Bradford was chosen last week as the UK’s City of Culture for 2025. This week, Bradford Cineworld – as well as a number of other cinemas around the country – announced that a new movie called The Lady of Heaven was being pulled from schedules following protests by angry Muslims. So is this what we can expect from a City of Culture in 21st-century Britain – the creation of all kinds of culture, except for anything that might offend some adherents to the Islamic faith?
The fuss and fury over The Lady of Heaven has been incredibly revealing. This is a British-produced epic historical drama about Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad. It was written by the Shia cleric Yasser Al-Habib. The film has been slammed by some Muslim observers. Some say it will whip up Shia/Sunni sectarian tensions. Others condemn it for depicting Muhammad. Iran has banned it for being ‘divisive’.
There were protests outside cinemas in the UK following its release last week. It all brought to mind the Christian protests outside cinemas that showed Monty Python’s Life of Brian in 1979. (Though, entirely predictably, the high-minded liberals and leftists who would have condemned that 1970s Christian touchiness as backward and ridiculous have been quiet as mice over the Muslim fury that has greeted The Lady of Heaven.)
What is most striking about the noisy protests outside the cinemas showing this supposedly sinful film is how much the protesters sound like the godless woke mob.
‘It’s not OK to offend 1.8 billion’, declared one placard. At the protest outside the Cineworld in Bradford, one man said through a megaphone:
‘We are very offended. We have a right not to be insulted.
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