(Guest post by Greg Forster)
The delight of good food and the justice of political liberalism – what could be more Al-worthy? Ali Ahmed Aslam’s achievement reminds us why the two are connected.
The Al has a long relationship with good food. From the original Al himself to Steve Henson, Thibaut Scholasch & Sébastien Payen, Tim & Carrie League, Adam Butler & Autumn Thomasson, Mildred Day, Joseph Friedman and John and Justine Glaser, people who create food and make it more widely available to all are among the most frequent Al nominees.
It’s not hard to see why! When Ali passed away last year, the Times of India waxed poetic in its obituary:
Food is like life. It is a work in progress and has uncountable versions. Over 4 lakh [hundred thousand] years of collective knowledge and experience have gone into figuring out the basics of human culinary experience, not to talk of gourmet cooking, which is another level of a nuanced approach to food.
Food has other life-like attributes, too. It has no known beginning, no discernible end, has no finality of perfection or nadir of banality. It belongs to all, with no possible claims to a patent for a sense of ownership.
Now, folks, I do have to admit, when I eat one of Mildred Day’s Rice Krispie treats, I do have my doubts about whether the Times is right about food having “no finality of perfection.” And I have definitely eaten a meal or two in my time that could call into question the assertion that food has no “nadir of banality.”
But the Times got one thing right – food belongs to all. You’ve heard all the quips: Egg rolls were invented in America. Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada. French Fries are Belgian. Swedish meatballs are Turkish.
And chicken tikka masala is Scottish, thanks to Ali Ahmed Aslam, known to all as “Mr. Ali.” Born in what is now Pakistan in 1945, he came to Glasgow as a young boy. His father opened the first Indian restaurant in Glasgow in 1959, and he followed suit, opening the delightfully named Shish Mahal restaurant in 1964.
Legend has it that Ali invented chicken tikka masala in the 1970s after a customer complained his chicken was too dry. As with most legends, the particulars are disputed. The muse of history has delicately draped a veil of uncertainty over the exact origins of the dish. But there is no question that Ali popularized it through decades of hard work and sacrificial service to his community through his successful business. It was Ali who made chicken tikka masala, as his obituaries unanimously proclaim, the national dish of Great Britain.
How was it possible for chicken tikka masala rather than, say, shepherd’s pie to become Britain’s national dish? And how can people maintain any stable sense of identity and belonging in a world where such fluidity is possible?
Food belongs to all, as the Times so beautifully puts it, because beauty itself in all its forms – like the good and the true in all their forms – belongs to all. We experience beauty, including a beautiful meal, first and foremost not as British or Brazilians or Bhutanese, not as men or women, not as moderns or ancients, but as human beings.
Of course the experience is always filtered through our particularities. I don’t experience chicken tikka masala in exactly the same way as a Scottish or Chinese person does. That’s why humans are social creatures, and need one another. None of us sees the whole picture, and we grow as we appreciate one another’s different experiences within and across community. Those who are not humble enough to learn something from other cultures do not understand even their own, for they lack a frame of reference.
But however varied our particular experiences, our collective participation in a shared human nature and the essential sameness of the good, the true and the beautiful for all of us must come first. Without that, no growth from any exchange of different experiences, no justice and no community, is even possible. If we are not all humans together, experiencing in our different ways the same basic human things, the gap between cultures, and even the gap between individuals, can never really be bridged.
There is only power – a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
I’d rather have chicken tikka masala.
Hence Ali brings us not only to Mildred Day, but to Fasi Zaka, Wim Nottroth, Charles Montesquieu, Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, Whittaker Chambers, George Henry Thomas, Bob Fletcher, Hans Christian Heg, Nazar Mohammad Khasha and George Washington. When I nominated Khasha, I wrote: “For all our morbid obsession with the supposedly insuperable bounds of cultural particularity, I suspect Khasha and Taiwan’s magnificent President Tsai Ing-Wen would have understood each other quite well.”
But I think Washington said it best, in a context we would do well to remember:
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
After he passed, Ali’s son posted on social media:
Dad came to the UK in the late 1950s, about 1958 or 1959 and they were from a very, very, very poor background. He made Glasgow and Scotland his home, he did not look back.
He was Glaswegian and Scottish first. He was very, very proud of being Glaswegian, very very proud of being Scottish, and it was very important to him. He set up a lot of charities and he donated a lot of money because he was from such humble beginnings.
The liberal political order replaces the strict cultural homogeneity of ancient societies with complexity, ambiguity and fragmentation. People look at their neighbors and don’t immediately recognize themselves in those very different faces and very different lives.
We have not yet figured out how to maintain social solidarity under these conditions. The humaneness and generosity of a Mr. Ali will always find its dark mirror image in the depravity of those who, for whatever reason, simply cannot find their way to the place where a man born in Pakistan can be proud to be “Glaswegian and Scottish first.” And where others can genuinely see him that way as well.
But let us make no mistake about our alternatives, of which we have only two. We can press forward into the unknown, into the fog of liberal ambiguity, or we can attempt to lift the fog by the application of violence. And not just any violence, but a special kind of violence: Violence that is not restrained by any recognition of our shared humanity, not restrained by any awareness that the good, the true and the beautiful are in the end binding on all of us together.
Like I said, I’d rather have chicken tikka masala.
Image HTs: AFP via Getty; Shish Mahal via Yahoo
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