Raj and Brick Lane

When I worked in a London shoe store, I had a colleague named Raj. He was from Bangladesh, here working two jobs in order to send something back each month (needless to say, they were both poorly paid). Raj provided me with an interesting insight into the way things really work 'on the other side'. He was not a devout Muslim, but he did try to live life in conformity with the Islam of his home and community. He was a tragic figure.
He relation to women was fraught. Ramadan was a particularly problematic time. I fondly recall his shop-floor erections, and his not-too-surreptitious taking-cover behind the till. As devoted Westerners, his co-workers took great pains to draw his attention to attractive or scantily-clad women during this holy month. In his turn, he hesitantly embraced the crude and suggestive language of a London lad.
One day, we discovered that during his last holiday home, he had been married. Finally the time arrived when his wife came to England to live with him. We were fascinated: what could this small, faintly comical man make of married life? The following day, he was at work looking unwell.
"Did your wife arrive safely, Raj?" we enquired.
"I bought her MacDonalds for dinner. She threw it in the bin. And cried."

Raj struggled to reconcile worthless Western ways of living with the - to us - unsettling traditions of his home. The MacDonalds episode only gives us a very small taste (!) of this 'clash of cultures', but it also provides us with an opportunity to consider the multifarious cultural forces which push and pull at immigrants in Britain. He was clearly willing to accept certain ways of thinking which are considered 'British', though these are (also) repugnant. How can we expect someone who is living near the bottom of society to be moved by such ugly culture? It is not a question of 'Mill or Mohammed', but of 'capitalist slavery or patriarchal religious slavery'.

How does this relate to the Brick Lane episode? All those who wail about freedom of speech believe this choice is between Mill and Mohammed. Of course, those people who protest against the filming present themselves as petty and small-minded. In my view (naturally) the appropriate response would be for those Muslim men - and women - who feel attacked to stand proud and say: "Look at yourselves. You want me to abandon my culture for this noxious spectacle you call civilization?"