Next week, thousands of young people will begin high school.
Some of them have received a letter from home.
It is not from their parents. It is from Hizb ut-Tahrir, and it warns them about what awaits - a youth environment where behaviour, norms and lifestyle "do not harmonise with Islam", a culture that is "shameless and boundless", a community they must protect themselves against. "Stand firm," it says. "Keep your distance. Wear your identity as a shield against the others."
Hold on to that. While you keep reading.
Because I also have a message for the young people starting next week. It is not 1,400 archaic years old. Mine is from 1993. Old. Not so old. But old enough.
It is a song. I wrote it as an 18-year-old together with a good friend, and it is about a Saturday at a friend's place, a stranger named Ben, a bottle of eighty-percent rum and a contest, none of us remembered much of afterwards. We sent it in to a youth programme on Danmarks Radio, and they chose it for their melody grand prix for young people, and then suddenly we had to go over and film for a whole week - at a time when my absence percentage was higher than VAT, and I had solemnly promised my headmaster not to skip school any more to play music.
But what was I supposed to do? Say no to Life to follow the rules?
Place the two documents side by side. The letter and the song.
They are answers to the same question - what is a young person to do with the life that lies wide open before them?
One answer says - protect yourself from it. The other answer is to throw yourself into it, make a fool of yourself, make mistakes, get up and triumph - and write a song about it afterwards and laugh all the way.
And here is the interesting thing - because Hizb ut-Tahrir is right in their description. Danish youth culture IS transgressive. Rum WAS drunk through a funnel that Saturday. I deny nothing - I have written a song about it, and national radio thought it should be broadcast to the whole country. The difference does not lie in the description. It lies in what you see.
They see a culture that must be shielded against, because it is full of mistakes. I see a culture that is free enough to make mistakes - and precisely therefore free enough to grow from them.
Try to imagine Hizb ut-Tahrir's version of that song. If they were allowed to write songs, that is. A self-ironic, laughing account of a Sunday with a hangover and regret. It does not exist. It cannot exist. Because a movement that cannot laugh at itself cannot forgive itself either. And a movement that cannot forgive itself ALWAYS ends up controlling everyone else.
And that is what they want. That is why the UAE has banned them.
This is where I want to say something directly to the young people - including the Muslim young people the letter is addressed to -
The world is full of people who use religion as a control apparatus. Endless rules for when you are good enough, when you are doing life right, what you should be ashamed of. They say they want the best for you, but they live off your life force like leeches. It is not faith. It is faith's falsification - Darkness pretending to be Light. And you can always tell the difference between the two, because control makes you smaller, and what is real makes you larger.
NO closed book can give you the answers to your life. Which incidentally is the deepest insight of Western civilisation itself, that Truth is not a code of law but a relationship - something you live within, build up from your own experiences, and find by listening to the voice of conscience and reason, which dwells deep within you and speaks clearly, if you turn towards the place the Light comes from.
Was it smart to drink rum through a funnel? No. Did my generation drink too much? Yes, absolutely DEFINITELY.
But freedom was never the alcohol. Freedom was THE RIGHT TO FAIL WITHOUT LOSING YOUR WORTH - the right to make a fool of yourself, get up, become wiser and STILL BELONG.
That is the right the letter wants to take from you. And that is the right that awaits you next week, together with the rest of the community.
A headmaster at Frederiksberg Gymnasium put it like this to the new students - we look forward to seeing you, you become part of the community, and we look forward to you shaping it.
That is an invitation.
The letter from Hizb ut-Tahrir is a warning against accepting it.
I accepted the same invitation 33 years ago. It cost me half a curriculum and a promise to my headmaster. And it gave me a life.
Come on in now - into Freedom and Responsibility and Love for all of it - together with the rest of us.
❤️🔥🪽
...
And in addition. The song came number 2 in Zig-Zag as the programme was called in this competition. I was scored by a host who taught me a thing or two about... life... if you understand... got to play on the lawn in Tivoli and other places, got new friends and contacts into an industry I was interested in. So all in all. Well spent.
I made the video bare-chested, because several semi-religious idiots this week suggested that there should now be a law with a dress code for men, so they are no longer allowed to go bare-chested to get an ice cream in a supermarket in the summer heat. 🥴
I mean, Denmark. What is happening?
