going half the time. You might well wear the veil because it’s your choice. It’s up to you. I’ve often been told that no one is forcing Islamic women to cover up like that but I think it’s worth asking the question: what would dad, brother, hubby, uncle, Imam or the rest of the insular community say if your ‘choice’ was to go without? I wear trousers and shoes to collect my children from school. That’s my choice, but let’s not pretend there aren’t social pressures at work here. They may be legitimate, but the notion of total freedom of choice is relative and to collect my kids in just a pair of pants or worse still in a 4×4 would be socially awkward for me.

  On the rare occasions I’ve played live with Muslim women in the audience it’s been affirming and pleasant. Usually it’s just the ones wearing the hijab, but occasionally I’ve played venues where there were girls in a face veil, and at a comedy gig this is wonderful. It’s a delight to see them there for a start, but the real bonus comes when they laugh. A little giggle and the veil seems to dance as the exhalation flutters and ripples the cloth. A hearty guffaw will see it lift off the face and float like a butterfly searching out the nectar of comedy in the air before coming to rest again on the face of the mysterious lady beneath. Sometimes from where I stand on stage you might even catch a cheeky glimpse of chin. I like it. Normally I would describe myself as being sexually underwhelmed by the female chin, but once it’s taken away from you … well, it takes on a whole saucy significance of its own. It’s like an ankle to the Victorians. You catch a glimpse, you’re not sure, could it really have been a suggestion of chin? Did I just see what I thought I did? Ooh, I wanna get me some chin again. Just a flash. Then you start having bad thoughts. You start imagining things on that chin … like your balls. If you’re very lucky you get a whole row of Muslim women one after the other and if you can get them to laugh in a coordinated way it’s like a Parisian cancan of saucy chin action.

  10

  Rules

  I’M NOT TRYING TO BE OBTUSE, OR NEEDLESSLY OFFENSIVE. I’m not interested in being dangerous or provoking the ‘bestseller-list’-inducing fatwa or furore. I said all this on my tour whether there were Muslims in the crowd or not. Like all faiths, the vast majority are clever enough and reasonable enough to take what I say in context, be offended if they choose to be and move on. In any case, the veil issue has next to nothing to do with the Islamic faith. It’s politics and it’s prejudice and it’s bullshit. All the faiths do it to one degree or another. Wom
en always come out of it badly, but it could be any issue. The faithful grab hold of whichever piece of bigotry or hatred they wish to defend, staple it to a tenuous bit of 2,000-year-old scripture and then claim it as part of their belief system.

  ‘This is holy for us now, so you can’t touch it.’

  None of it matters in the real world and everyone should be and could be free to criticize and analyse it. In any case, I’m not a Muslim, my wife wears what she pleases, including my Pink Floyd T-shirts in bed sometimes. That’s not OK, and if you think it is you obviously don’t understand how much Floyd mean to their followers …

  ‘And so it was written on the fourth album, track three verses one to seven, that the wife of the man of the house of Floyd shall taketh not the garment of praise for the works of our fathers, Mason, Waters, Gilmour and Wright, lest she be scowled at from the Dark Side of the Moon and cast into the eternal bafflement of Ummagumma.’

  See, it’s in the scriptures and you can’t ignore them because they’re old and old stuff is always true and always best.

  The rules of the faiths are not my rules. The law of the land, I am obliged as a citizen to obey. Some of these laws are derived from religious traditions and many should be challenged. We are fortunate enough to live in a functional democracy and the laws we live by can be changed if the majority choose to demand it. This is not so with religion. It is not democratic, so logic, reason or changed circumstances rarely gain the traction they need to make change acceptable to the institution in question.

  There seems little sense in needlessly provoking or offending people because they have or don’t have a belief system. But provocation is rarely totally needless, although it may lead to terribly violent conclusions, which I personally would always choose to avoid. But the rules of the church, synagogue or mosque are not my rules and as a non-believer I’m not required to respect them or leave them unchallenged. Translations of the Qur’an tell me I mustn’t make images of the Prophet Mohammed. There’s been some fuss over precisely this issue with lives lost and blood drawn … over cartoons. I’m not a Muslim. If you are one, then bully for you, but as a non-Muslim I can draw a picture of the Prophet Mohammed if I wish to. Not very well, I admit that. I’m not very good at drawing. But I could colour him in nicely. I’m good at colouring in, though my lips move when I do it … I’m not sure what that means. If I had a decent sketch of the Prophet Mohammed, I think I could colour it in beautifully. I wouldn’t go over the lines or anything. I have a horrible feeling that for many Islamists that is still a beheading offence, isn’t it? I can see them now, gathered around my colouring-in book, shouting and looking cross with upsetting banners threatening to sever the head of the colourer-in. Perhaps they will have been sufficiently offended that they will bring babies in T-shirts and headbands emblazoned with messages supporting the righteous killing of the insulting infidel.

  Here’s a thought. If you’re an offended Islamist, instead of leaping straight for the head-chopping sword, why not do what most of your fellow believers do and fucking deal with it! Put on a Cat Stevens record, have a cup of tea and sit down, you shouting, bearded tit. For a long time now, I’ve wanted to create one of those magic eye pictures of the Prophet Mohammed so that only really patient Muslims will want to kill me. It’s the joyful image of a livid, trembling bundle of Islamic fury squinting at the coloured dots and squiggles with half-crossed eyes. Waiting for the image to reveal itself. And then, as the bearded face of Mohammed appears in a shimmery three-dimensional image on the page, he screams:

  ‘This is blasphemy … look!’

  And passes the swirly dotted sheet to his Imam to show him what devilry has been perpetrated by the infidel scum. Ten to fifteen minutes later and the Imam still can’t see anything but smudges.

  ‘Try to look through the picture, not at it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look beyond it.’

  ‘We’re not even supposed to look at it, let alone beyond it …’

  ‘No, it’s there, I swear to you. Clear as day, it is the Prophet Mohammed, praise be upon him. Try to half-close your eyes.’

  ‘Now I can’t see anything. No, wait. I have it. Are you sure it’s the Prophet?’

  ‘Yes, brother! Do you see it? Death to the infidel!’

  ‘I think I can see a dolphin …’

  ‘What do you mean, a dolphin? It’s not a dolphin, it’s Mohammed. He has a beard. What sort of dolphin has a beard? Give it back to me.’

  These are not my rules.

  There was a death sentence decreed upon a British teacher who allowed her class to name a teddy bear Mohammed. I don’t think she believed the teddy was an accurate rendering of Allah’s chosen messenger on earth. I think if the Prophet had looked like a stuffed children’s toy, someone would have made a note of it at the time. I also doubt he would have been taken seriously if he sought to pass on the sacred and final word of the Lord in the form of Teddy Ruxpin. The most popular name in the class by a distance was Mohammed and so the children elected the staggeringly unimaginative moniker ‘Mohammed’ for the stuffed toy. The teacher agreed with their wishes and the next thing she knew she was in prison with a great many people discussing what to do with her bonce once they’d cleaved it off her body. It’s a very good job they never found out the bear’s full name was Mohammed the Pooh. It was a bear, get over it.

  It’s not that I think it’s particularly clever or worthwhile to callously offend someone’s deeply held beliefs, nor do I disregard the impact of riding roughshod over the rules and traditions of someone else’s faith, but that’s just it – it’s their faith, not mine. Offence is fine, it’s good and often useful, it’s how we know we care about things, but to be offended does not entitle anyone to anything extra. You don’t get to say, ‘Well, I’m offended, so now you all have to stop what you’re doing.’ You’re just offended, you’ll be OK. Offence is the excellent barometer we use to gauge how much we mind about the things we believe in. Imagine what sort of dull uncaring dolt you’d have to be to never be offended by anything.

  Personally I’m offended by blandness. While hundreds of sanctimonious people saw an opportunity to oust Jonathan Ross from the BBC after the Andrew Sachs phone-call disaster, I continued to be offended by the fact that a great many programmes are made with the express purpose of not offending anyone. What motivation for art is that? Imagine a life without any offence – awful. The trouble is blandness, like atheism, isn’t cohesive. A lack of offence is very unlikely to bring together thousands of livid people all at once. Imagine if it did, though. I’d like to see tens of thousands of people all complain at once the next time Nicholas Lyndhurst is given his own sitcom …

  Dear BBC,

  I am writing to complain about how little I was affected by the programme I just saw. Not one moment of it offended me in any way at all. I didn’t care about what happened, it challenged nothing I believe in, it affected me so little I ended up dribbling on to my own jumper as my body gave up some its functions. I would have been more stimulated if I’d injected morphine directly into my own spinal column. Please stop this sort of vapid, bland, inoffensive, watered-down, beige nonsense.

  Yours sincerely

  Unaffected of Wandsworth

  Offence is yours to take. What you choose to do with it is up to you. How I choose to respond to your objection is up to me. If you’re offended by me and I choose to acknowledge your position but decide not to change mine or to moderate my choice of expression, can we still be friends? Or is offence so very important that if I offend you once, then the relationship we had is over? Offence is taken easily by the faithful, on behalf of entities they’ve never met and people they’ll never know. There seems to be an expectation that if a person’s religious ideology is offended, this is somehow a greater crime than to offend someone’s morals or politics or passions. It isn’t, though, is it? There exists in all of the faiths hateful hysteria, ugly and punitive discrimination and lunacy, and some of this offends me. I
f you don’t all stop it, I’ll hold my breath. I will. I’ll do it. Don’t make me because I’ll do it … I mean it.

  I know lots of Christians. They’re nice, they’re fun, they’re witty, they’re clever, they wear jumpers and eat yoghurt. All the things you’d hope for from real people. I talk to Christians all the time and we get on well. But whenever I’m talking to a Christian I don’t know well, I find myself wondering if they are one of those who have that monologue inside their head. They can chat away to you, a smile on their face and a song in their loving heart, but they’re constantly plagued by that question worming its way through their brain … What are the gays up to? What are the gays doing now? Are they coming here? Do they want me to be gay? Is it going to be compulsory? Are they getting gayer? I saw Graham Norton on the television; I thought, that’s as gay as you can be and then … gasp! Alan Carr!

  Christians are obsessed with gay people. If you’re not gay, it’s probably nothing to do with you. If you think you’re not gay but you’re a man who really likes cock, then yes, there are some things to look at. If you’re a Christian woman who thinks of kd lang’s bottom and little else, well then, welcome to the sisterhood of lez. If you’re none of the above, then shut up and stop worrying what the gays are up to. Most homosexuals are as interested in you as they are in soccer. Which is to say, not that much. Christians are more obsessed with gay people than gay people are, and that is saying something.

  The most recent bit of political religious posturing revolves around gay weddings where a man and a man or a woman and a woman can be joined in a civil partnership. The religious argument has it that gay weddings undermine the institution of marriage. Two men getting married to each other because they are in love and wish to commit to that for ever or two women vowing to spend the rest of their lives in a union of love and respect undermines the Christian foundation of marriage. Does it?