The scene at 7 minutes and 9 seconds here, in which Mr Khan belts out the Tom Jones song Delilah and it is relayed through the loudspeakers on the minaret, strongly resembles the scene in Devil of a State in which the character Paolo Tasca is holed up, drunk, in the minaret of the mosque in Brunei Town: You can view the first episode here, and some of it is also available here. The sitcom centres on a Pakistani Muslim ‘community leader’ and his family living in the Sparkhill district of Birmingham in central England. The appealing side of Islam, when it ‘jostles up’, in Burgess’s words, against other aspects of a vigorous diverse society, in the way it does in Malaysia today, is reflected in a new BBC comedy called Citizen Khan, created by and starring Adil Ray. When it becomes monolithic and a genuine state religion, as in Saudi Arabia. I wonder how, with such a repetitive farrago of platitudes, expressing so self-evident a theology and an ethic so puerile, Islam can have spread as it has.īurgess in an interview has called the Quran ‘a very bad book’, and has expressed concerns about Islam In The Enemy in the Blanket (1958), the character Hardman, an impecunious English lawyer who becomes a Muslim in order to be able to marry a wealthy Malay, has this to say about the Quran after studying it closely: She can achieve divorce in the same way a man can….Four wives and an incalculable number of offspring, all attesting…virility and sustained by…patriarchal authority.īut this enthusiasm seems to have been succeeded by disillusionment. The wife herself has a commensurate freedom. You have a tremendous amount of freedom, sexual freedom you can have four wives. In the late 1950s Burgess seems to have flirted with the idea of becoming a Muslim. Hence the epigraph in the 1959 novel Beds in the East, Arthur Hugh Clough‘s ‘Allah is great, no doubt, and Juxtaposition his prophet’ from the verse-novel Amours de Voyage.
It’s very touching to see how it gets on…against Buddhism and Christianity. There’s a charm about Islam in a country like Malaya…where it has to stand on its own and jostle up against other religions….And it’s very amusing. It is a pity Burgess’s work is not more widely known in the Islamic world, for he wrote affectionately about the parts of it he knew. Meanwhile the Malayan trilogy appears to be tacitly banned in Malaysia, though I would be delighted if it could be shown that this is not so. An edition of A Clockwork Orange was recently brought out billed as a ‘banned book’, which is a misnomer the real banned book is Burgess’s 1961 Borneo novel Devil of a State- it is almost certainly banned in Brunei. A number of Anthony Burgess’s books are available in Turkish translation, but as far as I am aware not a single Burgess work is available in Arabic or Urdu or, for that matter, in Malay.