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This street is like 5 minutes from my house lol. It’s at the corner of Edgware Road (Marble Arch), which is the main Arab neighborhood in London. Arabs are a small proportion of Muslims in England, Edgware Road is a wealthy Arab neighborhood, it’s mainly shisha cafes and ice cream stores open until 3am where Muslim teens can ‘date’ with plausible deniability in a location that technically doesn’t serve alcohol (I once walked past a Muslim couple having sex next to a dumpster behind the Hard Rock Hotel next door). I stop by on occasion because I have a weakness for Belgian waffles with Nutella after coming back from work at midnight.
I do think Islam is an inherently appealing religion. There is a reason that, even at the height of the British Empire, some British aristocrats converted or certainly developed a fascination with Islam. That’s to say little of the widely-publicized views of Hitler and others of Islam. Islam lacks a Christianity’s guilt, its humiliation rituals in front of other humans, its contradictions around violence. It’s pure, absolute submission, which is attractive even divorced from every other aspect.
A friend of mine at college updated her LinkedIn picture recently. Italian-American from Long Island, pretty, smart, moderately promiscuous at college (though not extremely so). No religious views. A secular, urban liberal, who went into international diplomacy / think tanks on foreign policy. Socially she was a pretty generic upper middle class New Yorker. In her new LinkedIn picture she wears a Hijab and no makeup. Islam has its draws, for sure.
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