Growing up, everything was considered haram. You got a bank account? Haram. You wear jeans? Haram. You got your ankles out? Haram! As a girl I only had to leave the house and make eye contact with a tree and it was considered haram. The only thing that was halal was the butchers but as a teenage girl I wasn’t really interested in meat. Well not unless it came on two legs and took me out to the local nightclub. The list of haram things seems to get bigger and bigger and stranger and more bizarre with the years.
I was watching one of these Islamic channels the other day, one of these channels that ageing parents have on twenty-four hours a day where an Imam is giving advice on everything in life, despite never having left his living room. A woman rang up and asked, ‘Is it ok for me to take selfies of myself and keep them on my phone for me to look at?’, I would have said, if you’re spending a lot of time photographing yourself, looking at yourself, and storing pictures of yourself, you’re a narcissist and should be calling a therapist not an Imam. However the Imam went on to give a lecture on halal and haram. He said that this whole selfie thing was more haram than permissible. The phone could be stolen, hacked, other people could watch it and see the images of you. He ended his response by saying, ‘Allah knows best’. Which is the full stop to every opinion given by every Muslim once they’ve given their disapproving opinion.
Depending on how you view things, you can find haram in most things these days. We live in the most voyeuristic time in history, where everything is documented, displayed, photographed, and commented on. No point telling someone about something, we have to see a picture. Celebrity, social media, more TV channels than ever before, podcasts, and websites, mean that there is more content out there and the lines between halal and haram are vastly blurred to anyone that is not Imam Omar Suleiman.
Growing up, there was always comedy on TV in our house. My mum liked Larry Grayson, Frankie Howard, Kenny Everett, all the gay ones but she didn’t know they were gay. My dad liked the ‘Carry on’ Films, Barbara Windsor in particular. We took it as it was, comedy and laughter. It was very British comedy and my parents who had come from Pakistan to Birmingham in the 1960s were desperate to fit in and be more British than the British. So if Reg and Sue next door were watching ‘Some Mother’s Do Ave Em’ then Mohmmed and Sarwat had to do the same. I never thought that I would ever end up doing what these people on TV were doing. My options were broadcast to me from an early age. ‘You have three career options. A Doctor. A Doctor. And a Doctor’. Comedy was what white men did. Asian women kept quiet, worked hard, and married a man with good prospects.
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