I think your’e on to something there.

A good friend wasn’t the first Pakistani woman in Manchester to go to University; she was the first Pakistani woman in Manchester to move out of the parental home to go to University.

There was a gap of just a few years before the second was… her sister.

The artistic achievements of Islam have almost always been described by non-Moslems. Without western (Christian, Jewish or secular) scholarship it is doubtful whether we would have this appreciation.

I care not at all if Moslems decline to embrace wetern culture. If they choose to do so, then fine. That is not what is keeping me awake at this hour.

Now wait — Prophet Mohammed is infallible. Islam is pure truth and perfection. All the crappy stuff that Muslims disproportionately do must be because Muslims are bad people — otherwise Islam is perfection and there is nothing wrong with Islam.

Now according to the intellectually comatose Left, this statement was NOT racist.

But it is pure racism to say Mohammed was a pedophile and a slave owner.

…..and I kind of liked the BMSD. Now I’m confused………..

This is becauuse drama (with its “free mixing”) art (depictions of living things) and music (other than drums) are forbidden in Islam.

Yasmin and the Alibhais may be talented and enthusiastic, but their “Prophet” would not approve.

Fortunately, given drama, art, music (and sport) are pretty much the ne plus ultra, if not the sine qua non, of good things to put on a UCAS form, it has the handy side effect of keeping the children of nutters out of university. Unfortunately, that means they are less likely to have their prejudices confronted: whatever we might say of ISOC hardliners, a university campus is less monocultural than living with your parents in Bradford.

I hear from people whose children are UCAS-age in the (60% Muslim) school my children attend that some parents are outraged that white children seem to get better offers, all things being equal. But of course, all things aren’t equal: in a high achieving girls’ school, the 40% white portion constitute all the music, most of the drama, all of the sport, most of the art. When it’s hard for universities to differentiate, and when the white girls are applying nationwide whereas the Muslim girls appear unable to go anywhere more than ten miles from home, it’s inevitable that the offers are going to be different.

The multi-dimensional resonance of Trofim (invoking Lysenko) implicitly encouraging people to listen to Shostakovich in the context of a politically oppressive system is impressive. I am in the midst of writing an essay on Shostakovich, and his struggle to work in an oppressive state is an object lesson in what Muslim hardliners would like to do to art. Muddle instead of Music, indeed.

Or Shostakovich, for instance.