It is time we started a campaign to free the Meedhuffushi One, a victim of government persecution. Hussein Didi was arrested and faces prosecution for the crime of having officiated at a hotel ‘wedding’ ceremony on the tiny island of Meedhuffushi in the Maldives. You may have read about his unorthodox benediction to the Swiss couple who paid £830 to have their right to fornicate endorsed fraudulently while they sipped cocktails out of a coconut shell in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Or you may have watched the video online.
Either way, it is worth reacquainting ourselves with some of the details, especially those not reported in the press. Holding the hands of the Swiss pair, Didi told them in his native language of Dhivehi — which of course they did not understand — that they were pork-eating infidel swine whose children would therefore be bastard swine and furthermore marked with ugly spots and blemishes. The wedding was, Didi continued, entirely without legal force, adding the description — rarely used in wedding ceremonies, except maybe on occasion by the bride’s father — motherfucker. He then, in impressive rhetorical style, advised the couple on what precautions they should take if they intended to enjoy sexual intercourse with chickens. Check the chicken’s hindquarters for possible sores, Didi suggested, before he observed that, one way or another, the man in question would witness large worms emanating from the tip of his penis, whether chickens were involved or not.
I now illegally pronounce you man and wife, he concluded, beaming, while the Swiss couple sipped sheepishly away at their Sex on the Beach or Slow Screw against the Wall or whatever effete concoction had been provided by the hotel, the Vilu Reef Beach and Spa. Didi then advised the cameraman to ‘cut that bit out before you give them the video’ — advice which sadly was not heeded. The video went viral and the President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, hit the palm-fronded roof. Didi was sacked and arrested and the couple have been issued with a grovelling apology and the chance of another holiday in the Maldives, gratis (‘um, I think we’ll try Greece this year, thanks Mohamed’). I haven’t laughed so much at a news story since the time those Muslim medical students tried to blow up Glasgow Airport and succeeded only in setting themselves alight and getting beaten up by passers-by.
There but for the grace of one or another flawed God, I suppose. My first marriage was marked by an initial ceremony in an Islamic country — Malaysia — and conducted entirely in Bahasa Malay, a language of which I know a little, but probably not enough to be absolutely sure that the charming imam wasn’t telling me that he hoped our plane would blow up on the way back and that we would roast in kuffar hell for eternity, being doused with boiling water by Satan’s infernal imps. The service lasted a good 45 minutes, only slightly less than the marriage itself — although that was more down to me than any possible curse placed upon us by the imam. I mean, we even bunged the local masjid a few quid out of goodwill. It needed a new roof, if I remember. So did I, about two weeks later.
I suppose that this is the point, as it would appear to Hussein Didi. Given that he, like the rest of the indigenous population of the Maldives, is a Muslim, it would be difficult for him to officiate with anything approaching sincerity at some godless union of a decadent infidel couple who affix to marriage the same level of importance which they affix to, say, ensuring they have a kingsize bed with a sea view, breakfast included and a coupon for free sunset cocktails. As a Muslim he would find the benediction of this union an absurdity. There is little that he said in his bellowed Dhivehi ceremony that would have contravened the religious code with which he was brought up, except maybe the stuff about chickens. Indeed, to have offered sincere blessings and to have pretended that this beachside ceremony had any force, moral or legal, would have been haraam — a word he used many times, in case there should be any doubt about it, and which means — put simply — just wrong. His arrest was occasioned not because of any infraction of legal or moral strictures, but because the Maldives survives on Western tourism and the local people are expected to subordinate their faith to assuage the expensively acquired sensibilities of we blasé or pig-ignorant infidels.
Didi can point to the cataclysmic divorce rates in Western societies as a consequence of our lack of seriousness and commitment. But beyond Didi there are thousands upon thousands of workers in the hospitality industries across the world perpetually disgusted by our codes of behaviour. Think of the hoteliers and bartenders from Tallinn to Bratislava who must find a way somehow to disperse the yellow river of cheap stag-weekend piss emanating from male Westerners on the razz, or the black-clad senior citizens of the Greek islands who unaccountably take offence at young people shagging in the market square, or the Thais and Filipinos and Vietnamese balefully watching fat middle-aged Brits and Germans squiring teen and sub-teen girls from bar to bar, or the Spanish municipalities on the costa del crime spoiled for ever by two generations of English thugs, or the French of Provence, or the people of Piedmont and Tuscany, enraged by ever-rising house prices occasioned by the mewing middle-class British arrivistes with their plans for an olive press and organic vineyard.
Hell, they’ll take the money — that’s how the world works. But don’t expect them, when they recourse to their own language, to like it. They do not. They bitterly resent it.
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