Puwar tu tha Piupla!

One of the less striking aspects of the blasphemous-teddy-bear story was the extent to which the must-respect-the-nutters dhimmitude of the British people has extended even into the realm of transliteration.

In the letter which Gillian Gibbons wrote to her pupils' parents about the class teddy bear, its name was given as Mohamed. This is the normal way the name is spelt in North Africa, where Sudan happens to be. It is spelt in many different ways, partly because the Arabic-speaking world is large and varied in its speech. I am no Arabist, but I have been told by those that are that there are great differences between Gulf Arabic and that spoken in the Maghreb region. When I was younger the name was always spelt in English as Mohammed.

However, during my lifetime an edict seems to have gone out that the "proper" transliteration is Muhammad. Likewise, the followers of the desert death-cult were once always described as Moslems; now it must be Muslims. Anyone my age knows their holy book as the Koran, but it is now the height of insensitivity not to write Qu'ran. (I don't know whether that apostrophe is in the right place; but, like the greengrocer, I know there has to be one somewhere.) Basically you can now only use three vowels in Arabic transliterations; o and e are banned. The Foreign Office camel corps tries to make diplomats write Usama bin Ladin. Does that make Arabic words any easier to read for non-Arabists? No, I would say, or possibly Nu.

I believe that this is an attempt - made not by Arabs themselves, but by the PC crew in Britain - to homogenise Arabic around the sort spoken in Saudi, i.e. by unpleasant gynocidal nutcases. Certain newspapers insisted, no doubt enforcing mindless "house style" edicts, that Ms Gibbons' class had named the bear "Muhammad". They hadn't. They'd called it Mohamed. And it is Moslems, not Muslims, who can feck off out of this country if they want to live under Sharia law; and Mohammed, not Muhammad, about whom Sir Salman Rushdie can write anything he damn well likes.