The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  After a few weeks at the women’s refuge, Rabiah was deemed eligible by the government for subsidised accommodation at a new housing estate on the south-western outskirts of Sydney. She was taken to a brand-new, four-bedroom, split-level home, with a playground where boys and girls romped about together and a communal park where residents attended weekly ‘BYO’ (‘bring your own’ alcohol) barbecues. But the prospect of life in such a quintessentially Australian setting was now so foreign that it filled her with dread. ‘It was just so impossible for us to live like that. It was a lifestyle that was just so void of anything Islamic. How could I have gone to barbecues with music and drinking?’ Instead she found a two-bedroom house in her old stamping ground, Lakemba. The rent was cheap because the street was a known haunt of drug dealers and criminal gangs, but at least it was near the mosque.

  Rabiah enrolled the children in the Al Noori Islamic primary school at nearby Greenacre, which had been set up by her former friends Silma and Siddiq Buckley. The couple had since divorced and the school was being run by a board chaired by the respected community leader and former president of the Islamic Council of New South Wales, Sheikh Khalil Chami. Sheikh Chami had known Rabiah in her days as a voluntary scripture teacher and had always been impressed by her seemingly inexhaustible energy. He appointed her to a committee to choose a new principal and she later joined the school board.

  ‘She was very, very active—a very, very good worker’, says Chami. ‘She was the best in that time. She could achieve anything. If we wanted something done she’d do it. We were a very good team.’ Chami recalls Rabiah was ‘very frank and outspoken’ but says he saw ‘nothing radical or extreme’ in her behaviour or views.

  The new principal of the Al Noori school, Siddiq Buckley, who had known Rabiah when she first moved to Lakemba in the early 1980s, found her as dedicated as ever—‘she was a very concerned person, concerned about following Islam’—and just as abrasive. ‘She was just an opinionated person. That’s the way Rabiah was—black and white. Her opinions didn’t bother me a bit, that’s just the way she was.’

  Siddiq took exception on one occasion when Rabiah remarked that she wouldn’t send her children to a kafr school. The word kafr means ‘non-believer’, but is sometimes translated into the more pejorative ‘infidel’.

  ‘Don’t call them kafr’, Siddiq reproved her.

  ‘What should I call them?’

  ‘Call them “non-Muslims”.’

  ‘Isn’t that the same as saying that a table is a “non-chair”?’ Rabiah objected.

  ‘I was a bit too radical for them’, she would later reflect.

  Rabiah threw herself into Islamic community life in Sydney. In addition to serving on the school board, she was active in the Muslim Women’s Welfare Association, a converts’ group that published a book about women in Islam, and set up a charity to distribute relief to needy Muslims.

  By this stage a new ‘holy war’ had erupted in Bosnia, creating a fresh cause célèbre for the international jihadist movement. After the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, Serb and Croatian forces had moved to expand their territory into neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina, unleashing a vicious series of struggles in which Bosnian Muslims were targeted in mass killings, systematic rape, torture and ethnic cleansing. Bosnia invigorated the Islamic community as Afghanistan had done a decade before. Rabiah and some ‘sisters’ launched a drive to raise funds in conjunction with the international Muslim charity, Human Appeal International (HAI), and used the proceeds to send shipping containers of food, medicine and clothing, along with money. HAI was later named in a CIA report on terrorist financing, which alleged the charity ‘probably acts as a fundraiser for Hamas’, the Palestinian militant group. But Rabiah says that in the mid 1990s there were no such qualms.

  ‘In those days everyone agreed with jihad. I’m talking about Afghanistan, Kashmir, Bosnia. I never met any Muslim—or even non-Muslim—who was against it.’

  The jihadist wave sweeping the world had reached Australia as well. In Sydney it centred on a new musalla (prayer room) in Haldon Street, Lakemba, which was the hub of a burgeoning Salafist community. It was established by a group of renegades from the Lakemba mosque who had broken away from the mainstream congregation led by the so-called Grand Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al Din al Hilali. The rebels’ spiritual guide was Rabiah’s former teacher Sheikh Mohammed Jamal Omran, leader of Australia’s largest Salafist group, the Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah Association. Like the Afghan-Arabs in Pabbi, the men were conspicuous by their long beards, robes and trousers above their ankles, while the women were garbed all in black. Hundreds of people turned out for the fiery Friday sermons delivered by Omran’s lieutenant, Sheikh Abdul Salam Zoud. As the years passed, the Haldon Street musalla would attract intense scrutiny from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). But back in the early to mid 1990s, Sheikh Zoud’s exhortations that Muslims must live by the shariah aroused no controversy. ‘To say then that all Muslims should live under Islamic law was completely acceptable, because we were talking about Muslims in Muslim lands’, Rabiah says.

  Foreign sheikhs on the Islamic speakers circuit who ventured to Australia received an enthusiastic reception. Sheikh Omran hosted one such visit by the British-based cleric Abu Qatada, who had been in Peshawar for the jihad against the Russians in the 1980s and was granted asylum in the United Kingdom in 1993. Years later he would be convicted of terrorism charges in his homeland, Jordan, and accused of being ‘Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe’. His visit to Lakemba in 1994, well before he gained notoriety, was no clandestine affair. ‘They held it in the bloody council hall’, Rabiah recounts. The public hall near the Lakemba train station was packed with dozens of men and about thirty women who sat at the back behind a curtain. Rabiah says the discussion centred mainly on ‘correct’ Islamic observance.

  The surge in jihadist activity had also galvanised the Indonesian migrant diaspora, which now boasted its own chapter of JI, the organisation formed in Malaysia in 1993 by Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir. During one of their visits to Sydney the two clerics had resolved to establish an Australian jemaah (community) and appointed Rabiah’s former husband, Abdul Rahim Ayub, as its emir. As Rabiah tells it, Abdul Rahim was chosen because ‘he was the only one with prior connections—he met them through me’. Rabiah maintained regular contact with Abdul Rahim, the father of her three youngest children, Mustafa, Ilyas and Aminah. He had married again, to the same Indonesian woman whom Rabiah had suggested a few years earlier as her ‘co-wife’, and had a baby son.

  Throughout the 1990s, Sungkar and Ba’asyir visited Australia eleven times. Their jemaah came to number about 130 members in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, about thirty of whom swore the bai’at to one or other of the pair. The principal role of JI’s Australian branch was to raise funds through lectures, prayer meetings and zakat (alms) donated by its members and remitted to Sungkar and Ba’asyir in Malaysia.

  ‘So-called “JI in Australia” was just a group of Indonesians’, says Rabiah. ‘There were lots of Indonesian students, mostly illegal, and a lot who got amnesty in the 1980s. Most weren’t practising Muslims when they came. When Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir came, it wasn’t to recruit them; they just preached to them, and brought them back to their deen (religion). They told them that now they lived in a country of such wealth, it was their duty to give something back. The only function that people served in Australia was to raise money to support the schools and other projects in Malaysia. They got more money in a week here than in a month in Indonesia.’

  Over the years, Sungkar and Ba’asyir grew bolder and more vociferous in their denunciations of the Suharto regime. They were equally contemptuous of democracy, and urged their followers in Australia to obey only Islamic law, arguing that man-made laws usurp Allah’s rightful authority and constitute ‘an open declaration of disbelief’. The clerics had also become stauncher in their own observance of Islamic practice.
Rabiah recalls attending a lecture given by Ba’asyir at the Dee Why mosque around this time; afterwards, when she went to speak to the mentor whose home she had visited so often at Ngruki, she was obliged to converse with him from behind a curtain.

  Rabiah herself was by now a well-known figure in international Islamist circles, by virtue of her years in Indonesia and Pakistan, her linguistic range, and her close association with jihad-ist icons such as Sungkar, Ba’asyir and Sayyaf. Her fund-raising for Bosnia became known abroad, and in 1995 she received a job offer from an Islamic propagation centre in Kuwait. The position at its headquarters in Kuwait City came with a salary of US$5000 per month, plus airfares, accommodation and Islamic schooling for her children. She leapt at the offer.

  The week before she was due to leave for Kuwait, Rabiah’s brother George drove her son Mohammed over from the northern beaches to farewell his family. The visit was strained. Rabiah’s relations with George had been cool for many years. Mohammed had evidently abandoned Islam and was wearing a beanie pulled down low over his head to hide an earring, which George seemed to enjoy pointing out to Rabiah, and which she pointedly ignored. Before they left, Mohammed asked his mother exactly when she was flying out to Kuwait, so he could come and say goodbye to her and his siblings.

  But the trip to Kuwait never eventuated. When Kuwaiti officials got their hands on Rabiah’s passport and apparently saw the visa stamps revealing her four-year sojourn with the mujahi-din in Pakistan, she says the job offer was suddenly withdrawn. By way of compensation they paid her US$5000, the equivalent of one month’s salary.

  A few days later, Devi rang her mother, fuming. Unaware that the trip had been cancelled, her brother Mohammed had got up at dawn on the day of their scheduled departure and taken a bus to the airport to see his family off. He had sat waiting for them for hours. The family had been unaware that Mohammed was coming to farewell them, and no one had thought to tell him they weren’t going.

  ‘How could you do that to him?’ Devi railed at her mother. ‘It just reinforced in his mind that you don’t care about him.’ Rabiah would later describe Mohammed’s reaction as that of a ‘disappointed little boy’.

  Her own disappointment at the lost opportunity in Kuwait quickly turned to anticipation. She now had US$5000 in the bank. It was her ticket to freedom.

  ‘I couldn’t stand it in Australia any more’, she says. ‘The children kept getting sick. They’d developed asthma and the doctor said it was emotional. I was trying to home-school them because I’d put them into school and they hated it. And they were losing their Arabic.’ Her now instinctive reaction was simply to pack up and leave. It was merely a question of where she should go.

  Rabiah had a friend from Melbourne who was living and working as an English teacher in Egypt. There was also a large cohort of Indonesian students studying at the Al Azhar University in Cairo, the most esteemed Arabic language and Islamic studies institute in the world. Another friend in Jakarta who was planning to travel there reported it was easy to get visas. Sheikh Khalil Chami provided a letter of introduction for Rabiah to the authorities at Al Azhar. Before the end of 1995, she and the four youngest children were on a plane with their Chinese samsonites, three sets of clothing and jars of Vegemite, bound for Cairo.

  When Rabiah and her family landed in Egypt in late 1995, the country was in the throes of a bloody Islamist insurgency. Egypt had been the crucible of the modern Islamic political revival. It was the birthplace in the 1920s of the Muslim Brotherhood, which provided a prototype for Islamic groups around the world; and of the writer Sayyid Qutb, whose conception of Islamic revolution became the underpinning philosophy of the jihadist movement. When the Brotherhood spurned the notion of violent jihad, a younger generation of militants emerged, nurtured by two new organisations, al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group) and al Jihad. The latter was led by the Egyptian physician Dr Ayman al Zawahari, who would become a driving force behind al Qaeda’s turn towards terrorism.

  By 1995 emergency law had been in place in Egypt for fourteen years, since the 1981 assassination by Islamic militants of President Anwar Sadat. Through the early 1990s a fresh wave of violence had rocked the country, beginning with sniper attacks at cruisers on the Nile River and the ambushing of a tourist bus, and ultimately claiming more than one thousand lives. Muslim activists were being arrested in their hundreds under draconian emergency laws, detained, beaten and tortured in the country’s notorious jails, emerging often more militant than when they went in.

  Rabiah and her family were greeted in Cairo by a group of Indonesian students who were enrolled at Al Azhar University, the most popular destination for Indonesians studying in the Middle East. They were boarding in a grimy tenement in the district of Al Husein, a crowded quarter of narrow alleyways and pungent market stalls not far from the main campus of the famed university.

  Al Azhar boasts of being the oldest centre of Islamic learning in the world. It was founded in the tenth century and reputedly named after the Prophet Mohammed’s well-educated daughter, Fatima az-Zahraa—Fatima, the brilliant—a role model for generations of Muslim women. Al Azhar was described by Napoleon Bonaparte, whose forces occupied Cairo, as the Sorbonne of the Middle East. The university adjoins the historic Al Azhar mosque, a jewel of Islamic architecture with its stately minarets, alabaster columns and vast white marble courtyard.

  After a few weeks staying with the students, Rabiah and the children moved to Nasser City, a satellite town on the eastern outskirts of the capital, where they rented an apartment close to a preparatory secondary school for Al Azhar where Rabiah intended sending the children. They slipped easily into a community of expatriate students, academics and families that had sprung up in the environs of Al Azhar. Far from home, the muhajirin (migrants) sought each other out and, as in Pabbi, the women coalesced into an intimate society of their own. In addition to Indonesians and Malaysians, there were many English speakers—mostly Europeans, from France, Germany, Belgium and Britain, many of them married to Egyptians. The women held weekly meetings where they read the Quran together and studied the hadith. When it become apparent that Rabiah had studied more than most of them, she took over some of the classes. By necessity, these gatherings were kept low key so as not to arouse suspicion. Muslim activists were being kept under close surveillance and Rabiah was told the emergency laws prohibited gatherings of more than five people without a permit. Women who wore Salafi attire and veiled their faces were automatically deemed suspect. At one point she received a friendly warning from an Egyptian sheikh who was teaching her children the Quran: ‘Umm Mohammed, I want to give you some advice. While you are here don’t speak in Arabic, speak in English— because the Arabic you speak is Peshawar Arabic, and if the secret police hear you, they’ll know exactly where you’ve been.’

  In readiness for their enrolment at the Al Azhar secondary school, Rabiah hired private tutors to coach the children in Arabic, Quranic studies and secular sciences to ensure they would pass the entrance test. After months of tuition, she signed them up for the exam. But an unforeseen problem arose, when she was advised that the school she had chosen was open only to ahul balad, or ‘people of the land’; children whose families were not native Arabic speakers were obliged to attend a separate school for ‘foreigners’. Rabiah learned of the restriction on the day the children sat the entrance exam.

  ‘But I want them to go to this school’, she announced at the school administration office.

  ‘I’m sorry, madam, they’ll have to go to the foreigners’ school’, she was told.

  ‘No, I want them to go here. My children speak Arabic and I want them to go here.’

  When they refused to yield, Rabiah demanded an appointment with the Grand Imam, Sheikh Mohammed Sayyid Tantawy, leader of the Supreme Council that governs the affairs of Al Azhar. She tells of how she barrelled up to his office accompanied by her daughter Rahmah, now aged thirteen, sweeping past the armed guards and ignoring their request to see proof of identi
ty.

  ‘Go ahead and shoot me, imagine how good that’s gonna look’, she snorted. Inside, she was ushered into Tantawy’s office, where she proceeded to lecture the man in charge of the world’s highest centre of Islamic learning on the finer points of Islamic law.

  ‘You’re supposed to be the oldest Islamic learning institute in the world, but you won’t accept a hadith of the prophet!’ she berated him. ‘The Prophet said, “Whoever speaks Arabic is an Arab”. My children speak Arabic and I want them to go to the Arab school.’ She says she refused to leave his office until he finally relented, instructing an aide: ‘Give her whatever she wants, just get her out of here!’ Later when Tantawy recognised Rahmah on the school campus, he greeted her: ‘My daughter, any time, whatever you need, you can come to me—but please leave your mother at home’.

  Rahmah and her little sister Aminah and the two boys, Mustafa and Ilyas, attended the Al Azhar preparatory school for two and a half years. It was an exacting regimen. The school day began at 7.30 in the morning and ended at 1.30 in the afternoon, followed by two hours of private tuition and then homework. Rahmah studied twenty-one subjects: the full range of secular disciplines including mathematics, history, geography and English; a suite of Islamic topics such as Quran, hadith and philosophy; and five Arabic courses including grammar, literature and poetry. According to Rabiah, her children were the only non-Arab pupils at the school—and the poorest. Their classmates, who included the offspring of Saudi princes and Gulf-state oil sheikhs, were deposited at the school gates by taxi or chauffeur-driven limousine. Rabiah’s suggestion that her family buy a cart and donkey for the school trip was greeted with disdain by her children, like many of her ideas.

  ‘My children were always very polite. But in the end they would just gang up on me and flatly refuse.’ Despite her insistence that their objections were ‘un-Islamic’, they were adamant: ‘May Allah forgive us, Mama, but we refuse. We will not ride on a donkey.’