There Is No Fun in Islam Or Iraq

Credit: New York Times

“An Islamic regime must be serious in every field,”
“There are no jokes in Islam.
There is no humour in Islam.
There is no fun in Islam.”

Ayatollah Khomeini

Meanwhile back in Iraq, the renown Babylon Festival was basically canceled (Hat Tip Bassam Sebti). As the New York Times tells us: On the eve of its opening on Saturday, after a dozen foreign music and dance troupes had already arrived by the busload, the region’s deputy governor banned music and dance. He cited the coincidence of the birthday of the sixth imam of Islam, Jaafar ibn Muhammad al-Sadiq.

The ban scuttled much of the weekend’s program, which had been prepared months in advance, and left a dozen performers — flown in from Algeria, Azerbaijan, Denmark, Finland, Iran and Russia, among others — in the lurch, whiling away unexpected free time at the ruins of Babylon.

“We rehearsed,” said Nurhan Mohammed Abdel Hamid, 20, a dancer with an Egyptian folkloric dance troupe, Pharaoh of the Nile.

The show must go on, and it did, for a bit.

A theater group from Diwaniya Province performed a play called “Globalization,” which recounted the displacement of Iraqis by war. The cultural wing of the movement of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr staged a play called “The Devil” about the United States. (Some things never change.) There were exhibitions of photographs and paintings, a book fair and poetry readings. Read more...