That’s what happens when the gentry try to behave like common people. They themselves become common. But unlike August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, the same could hardly be said of Jemima Goldsmith, until recently aka Haiqa Khan.
Fresh from the talaq queue, the blond billionaire’s daughter is partying up a storm with celebrities and the like in some of London’s poshest clubs — a daring leap from her not so distant days of salwar kameez and blowfly-infested Pakistani orphans.
Which is not to say Jemima/Haiqa is a phoney. Or that she didn’t genuinely fall for Imran Khan, the alpha male cricket captain who swept her off her feet and on to his magic carpet: destination Karachi. After all, he was familiar with the fast-living jet set crowd she came from. Far from a mésalliance, they seemed suitable, even. He wasn’t like them.
But I smell a rat. And it can be traced back to Jemima/Haiqa’s 1995 entreaties in the British media, where she spelled out her love for her newfound culture.
Fresh from her Urdu class, she touchingly observed: ”It would seem that a Western woman’s happiness hinges largely upon her access to nightclubs, alcohol and revealing clothes.”
Describing such vice as ”transient pleasures”, she noted: ”As we all know, such superficialities have little to do with true happiness.
”Islam is not a religion which subjugates women whilst elevating men to the status of mini-dictators in their own homes,” she added.
Of course, times have changed. Imran hides from cameras in Afghanistan, and his ex-wife is wearing short skirts and being snapped in cars with haraam (religiously taboo) men.
Speculation has been rife. Jemima/Haiqa got amoebic dysentery once too often in Pakistan. His sisters interfered. She got too lippy. Huntington’s thesis was right — the civilisations do clash.
But there is one theory that has been overlooked. ”Leila does Lala-Land” syndrome.
This affliction, which may be best described as a cross between the orientalism of yore and Karen Blixen-ism, only in Jemima’s case, with desert sand and burqas.
Haven’t we all had Omar Shariff’s kohl-eyes turn our insides to jelly in Lawrence of Arabia? Or imagined ourselves a local version of Sheherezade, seducing the handsome but aloof stranger from behind our veils? Lest we forget, mystery is ever the aphrodisiac.
But some women, like Jemima/Haiqa, take the fantasy one step further and unwittingly or otherwise, become Leilas in Lala-Land.
They inhabit a sherbet world where exoticism turns them on, and they turn a blind eye to those teensy-weensy, less pleasant things that you don’t see on the brochures. Such as, if they marry these men they might just be deprived of their human rights, or that far more Muslim men than we’d like to admit are a) wife beaters, or b) wife collectors or c) mini-dictators in their own homes (remember that one?).
The Internet would be a useful place to find Leilas. On one site, for American girlfriends of Middle-Eastern, Muslim gents, Michelle asks: ”Hello, could you please tell me how to make a chador [the black half-moon tent that transforms Iranian women into ink spots with legs]?” She ends simply: ”Please respond urgently. Thanks.”
Another, Dorri, from Auckland, New Zealand, asks: ”How to [sic] I make my Iranian man marry me?”
April lives in the Middle East (yes, no need to be specific, they’re all the same) where she’s not allowed to leave the country with her children. ”I’m not unhappy, though,” she assures us. Her 14-year-old son has never had a girlfriend and plays chess at recess. ”Life is definitely not boring here!” she thrills.
The Leila effect is visible on many of these sites, where the adjectives ”dashing” and ”mysterious” are oft-used to describe their love interest — and moderators advise on how to cope with not being allowed to leave the house, or how to improve the texture of your biryani.
Loving a Muslim (LaM) is a site devoted to offering advice and support to Leilas, both before and after they emerge from Lala-Land. Jan’s husband, a Palestinian, doesn’t let her go to the store, check the mail or do the laundry alone. He has threatened to beat her daughter within an inch of her life if she doesn’t finish her felafel and can’t stand any references to Jesus in their home. ”I don’t have it nearly as bad,” she assures visitors to the site.
In between stroking her hair in their nuptial chamber, Marjorie’s husband would spend hours on the phone in Arabic to his sister in Egypt — who turned out to be hardly a sister at all, but his wife.
The moral of the story being that, as one poster put it, ”they play a good game until they’re married”. As to whether Imran Khan was one of them, nobody knows. Perhaps no one will ever know. But of one thing we can be sure, Jemima/Haiqa knows.
And that she took to her transient pleasures so quickly, fully aware that she will come across as a complete hypocrite, is telling.
The bearded politically correct brigade who are firing off protest letters to this newspaper as we speak should take comfort in the fact that none of my racist generalisations are putting women off. To the contrary, they are flocking to become Leilas in such droves, one could soon see the phenomenon being taught as a social anthropology subject.
Perhaps John Gray could write a book: Jenny from Jo’burg and Ja’far from Jeddah: Happily Ever After. How to Keep the Flames Alive and the Stones At Bay.