Her family, long accustomed to her knack for reinvention, was sanguine about her latest incarnation. Despite her own ambivalence about religion, Bessie took it in her stride. ‘I think in the beginning Mum just thought, oh well, here she goes again. Then it was: oh well, she may dress funny but as long as she’s improving herself. Because my mum saw the change in me—that I was being focused, not going out to nightclubs or drinking alcohol and taking drugs. She didn’t really care if I was wearing something on my head, just as long as I was better, a better person.’
Aside from the strange clothing and rituals, Rabiah’s core beliefs had changed little from the values Bessie had drilled into her as a child. ‘There’s fundamental things about me that are still the same—the values instilled by my mother that are a part of my character. And the negative things: bad-tempered, stubborn, authoritarian. I didn’t turn from a devil into an angel. The only thing I haven’t found to be true is that she taught me there was grey. I don’t see grey, it’s all black and white to me.’
Since Rabiah now avoided the northern beaches, Bessie often made the long trip by public transport across the Harbour Bridge to Lakemba to visit her daughter and grandchildren, Devi and Mohammed, on whom she doted. Eventually she moved in and lived with them for three months. She remained entirely mystified by Islam, but when Rabiah went out and Bessie was left to babysit she always made sure the children said their prayers, as instructed. ‘I don’t know what they said but they said something’, she would report on Rabiah’s return.
The family had moved out of the McCormacks’ house and into a one-bedroom flat, where the only furniture was a fridge and bunk beds for the children. Rabiah rejected repeated offers of furniture from helpful friends, preferring to sit and sleep on the floor as the Prophet Mohammed had done. She was a fastidious housekeeper who couldn’t stand mess or dirt. ‘I think it’s just me, I like things to be in order, I think it’s because I’m a control freak’, she explains. She liked to hang the laundry in order on the washing line; her own clothes, Devi’s and Mohammed’s in separate—preferably colour co-ordinated— groups; she also used to colour-code the pegs until a friend told her it was a sign of obsessive compulsive disorder. Bessie lost her temper one day after hanging out the washing when she found Rabiah rehanging it ‘correctly’. ‘You can go naked for all I care’, her mother snapped.
Rabiah’s style of parenting owed much to Bessie’s own no-nonsense firmness, with echoes of her grandfather’s severity. ‘Mum was a lot softer than me as a person, not as severe’, she says. The children were drilled each morning to wash their face, hands and feet, fold their pyjamas and place them under their pillows. They had to finish every scrap of food on their plates; Rabiah couldn’t abide waste and continually lectured them about all the poor children starving overseas. For all her efforts as a disciplinarian, it was clear early on that her children had inherited a streak of rebellion, which she put down to her own draconic temperament and the absence of a father. ‘It affects children, not to have a father figure, and to have an authoritarian mother; it tends to make them more unconventional, to want to rebel.’
Five-year-old Devi came home from her first day at school refusing to go back because she hadn’t been taught to read and write.
‘If you don’t go, the police will come and take you’, Rabiah warned.
As strong-willed as her mother, Devi tried a new tack the following day.
‘Don’t forget your lunch’, Rabiah reminded her.
‘No thank you, I don’t want any lunch today.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, you know all those children who die from not eating? Well if I don’t eat, I’ll die, then I won’t have to go to school.’
Three-year-old Mohammed was a similarly forthright child. One day, while Bessie was staying with them, they were about to walk to the shops when Mohammed darted into his mother’s bedroom and came out with a headscarf, which he handed to his grandma.
‘Oh no, darling, I don’t wear that’, laughed Bessie.
‘But Muslims have to wear it’, replied Mohammed, echoing his mother’s oft-repeated words.
‘I’m not a Muslim, darling’, explained Bessie.
‘Well you’ll have to leave then’, said a solemn-faced Mohammed.
The education of their children was a pressing concern for the small but vocal convert community, which lobbied the New South Wales government to introduce Islamic education into the state’s public schools. In those days there were no exclusively Islamic schools; most Muslim children attended government public schools where they were expected to take part in Christmas nativity scenes and Easter passion plays. Islam rarely rated a mention, even though in some schools in south-western Sydney 80 per cent of the students came from Muslim families. Finally, a program was launched under the auspices of the Islamic Council of New South Wales to teach Muslim scripture in certain schools. Rabiah was among the volunteers who offered to take the classes.
She showed up on day one at the Hampden Park Public School in Lakemba where the teachers had rounded up about sixty children, aged seven to ten, and herded them into the assembly hall for their first Islamic scripture class.
‘They were totally out of control’, Rabiah recalls. ‘It was like being in a zoo, they were running and screaming, it was absolute bedlam.’ She first tried cajoling them into some semblance of order. When that failed she resorted to the bootcamp approach.
‘I got ’em all in there and I literally screamed at them. I made them stand up against the wall. I threatened them—“I know who your father is”.’ The children came from mostly Lebanese families who hailed principally from impoverished rural villages or were refugees from the country’s civil war of the 1970s. Many of their parents were on social security benefits or in poorly paid manual work, and most spoke English as a second language and felt like second-class citizens in Australia. ‘They were ashamed to be Muslim, most of them. I wanted them to be proud of being Muslims, to give them back their self-esteem’, Rabiah recounts. After haranguing them into submission, she taught them how to perform wudu, the ritual washing, and how to recite salat, the five obligatory daily prayers. She taught them Islamic songs and games. Then she delivered an ultimatum.
‘Right, now it’s up to you. Which one did you like better— when I was screaming at you and punishing you, or when we were doing fun things?’
‘When we were doing fun things, Miss’, they chorused.
‘OK, well this is the rule. We’ll do fun things as long as you behave. If you misbehave, you get out.’
Silma and Siddiq Buckley remember Rabiah as always an eager volunteer. Siddiq says she had ‘a lot of determination, a lot of energy’. Silma recalls: ‘If there was a challenge, she would do it. If they told her that to be a Muslim she would have to climb Mount Everest, she’d do it. She would do it in the morning, and then she’d go back and do it again in the afternoon. That’s how determined and committed she was. She had a lot of respect in the community.’
Rabiah could often be found proselytising with gusto on the streets of Lakemba, issuing instructions to hapless passers-by on the ‘correct’ practice of Islam in her usual stentorian tone.
‘Oh no, here comes Rabiah with her shariah stick’, people would mutter as they spotted her striding down the street.
‘Excuse me, brother’, she would yell across the road in her strident Australian accent, if she spied a man standing in the shopping strip having a drink.
‘Do you know you’re not a Muslim any more, because the Prophet said Muslims don’t stand up to drink?’
Or if she saw someone eating with their left hand, she would berate them: ‘You know you’re not going to paradise, don’t you?’ Looking back, she shakes her head at the memory of her younger self in full flight, ‘screaming at the top of my lungs from one side of the street to another’. ‘In a very short time I had acquired—I wouldn’t call it knowledge, but massive amounts of information. Sometimes this is good, but sometimes it can b
e a disaster, if there’s no method or rhyme or reason to it—like someone who loves science but turns out to be the mad professor. I think I was a bit dangerous, I had no qualms.’
She dates her zeal to the evening of her pizza epiphany when she had been gripped by a sensation of dying, as a result of which she carried a burning conviction that God had saved her. ‘That feeling I had of dying has never left me. Since that day I thought Allah was going to take my soul from me, that has stayed with me. It has made me very intense. People find me intense and scary.’
This assessment is confirmed by those who know her. ‘She was very stern about everything, not just religion, that was just her character’, Siddiq Buckley says. ‘Everything for her was serious, and she had an opinion about everything, no matter how big or small it was. If she saw things a certain way then that was how it was; it was either right or wrong, there was no grey area in between the two. She had very pessimistic views about Australia, even though she was a dinky-di Aussie. We were all concerned about the lax moral attitudes, but she expressed herself more forcefully than most people. And once she had an opinion it was very hard to shift her, because she was very firm in her conviction. People are generally happy and enthusiastic about becoming a Muslim. Most of the people who came to Islam were much softer in their approach to Islam. They didn’t seem to have a chip on their shoulder about doing something to change the world, they were more interested in changing themselves. She seemed to be an angry young woman. I wasn’t sure if she was angry about herself, or angry at others, or angry at life in general. Not angry as in violent, but she was not happy.’
Silma Buckley recounts an occasion when she was looking after Devi and Mohammed, of whom Rabiah was fiercely protective. When Rabiah arrived to pick them up, she was furious to learn that Silma had given them biscuits that she believed were not halal. Silma remembers: ‘She went off. “How can you give the kids biscuits? I’ve heard there’s liquor in these!” She was very angry and upset that she had been violated and her kids had been violated.’
The split between them deepened during a debate over the ‘correct’ interpretation of a particular ayat (verse) of the Quran. At one of their Tuesday night meetings, Silma was reading from a verse that states that Jews, Christians and non-believers will be judged by Allah alongside Muslims on the Day of Resurrection. Silma told the gathering that the meaning of this verse was that other ‘People of the Book’ could gain entry to paradise, along with Muslims. Rabiah was taken aback.
‘Hang on a sec, do you mean to tell me that I could still be a Christian, and drink and party, and I don’t have to wear this, and it’s acceptable? And I can still go to paradise?’
‘Well that’s what it’s saying.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense. Why would someone become a Muslim if they can just be a good Christian and it’s acceptable to Allah?’
Rabiah resolved to seek a second opinion from an Egyptian friend who spoke fluent Arabic and could therefore check the original text, rather than rely on a translation. The woman consulted a book on tafsir, the study of interpreting the Quran, by a renowned eighth-century scholar named Ibnu Kathir. His view, her friend explained to Rabiah, was that the only Jews and Christians who could enter paradise were those who lived in pre-Islamic times. Rabiah announced her discovery at the next meeting.
‘What we said last week was wrong. Here’s the correct interpretation’, she explained to the gathering. But Silma stood her ground.
‘Well Ibnu Kathir’s got his opinion and I’ve got mine.’
Rabiah was shocked by Silma’s seeming renunciation of a renowned Islamic scholar, whom she assumed must be correct.
‘It’s like saying, “Well, Rabiah’s got a scalpel and the brain surgeon’s got a scalpel, so I might as well just let Rabiah do my brain surgery”.’
The differences between the two women would prove irreconcilable over time. ‘I couldn’t accept that interpretation—that only Muslims can go to paradise. I’ve simply never accepted it’, says Silma. ‘People like Rabiah have one view, they can’t countenance alternative views.’ Rabiah believes there can be only one interpretation of the Quran because it is unthinkable for a mere human to change the laws of God.
Rabiah also parted company with Jemaah Tabligh, deciding the group was cult-like and that its eschewal of politics— including the waging of jihad—meant denying an elemental part of Islam. ‘Their concept was that you have to be a perfect Muslim before you can defend Islam, which is wrong. And this business of not being involved in politics. I mean Islam is a way of life. You can’t separate the political side of Islam from ritual devotion because it’s a way of life. If Islam teaches us how to go to the toilet, how can it be that it doesn’t teach us how we should be ruled? It doesn’t make sense. There’s no such thing as politicised Islam and non-politicised Islam. If you have un-politicised Islam, then you’ve only got half of it.’
Political Islam was now the fastest growing ideological movement in the world. The Iranian revolution had fuelled a global surge of Muslim pride and a resolve to replicate the Ayatollah’s shariah state in other Islamic countries. Iranian women had taken to the streets wearing the face-covering chador—which had been banned by the Shah of Iran’s father—as a symbol of protest against the corrupt Western-backed regime. After meeting an Iranian woman whose husband was studying in Australia, Rabiah abandoned her hippy-style kaftan and headscarf, and began wearing a more austere Iranian-style hijab, which she teamed with a grey abaya, the flowing cloak-type garment designed to conceal a woman’s body shape, in keeping with the Quranic ayat that says women should ‘draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their finery’.
Another front in the Islamic revolution had been opened in Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion of 1979. Volunteers from all over the Islamic world had begun trekking to Afghanistan to join the mujahidin, and donations were pouring in from Muslims around the globe, a contribution soon eclipsed by the billions funnelled from the United States and matched dollar for dollar by Saudi Arabia. Rabiah didn’t know much about Afghanistan, except that the Russians were ‘filthy Communists’ who had invaded a Muslim land. On Fridays, she and her friends would spend hours at the mosque collecting money for the mujahidin. Women would hand over their gold necklaces, bracelets and rings, sometimes thousands of dollars worth in a day. The proceeds were handed over to a roving representative of the mujahidin, an Afghan doctor named Abdul Aziz, who had been given the use of an office in Lakemba by the Lebanese Muslim community.
On one of his visits, Dr Abdul took a shine to Rabiah’s boy, Mohammed, an intrepid youngster who was by now four and a half years old.
‘Do you want to come to Afghanistan with me?’ Dr Abdul asked the boy. ‘You could come and live in Afghanistan and be a Muslim soldier.’
Mohammed’s eyes lit up. ‘My son thought he was serious’, Rabiah recounts. ‘When Dr Abdul left and went back to Afghanistan without him, he was devastated. After that Mohammed used to say “One day I’m going to Afghanistan”.’
Rabiah herself was growing restless. Like her own mother, she had never really settled down, and had never lived in one place for more than three years (she still never has). In late 1981, she decided to make the haj pilgrimage to Mecca, a journey that Muslims are expected to make at least once in a lifetime as one of the ‘five pillars’ of Islam. She booked the trip through a tour group in Lakemba and arranged for Bessie to mind the children while she was away. But two days before their scheduled departure, Rabiah was seized by a sense of foreboding. Seeking guidance, she performed an istikharah prayer, a special supplication that Muslims make to solicit Allah’s advice.
‘I’m not going’, she announced to her fellow pilgrims’ dismay.
‘But you have to go.’
‘No, I’ve prayed istikharah. That’s it, I’m not going.’
The hajis left the following Saturday. On the Sunday, Rabiah’s mother collapsed and was rushed to hospital where she was diagnosed with chron
ic emphysema, which would eventually take her life. After a week or so in hospital, Bessie was discharged and went to stay with her younger daughter Susan, at her home on Sydney’s northern beaches.
Having missed out on the trip to Mecca, Rabiah resolved instead to take the children to Indonesia so they could see their grandparents and she could study Islam. ‘I couldn’t bear it any more—sitting around with a translation of the Quran saying, “I think this” or “according to me, that”. A lot of the time it was just empty talk. The reality was we weren’t putting into practice even the things we knew. I didn’t know how or where, but I just knew I wanted to go back and study.’
Before returning to Indonesia, there was one outstanding matter that she wished to resolve—her marriage to Bambang Wisudo, which had not yet been annulled. Neither she nor the children had seen him since he left Australia and returned to his family in Indonesia after their separation two years earlier. She was confident she had grounds for a divorce based on Bambang’s drug use and failure to support her financially, and wanted to have the marriage dissolved before going back to Indonesia. She travelled to Canberra to visit an Indonesian cleric, Amin Hady, who was then imam of the Canberra mosque and recognised as a religious authority by the Indonesian embassy in Australia. However, he refused to grant her a divorce, having not heard Bambang’s side of the story. Legally she was still Mrs Robyn Wisudo, a situation she resolved to remedy on her return to Indonesia.
7
AN ENEMY OF SUHARTO
Indonesia, 1981–1984
Arriving back in Indonesia in early 1981, Rabiah was startled to find Bambang there to greet her. When she had phoned from Australia to tell his parents she was bringing Devi and Mohammed to see them, they had told her Bambang was in Bali; but there he was in Jakarta, doing rehab and staying at the house in Pondok Bambu. With customary Javanese inscrutability, the family embraced Rabiah and the children as though nothing had changed, and ushered them to Bambang’s room. ‘The crazy thing was they just automatically assumed I was still his wife—and technically I was’, she says. When she raised the issue of a divorce with him privately, Bambang was uncharacteristically obdurate. ‘He told me “I’ll never give you a divorce”. The family view was that divorce was shameful. I was his wife, and legally he had rights over me.’
The Mother of Mohammed Page 12