The rules about individual actions, Ibadat, are pretty uncontroversial, and by following these rules Muslims in Australia practise Sharia law without infringing on the rights of others. Praying five times a day, how to do Wudhu before prayer, is all covered in Ibadat.
The rules that govern society are generally what come to mind when Sharia is referred to in the media. One of the main rules of this part of Sharia law is that Muslims must follow the laws of the land they are in, regardless of who is governing. So by following the law of Australia, for example, Muslims are following Sharia law. Muslims aren’t seeking to ‘impose’ Sharia in Australia – they’re living and practising it already, despite inflammatory and inaccurate depictions to the contrary.
The application of Sharia law has changed over time, and that’s where this discussion gets tricky – when we need to bring in colonisation. It’s strange to talk about colonisation so often, when it feels as if it was an age ago, but the colonisation process changed everything, including, in some ways, Sharia. It started with the British East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch entering India and Indonesia in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; these movements eventually led to some pretty drastic changes in how Sharia was practised and understood.
Colonisers brought with them particular ideas, including the ‘nation-state’ and the codifying (translating and writing down) of laws. Because colonisers saw Islam as distinctly different and therefore a threat to the system and civilisation that they understood, they began remodelling the legal system.
One of the main things about Sharia is that it was meant to be fluid and able to change for every time and context. If things were working as they technically should, you would have multiple interpretations of the same source material at the same time! When the English and Dutch arrived, they started to translate, write down and convert Sharia – as they understood it – into written law. This may have seemed harmless, but in doing so they turned Sharia’s awesome fluidity into rigid laws that couldn’t be changed even if the times had. They took away the interpretative element of Sharia that it depended on and Islamic law became unable to do what it needed to do to function. That ain’t right.
What’s even more galling is that the colonisation process actually wound back progressive aspects of Islamic law to conservative Western standards. Sharia and Islamic law had given women rights and privileges that were advanced and equalising and that didn’t yet exist in the Western context. When the laws were translated, those nuances were removed and the patriarchal colonial culture prevailed, writing the rights women had enjoyed under Sharia out of the system entirely.
What does that mean? Well, things like the idea that ‘Sharia law’ says the man is the head of the family to be obeyed without question was actually drawn from biblical sources and added after colonisation, completely changing the original intent of the Islamic ruling. ‘For a husband is the head of the wife.’ (Ephesians 5:23)
Another great example is that certain colonial governors believed Islamic law allowed criminals to escape punishment too easily, complaining that Sharia was ‘founded on the most lenient principles and on an abhorrence of bloodshed’. Given Islamic law’s current reputation, this is kind of ironic.
Sharia law may sound foreign, especially if you don’t know much about it, but it doesn’t need to be feared. At its essence, it’s about finding a way to live a good life, and by practising as Muslims (praying, fasting, eating good kebabs), millions of people around the world are following Islamic law without coming into conflict with the law of the land. Muslims are well accommodated in the current legal system and there is no reason why this should change. Fear-mongering about Sharia law and portraying it as a ‘threat’ to Australian society serves only to bolster the damaging and dangerous ‘us and them’ narrative, ultimately helping no one but terrorists.
There is a verse in the Qur’an that sums it up for me:
True piety does not consist in turning your faces towards the east or the west – but truly pious is one who believes in God, and the Last Day; and the angels, and revelation, and the prophets; and spends their substance – however much they may cherish it – upon near of kin, and the orphans, and the needy, and the wayfarer, and the beggars, and for the freeing of human beings from bondage; and is constant in prayer, and renders the purifying dues; and [truly pious are] they who keep their promises whenever they promise, and are patient in misfortune and hardship and in time of peril: it is they that have proved themselves true, and it is they, they who are conscious of God. (Qur’an 2:177)
It might be difficult to decipher if you are not used to reading religious texts. I am not a scholar, just a Muslim woman making her way in the world, but to me this verse means that God looks at more than simply how much you pray or what you tell other people to do. It is about being the best person possible: patient, kind, helping others. To me, Islam is not just about what you wear, how you walk, what your job is. It’s about character. It’s about being someone who works to make the world a better place. It is also not necessarily about following a specific hierarchy, because that structure does not exist in the Islamic context. There is no one spokesperson, there is no one correct answer for most of the questions – the plurality of the religion is part of its beauty and why it remains relevant no matter the time or place. That said, it does make it difficult to have a single, united message and story when we are not a single community. So the misconceptions continue, and even as children we became aware of the contention our faith was causing, although we couldn’t understand why.
In 2002, our local mosque was burnt down and abuse scrawled on the fence in spray paint.
When I tell people this they tend to be appalled. It’s a shocking act of vandalism. But at the time my classmates and I accepted it as our reality, too young to understand how life should be, or was, for other kids – for non-Muslim kids. We just realised that bad things were happening and people were blaming us for it. That became the narrative of our childhood. Bad things happen overseas, we get the repercussions. I remember hearing about the mosque and thinking Gosh, it really is like being in a movie. It did seem odd to me that someone would go to the trouble of burning down the place in which we prayed. What did we have to do with anything that was happening overseas?
We started going to another mosque while ours got rebuilt. My father spent weekends helping reconstruct the new mosque with others from the community. Officially, they called them working bees, but Dad always called them his busy bee days – he saw these phrases as the same thing, an illustration of how some nuances get lost in translation. The man who burnt down the mosque was prosecuted, but as we drove past the shell of the building on our way to school, it was a regular reminder that some people didn’t think we belonged. Nothing was to be gained from getting angry, so we simply accepted the reality and moved on – or that was what our parents told us, anyway. Perhaps my parents had a different experience and understood the community anger. Perhaps, but they hid it well.
Even in hindsight, I’m neither shocked nor disturbed by events of hatred that were aimed towards my communities, which might seem strange. Different people chose to deal with the general onslaught of hatred after 9/11 in different ways. Often people got angry. As I grew older and had to negotiate this hatred, I mostly chose to only barely acknowledge it and then to look at ways to move beyond the act itself. You could call this a survival mechanism; if I were to think about the injustice too hard I would wallow in pity and all-consuming anger. These are legitimate feelings when someone attacks your faith and your community, but they aren’t useful ones for me. It probably also helped that my parents didn’t entertain an ‘us and them’ rhetoric in our house. To the contrary, there was always discussion of what we needed to do to bring people together, to calm people down. What vigil were we going to attend? What was happening in the conflict zone? When was the next town hall meeting and how could we help? I was brought up by parents who wanted to do everything possible to keep the community intact. After
all, we had left our country and community to create a new one here, and we weren’t going to let it be slowly taken apart. That perspective is probably an enormous reason I have the outlook I do. At the end of the day, the mosque burning down was a dislocating experience, but we were migrants. We were used to adapting to whatever was thrown our way.
Chapter 4:
Hijab
I decided to wear the hijab on 10 November 2001, the day of an Australian Federal election. I chose an auspicious date for this turning point in my life, the day I started to dress like a ‘Muslim woman’, just in case I forgot. It would be a date I could look up in the history books, an old memory trick I picked up from a book from my father’s shelf in Sudan.
I hadn’t given the decision very much thought. I consulted with my friends at school, some who wore the hijab ‘full-time’ and some who did not, and then decided. My mother had worn the hijab for as long as I could remember, but we had never discussed it specifically. I had always assumed that at some point, when I became a woman, I would wear it just like my mum did. In some ways I made a powerful decision on a whim. This was a whim I felt was right at the time, and one that would shape my future beyond anything I could have anticipated.
In Islam, we are not judged on our actions until we reach adulthood, which is when we hit puberty. For women, that moment is straightforward: it comes with the arrival of your period – this is a generally accepted norm. For some Muslim women, they will start to wear the hijab ‘full-time’ once this happens, and some women will opt not to; there are cultural and personal reasons for these decisions.
I thought I had reached that stage of adulthood, even though I would only really get my period two years later. I decided that I had matured enough and it was time for me to step up to being an adult. I had no patience to wait for the ‘usual’ time it took for something to happen – I had decided that at the age of ten I was now an adult, and that was that!
My decision had nothing to do with the events of September 11; it was about doing what I was taught an adult Muslim woman was supposed to do. I didn’t connect wearing the hijab with 9/11 at all, because at the time it still seemed like an event that was so far removed from my reality. I can understand why people would think they are related (I have often been asked if I wore it in protest), but even in hindsight I think my motivations were more religiously focused than political. My identity was simply uncomplicated as a young Muslim. I knew the ‘right’ thing to do by Islam was to start wearing the scarf when I was of age because I knew that Muslim women wore the hijab. So, once I became a woman, I would too. It was the equivalent of wanting to wear your mother’s lipstick, a stepping stone up into the world of womanhood.
Wearing the hijab wasn’t the radical change it could have been either; after all, I went to a Muslim primary school where the hijab was part of the uniform. We wore it most of the day every day, anyway.
It may have been uncomplicated as a child, but as I got older I discovered all the different dimensions that came with that choice. My Muslim identity became clearly visible and therefore I was expected to speak about it constantly. It also meant being held to a higher religious standard because the hijab becomes a barometer of your religiosity, going through regular teenage angst about your body with the added dimension of the hijab, and dealing with other people seeing it as a tool of oppression, barbarism or even liberation. At the time I didn’t consider any of those aspects, but rest assured they made themselves known to me, soon enough.
I didn’t quite comprehend how the political environment had changed for Muslims. I knew that people would probably stare, but I was used to that, being brown in the suburbs in Brisbane. Now people on the street would know for certain I was Muslim too, but I didn’t see that as a problem. That was who I was, so why should that bother me?
It was probably a blessing that I chose to become a Hijabi so early. If I had waited until I understood all the ‘external’ implications, perceptions and connotations associated with the hijab, I may not have been as brave. Furthermore, my identity would probably have started to be formed around my body and what I looked like, like most teenage girls. Wearing a hijab at that point then and having to reinterpret my identity – internally, but also externally, to my other non-Muslim teenage friends – would have been much more difficult.
I woke up determined that Saturday morning, having decided the night before that tomorrow was the big day. I marched up to my parents where they were busily preparing breakfast in the kitchen.
‘Mama, can I borrow a scarf? I am going to be Mahajabah [a lady who wears a hijab] from now on.’
My mother looked at me out of the corner of her eyes. ‘Just go into my room and there are some in the cupboard.’
I left the kitchen and turned right, down the hall to the master bedroom. Opening Mum’s cupboard was like finding a window into Narnia, with all the wonderful colours of her dresses and scarves. She had so many scarves, hundreds perhaps, colourful, textured and neatly folded in columns in her closet. My mother wears the long rectangular scarf that Sudanese women traditionally wrap around their heads. Her preferred style is a cotton wrap, about two metres long and half a metre wide, lined with thin tassels on the shorter edges. I remember standing behind Mum countless times growing up, watching her wrap the scarf around her head with practised ease, her natural but well-kept fingernails making a pleasing scrape against the cotton as she elegantly brought it around her head. Standing in front of the mirror, she would place the scarf flat on her head, a third on the left side and the rest on the right, swing the long side beneath her jaw, bring it back up and over her head, and secure the material with a long pin just above her right ear. The top of the scarf would sit halfway down her forehead (she always says I put mine too far back and make my forehead look huge: ‘It’s all about proportions!’) and frame her face in a smooth oval, a line interrupted only by the arms of her glasses. She never ties it too tight and always looks beautiful. If she was in a rush she would simply throw the long end of the scarf over her left shoulder, tassels swinging.
Accustomed to my white square school scarf, I was opting for the classical ‘Arab’ look sported by most of the Lebanese girls I went to school with and the style that was considered quite ‘cool’. Rather than wrap the scarf flat against your head, the Arab style has more of a structured body, the fabric forming a peak at the forehead. I scrounged around the options for a square scarf that morning.
There was just the one. It was white cotton, plain with a faint striped pattern in the stitching design. This was perfect!
I ran back down the hallway, past the kitchen and straight into my bedroom. The scarf pin that my friend had lent me would have to do, I thought, as I picked it out of my small jewellery box, a teal-and-fuchsia plastic love-heart container. One of my primary school friends had given the pin to me as a gift a few months earlier when I mentioned that I wanted to go full-time. I had kept it safe for this very moment. The box had a hinge and a purple tray insert that held a couple of special rocks I had found, a few pairs of small stud earrings, and the scarf pin. All the valuables that my ten-year-old soul held dear.
I stood in front of my mirror, the cupboard door providing me a full-length reflection. My fingers groped with the material as I tried to fold it in half into a triangle to place over my head. The scarf was huge. It was much larger than my usual school uniform hijab, which was a polyester design a quarter of the size of this cotton piece, and much easier to handle.
Once I had a triangle, I positioned the scarf on my head with the long edge on my forehead, roughly in the middle, lifted up my chin and gently pushed the pin into the scarf right at the join of my neck and jaw. Looking back down into the mirror, I almost choked. Too tight! I hurriedly readjusted.
Because it was such a large piece of material, the scarf covered my entire upper body down to my waist. This won’t do, I thought, unpinning it to fold it in half once again. That didn’t work either. The folded scarf was far too thick to drape
gracefully and be pinned effectively; it was like wearing a blanket on my head. I sighed, and reverted to my original plan. I had rejigged the style numerous times before my mother came in and asked if I was ready. I looked back in the mirror. ‘I think so.’
As I walked out past the kitchen, Dad came towards me and pinched my chubby right cheek.
‘Ah, Khalas, ah?’ he said, which roughly translates to ‘All right then, are you?’ His face was unreadable, but that was nothing new. ‘You’ve decided to wear the scarf now?’
‘Yup!’ I grinned proudly at my father.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked, his voice a mixture of pride and concern.
That seemed like an odd question to me. Of course I was sure! I was wearing it already, wasn’t I? I wore it every day at school alongside the other girls, after all, so it felt no different to that. The only change would be that I wouldn’t take my scarf off on the bus after school.
‘Yes, I’m sure!’
‘Okay, Mabrook [Congratulations]! Yassmina is growing up.’
As we went to the election booth that day, I strode down the street with my head held high, looking at people who walked past me, wanting them to notice. I had changed! I was now officially a Hijabi, Mahajabah, a woman! I had arrived.
Later that week, on the bus home from school, I talked about my newly hijabied status and a few girls on the bus laughed: ‘You won’t last! People always take it off and give up after a few months.’
Right then and there, I vowed not to. Challenge accepted, I thought, defiant. I was always someone who stepped up to a challenge, especially when I thought it was within my grasp. This one definitely was. This tendency has probably got me in more hot water than any other. On the other hand, this same stubbornness has given me the sticking power to learn new skills, try new experiences and generally push the boundaries to see how far they can go. My parents and family call it Raas Zalata, which literally means ‘head of rocks’, or that I’m stubborn. I call it determined and driven. Just different sides of the same coin, perhaps?
Yassmin’s Story Page 8