The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  For Rabiah’s children, Melbourne was their fourth new home in as many years. Fourteen-year-old Devi—‘a fiery teenager with a mind of her own’, according to Nadia—attended the local high school. Her brother Mohammed had struggled through primary school devising ever more inventive excuses for not doing his homework. On one occasion Rabiah was summoned to the school after Mohammed told his teacher that he had been unable to finish his project because his mother had woken him for breakfast at 3 a.m. so he could fast through the day, and as a result he was too exhausted. Rabiah indignantly insisted it wasn’t true. The younger children attended the Footscray state primary school where they became known as the pupils whose mother would not allow them to do music, dancing or go on excursions, which she regarded as haram (forbidden). ‘The school found me uncompromising’, Rabiah volunteers.

  Their life in Melbourne was a constant whirl of activity, and the strain of it showed. Abdul Rahim was studying computer science and applied physics at the Victoria University of Technology but didn’t work while they lived in Melbourne. Nadia Aboufadil recalls that he was ‘pleasant’ but ‘very quiet and kept to himself’. ‘He seemed to admire Rabiah but they rarely spoke to each other.’ She recalls her friend saying they were ‘having problems’. By her own description, Rabiah was not an easy woman to be married to—domineering, tempestuous and a relentless perfectionist. One habit that grated on Abdul Rahim was her insistence on crisply folded ‘hospital corners’ on their bed sheets. One night they arrived home late after a function. It was almost midnight and Abdul Rahim was ready to collapse—but first the bed had to be correctly made. Exhausted, he put his face in his hands and begged, ‘please, please don’t make me do hospital corners’. Of course she did.

  Abdul Rahim’s crisis of confidence over his diminished role had not abated, and having to rely on government benefits to feed a family of eight didn’t help. ‘Rabiah told me that her six children were only allowed to eat one piece of fruit per day’, says Nadia. ‘Every day she’d cook up a few cups of rice in her electric rice cooker. There was never much to go with it.’ However, Rabiah blames the stresses in their marriage primarily on the difficulty of maintaining an Islamic lifestyle in secular Australia. ‘There was never a problem in our compatibility as husband and wife—we were very compatible. The problem was being in Australia. The social structure of this society placed a lot of outside pressures on our marriage and on his identity as a man and a husband. The fact of having four kids in four years—it should have been joyous. But instead people thought: they breed like rabbits, or: they’re doing it to get money from the government.’

  In her inimitable fashion, Rabiah came up with an idea that she thought might solve their marital problems. She raised it with her friend Nadia Aboufadil.

  ‘Will you be my co-wife?’ she asked, to her friend’s astonishment.

  ‘No thanks’, Nadia replied.

  It was not the first time Rabiah had suggested that Abdul Rahim take a second wife. She had proposed it while they were living in Brisbane, suggesting an Indonesian woman his family knew in Jakarta. Abdul Rahim was unenthused. ‘No, you’re enough—just having you is like having four wives’, he told her. Undaunted, she rang the family in Indonesia, who was aghast at the suggestion. ‘Apart from the fact that now most people shy away from polygamous relationships, they said, “Tell him to look after the one he’s already got”’, she recounts.

  Rabiah had long held that polygamy must be accepted simply because it is part of God’s law. She could now see practical advantages as well, particularly for a youthful husband with a healthy libido and an extremely busy first wife. ‘I had so many children and so many things to do, and he was younger than me. One of the benefits of polygamy is that if there’s another wife there are so many days in the week when you don’t have to cook or clean for the husband because someone else is looking after him. It means the woman has more time to herself.’

  The issue of polygamy was a source of much debate among the women in her circle. Her friend Khadija dreaded the thought of Sheikh Omran taking a second wife, which they used to joke about.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to see your co-wife crossing the road or you’d be tempted to run her over in your car’, said Rabiah one day.

  ‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous—I’d drive up onto the footpath to run her over’, Khadija replied.

  Rabiah’s proposal for a second wife rejected, the tensions in her marriage continued to simmer. Abdul Rahim’s frustrations came to a head one day while they were sitting in a traffic jam with three of the children in the back of the car. Beside them in the traffic was a very large ‘Aussie guy’ in a Mini Minor who was glaring at Abdul Rahim. As the traffic started moving, his vehicle veered towards them and sideswiped their car, seemingly on purpose.

  ‘I saw something in Abdul Rahim’s face—it was the straw that had broken the camel’s back’, Rabiah recalls.

  ‘Just try to get away’, she urged him.

  ‘Shut up, I’ll handle this’, he replied.

  Abdul Rahim stopped the car dead in the middle of the street.

  ‘I’m ordering you to stay in the car and whatever happens, do not interfere, do not get out of the car.’

  When he confronted the other driver, the stranger took a tyre lever from his car and hit Abdul Rahim over the head, causing blood to spurt from his skull. A life-long martial artist, Abdul Rahim swiftly floored his assailant then grabbed the tyre lever and was about to strike him, when Rabiah stepped in.

  ‘As he brought up the tyre lever, I came from behind and pulled it out of his hand—and he never forgave me.’

  Abdul Rahim required treatment in hospital for the gash to his head. Doctors found an aneurism in his brain that required surgery and later diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. The police were called but Abdul Rahim declined to press charges. He eventually received a small compensation payment but he never fully recovered, according to Rabiah—either from the physical trauma or the humiliation of being stopped from defending himself by his wife. ‘He became very moody, very angry. He used to get incredible headaches and was unable to sleep. And the fact that I had effectively taken away his manhood in front of the inhabitants of Footscray—it affected our relationship terribly. No matter how much I tried to tell him—he would have gone to jail, he would have been charged with manslaughter—he said, “It would have been worth it to keep my manhood”.’

  Because of the injury, Abdul Rahim had to give up his studies and was unable to work, and they were forced to discontinue their weekend Islamic school. His despair worsened. Once, when leaving the house, he muttered, ‘You’d better give me your hijab, I’ve got to go out’. When she asked what he meant, he replied, ‘Well, I’ve turned into a woman’.

  One day when the children’s rowdy horseplay woke him while he was trying to sleep off a migraine, Abdul Rahim lashed out and gave Mohammed a hiding. The boy was so sore and bruised he had to be kept home from school. When he returned to school three days later, a teacher asked him why he was bruised. ‘Because my father beat me’, Mohammed replied. The school called the government department responsible for child welfare who ordered that Mohammed be removed from his family. Rabiah was mortified. Even worse to her than her son being taken was the fact that he was placed with a non-Muslim foster family. At her insistence, he was transferred to a Muslim family, who kept him for a month before he was allowed to go home.

  ‘We got Mohammed home with a very stern warning’, says Rabiah. ‘They tried to make out it had happened because of Islam, that it was normal for Muslim men to bash their children and wives, that he was power-drunk and an egotistical excuse for a human being. They gave me the benefit of the doubt because I was an Aussie—“poor thing, poor oppressed thing”. They made it clear that if it happens again, you won’t just lose this child, you’ll lose all of them.’

  Throughout the five years they lived in Australia, Rabiah had stayed in contact with Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, still living
in exile in Malaysia. There they had begun building a new jemaah (community), which would later form the foundations for the organisation they called Jemaah Islamiyah, with branches in half a dozen countries. The clerics had established a new Islamic boarding school in a jungle clearing in Johore, the southernmost state of Malaysia, and appointed as its principal one of their loyal followers, a young Indonesian named Ali Gufron bin Nurhasyim, who was a former student and teacher at their Ngruki school. Ali Gufron would later become infamous by his nom de guerre Muklas, as the spiritual leader of the 2002 Bali bombings. He had been at Ngruki at the same time as Rabiah but she says she never met him, because single males were housed separately from women and families and were barred from entering the girls’ school where she taught.

  Rabiah had been agitating to move to Malaysia with her family so her children could attend the new pesantren. But Ba’asyir and Sungkar had insisted, to her frustration, that she stay put, arguing that it was her duty as a muhajir to spread the message of Islam in Australia. ‘When they established the school in Johore, I was still complaining and whingeing—“Australia is no good for us, we don’t want to be here”. I wanted to move to Malaysia with Abdul Rahim and the children. But Aba (Sungkar) wanted me to stay here to continue the work I was doing, and send the children to Malaysia.’ The new pesantren took children as young as three years old, but Rabiah wanted to keep her children with her, so all of them stayed in Australia.

  One day she was on the phone to her old friend Ecun, Ba’asyir’s wife, lamenting the parlous state of the Indonesian Muslim diaspora in Australia and its lack of Islamic guidance. ‘The Indonesian community here is lost—they are mostly young students, there is no Indonesian mosque and no scholars’, she recalls telling Ecun. ‘Could you ask ustadz Abu (Ba’asyir), does he have anyone—a student maybe—who he could send to Australia to guide us?’

  When they spoke a few days later, Ba’asyir feigned chagrin.

  ‘So you want one of my students, you don’t want me?’

  ‘Would you come? Can you really come?’

  ‘Yes, we will come’, he replied. ‘But you know we don’t have money.’

  Rabiah and Abdul Rahim solicited donations from the Indonesian Muslim community to raise the $1000 or so that was needed in those days for two return economy airfares from Malaysia to Australia. Rabiah could barely wait to see them. She showed her friend Nadia a report from Amnesty International documenting the torture and arrest of usroh activists in Indonesia, and told of how her mentors had escaped by boat to Malaysia to avoid capture. ‘She kept talking about her ustadz (teacher). She said to me, “Come and meet my ustadz”’, Nadia remembers.

  Ba’asyir and Sungkar arrived in Melbourne in April 1990 on the first of a dozen trips they would make to Australia through the 1990s. They stayed for a week with Rabiah and Abdul Rahim in their home in Footscray, sleeping in one of the children’s bedrooms while the children all piled in together. Their reunion was a polite affair, in keeping with Indonesian custom and Islamic akhlaq (behaviour). But it was soon just like the old days, with Rabiah berating them as she had done at Ngruki for paying insufficient heed to ‘correct’ Islamic practice. It was the fasting month of Ramadan, the timing of which is calculated in Australia by computer calculations of the lunar cycle, rather than the traditional method based on the first sighting of the new moon.

  ‘I remember having a big fight with ustadz Abu because they were praying according to the computer readout instead of sighting the moon’, says Rabiah. In keeping with the maxim ‘when in Rome’, Ba’asyir was willing to go along with the local custom, pointing out to Rabiah that Islam allows for minor technicalities to be overlooked in the interests of a greater good such as preserving community harmony. But Rabiah wouldn’t hear of it: ‘I told ustadz Abu I wasn’t going to pray, and that coming to Australia had corrupted him’.

  Just like Abdul Rahim five years earlier, the two clerics were gobsmacked by their first taste of Australia. They had travelled to Malaysia, Singapore and Saudi Arabia, but never to a Western country. They were impressed by the cleanliness, order and affluence, commenting on the lack of beggars on the streets, and scandalised by the sight of women wearing shorts.

  Ba’asyir was a fitness enthusiast and creature of habit whose daily routine mandated a brisk walk after morning prayer. He returned on the first morning after striding around the streets of suburban Footscray, clearly perturbed. ‘Aduh (Oh dear), Rabiah! The people here are not embarrassed, are they? Even the women—sticking their heads out the windows, looking at me.’ For a woman to display blatant curiosity towards a strange man was unheard of in Ba’asyir’s milieu, and it hadn’t dawned on him that a man with a scraggly white beard wearing a sarong and a haji hat might be worth a second glance. He soon dispensed with his morning walk, deciding ‘it was too traumatic to go out in the daytime’, according to Rabiah. Abdullah Sungkar was even more voluble, particularly about Australian feminine attire. ‘This is because we don’t live under Islam and that’s why you have all these naked women running around!’ he pontificated.

  After five years in exile together in Malaysia, Ba’asyir and Sungkar resembled an old married couple. A companion who had travelled with them told of how they’d spent the entire journey doing silent battle over the air-conditioning vent above their seats. Sungkar would reach up and turn it on, then settle back for a snooze; as soon as his eyes were shut Ba’asyir, who couldn’t stand air-conditioning, would reach up and turn it off. Nor could the health-conscious Ba’asyir abide Sungkar’s habit of chainsmoking clove cigarettes. ‘They were always fighting over it’, Rabiah recollects. Ba’asyir believed that smoking was haram because self-harm is forbidden to Muslims, while Sungkar had decided it was merely makru, which means disliked by Allah, but not necessarily haram. But he had learned to keep his kreteks on his person as they tended to mysteriously disappear if left lying around.

  The preachers’ first visit to Australia was kept deliberately low key. They travelled under aliases they had assumed to avoid detection in Malaysia: Sungkar was known as Abdul Halim, Ba’asyir as Abdus Samad Abud. The visit was a private affair, with no public sermons or political speeches; those would come on subsequent visits as their confidence and enmity towards Suharto grew, along with their reputation among the Australian Muslim community as fearless dissidents who dared to speak out against the tyrannical Suharto regime. They attended Friday jummah at the Preston mosque where they met other clerics including Sheikh Mohammed Omran, whose Salafist ideology was a close match with Ba’asyir’s and Sungkar’s beliefs. Sheikh Omran said later he found Ba’asyir to be ‘a very peaceful man’.

  During their visit Rabiah arranged for Abdullah Sungkar to deliver a private lecture at an Indonesian family’s home in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. The neophyte Nadia Aboufadil remembers being impressed to meet such a knowledgeable cleric: ‘I thought it was really cool, here’s this guy who’s memorised the Quran’. Starting with this visit, Ba’asyir and Sungkar would build a strong following among the community they referred to as their Australian jemaah. ‘The Indonesians here fell in love with them’, Rabiah says.

  Ba’asyir and Sungkar were not yet preaching violent resistance; they still believed their goal of an Islamic state in Indonesia could be achieved through peaceful means. However, they had by now begun preparing for the eventuality of having to fight for it. Since 1984, they had been sending selected recruits for military training in Pakistan to build up their group’s military preparedness. Nadia Aboufadil remembers Sungkar delivering a fiery lecture on chapter eight of the Quran, ‘Sura Al-Anfal (The Spoils)’, which contains this clarion call to jihad:

  Your Lord bade you leave your home to fight for justice … God revealed his will to the angels, saying … ‘I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, strike off the very tips of their fingers! … Make war on them until idolatry shall cease and God’s religion shall reign supreme … Muster against them all the men and cavalry at yo
ur command, so that you may strike terror into the enemy of God.’

  While Sungkar thundered on in Indonesian, Rabiah would sit with Nadia whispering the English translation into her ear. Nadia recalls Sungkar’s orations about jihad had an electrifying impact on her friend.

  ‘Rabiah also began talking about jihad a lot. Her eyes would light up when she spoke about it. She had this whole romantic notion that Muslims defend themselves with jihad. It was just this fantastic thing that you aimed for.’ Rabiah says the jihad to which Sungkar was alluding and which so inspired her was the ongoing mujahidin struggle in Afghanistan to defeat the infidel Communists and establish an Islamic state.

  Ba’asyir and Sungkar’s visit to Melbourne only seemed to exacerbate the growing tensions in Rabiah’s marriage. As a student radical in Jakarta, Abdul Rahim had been habituated to segregation of the sexes, which was practised by the students but had never been enforced at Ngruki. While living in Australia, he and Rabiah had practised segregation, as far as practicable, in their own home, with discreet sitting rooms for men and women to socialise separately. Now here was his wife entertaining the two visiting luminaries, vigorously debating the finer points of shariah with two men unrelated to her and in the same room. By Rabiah’s account, it only reinforced Abdul Rahim’s place on the periphery—a position not unlike the one her two previous husbands had endured. As she tells it, Abdul Rahim was just ‘Rabiah’s husband’ to Sungkar and Ba’asyir.