We Have The Music (12/06/16)

I remember very vividly this Petula Clark song from the 1960s which was so different and unlike anything I had ever heard before because 'Downtown' was youthful, upbeat and incredibly optimistic, just like the times from which it emerged.

It's incredible to think that this kind of music is forbidden in conservative Muslim countries, for reasons that are never explained or discussed openly, presumably because to do so would be to question the authority of religious leaders (all older men, of course) who lay down ridiculous rules based on tales from ancient 'holy' books.

Yet that's exactly what political Islam needs if you ask me, a social and cultural revolution as happened in the west in the 1960s, one that challenges the old, set-in-aspic, hidebound ways of doing things - which includes putting women on a pedestal while at the same time treating women as property and second class citizens.

Until that happens "we have the music", as Leonard Cohen once famously said which just goes to show you what people in conservative Islamist countries are missing.