Britz: another exposition
Having watched the second episode of Britz, sister Safiya posted a second article outlining its inconsistencies. She concludes that the programme is “prejudiced garbage” and that the Muslims involved in it should be ashamed. I agree. She points out a few issues I’d not noticed, such as the fact that the “covenant” the bomber took made no mention of Allah and the fact that all the Muslim characters were either nominal Muslims or extremists, with nothing in between.
I have a couple other qualms regarding the “realism” of this programme:
The issue of a woman being subject to a control order because a bulk quantity of curry powder was found in her family’s house seems like an attempt to emotionally manipulate us. While it is true that people were convicted of IRA terrorist activity in the 1970s on the basis of explosive being found on their fingers, which was actually derived from common household cleaning products, no such event as shown in Britz has happened as yet and, surely, the fact that curry powder is widely used in Asian cooking would surely occur to the authorities when issuing a control order.
I also find Sabia’s suicide unlikely given that the length of time she had spent under the control order was not that long and that it wasn’t stringently enforced; she was able to go to college and Nasima, who she was banned from meeting, nevertheless managed to sneak in at night.
Then there is the issue of how the “Nasima lookalike” ended up dead, and not only dead but “interfered with”. This is not at all explained, but I find it difficult to believe that even Muslims who would kill for political reasons would simply kidnap an innocent woman, sexually assault her and then murder her, for no other reason than to make it look like one of their bombers was dead, if that is what we are expected to believe. I have never heard of it happening or (unlike terrorism itself) anyone trying to justify it.
Parts of Britz could have rung true if it had been presented at some time in the near future as some sort of cautionary tale about where the Blair control order laws could lead, but it was not; it was set now, and the terrorist plots arose directly out of the July 2005 bombings. As it was, it gave a distorted picture of what Muslims are like while apparently trying to manipulate us with exaggerated details about control orders. Whatever the political standpoint of its authors, this drama was not very good.
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A closer look will find the gaping holes in Kosminsky’s either-black-or-white portrayal of British Muslims too many to count. Here are but a few:
Nasima’s mentor teaches her to be discrete and never attract attention. Then she drives Naz on a motorcycle through the narrow lanes of Peshawar where nothing could have proved a bigger head turner in those crowded places.
Having got Riz laid with his fellow spy, the only time Kosminsky finds convenient to get Naz and Jude together in the bed is when Naz’s mother is in hospital and her mate still in custody. If Naz could be thus comforted, how she could opt for eternal pains so soon?
The sense of proportion is sacrificed in an eagerness to show contrasts between the civilized and the uncultured, the developed West and the undeveloped East.
The portrayal of life in Rawalpindi displays how things were in 1950s but not as refrigerators, air conditioners and washing machines are afforded by a large number.
Where do you find a female worshipper saying prayers standing between two male prayers on either side.
Perhaps viewers needed to suspend common sense to swallow propaganda packaged as entertainment.
Kosminsky wishes to fit Britain’s second generation Muslims in very narrow and rigid categories. The binary logic functions as follows:
Are there any subtle messages? Quite a few: What a Muslim young man has to do to be considered on the right (but not principally correct) track.
You are expected to accord unquestioning support even if concerns your neighbours, relatives or peers.
Compromises are the key if not a compulsory condition to a career that can be unthankful. Thus when Sohail decides to side with the just cause, he chooses not to object himself questioning a badly beaten person tortured in Romania.
Life in the training came seems to be juxtaposed from the Russian dramas portraying Chechnya making the portrayal of life in frontier outposts both problematic and patchy.
Kosminsky’s bid to display dichotomies faced by Britain’s second generation Muslims is fraught with dilemmas.
The journey between the rational and the radical comes with no middle grounds, no flexibility, no half-way adjustment but only 180 degrees turn around. That is why at first the two central characters both start as conformists, though the brother is trying harder to out-British the Brits.
Wow, Rita, your summary was far more eloquent then mine.
The sad thing is, that the director claims to have spoken to many Muslims, therefore he must be right.
This programme overwhelmingly portrayed Muslims as victims who become terrorists because they are angry about oppression and UK foriegn policy etc etc. I thought this would go down with most left-wing librels and angry Muslim groups. Guess not.
The point is that a lot of Muslims are aggrieved about foreign policy and rough policing; most don’t turn to terrorism. This woman, who was a not-very-religious political activist with a non-Muslim boyfriend, did so after one test of her political methods, and a not very plausible one at that. How many Muslim civil rights activists have decided to become terrorists in such circumstances, as opposed to coming through the channels of religious extremism? Add to that the fact that no decent, practising Muslims appeared in the programme, and you might guess why we don’t like it.
“I also find Sabia’s suicide unlikely given that the length of time she had spent under the control order was not that long “
I still wonder how long you would find reasonable. in fact, it is in the early days of a prison sentence that people are most likely to kill themselves. There’s no reason to think it would be any different with control orders.
In the early days of a prison sentence, someone will be getting to know their new company of rapists, drug dealers, murderers and thugs. Sabia was living in her own home, surrounded by her own family. Big difference.
The critical analysis of Britz offered here is interesting to us secularists as well as to Muslims.
What struck in my craw was that the film has someone so obviously good, human-hearted and sensitive as Nasimra ending up as a suicide bomber at a London Sinfonia Concert.
It was very hard to take that: a serious slur on radical political activists concerned about Blair/Brown and Iraq, and all kinds of believers alike.
I would just like to point out another unconvincing part of this film.
She’s meant to blow up/damage the towers, yet she’s sat in a basin-like arena with a minute amount of explosives on her?!
Seriously, the more I think about this, the more faults I see. No wonder Channel 4 is going down the tubes when it shows dreck like this.
This was silly nonsense from beginning to end. The dialogue was quite wooden, as if the characters were constantly making a political point, but even the political points were not well made.
The non-Muslims were no more convincing than the Muslims. There’s a scene where Nasmira wears a hijab and nobody sits next to her on a crowded bus. This is very unlikely.
What twaddle.
“In the early days of a prison sentence, someone will be getting to know their new company of rapists, drug dealers, murderers and thugs. Sabia was living in her own home, surrounded by her own family. Big difference.”
There aren’t many rapists in women’s prisons and people are sent to prison only after being convicted of a crime, which means they probably already associate with other criminals before they go in. It is the shock and disorientation of imprisonment, among other things that drives themto kill themselves, and in that respect, control orders- indefinite sentences for unspecified offences with the duty of making sure the prisoner behaves as a prisoner imposed on the prisoner in their own accustomed surroundings- is probably even more disorienting.
Are you really missing my point or are you being deliberately obtuse? Prison is prison, and women’s jails have their share of psychos just as men’s jails do, even if they are not rapists. I have heard of two female prisoners who committed suicide who were not hardened criminals before they went in (Sheena Kotecha and the Campbell woman whose mum insists her death wasn’t suicide even though she took an overdose of meds she’d brought with her). Your thesis is undermined by the fact that no suicide has yet taken place as a result of a control order.
Sheena Kotecha was a hardened criminal- what else would you call a persistent armed robber? She was not a hardened prisoner.
As only twenty two people have had control orders imposed on them there isn’t much material for a statistical analysis of their effect; however, we do know, from what people under control orders have said and from the fact that people under control orders have preferred to return to countries with a taste for torture, that they have an alarming effect on the people they are imposed on. There is no reason to think their immediate effect is any different to that of any other form of imprisonment, which includes a greatly increased risk of suicide in the period immediately after they begin.
Sheena Kotecha was a hardened criminal- what else would you call a persistent armed robber?
No, she was not a persistent armed robber. She was driving the getaway car for an armed robber - something she said she did not realise, believing that the robber was merely getting a drink. Neither she nor the robber had any previous convictions.
i think it was good use of my 4.5 hours even just to see what people worry about muslim female doctors ( like me).
i dont think the mistakes were malice but oversight,
this is in the prophetic tradition of having compassion for your enemy ( they might be ur brother or sister…) and makes us thinnk of the pointless tragesy that godlessness in all people the muslim and the non muslim always leads to.
Indigo Jo (7 November 2007) refers to two women prisoners who died in the ‘care’ of the State in recent years. His/her post contains factual inaccuracies, which I need to correct. I am the grieving mother of one of the women referred to: Sarah Elizabeth Campbell, 18, who died in the so-called care of Styal Prison in 2003. Indigo Jo says: “I have heard of two female prisoners who committed suicide [sic] who were not hardened criminals before they went in (Sheena Kotecha and the Campbell woman whose mum insists her death wasn’t suicide even though she took an overdose of meds she’d brought with her).” As I type this comment, Sheena Kotecha’s inquest is running, and it is for the jury to decide (and no-one else) whether or not Ms Kotecha’s death was suicide. A verdict will be reached when all the evidence has been heard. Re the death of my only child Sarah - it is not that her mum “insists her death wasn’t suicide”. The jury in 2005 decided that my daughter’s death was not suicide. There is a great deal of misunderstanding about the term “suicide”. A jury is only allowed to return a suicide verdict if the evidence clearly indicates the person intended to take their own life. My daughter took an overdose of antidepressant tablets on the day she died, but then told prison staff what she’d done. Their response (including a nurse) was to walk out of the cell, lock the door and leave her alone. There were “avoidable delays” before staff phoned for an ambulance. On arrival at the gates, the ambulance was stopped for 8 minutes before being allowed through. The jury’s verdict [255 words] was a damning indictment of the “care” my daughter received at the jail. Sarah’s death, and the deaths of 5 other women who died at the same prison within a 12-month period, have been described by INQUEST, London, as “a clear example of corporate manslaughter”. None of the 6 inquests returned “suicide” verdicts.