IN MY SHOES: Muslims Have A Sense Of Humor (Who Knew?)
Writing in The Washington Post, British writer and broadcaster Sarfraz Manzoor argues that Muslims are regarded as being humorless because “[t]he funny ones haven't been speaking up”:
Woody Allen is my G-d. Nothing strange about that, you might think -- except that he is an Upper East Side New York Jew, and I am a British Pakistani Muslim from the working class. His characters are moneyed intellectuals whose only contact with dark-skinned people comes through the jazz soundtrack playing in the background while they agonize over their relationships. I grew up with a father who worked in a car factory, and the only white person who came near our home was the newspaper delivery boy.
And yet, when I first saw "Annie Hall" as a teenager, I knew I had found a kindred spirit. It didn't matter that I had never set foot in the United States or that I missed some of the cultural references. (Who is this Marshall McLuhan character, anyway?) I saw myself in Woody Allen. Self-doubt cloaked in self-deprecation? Check. Existential dread rubbing up against carnal desire? Check. He was so much like me that I almost forgot that I wasn't, in fact, Jewish. …
When I was a child [my mother] insisted on buying me shoes that were three sizes too big and stuffing them with newspaper so my feet wouldn't slide out. In my early teens, I was known as Ronald McDonald. A few years ago, she became so concerned about her 30-something bachelor son that she persuaded me to consider an arranged marriage. We agreed that she would pass along the names and numbers of a few suitable women. Among them, she told me, was a dentist who had graduated from Cambridge University. She turned out to be a dietitian who had once been to Cambridge.
When I tell these stories, my friends say that my mother's just like a stereotypical Jewish mother - overprotective, overbearing and overly involved in her children's lives. But my mum isn't typically Jewish; she's typically Muslim. It's just that too few Muslims joke publicly about their mothers, so we haven't created a stereotype.
Comments