Unexpected & Forced Religious Recruitment
For only £3.90 and about 3 minutes travel, you can get a taxi back from central Cardiff to your door.
What you also get, is a devout Muslim cab driver who won’t let you get a word in the entire way. He talks at you about how everyone in Cardiff nowadays is a sinner and a prostitute, like the “lions ripping the meat off the female gazelles”. The fact that those women are:
“selling their bodies in exchange for drinks and having sex with anyone and everyone”. That “they’re all whores who, 20 or 30 years ago there was maybe one of them, stood under a streetlamp and everyone knew her as the whore; but now everyone is a whore and there’s no other purpose to their lives.”
We arrive at my house. £3.90 fare. I hand over a tenner, and wait for my change. While waiting, the non-stop one-sided speech turns to:
“this is what doesn’t happen in the Quran. The Quran teaches about a creator. They choose to be whores and offer themselves for rape but we don’t choose our skin.”
He grabs my arm:
“You didn’t choose to be white, I didn’t choose to be brown. The creator chose these for us but we choose to fight because of it. They choose to be whores but we can choose a better life, one where somebody’s daughter, wife, sister or mother isn’t being abused on the streets.”
I try to politely exit the cab, but the door is locked. He continues:
“The Quran teaches us we can be free of the need to act like animals on the ground that someone out there for us, and the sky that was made above us. We all have a purpose that extends beyond our life. The Quran looks beyond death to what really matters. When you’re 80 and you’re in your wheelchair dying, dying, dying, and you think ‘where is my house?’ ‘What is my car for?’ These are all things that do not matter under the Quran because what matters is to live and die for a purpose.”
I pull on the door handle a few more times but it still won’t open. Seeing this, he leans over me and unlocks the door, puts his hand on my leg and says:
“Take the teachings of the Quran.” (He hands me one of the pile of leaflets he had stored on his dashboard, presumably for every fare). “Take this book and understand why we live, why is our purpose and what we should die for”.
He opens the just-unlocked door for me and lets go of my leg.
“My brother, read the Quran. It doesn’t cost you anything, and all the women and cars in the world don’t matter compared to the true purpose of life in the Creator’s plan”.
He finally gives me my change, and pushes the religious booklet into my hand as well, ensuring I have to take it. I exit the cab and he speeds off.
Well.
I respect his moral integrity. I respect how strongly he believes in his faith. What I don’t respect, is how he’s trying to force his faith upon others. People who paid him for a service of getting from A to B, and at no point in the evening expected that service to include having a religious recruitment speech forced upon them before they’re physically allowed to exit his vehicle.
I’m all in favour of holding one’s beliefs to a high standard. I respect the right to have any belief and to, in an informal, discussional, rational and two-way exchange of ideas, share your beliefs with someone in a fair exchange.
I did not, under any circumstances, expect to be lectured for 20 minutes, not allowed to get a word in, and tried to be converted to Islam in a locked cab, when I got into a taxi journey that should have lasted just 3 minutes.
The fact that I was locked in until he’s finished his recruitment speech was what really upset me. That, and every time I tried to utter a single word, he continued to speak; raising his voice to drown out mine each time.
Fortunately, I’m a strong-minded male in my twenties. I was not going to succumb to his aggressive recruitment tactics. What if I were an impressionable teenager? Or a terrified young woman, who could very well have burst into tears at his violent accusations that I’m a whore? I’m fairly certain that the full blunt force of the law would come down on him if I were.
Personally, I think it should anyway. But because he was an unlicensed taxi and I didn’t manage to clock the registration number before he sped off, he’s likely to still be recruiting now.
It was a volatile atmosphere to be in, and the last time I take a taxi in Cardiff.
