Confused about Islam? Get your HIT

By Maher Mughrabi

How not to let facts get in the way of a good religious stereotype.

It's really amazing how much easier it has become to understand the myriad political situations between Morocco and Indonesia, or Nigeria and Chechnya since September 11, 2001. Gone are the tiresome days of having to study each country and its historical and social circumstances, its language and thought, before you can write about it. You just whip out your Handy Islam Template and presto: everything falls into place.

If young women are being genitally mutilated in Africa, your template can help you understand it without any need to talk about tribal practices that existed in Africa before Islam arrived; if young people are blowing themselves and others to bits in Israel, you can talk about Islam's "culture of death" without having to figure out what it means when Sri Lankan Tamils, hardly any of whom are Muslim, adopt the same terrorist method.

But the usefulness of your Handy Islam Template (or HIT for short) doesn't end there. You can use it to make sense of your civilised Western surroundings too. Once upon a time you might have bored your readers by examining the tendency of first-generation migrants to concentrate in certain neighbourhoods, how governments responded, and what that meant for their children and their integration.

But now, thanks to your HIT, you can titillate your audience with totally new and hair-raising scenarios: when Muslims migrate, they don't do so to escape political persecution or find ecomonic opportunity like migrants of other cultures. What an outdated notion. In fact they re sent by underground leaders to overthrow Western civilisation and wreak revenge on behalf of the Moors. They live close to one another so that they can plan their jihad without being disturbed, and the women wear burqas to hide the secret weapon. What is the secret weapon? No one knows - it's secret. But as Donald Rumsfeld so sagely said, the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

(An important reminder: when using your HIT, make sure you drop in some of those exotic Arabic words. No, you don't actually have to speak Arabic. Your HIT is designed for convenience and easy use.)

Which brings us to the rioting in Paris over the past fortnight. Two kid trying to avoid police end up getting themselves killed? In the bad old days you might have been tempted to compare this with the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King verdict, or even what happened in Redfern last year.

With your Handy Islam Template you can actually trace rioting like this right back to the Middle East, without having to wonder about the fact that many young French Arabs dress like American rappers and idolise the guns, drugs and scantily clad women of hip-hop culture. Forget all that urban guerilla warfare you might have read about in French history (the reason Baron Hausmann made the boulevards of Paris so wide in the 19th century was to stop the mob barricading them) and get your HIT out.

After taking a potshot at French multiculturalism (whatever that is), you don't have to identify a single reliable source that claims this is a religious rising. You just have to hint at shadowy Islamic radicals and chuck in the word "intifada". After all, that was what the intifada was, right? Just a big riot (that's certainly what it looked like on TV) run by mad mullahs under the bed. If someone asks you whether there was a "failed Israeli experiment with multiculturalism" in the Gaza Strip, or what kind of police they had in Nablus in 1987, then you know for certain that this person doesn't own a HIT.

One more lucky customer.


Maher Mughrabi is a staff writer at The Age, where this article first appeared in November 17 2005