"Women are not fucking around in this area."
The British reporter Johann Hari writes on a ferocious cultural conflict in his London neighborhood, Brick Lane. The controversy surrounding Monica Ali's book Brick Lane, about the repressive culture of a Bangladeshi community in the neighborhood, was simmering even before it was optioned for a film.
When the BBC decided to make this into a film, they naturally wanted to shoot on Brick Lane itself—and the troubles began. A small number of Bengali men were enraged by Ali. A woman—a woman!—had dared to take the rest of us on an intimate tour of the Bengali community. She had even tried, in her subtle, tender way, to incite a rebellion of Muslim women, to encourage them to become Nasneems and discover the joy of being free-thinking sexual women rather than being terrorised into tethered livestock hiding in cloth-prisons. They organised demonstrations to halt the filming, to shut up this uppity bitch once and for all. Their meetings talked of burning the book and of burning her.
There's more about the feminist Germaine Greer-conservative Muslim alliance against Ali and an interview with the foul-mouthed organizer of the anti-Ali campaign.
UPDATE: I corrected the text to make clear it's only one feminist allying with the conservative Muslims, and an iconoclastic feminist at that. But I just noticed something else. Brick Lane is included in the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency in Parliament. This is the seat represented by George Galloway.