Isam B has written a beautiful song.
"Niqab in Copenhagen", I think it's called. Or "Sharia by the Lakes". Something along those lines. I remember there were dates in it.
It's the song about Ramadan, where the only thing fasting is the text...
Everything the month actually binds you to, it has left at home, and that's quite a bit by now?
The prayer, which is not an offer you can decline, but a duty that counts your failures. The law, which is not a mood you can step out of, but a judgement that doesn't ask if you agree. The woman, who doesn't walk hand in hand through Copenhagen, but two steps behind through an entire life, a life where her testimony weighs half and her inheritance the same. And the way out, the door out, the one that in any other context is simply called freedom - it doesn't exist, because the one who leaves the house doesn't just leave the house. On the contrary. There are two handfuls of countries where you die from it. There are families here where you do.
Try and listen.
NONE of that made it into the song?
I could understand it if it just left out that bit about social control - and threats on your daughter's life if she enjoyed life too much.
But none of it? Not even a tiny little itsy bitsy verse?
What remains are melboller, caramels, a moon over Nørrebro and something about someone holding hands and laughing... a one thousand four hundred year old bone-hard legal order enforced with swords and severed limbs, boiled down to the one thing it has never been - non-committal!?
You could almost call it a miracle.
A system that regulates everything from inheritance law to beheading, lands in the Folk High School Songbook as a cosy family evening with snacks.
It is the most successful translation in Danish literary history - from law to stoning... oops, I mean - from law to mood!
They have taken an order that knows no distinction between faith and state, and rendered it as a fragrance series. And an entire songbook committee has sat around a table and nodded, because the scent was good, and because none of them will ever have to live under what smells so sweet.
Sweetish - like the air beneath the cranes in Tehran, where they hang the young people who didn't care for the dates.
But fine. Let it stand. We're not petty. We just ask for the same thing the other way. We have therefore written a new Christmas carol.
It's called "Æbleskiver over Bethlehem" and is entirely about æbleskiver. And a bit about icing sugar.
There is no manger in it, no angel, no child, no salvation and absolutely no crucifixion - it is, after all, a song for adults, and adults in this country must be spared such things - only æbleskiver, icing sugar and a nice, round feeling of December.
The third verse is about jam. And we demand, with precisely the same self-evidence as the committee, that it be sung in the nation's churches on Christmas Eve - INSTEAD of the gospel, because it's roughly the same thing, just cosier.
Should anyone object that the song contains nothing whatsoever of what Christianity actually is, we simply answer, as we have been taught - that is precisely what's beautiful about it.
Because that's apparently the rule now.
A religion is what remains when you have removed everything it demands.
Isn't it?
"Ninja in SummerNiqab"... "Dates in Durum".. was that what it was called, help me out here?
😉😁
Good evening, friends ❤️
