You can take a post from my friend and exiled Iranian Babak with you into the weekend.
It's worth reading all the way down, because he's pulled something up that very few would have thought to look for.
Benny Andersen lies one morning in his own bed, the sun curves around a sleeping cheek, his toes stick out from under the duvet, and he kisses them in turn. And in the middle of it, in the middle of the most peaceful and domestic scene a Danish poem can possibly produce, Khomeini forces his way in.
Veils being mandated.
Hands being chopped off.
He writes it down without explaining it and without making a thing of it, as if that's just how it is, that the gruesome lies down next to the tender and stays lying there.
The remarkable thing is not that he wrote about it. The remarkable thing is how little it took to see it. No intelligence assessment, no expert group, no study trip to the region, no committee or commission that had to investigate.
A man with a toe in his mouth could see what was coming, while those who had it as their livelihood to see it were still busy figuring out whether you were even allowed to have an opinion about it.
"Stone women? Cut into their genitals? Chop off hands and heads for words? Hide Woman away and strip her of freedom and opportunities. Death penalty if you leave the religion? Yeah okay, that's just another way to live - it's just different. So it's completely legitimate. We have to figure out how to reconcile it with our way of life."
Imagine how much you'd have to have smoked, to stand there…
Anyways.
That's where we positioned ourselves.
And we've been standing there ever since.
Because it's not that we don't know it.
We've had forty years. We've had Rushdie and van Gogh and the cartoons and Paty, we've had women beaten to death over a strand of hair, and we've had every single Iranian in exile, who calmly and patiently and over and over again has stood up and said the same thing to us, as people who have seen it from the inside and know precisely what they're talking about. Babak is one of them.
Still, Islam continues to be treated in large parts of Danish politics as a variable. Something that can be adjusted, modernised, put into dialogue, divided into a palatable and an unpalatable part, depending on what's needed in any given week.
One imagines that it can be negotiated down, or used for something, or grow European over time, if only we're friendly enough long enough. And when that doesn't happen, it's called "an integration challenge", as if it were an administrative delay that Islam won't let itself be changed, instead of acknowledging that it is a fourteen hundred year old order system that operates on its own premises and always has. And always will.
The architecture in it is written that way.
It's not accommodation we're talking about anymore from our side.
It's absence of seriousness.
We wouldn't entrust a construction site, a cardiac ward or a pension fund to grown adults with that form of reality comprehension. There we'd call it irresponsible, and we'd take the responsibility from them the same day.
ONLY when it concerns what carries an entire society do we accept WISHFUL THINKING as method.
Meanwhile it's not us who are paying.
It's those who live under it.
The poet saw it with a toe in his mouth.
The rest of us have had both hands free for forty years.
It's time for reality to seep in between the ears of those we've put in the driver's seat to run the country.
Isn't it?
Happy weekend ☀️
