The superstar Muslim evangelist Zakir Naik was banned recently from entering a communally sensitive district in Karnataka, along with Vishwa Hindu Parishad ideologue Pravin Togadia. A qualified doctor from Mumbai, Naik is now a performing superstar with global reach for his lectures, debates and Q&A sessions.
Naik’s Islam, though, is a particularly conservative brand of Salafism, the ultra-conservative reform movement within Islam which aims to go back to what its proponents call the fundamentals of the faith.
This involves a hyper-literalist reading of Islamic texts, which often tend to border on the absurd. For example, Zakir Naik claims, in all seriousness, that for Muslims even something as trivial as wishing someone Merry Christmas is “100% wrong” and “haraam”.
Naturally, this sort of literal conservatism and robotic memory is ripe for parody. And this is what British Muslim comedian Waleed Wain does in the video above, imagining a situation where "Zakir Naik" discusses whether nursery rhymes are permitted in Islam.
Find out for yourself what "he" has to say about Jack and Jill, or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Naik boasts of a huge fan following, attracted in part by a prodigious memory which gives an impression of erudition. On stage, he can quote passages verbatim from the Quran, Bible and Gita. In this video, for example, he rattles off nine Quranic references to back up a single point of his, so amazing his audience that they have no choice but to break into spontaneous applause.
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