Their racism is punishable … ours is hushed

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BRITAIN’S series, “Coronation Street,” is the longest-running British soap aired by a British TV public channel. I was surprised to find out that this series is still going on, because I followed many of its episodes when I studied in Britain in the 1970s.

Recently, the series caused an uproar in British media until it was announced that the internal production bodies will investigate officials of this soap, after hundreds of viewers complained about the racist remarks made by one of the cast members. In an episode aired last August, Eva Price — played by Catherine Tyldesley — visited a hair salon where she made the racist remark, “I have more roots than Kunta Kinte. No idea who that is, by the way, just something my mum used to say.”

For our brothers and sisters in the new generation, Kunta Kinte was the main cast in one of the most famous US family saga movies and hit TV miniseries in the 1980s, adapted from the novel, “Roots,” by Alex Haley.

According to Alex Haley, the book is based on a real-life character in the story of a young man, Kunta Kinte, who was taken from Gambia and sold as a slave.

All we can do in this regard is to praise the ‘urbanism’ of British people, adorned by their liberal secularism culture that prohibits, to the extent of criminalizing it, racial discrimination or ethnical humiliation and taunting, even if such remarks are made in the context of a dramatic work.

When it comes to us, the matter is totally different in countries of religious devotedness or ranting about religiousness. Here we mean the religion of Islam, which absolutely prohibits racial discrimination as per the verses of the Holy Quran and the traditions of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

Despite all that, we witness daily on our television screens the clerics and preachers or men trading with religion, calling for woe and destruction upon anyone who is not in their ‘takfiri’ bloody creed.

In fact, a few days ago I watched a preacher narrating a story to another person of his kind, telling him that he meets the genie periodically. This preacher claimed that he asked his friendly genie or whoever he meets with, “about the filthiest genie in the community of genies.” The genie replied, “The ones who belong to so and so religious sect.”

The preacher rejoices, and in return, he tells the genie that, “even among humans, they are those who belong to so and so religious sect.”

This is what the preacher said, he attributed filth to millions of people affiliated to that religious sect and such a person neither gets punished nor censured.

This is the difference between people from civilized communities, and people from backward communities like ours.

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By Ali Ahmed Al-Baghli

Former Minister of Oil

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