How was your Everybody Draw Mohammed Day?

Ms Molly Norris, a Seattle cartoonist, called a few weeks ago for May 20th to be declared Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. This was in protest against the self-censorship of Comedy Central, producers of the notoriously iconoclastic South Park series, when they pulled a provocative cartoon of the Prophet PBUH in a bear costume. She has since retracted the call, apologised to Muslims in general and taken down the relevant Facebook page. Why? Well, you can guess.

Now, I enjoy a wind-up as much as the next person, but I did not participate. Largely because I can’t draw to save my life (and perhaps it did save my life). I feel extremely ambivalent about this sort of think, as I expect a lot of people do. When I say I enjoy a wind-up I mean I like winding up the pompous, prissy and cocksure; not that I burn with passion to offend peaceful people who do or wish me no harm. I do not remove my copy of “The Satanic Verses” from the bookshelves when I have Muslim guests; but I do not wave it in their faces. Like most British people, Muslim and Christian alike, I am a determined live-and-let-liver. (I wish more of the atheists were. I am tempted to suggest that next to Rushdie’s magnum opus on my shelves stands a copy of “The Good Writer Philip and the Scoundrel Pullman”.)

But something gnaws at me. Essentially, it is one of those “elephants in the room”; truths which everybody knows but feels compelled to ignore. We have large Muslim communities in Britain, and other Western countries, whom we welcome in the name of liberalism and diversity, provided that they hare here legally. But why are they here? I am no fanatical anti-immigrationist, and I accept that the post-war influx of sub-continentals was a natural concomitant of the end of Empire. But there is no corresponding inrush of Geordies, Scousers or Cockneys to Bangladesh. Now, one must tread carefully here, but is it permissible to mention words like “flush toilets”, “electricity”, “central heating”, “political freedom and stability” etc.?

And where did those come from? No serious historian will deny that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the industrial one of the eighteenth derived at least in part from the freedom of thought generated by the Reformation and the Enlightenment; i.e. to put it crudely, the freedom to flout religious taboos. People come to us because our society is better, and it is better because we do things they won’t. And no, it isn’t better just because of our previous imperialist exploitation. To cite just one example, societies which bar women from socio-economic activity out of terror that they might develop a sex life get poor, and get poor quickly. China was the world’s leading civilisation before they started binding women’s feet.

And if they do come here, they shouldn’t be demanding that we become more like the society they left. Britons of Pakistani or Bangladeshi background are here, or at least their parents were, because Britain is not Pakistan or Bangladesh. And, with all respect, we don’t want it to be. Any of it. Is this crass racism? If it is, then shoot me. But I don’t think so.