‘Yassmina, there are some people who are from Africa who are white. White people came to Africa a long time ago and they have lived there for a long time, too.’
I was astounded and couldn’t understand how an identity that I had associated with a colour for so long could suddenly change. All the people I had met who considered themselves African were brown or black, and now a white person was African? What did this mean? Could anyone be anything?
This may have been my very first paradigm shift about identity, at the ripe age of nine.
I never saw that white African lad again.
Crushed crushes aside, the centre was a fun and carefree environment; the supervisors were mostly university students and they kept us occupied. My memory of them is that they were all Anglo, and so some things got lost in translation.
One summer, when I was eight, the Brisbane humidity turned itself up and I began to complain about the heat. The supervisor, a leggy brunette, frowned at me. ‘Then why are you wearing such long pants? You need to wear shorts when it’s this hot!’
I looked at her legs, which were thin and tanned, and although I was still too young to internalise many of society’s beauty standards, even I knew that was how legs were supposed to look, and that mine didn’t look like that. Mine had black hair on them for one, and my knees were dark because of my brown skin. Her knees were so white and clean!
‘I don’t think I want to wear shorts.’ I looked up at her, puzzled. Why was she even suggesting this and why did it matter to her?
‘Next week you’re going to have to. You can’t walk around in the heat with your legs all covered up! It’s crazy.’
I remember being a little uneasy at the time. She possibly didn’t realise what she was asking of me – even at a young age I was encouraged by my family to dress conservatively, whether because we were Sudanese or Muslim I couldn’t tell for certain. But I did know that I didn’t own any shorts.
In the car heading home I informed my mother. ‘The vacation care says I need to wear shorts.’
‘You need to do what?’
‘They said I need to wear shorts, because of the heat.’
My mother looked at me over her glasses, one eyebrow up, both hands on the steering wheel.
‘Tayib [okay].’ She pursed her lips, obviously unimpressed. ‘Let’s go buy some shorts, Baga [then].’
We found a pair of white shorts in Big W that seemed to fit. They finished comfortably enough around my knees when I was standing, but when I sat down they disturbingly came halfway up my thighs. I didn’t look like any of the girls in the ads, I thought, looking at myself in the mirror. I just felt disappointed and unsure. Although my shorts were greeted with approval that next week, I returned to my long pants after a few days, feeling exposed and hairy next to my white friends with legs like the girls on TV.
A little while after 9/11, and after I started wearing the hijab at vacation care, the carer and the older lady who worked in the office started asking me about Islam. ‘Why do you wear that on your head? What does it mean to be Muslim? Why do you pray?’
I answered their questions the best way I knew how to, and then consulted with my parents around the dinner table when I got home. I first showed my parents the Paddle Pop stick box that I had made, having painstakingly arranged the sticks in a structurally sound manner then doused it in superglue just in case my design was faulty. Once they oohed and aahed over my creation, I proceeded to proudly share the story of my little stint educating people about Islam.
‘The lady, she asked me about the hijab, and about praying, and then when I went to pray Dhuhr in the library the other kids wanted to know what I was doing so I explained, and then for Asr I went outside and prayed in the backyard and let them all watch so they know we’re not scary at all!’ I said in one big long breath, then looked at the faces of my parents.
‘Wallahi kwayis, Yassmina!’ my dad said, indicating his approval. He got out of the chair and walked to his desk, picking out an A5 blue booklet with ‘ISLAM’ written on the front. It was also decorated with a minaret and hands cupped together side-by-side in prayer, all traditional Islamic motifs.
‘Give this booklet to her,’ he said to me in Arabic. ‘If she has any more questions about Islam, she can come to us.’
At the time, I thought, Cool! She might want to become Muslim! How exciting would that be, another Muslim person in my life? What I hadn’t figured out yet was that she wasn’t curious because she thought the religion was amazing, but because she associated it with the oppression of women – I was a child who didn’t want to wear shorts, her natural garb! Every word I said would be repeated by these supervisors as gospel – often because they had no other source of information aside from the news reports, and they could be biased, shallow and inflammatory. It was most likely they were taking the word of a ten-year-old as the truth about this diverse, widespread religion. Without realising it, I had become an unsuspecting ambassador for my faith, being asked to speak for Islam whether I wanted to or not.
The supervisors never did ask my parents about Islam, and I suspect it was because my parents fit their stereotype of Muslims more than I did. I think my parents saw these interactions as opportunities to provide positive interactions with the wider public about Islam. As long as I was not being attacked or hurt, they encouraged me to approach every situation with the mindset that it was a chance to educate people, to broaden their horizons and to share what our religion truly was about. A chance to show that we were not so different, really.
Like the gradually heating water in the pot, the other small changes in society’s perception of us are more difficult to remember as discrete events. At some stage I started hearing stories about my friends getting their hijabs ripped off in the supermarket; once in a while someone would yell ‘towelhead!’ at me from a passing car. Getting stared at while we were out shopping became pretty normal, but I told myself it was because I was so good-looking that people couldn’t turn away. It was my secret self-empowering Beyoncé talk: ‘They’re looking at you because they wish they were you, Yassmina!’ I would tell myself, and it worked.
The attention was kind of exciting at the time. It almost felt like we were in a film or in one of my books. It did not seem serious; it just felt like an adventure. We would compare notes at school and see who got the worst hate that week.
‘Did you hear the bus got glass bottles thrown at it yesterday?’ someone said to me at assembly, as we stood in lines facing the principal while a young boy read a verse from the Qur’an in prayer out the front.
I subtly turned my head, not wanting to get in trouble for talking during assembly but keen to hear more. I was almost disappointed that it wasn’t my bus – what would that have felt like?
‘Oh, whoa, really? That’s crazy! Are they okay?’ I whispered. My classmate shrugged and we shook our heads in collective but naive disbelief. How much outrage can you truly have as a ten-year-old?
Hoons drove into the car park of our school a few weeks after that event and caused a ruckus, yelling racist garbage. My memory of this is vague, but it was shortly after that incident that a police officer was stationed at the front of our school to give us some protection, although perhaps this was more a symbolic move to show the police cared, because what would a single cop be able to do against a racist rabble?
The police officer became a source of endless curiosity, and we would spend hours after school sitting across the footpath from his or her spot at the wire front gate, cross-legged and attentive, asking this foreign creature about their world. We were not in the least afraid of this police officer. We would ask about relationships, what it was like to do the job, and if he or she had ever seen any grizzly fights. We would ask to see the gun, the torch, the baton. We did not fear their presence, but were fascinated by this instrument of authority, this white person in our world.
But as time went by even we ten-year-olds began to believe the police weren’t on our side. We started to he
ar stories about cops stopping people because of their beards and their hijabs. It was often rumour, someone’s mother, an aunty, or a friend. As the months went on and the talk in the media began to turn to the invasion of Afghanistan, the mood went from being exciting and adventurous to confusing and frightening. What had been certain was called into question. Was the police officer out the front of the school really there to help? My mother considered not going to work for a few weeks, and we were constantly attending strange ‘community forums’ with other families. Our parents would discuss issues like police–community liaison strategies, the language of the media, protection of school children … and I would play with the other kids, thinking it awesome there was another opportunity for us to hang out.
It still didn’t feel connected to ME. It felt like everyone had just got it wrong. Yeah, we were being blamed for something, but surely these people actually realised we were just like them? It didn’t occur to me that others might truly hate my family and me because of what had happened. It all still felt like a game.
Mrs Deen, my teacher at the time, was cognisant that we lived in a changing world and her way of encouraging us to talk about current issues was to have ‘News Time’ in class. Everyone brought in a piece of news each morning, and just before we were released from class at the end of the day, we would stand behind our tables and share our piece. It was always a mixed bag because our parents, from all around the world, watched different sources of news. Pakistani classmates had news from Pakistan, with Kashmir a common theme. One of my classmates was from Chechnya and he would bring updates from the Chechen conflict. At the time, I didn’t realise I was hearing about the second Chechen war, but we got a blow-by-blow account of everything that had happened. My classmate always got so upset and I didn’t understand why. I didn’t see that it was his family he was talking about, and they were always in real danger. I wish I had paid more attention, but at the time it just seemed like yet another war and all of our countries were involved in some sort of conflict. I remember thinking, Oh, you have news about Chechnya again? When the USA and the UK invaded Afghanistan, it was simply another item in ‘News Time’. It wasn’t until I left the warm cocoon of the ICB environment that the realities of being Muslim in Australia really started to make themselves felt.
It makes me sad that there is an entire generation of young Muslims who don’t know what it was like before we became the face of the amorphous ‘enemy’ in the country we grew up in. The anonymity of an Anglo-Australian and the privilege to choose the way the world perceives them and reacts to them is a freedom some young Muslims will never know.
The issues that Muslims face in Australia have regularly been compared to the issues other waves of migrants have experienced in the past. Time and time again people have said, ‘The Chinese went through this, the Vietnamese, the Greeks and the Italians all did their time, so it is just the same for Muslims. Give it time and it will be fine.’ Yes, Australia has had waves of migrants go through teething pains before becoming part of the cultural landscape. However, I do think that our current situation is a little different.
Today, the enemy is not a single race far away, at a border that could be clearly defined, whether it was, for example, Nazi Germany or the Ottoman Empire. Now the enemy has been characterised as an ideology, a belief system; the enemy is ‘Islam’. Why? The actions of an individual from a marginalised group are often seen as the representation of the entire group rather than attributable to the individual. In our case, partly due to history, partly due to ignorance, rather than prosecute individual Muslim perpetrators, the entire ‘group’, Islam, became the enemy after 9/11.
There are people in all religious groups who use their faith and a divine decree to justify their violence or vitriol. There is not enough engagement, interaction or even basic knowledge about Islam for the general public to separate violent extremism in the name of political Islam from the peaceful and practical religion that millions of Muslims practise around the world and in Australia.
It should also be noted that the ‘Islamic community’, or the ‘Ummah’ as some Muslims like to call it, is incredibly diverse – as my own little school showed.
Ah, the intricacies of the Muslim communities. This is another topic that is difficult to talk about, hard for fear of ‘airing the dirty laundry’. It is hard for someone within a marginalised group to talk about issues within that group in a public forum as it makes more sense to have one voice and a united front. Airing the dirty laundry can add fuel to the fire and legitimise the hateful voices that are bleating with ignorance. However, to lump ‘all the Muslims’ together when talking about ‘Muslim issues’ is hugely problematic because within the Ummah there are innumerable different cultures, ethnicities, tribal groups and nationalities. Each group brings with it their history and cultural norms and these norms are often then conflated with Islam. Muslim communities generally split along largely cultural and national lines, so on top of dealing with outside pressure, internal fissions must be navigated.
How does this play out? At the basic level, each cultural group has its own mosque. It is not a formal position but an unwritten rule: people would go to the mosques where they felt comfortable and where the practices largely mirrored those of their countries of origin, similar to a German going to a German bar, an Irishman to an Irish pub.
So the next time you see someone representing ‘the Muslims’, remember, they don’t represent ‘all the Muslims’, if I can be glib. They represent themselves, and if they are elected to lead a group then they represent that particular group. The experiences of Muslims are diverse and those of a Lebanese woman in Western Sydney are not the same as those of a Sudanese in Darwin and definitely not the same as those of a Fijian Indian in Mount Isa. Each group has its own battles, perspectives and solutions. Given that Sharia means there are technically many interpretations of the same source material, to expect a single answer from Muslims to any question is perhaps hoping for a little too much.
This may not be the easy answer, but it is closer to the truth than saying, ‘On behalf of all the Muslims …’
Something that makes the situation facing Muslim migrants different from that of other migrant groups is the perception held by some Muslims (regardless of cultural background) and non-Muslims that Eastern and Western values are incongruent. The dissent is no longer a case of We don’t like their food and the fact they like living in extended families and speak a different language, like with the previous waves of migrants. This is about values: Their values are not like ours. They don’t respect their women. They don’t like freedom. They like violence and killing. They are choosing this, so they shouldn’t come here or won’t belong here until they choose to be Australian, and that means taking on Australian values. On the other side of the fence, some Muslims will have equally low opinions of their Western counterparts: They don’t care about family or each other. They invaded our lands. They have no respect, for their women, for history, for anything that isn’t Western. They are hypocrites, saying we are violent but doing the same in our countries just under false pretences of civilisation. It’s like the Crusades all over again.
Of course, this is flawed logic, from both sides, based on ignorance. In Islam’s case, it doesn’t help that people seem to think Muslims are making a bad choice in signing up to a belief system they see as backward. ‘Why would you believe in a religion that’s oppressive to women?’ I’ve been asked, multiple times. The implication is that I’m actively choosing to follow the wrong path, and that is problematic on so many levels, not least because often that opinion is based on incorrect information. Take the concept of Sharia law, a term that is thrown around in the news and in the media willy-nilly, scaring people into believing Muslims want to start chopping off people’s hands for nicking a banana and stoning anyone who may have even thought about extramarital relations. Oh, drop ‘Sharia law’ into any conversation and watch the sparks fly!
Gaining an understanding of these
sorts of concepts is one of the best ways to overcome the perception that Islamic and Western values are incongruent because it is an argument that is fundamentally incorrect.
As previously mentioned, Sharia is like common law with an unchanging core based on the Islamic objectives of the protection of life, offspring, mind, property and religion. The main sources of Sharia law are the Islamic holy book, the Qur’an, and the Prophet Muhammed’s (Peace Be Upon Him)1 sayings and actions. These are known as the Sunnah, and are where Muslims get their understanding of how to live a good life.
The practical detail for Islamic law comes from interpretation of the Qur’an and Sunnah. All that detail fits under something called jurisprudence, or Usul al-fiqh. Usul al-fiqh covers quite a lot, but it essentially means interpreting the broad rules set out in Islam’s two main legal sources into law that is relevant to the current time and place. There are a fair few ways sources can be interpreted but in Islam there are two main methods: consensus and analogy. Consensus is when the ‘learned community’ agrees on something, usually something that has already happened. For example, the standard number of extra prayers Muslims pray each year during Ramadan (the month of fasting) was a result of consensus.
Analogies are rules extrapolated on methods and processes detailed by Islamic schools of thought, based on what is already known – don’t drink beer because wine is prohibited, for example.
The laws themselves are broadly split into two types – laws relating to an individual’s relationship with God (Ibadat) and the laws that govern society (Muamalat) – and can be further categorised into four fields: rituals, sales, marriage and injuries. The laws cover almost everything to do with how Muslims live their day-to-day lives. Prayer, fasting, food and drink, sales, loans, cultivating wasteland and even shares are covered. There are laws that relate to marriage, familial support and custody rights, and very specific rulings about the laws of war and peace, homicide and so on.
Yassmin’s Story Page 7