Gazelle Media
Monday, January 28, 2008
The basement café bringing Britain's Islamic debate to life
By Jerome Taylor
Jerome Taylor discovers a brave new initiative to voice some of the hot issues facing young Muslims in the world today.
In the cold basement of an Indian restaurant on London's Drury Lane, two television cameras are trained on a pair of sofas covered in soft Moroccan cushions. The bare concrete walls have been temporarily covered in a warm red fabric and two small silver teapots from North Africa rest on octagonal tables inlaid with bright Mediterranean tiles. Were it not for the cold and the passing police sirens, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Casablanca rather than Covent Garden Into the room walks a 23-year old Somalian woman wearing a close-fitting black headscarf, a bearded London-born Bengali man with a penchant for Islamic rap – the spokesperson of a group that encourages Muslim voting and mosque reform – and a self-confessed former extremist who has turned her back on a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and now describes herself simply as "a single mother of five children"
What connects this seemingly disparate group is that they have all come to talk about dating and Islam.
Welcome to Muslimcafe.tv, an online television channel that has become a surprise hit with young British Muslims.
If you want to partake in discussions such as "Is hip-hop halal?", "Young, Muslim and single" or even "What is wrong with Muslim men?", then Muslimcafe.tv is the place to do it.
This morning's discussion,"Young, Muslim and single", is about the thorny question of how young, devout Muslims can find a partner who conforms to their own religious beliefs but is suitable for this modern day and age.
The discussion soon becomes somewhat gender divided. The rapper, Mizan Rahman, and Asghar Bukhari, the spokes person for the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK (MPACUK), want young Muslims to become better at overcoming their reservations about meeting and talking to the opposite sex. The former fundamentalist Fatima Khan and the Somalian student leader Zakia Hussen however, are more cautious. But all agree young Muslims should be just as entitled to fall in love as anyone else straight up and tell them," says Mizan, to incredulous looks from Zakia. "Not in a derogatory way, he hastily adds, "and definitely not if her dad is there with her!" Asghar, meanwhile, keeps returning to what he says is the failure of community leaders and parents to understand the needs of their children when it comes to love. "Everyone else meets in some sort of social environment, be it a bar or nightclub. We as a Muslim community have failed our young people by not having an infrastructure to ensure we meet. Thus we're forcing them to do things that are outside the boundaries of our faith and as soon as someone does that we look down our noses at them."
The discussion is free flowing and refreshingly different from the usual issues that Muslims are asked to comment on, such as terrorism, veils and community integration. This seems to be winning audiences over. Muslimcafe.tv gets thousands of hits a month; the channel's Facebook group is crammed with discussion among its 700 members from all over the globe.
"We're not really interested in what I'd call the usual suspects,” says Navid Akhtar, the show’s producer. "Whenever the media needs some comment from Muslims on an event, the same people always show up in the newspapers and on the 24-hour news channels. We will never have a discussion entitled ‘Are you Muslim or British?' It's an utterly banal debate to have."
Another discussion that has proved popular with online users is "Christmas Mubarak!"– an Islamic spin on the festive season ("Eid Mubarak!" being the traditional greeting given during Eid) – that debates whether Muslims should celebrate Christmas. The panel is eclectic, including an Indian born Christian leader from Surrey, a suited Muslim imam, and Fatima Khan once more.
For Navid and his director, Amir Jamal, two former BBC stalwarts who have made numerous award-winning documentaries on Britain's Islamic community and have set up Gazelle Media, a production company specialising in ethnic stories, the café is a personal hobbyhorse, and an attempt to bring something exciting and hip to the national debate on Islam.” You find these sorts of discussions happening in cafés, bedrooms, school buildings and university bars all over the country, and that's what we wanted to capture," says Amir, speeding through a cigarette in between shoots outside the restaurant.” I want the café to be a place for what I call interface, rather than interfaith. The whole point is to be eclectic."
The idea was originally created for the BBC, but a change in commissioners meant it was shelved. "We just thought sod it, we’ve got a bit of cash, let's go ahead and put it up on the net anyway," says Navid, who grins as he describes the café's promotional launch video, which had a woman in a full niqab veil banging the drums to Phil Collins, a take on the popular Cadbury ad. “Our debates are not put through a white middle-class filter,” says Navid.
"Britain is about Edgware Road on a Friday night, it's about Londonistan. To people like Melanie Phillips that's a terrible concept, but I and so many people like me wear it as a badge of honour.”