Ya Allah!

Last month Luigi Brugnaro, the mayor of Venice, warned that anyone who yelled Allahu Akbar (‘God is the greatest’) in his city was liable to be shot dead by a police sniper. A bit harsh you might think, but it’s weird how tricky it’s become to use the world’s fifth most spoken language in Europe, let alone invoke the Arabic name for God.

Three days after the London Bridge attacks, a trio of Muslim women attacked a female nursery worker on Wanstead High Street in north-east London. One of her colleagues told the Daily Mail they were ‘chanting the Quran, and invoking Allah’.

I doubt — though I may well be wrong — that the victim’s co-worker spoke Arabic, let alone was familiar with the verses, or ayat, of the Quran (if she did, surely she’d be more specific about the content of the alleged rant), and I would wager her testimony was based on the knee-jerk assumption that any excitable activity with an Arabic commentary must be religious and bloodthirsty.