The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  They settled well enough into Darwin’s polyglot community of Asian migrants, Pacific Islanders, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, and were allocated a subsidised housing commission home at Casuarina, still within walking distance of the mosque. It was a typical breezy ‘Darwin house’ with cyclone shutters and a big yard with mangos, coconuts and a frangipani tree. If you closed your eyes and inhaled the fragrant steamy air, you could almost be in Indonesia. The large and tight-knit Indonesian diaspora welcomed newcomers and the mosque was a popular hub where Friday jumaah was more a social than a religious event; ‘like Christians going to church on Sunday’, as Rabiah recalls.

  In keeping with their role as muhajirin, whose duty is to propagate Islam, Rabiah and Abdul Rahim threw themselves into life at the mosque. Abdul Rahim was soon teaching the Quran to children while Rabiah took classes for women. As in Indonesia, the novelty factor made her a drawcard. ‘I was a bit of a phenomenon because I was white, I wore hijab and spoke Indonesian. The Indonesians in Darwin were not particularly religious. Our behaviour was very foreign to the Muslims in Darwin because they had missed out on the Islamic revival.’

  Fresh from the maelstrom of Islamist politics in Indonesia, Rabiah was fired up to continue the struggle against Suharto and expected the local diaspora to rally to the cause. But the Indonesians in Darwin had grown comfortable; they were ‘very liberal, easy going, very casual’, says Abdul Qudus. Most still had families in Indonesia and many commuted back and forth; some had arrived illegally or overstayed their visas and had no wish to attract attention. So Rabiah’s fulminations were met mostly with embarrassed silence or mild alarm. She sums up their reaction: ‘we don’t want to talk about it, we can’t talk about it, and please don’t make trouble for us’.

  The imam grew accustomed to Rabiah barging into his office to harangue him about his failure to enforce akhlaq, correct Islamic behaviour. ‘I’d march down to the mosque, and the imam would see me coming and try to hide’, she remembers. One pet aversion was women from the Indian subcontinent wearing saris to the mosque, exposing bare flesh. ‘I’d go to the imam and say things like, “Why are you letting naked women into the mosque? You can’t let it happen”.’ Abdul Qudus was unperturbed. ‘She can’t push me—I was the imam’, he later pointed out.

  Abdul Rahim, who had never before been out of Indonesia, tried as best he could to absorb the double-barrelled culture shock of marriage to Rabiah and life in Australia. A short, stocky man with a wispy beard and dimpled grin, he was, by several accounts, amiable and well liked. But he had come from a devoutly religious family, was one of twelve children and a twin, and had never been apart from them before. In Indonesia, he had been a talented engineering student, respected Quran teacher, political activist and devotee of Islamic law. Here he was just another unqualified migrant with hardly any English and a wife and four kids to support. He got a job as a kitchen hand and dishwasher in an Indonesian halal restaurant called Warung Pojok (the Corner Stall) in Darwin’s CBD. The café’s owner, an Australian-born convert, Luqman Landy, who now runs schools and charities in Indonesia, recalls Abdul Rahim and Rabiah as ‘concerned and compassionate’ people who were devoted to Islam. He and Abdul Rahim tried to establish an Islamic school in Darwin but failed because of ‘insufficient material support from the local Muslims’.

  ‘From the beginning it was a disaster’, Rabiah says of their life in Australia. ‘He never wanted to come here in the first place. He had given up his studies, upset his family (by marrying her) and all of a sudden he’s in Darwin. So you can imagine, coming into a society that didn’t see any difference between men and women. I can remember him turning on the television and seeing naked people. He was quite shocked.’

  The contrast in their personalities was more starkly apparent now that Rabiah was back in her homeland and no longer bound by Javanese etiquette. The Siregars recall that Abdul Rahim was ‘very very quiet’, while ‘she was not—she was an Australian girl’, and a particularly loud one at that.

  ‘He didn’t speak a word of English, so wherever we’d go of course I’d have to do all the talking’, says Rabiah. ‘Also because I was older, I think he found that intimidating. He was not comfortable with the role he was forced into because I took over the dominant role of the family in every respect.’

  The simplest excursion could turn into an ordeal. One day they were pushing Mustafa in his pram around the supermarket when an old lady leaned over to chuck the baby’s cheek, and cooed, ‘Aren’t you a cute little monkey?’ Abdul Rahim had gleaned enough English to pick up the word ‘monkey’, which to an Indonesian is a grievous insult—like calling someone an ‘ape’. ‘What did she say?’ he asked, his eyes wide with alarm and shaking his head in consternation. ‘I could imagine his brain was exploding’, recalls Rabiah. ‘Why would a nice old lady come up and smile, and then say something so terrible? And every day was like that.’

  In her conservative Islamic attire, Rabiah found herself the butt of curiosity and sometimes derision, but not yet the intense hostility that would come in later years. ‘People in the 1980s didn’t hate Islam. They’d say, “Where’s your camel?” or “Do you know you’re in Australia now?” I’d turn around and say, “Have you got a problem, mate?” And they’d hear my Aussie accent and say, “Are you Australian? Oh, sorry”.’ But sometimes the fact that she was Australian only made it worse. ‘There was an underlying sense that you’ve defected, or become a traitor.’

  For Abdul Rahim the shock of life in Australia was compounded by the plight of the Northern Territory’s indigenous population, many of whom lived in squalor exacerbated by rampant alcohol and drug abuse and domestic violence. ‘The drunkenness and the state of the Aborigines really concerned and shocked him, and so did the society as a whole. He was totally dumbstruck by what he saw as the moral decay’, says Rabiah. He was horrified when he learned of a news report about a father who had raped his 18-month-old child and been sentenced to a short prison term. ‘He was just devastated. His mind couldn’t comprehend it. In Indonesia, if that man had been dragged out and beaten to death, nothing would have happened, it would have just been the natural thing.’ Australia’s idea of justice simply did not compute. ‘He hated it. It traumatised him. It was constantly like this—“What am I doing here?”’

  About a year after his arrival in Australia, Abdul Rahim travelled to Malaysia to pay the family’s respects to a ‘brother’ who was dying of cancer and to visit Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir in their new home in exile. He had nothing better to do in Australia, and suburban domesticity was proving a strain, according to Rabiah: ‘So I asked ustadz Abu (Ba’asyir) if he could go for a visit, to give him something to do, make him feel important’. She had fallen pregnant again and while Abdul Rahim was away she gave birth to a stillborn son, born two months premature and mildly deformed, apparently as a result of undiagnosed gestational diabetes. She named the boy Azhar and buried his tiny body under the frangipani tree in the backyard.

  ‘Of course I was sad but I had peace in my heart’, she says, ‘because any child who dies will wait for you at the gates of paradise, because they are sinless. And when Allah says, “Enter into jannah (paradise)”, the child will say “No, I want to wait for my mother and father”.’ When Abdul Rahim rang from Malaysia and learned the news he offered to return immediately, but Rabiah told him there was no need, so he stuck to his schedule and came back four weeks later.

  Around this time, Rabiah received word from Sydney that her mother Bessie was dying from the emphysema that had been diagnosed four years earlier. She bundled up baby Mustafa and four-year-old Rahmah, so that Bessie could see her two newest grandchildren for the first time. When they arrived in Sydney, Bessie was in an aged-care facility opposite her younger daughter Susan’s home on the upper north shore. Her emphysema was so advanced that when they wheeled her across the road to Susan’s house they had to carry an oxygen tank to keep her breathing.

  Rabiah faced her mother’s de
ath with trepidation. She believed firmly that Bessie would be barred from paradise because she was not a Muslim, a conviction that angered her sister who later said she wanted nothing to do with a religion that deemed her mother unworthy of heaven. On the last day Rabiah saw her mother, a Muslim friend in Sydney asked if he could try to persuade Bessie to convert to Islam before she died. But Rabiah could see Bessie was exhausted. ‘I said to him, “Mum’s not well today, she’s tired, leave it for another time”. So it was never said. I still ask Allah to forgive me.’

  Rabiah was back in Darwin a few weeks later when her brother George rang to say Bessie had passed away. Rabiah didn’t return to Sydney for the funeral. It was her mother’s wish to be cremated, and Rabiah had told her she could not attend because cremation is regarded as sacrilege in Islam. And in any event, according to Rabiah: ‘You’re not permitted to pray for forgiveness for people who die in disbelief. She was my mum and I loved her. But at the end of the day she didn’t choose to acknowledge Allah. And if she didn’t attain paradise, then it was her choice.’

  A few months after her mother’s death, Rabiah gave birth to another son, Mohammed Ilyas (known in the family simply as Ilyas), her third delivery in barely two years. He was a large baby and became stuck in the birth canal, a complication known as ‘failure to descend’. Rabiah’s blood pressure was dangerously low and the baby was in foetal distress. She remembers it like a scene from a movie: fluorescent lights whizzing overhead and a doctor yelling ‘we’re losing her!’ as they raced her down a corridor on a hospital trolley to the operating theatre for an emergency caesarean. The doctor who performed it recommended she have her fallopian tubes tied afterwards, as it could be life threatening to have another child. After seeking religious advice on the matter, she decided instead to leave her fate in the hands of God.

  Ilyas was nearly one year old when Rabiah and Abdul Rahim decided to leave the Northern Territory after three years. ‘We left Darwin because it was a dead end, we’d done enough’, is how Rabiah explains it. She and Abdul Rahim had grown dispirited among the laid-back Muslim crowd with its culture of ‘barbecues at the mosque’, while Rabiah’s aggressive proselytising had got some people’s backs up. Some of the women who attended her classes had begun wearing hijab, prompting complaints that she was having an ‘extreme’ influence, and her lessons were brought to a stop. ‘Wherever Abdul Rahim and I went, there was always opposition’, Rabiah says. ‘The imams of the mosques would either say “Yes, yes we know you’re right, but it’s too hard”, or they would oppose us and say “These people are extremists”.’

  After leaving Darwin, they moved for a while to Brisbane, but never really settled there. Abdul Rahim was out of work and they were living on his unemployment benefits and her child welfare payments, a meagre income with seven mouths to feed. Her eldest children, Devi and Mohammed, never got on with their stepfather. Twelve-year-old Mohammed was still struggling and behaving disruptively at school and was referred to a child psychologist. The marriage was under growing strain. ‘Australia wasn’t a good time for us. He was depressed, I was frustrated, basically we just didn’t want to be here. All that travelling around was about trying to find an Islamic environment that was going to be, if not good, at least not so detrimental to the children and ourselves. We kept moving because we were unhappy here. It’s not hard to see a pattern with me—that’s been my life. When I come up against difficulties, you know the saying: “a change is as good as a holiday”. I think that was invented for me.’

  After a few months in Brisbane they packed up and moved again, to Melbourne. Abdul Rahim went first to find them a place to live, while Rabiah—who was pregnant again—followed on the train with the five children. She got a sleeper carriage and ‘kept a couple of kids hidden’ to save on the fares. By the time they got there, Abdul Rahim had rented a house in Footscray in Melbourne’s working-class western suburbs, sandwiched between the railway line, the Footscray produce market and the Western Oval football ground, home to the Bulldogs Australian Rules team. The house had mouldy carpets, clumps of asbestos hanging from a hole in the fibrocement wall and a World War II–model refrigerator. A friend described it as ‘the cheapest house in the cheapest suburb in Melbourne’ with a hallway floor that ‘went up and down like the Scenic Railway at Luna Park’. It was owned by a niggard named Bellado who refused to spend money on repairs. ‘Mama, bloody Bellado’s here’, three-year-old Mustafa would call out, mimicking his mother, when the landlord came to collect the rent.

  Despite the grungy accommodation, Melbourne proved a more comfortable fit for Rabiah and Abdul Rahim. The city was home to a proud Salafist community, presided over by a Jordanian-born cleric, Sheikh Mohammed Jamal Omran, known among his followers as Abu Ayman. From his base at the Michael Street mosque in suburban Brunswick, Omran oversaw a community-based organisation, the Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah Association (roughly translated as ‘people of the Sunnah’), and its offshoot, the Islamic Information and Support Centre of Australia. Omran’s group became known as the most pro-active ‘fundamentalist’ outfit in the country, its members conspicuous for their pious dress; the men in long beards and Arab-style robes, the women shrouded in black, in the style of the original Muslims, the Salaf al-Salih, or ‘pious predecessors’.

  In June 1989 in Melbourne, aged thirty-five, Rabiah gave birth to her sixth living child, a girl named Aminah, who was delivered by emergency caesarean. Mother and child spent a fortnight in hospital recovering, and afterwards Rabiah had her fallopian tubes tied to prevent further pregnancies.

  Two months after the birth, Rabiah enrolled at Melbourne University to study Arabic. She also volunteered as the coordinator of a neighbourhood house run by the Footscray council, which provided language lessons for immigrants, mother and child play groups, and cooking and arts and crafts classes. Rabiah arranged for local Muslim women to use the neighbourhood house every Sunday afternoon, and got approval to run a weekend Islamic school for children. Classes were held at the community house every Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Rabiah took the children for Islamic lessons and games, while Abdul Rahim taught them the Quran. An Indonesian immigrant who had studied at Abu Bakar Ba’asyir’s alma mater, the esteemed Gontor Islamic boarding school in East Java, was roped in to take classes in nukil, translating the Quran from Arabic to Indonesian. Sometimes they took the children on excursions to the local swimming pool, because ‘Muslim children are allowed to have fun’, Rabiah points out, as long as they wore proper Islamic attire and girls and boys were kept apart. On Sundays she held religious classes for their mothers at the council facility, instructing about a dozen women in the hadith and Islamic law.

  ‘They loved her down there’, says a friend from this time, Nadia Aboufadil, another Australian-born convert. ‘They were just happy that a Muslim woman was active and organising the community and getting things together.’

  Nadia had grown up in leafy middle-class Glen Iris and was a student in the film and television course at Melbourne’s Swinburne University. On a trip to Europe to attend the Cannes Film Festival, she had met a Moroccan man who took her to his homeland where she ‘fell in love with Islam’. She married, had two girls, and returned to Melbourne, where her husband had recently died of cancer. She met Rabiah at a gathering held by the Islamic Council of Victoria. Rabiah’s energy and charisma made a huge impression on Nadia, who was a ‘bit of a feminist’ by her own description.

  ‘Rabiah wasn’t like the other women’, Nadia remembers. ‘I admired her. She knew everybody, she was very articulate and confident, she had a humanity, an openness and she made friends easily … She was quite dynamic and a powerful woman. People have this impression of Muslim women all being submissive women who obey their husbands, but Rabiah was completely the opposite. She was too outspoken even for some of the men.’

  Nadia recalls that at their meetings the women, who were predominantly Indonesians and other immigrants, would be in the kitchen cooking or sitting demurely with their
husbands paying little attention to what was being discussed. ‘And here was Rabiah rattling off all these hadith by heart. She was really passionate. Compared to the others she was just really interesting.’

  Nadia says Rabiah became ‘the organiser of a circle of women’. Also among its members was another Australian convert, Charmaine Johnston, who had taken the popular Muslim name Khadija. Her background had much in common with Rabiah’s. She was a country girl who had grown up at Cooranbong in New South Wales and attended Booragul High School on the picturesque northern shores of Lake Macquarie. Charmaine’s brother was the Australian soccer legend Craig Johnston, who played his first game for Booragul High then went on to star for Liverpool in the United Kingdom. Khadija was ‘a beautiful person’ in Nadia’s words, a loveable ‘former hippy’ who made her own bread and kept bees for honey. She and Rabiah met at a mutual friend’s home where Rabiah had given a talk one evening. Afterwards Rabiah bundled the children into the car but miscounted and left three-year-old Mustafa behind. As Rabiah tells it, it was this that inspired Khadija to seek her out as a friend, curious about ‘what kind of weirdo would leave her child behind’.

  As they got to know each other, Khadija confided: ‘My husband’s a sheikh’.

  ‘I’d like to meet him as well’, said Rabiah.

  Khadija’s husband was the leading Salafi cleric in Melbourne, Sheikh Mohammed Jamal Omran. He and Khadija had met and married in 1984 while Omran was visiting Sydney from Fiji where he ran a mosque at the time. Omran was looking for a wife, and a friend introduced him to Khadija. (By Rabiah’s account his proposal at their initial meeting was straight to the point: ‘What have you decided? Because I’ve got other women to see.’ Khadija told Rabiah she was so stunned by his directness that she accepted.) After Khadija introduced her to Sheikh Omran, Rabiah persuaded him to take her as a student for weekly classes at his home, despite the fact that he usually did not take female students. Nadia recalls: ‘He used to teach only men. Rabiah was the only woman who insisted on being a part of whatever was going on.’