Last night in West Hampstead a notable minority of the children “trick or treating” were Asians. The older ones (some of whom I recognised as being related to some of the local Islamic families) were running around on their own, without parental supervision and generally getting into the spirit of things.
I’m not convinced that revelling in Satanic regalia (most of them held plastic tridents and wore demonic make up) to celebrate a pagan festival is quite the sort of assimilation that moderate Islamic scholars have in mind.
And I’m pretty sure their more religiously observant parents would not have been amused.
Ironically, the reason Hallow’een took off in France (despite its supposedly American roots [French people only heard of it via the movies]) was that the day after Hallow’een is All Hallows Day, a Catholic holiday. This means that everyone has the day off so a drunken pagan bacchanalia the night before is not tempered by the need to go to work the next day. A perfect instance of unintended consequences, one might imagine.
