An email arrived recently in my mailbox screaming “JAKIM bans hot cross buns in its bakeries”. In case you hadn’t guessed, JAKIM stands for JAbatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia – the Department of Ismalic Development in Malaysia. The headline I saw was therefore entirely plausible.
Digging a little, I found out that the article was old news. The story had done the rounds a few years previously, when it was said that in JAKIM bakeries, the crosses on hot cross buns had been turned into mere ropes. In other words, one of the lines on the cross (see photograph) had been removed, purportedly to avoid “offending” Muslims.
There was just a small problem: a hot cross bun with no cross is no longer a hot cross bun. This observation prompted an imaginative local blogger to christen the new bun with the name “tali-bun”, “tali” being the word for rope in Malay. Talibun is also deliciously close to Taliban, and we all know what that connotes.
If JAKIM has indeed banned hot cross buns, it will not have been the first time that this innocuous pastry has sailed into controversy. Which is mind-boggling if you think about it – how could a sweet, spiced ball of dough possibly cause such fuss? Yes a cross sits astride its top and yes, the bun is traditionally eaten at Easter, but the bread holds barely any religious connotation today.
And yet, the sign of the cross still has the power to terrify.
As early as 2003, Britain’s Daily Telegraph ran a story saying that a handful of local councils in Britain had banned the traditional hot cross buns at schools to avoid causing “offence” to “non-Christians”. When it emerged that the councils named by the Telegraph did not in fact have policies on hot cross buns, the paper had to apologise.
However, the debate over hot cross buns just wouldn’t go away. A few years later, it was the turn of a British hospital to cause a furore by not serving hot cross buns at Easter. This decision upset so many people that the hot cross buns were soon reinstated.
The Brits who spent time worrying about how the sight of crosses could “upset”, “offend” or otherwise imperil Muslims had obviously not heard the story of the croissant. The croissant is today associated with France but it did not originate there: the bread actually came from Austria, from Vienna to be precise. Anyone familiar with the extraordinary variety and quality of Austrian pastries will not find this revelation surprising.
Among the most memorable characteristics of the croissant is its shape: the bread looks like a crescent. 
Indeed, the croissant may well have first been baked after the siege of Vienna in 1683, when bakers working in their cellars throughout the night heard burrowing underground – the sound of Ottoman soldiers invading – and alerted the authorities, thus saving Austria. As a reward, legend has it that the Viennese bakers were given the right to make a pastry in the shape of the Ottoman crescent.
I first read the above account in Stephen Clarke’s wonderfully entertaining book 1000 Years of Annoying the French. The author makes plain that there are other theories regarding the origin of the croissant, one of which is that it derives from an Austrian pastry known as the kipfel. There are records of the kipfel going back to the middle ages. In contrast, croissants do not appear in French literature until 1853, when a chemist named Anselme Payen wrote a book called Des Substances Alimentaires (Dietary Substances) – a title almost designed to put you off your food. In his book, Monsieur Payen discusses croissants under the section “fantasy or luxury bread”.
Regardless of who is right about the origins of the croissant, what is clear is that it was introduced from Austria into France. In its adopted country, the croissant soon became a breakfast favourite. Since then, millions of people – Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and otherwise – have been gulping down crescents – the sign of Islam (and of the moon) – without even being aware of the fact. Ingesting a crescent every morning, with and without butter and almonds and chocolate, has not upset anyone, irrespective of religion, nor has it dented faith itself.
The benign nature of the croissant did not stop a group of rebels in Syria from issuing a fatwa, a Muslim religious edict, against the bread because its “crescent shape celebrates European victory over Muslims”. Evidently, there are Muslims who need protection from both the cross and the crescent. That is the absurd situation we could end up living in, if ideologically-driven political correctness is allowed to become the norm.
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. It was the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud who came up with this perceptive saying. The people who are so busy pronouncing fatwas and other rules obviously cannot just allow a cigar to remain a cigar; otherwise, they would be out of work. Our only hope is for common sense to eventually triumph over ideology.
Window into Other Worlds 