Cabbages & Kings: Cultural mix isn't a problem

“The sink of the bath sings,
More melodious than a
coel’s tweet;
The steam of a cooking
scrambled egg
As it hardens, appears more concrete
Than the mist of a morning mountain;
The spout of broken firehose
More alluring than a Moghul fountain!

The Kal Yug’s here, so don’t complain
Oh poets extol your
birdsong —
Or contemplate my modern refrain
Oh Bachchoo, Where did
it all go wrong?”
From Tales of the Cyber
Pass by Bachchoo

My generation’s adage is that everyone in the world can remember what they were doing when John F. Kennedy was shot. I can recall what I was doing when I first heard of the attack on the World Trade Centre’s twin towers in New York. These tragic events define our era — the death of a liberal President, the bombing that killed 2,000 people in an act of historical vandalism that spelt the division of our world. My second cousin Cyra, who lives with her parents in London was six months old on the day when a maniac machine-gunned the revellers in the Pulse Club in Orlando, Florida.

Cyra won’t, of course, remember the event but I will — because that afternoon her parents, my Parsi cousin and her Christian husband held two ceremonies for her in a small park in the centre of London. Friends and relatives ate and drank as Cyra was dressed in a purple “jhubla”, the loose Parsi-child’s tunic and a Zoroastrian prayer cap and sat down amongst yellow “peydas” for her “sitting-up ceremony”. The rites which involved coconuts and Avestan blessings were performed before she was whisked off and had her clothes changed to an elaborate long heirloom of a cream-coloured Victorian christening gown. My cousin’s father-in-law, a Christian priest, performed a baptism with words and water as we watched, applauded and got through champagne and several plates of dhokla and bhel-puri.

It was fun and togetherness more than religion. The Zoroastrians, Christians and other friends were there to celebrate and offer goodwill towards Cyra and my cousin’s family. The simultaneous “sitting-up” and baptism ceremonies were a miniscule manifestation of the multiculturalism that has evolved in Britain. To a substantial proportion of the British population it doesn’t seem like a welcome or slow evolution. They see it as an alarming imposition of alien cultures in quantum leaps. I don’t suppose any of the fretful or bigoted would object to a Zoroastrian blessing following the solemnities of a Christian one. And yet the influx of immigrants in the last two decades has become the central political question, which seems destined to play a large part in the current realignment of British politics.

Unfortunately, the massacre of 49 people in the Pulse Club in Orlando also augurs the realignment of the political inclinations of the American electorate. America is by historical definition a country of immigrants, their hopes and inevitably their prejudices. This atrocity, perpetrated this time by an American-born Muslim who claimed, without any justification, that he was acting in the name of Islam and of the death-cult ISIS, has caused Donald Trump to call for a ban on entry from countries where any hostility to the US exists. I suppose this would mean every country in the world (including the US) but Mr Trump certainly meant Islamic countries. He also went on to campaign for every reveller at the club to possess a gun so they could shoot the machine-gun-toting maniac before he killed too many people.

It’s a return to the fantasy of the six-shooter holster. Ok Corral Western in an era of weapons of multiple destructive capability. And it’s being manipulated as an increasingly popular policy in America. Hillary Clinton, opposing Mr Trump’s call, treads cautiously against this tide. She dare not call for a ban on guns and says instead that a person who has been investigated twice by the FBI should not be allowed to buy one. In Britain, with five days to go before the country decides through a referendum whether to stay in the European Union or to leave it, the public decision will be determined, not by the threats to the economy which an exit from the EU poses, but by the contention that immigration is swamping the services and culture of this country and an exit from the EU would stop the deluge.

Several politicians play the anti-Islamic Trump card, saying that continued membership will mean Turkey is set to join the EU and flood Britain with Muslim immigrants who will bring terror and rape to this green and pleasant land. This argument, on the evidence of opinion polls and the interviews on TV day after day in this run-up to the referendum, appeals mostly to those who traditionally vote Labour.

The Labour Party leadership is now anxiously behind the campaign to remain in the EU, but a vast number, perhaps even a majority, of its traditional working-class support seems to have fallen for the anti-immigrant line. That the Labour leadership points to the incontestable fact that immigrants to Britain, perhaps five per cent of the population, contribute £20 billion in taxes to the economy and take out much less in benefits, doesn’t convince these voters. They want “out” through a sense of unease.

The reports from Florida say that a hate-preacher from Britain (with the unfortunate “Christian” name of Farrokh) had visited Florida in recent weeks and preached anti-gay sermons saying: “The sentence should be death!” I never imagined I’d be a convert to policing thought or free speech but in this or similar cases the sentence, to adopt a style of expression, “should be a permanent silencer”. I wish we could then invite the rest of Britain, silent and inactive terrorist-sympathisers and immigrant-limiters-and-haters amongst them, to something like a vast multicultural Cyra-ceremonial. I am not saying it would lead to mass conversions but it would demonstrate that the inevitable globalisations of cultural mix are not a problem, they are a fascinating variety.