Norway's Muslim Comic

[Pete C]

November 14, 2003
SKIEN JOURNAL
Where East Meets West Warily, She Makes Them Laugh
By CRAIG S. SMITH

SKIEN, Norway — A hush falls over the audience at the Ibsen House theater here when Shabana Rehman takes the stage to stand motionless in a black burka that conceals everything but her dark eyes. Then, as loud Norwegian folk music breaks the silence, she breaks into a frantic jig. The effect is hilarious but, the stand-up comedian hopes, instructive, too.

"As Europe becomes more multicultural, it's important to have an open debate about how Islam fits into the West," said Ms. Rehman, 27, driving through the starry night after her show.

She is both Muslim and Norwegian — an unsettling combination to many people in this Nordic kingdom, which, like the rest of Europe, is struggling to absorb an immigrant community imported during a labor shortage decades ago. Her ribald and impolitic act skewers prejudices on both sides of the divide between traditional Norwegians and the country's newer Muslim citizens.

Ms. Rehman is one of a handful of Muslim comics enlivening the debate across Europe about how quickly or completely the continent's new immigrants should assimilate. Many Muslims have resisted absorption into what they regard as corrupt, heretical cultures, while Europe's once largely monochromatic societies have been slow to accept people from different racial and religious backgrounds.

Ms. Rehman believes Norway, with a relatively small immigrant population, may be the best place in northern Europe to have that debate because the topic is not politicized to the degree that it is elsewhere in the region.

Still, her comedy and social criticism, both on stage and in her widely read newspaper columns, have excited passions in the country. In fact, the discussion of how Norway's Muslim population should behave has become known as the "Shabana debate."

Should Muslims forsake cultural practices — forced marriages or the veiling of women, for example — that grate in the more open societies of the West? Should Western societies tolerate attitudes and beliefs that clash with Western ideals of individual freedom and human rights? Her responses leave few participants unscathed.

Ms. Rehman, whose father came to Norway from Pakistan in the 1970's, started out writing for a local newspaper. When a friend asked her to help write a stand-up act in 1999, she decided she wanted to try performing a comic routine of her own.

One of her first jokes was about sexually active Pakistani-Norwegian women who have their hymens surgically restored so that their future husbands will believe they are virgins.

The way Ms. Rehman tells it, the medical procedure is an act of sexual empowerment by Muslim women rather than one of submission to a male ideal.

Her point, Ms. Rehman said, was to make fun of the attitudes that put pressure on Muslim women caught between puritanical and promiscuous cultures. "Norwegians laughed at these girls and said they were cheating, but it was the society that was cheating," Ms. Rehman said.

Her act quickly drew attention and she began writing columns that gave a wider forum to the debate inspired by her humor. Soon she found herself under fire from both sides. Liberals, whom she calls "halal hippies," criticized her insensitivity toward immigrant, Muslim attitudes. Conservative Muslims complained that she was denigrating their religion. She even received death threats, she said, mostly from young immigrants.

"Some people don't want change, even if they're living in ghettos," Ms. Rehman said.

In response to the growing controversy, she gave a lengthy interview to a popular political magazine and posed both in traditional Pakistani clothes and in the nude with the Norwegian flag painted on her body. Her point, she explained in the car, was that both identities were external to her and that she alone could choose what to be.

The response, she said, was extreme.

"There are naked women in the media every single day, but this picture attracted so much racism and hate because it showed a woman who didn't respect anything but her own birth," she said.

Her fame has grown since then, as has the debate she set off. Her act, meanwhile, matured into her current show, "Skiing Across Greenland," a reference to the famed feat by a Norwegian national hero, Fridtjof Nansen, who traversed the Greenland ice shelf on skis in the 1890's. Greenland is also the name of Oslo's most heavily populated immigrant neighborhood.

After her shrouded jig, Ms. Rehman sheds the burka to reveal herself in a bright red dress and proceeds to keep the audience in this relatively provincial town laughing at everything from Islamic Shariah law to honor killings — the murder of Muslim women by their male family members for infidelity or promiscuity.

She describes a Muslim wedding with vows that begin, "Do your grandmother, father and brother take your uncle's son to be your lawfully wedded husband?"

She has also taken the show abroad, to Germany and to Denmark, where radical Islamists menacingly took front row seats before walking out midway through the show. She hopes to take the act even farther afield.

Back in Oslo, she and her fiancé, Dagfinn Nordbo, head off to her sister's restaurant, where the Pakistani-Norwegian fusion dishes might symbolize the New Europe that Ms. Rehman is tilting toward. On the menu: Tandoori Reindeer.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Tanager]

I could be wrong, but I think I heard of a female Muslim comic dealing with similar themes while I was in London earlier this year. Her name escapes me, but I don't think it was the same woman (this one was, I'm pretty sure, herself a Brit).

[chuckyd4]

I saw that article in the Times this morning, and thought it sounded like an interesting act on paper, though the couple of jokes they tried to retell didnt seem to translate very well (Does she do her act in Norwegian?) Seemed to me that I would respect the effort more than love the product, though I'd still be interested in actually hearing it.

I also find it interesting that this thread - about an honest attempt to start communication between the West and Islam - gets buried with a minimum of responses, while Greg's myopic attempts to prove he's right and the world is wrong is the most popular of the moment.

[GregM]

Lotsa yucks, Chucky. The Muslim world has a lot of work to do. What do you think would happen to this woman if she did her act in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan for example. I'm glad she can poke fun at her religion's stigmas. In the West such behavior is NORMAL for any religion.

[Tom Storer]

A friend of mine, a woman with dual French-Algerian nationality, does an excellent stand-up act as Fadila, an Algerian cleaning lady in France, in which she examines bigotry, good intentions, cultural misunderstandings and communication difficulties through humor. It's very good, not focused entirely on religion, though.

In one bit she talks about chez nous and how Franco-Algerians have two chez nous, France and Algeria, and yet always know which one they mean. Except that her neighbor in the sketch, an Algerian Jew, one day says to her "there was a suicide bombing chez nous!" And Fadila says "Wait a minute - you mean chez nous in Algiers, or chez nous in Paris?" He replies, "No - chez nous - in Tel Aviv." The sketch then goes on to develop it all further.