The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  After six months in Cairo, Rabiah received a phone call from Sydney. Her eldest daughter, Devi, was struggling to complete her studies while bringing up a child on her own, and wanted to know if three-year-old Huda could join the family in Egypt. Rabiah and the children were delighted at the prospect of having their little ‘sister’ back with the family. A friend came up with the money for an airfare, and not long afterwards Huda arrived in Cairo clutching a teddy bear named Benny that she’d not let go of since leaving Australia.

  As the children continued their studies at the Al Azhar preparatory school, Rabiah decided that, by her standards, the venerated institution did not merit its reputation as a bastion of Islamic excellence. She was incensed by the school’s practice of punishing a child for misbehaviour by caning the entire class on the soles of their bare feet. She marched up to the school office to complain that this was ‘unacceptable and un-Islamic’, because Islam teaches that an individual is only responsible for his or her own actions, and to announce that she would be forced to withdraw her children unless the policy was changed. Unlike the Grand Imam, the headmistress was unmoved. ‘She was looking at me as if to say, “And you think I care?”’ Rabiah recounts. There were many such visits to the school to lambast teachers and administrators over its failings. Her children would groan in anticipation of her rampages, which they referred to as ‘doing a mama’. ‘You’d see the looks on my kids’ faces—“Oh no, here we go”’, Rabiah remembers. Sometimes they would recount the events of the day to her only after she promised not to storm up to the school office to complain.

  Mass canings for misbehaviour were not the only feature of their school life that Rabiah found ‘un-Islamic’. Funded and controlled by the Egyptian government, Al Azhar prized secular studies and propagated a conservative, apolitical style of Islam and a determinedly Western outlook. Any display of ‘radical’ Islamic dress or behaviour was discouraged; female teachers wore make-up and shunned the hijab, while the men eschewed long beards. At Easter the children painted colourful designs on eggs in class to mark the Christian festival. Rabiah recalls a plan to reduce the hours spent studying the Quran so French could be added to the curriculum, a proposal she found ridiculous.

  But what most disturbed her was the reliance on rote memorisation for which Al Azhar was famed. One day she caught Ilyas doing his English homework, reciting rhythmically the names of the days of the week:

  ‘Mon-a-day, Tues-a-day, We’ns-a-day, Thurs-a-day …’

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she demanded.

  ‘That’s how they told me to do it’, he explained.

  Another child they knew, while discussing Shakespeare in an English class, prefaced an answer with, ‘Well I think …’ The teacher threw a book at her, bellowing, “I don’t care what you think—I want to know what I told you!”’

  The technique of rote learning was applied methodically to study of the Quran. Every student was expected to have committed the entire book to memory by the completion of primary school. They were regularly tested on the ayats (verses) they had most recently learned, by which time they had usually forgotten all the ones they had previously memorised. Rabiah believed this ‘parrot fashion’ learning was pointless, apart from which it is considered sinful to memorise the Quran and then forget it. ‘There’s very high regard for memorisation of the Quran but it has to be done with appreciation and love and knowledge’, she says. ‘Rote learning is fine as long as it’s coupled with knowledge, but without that it’s against the principle of what the Quran was sent down for. The Quran is a guide, a way of life. I have seen people who are hafiz, they’ve memorised all thirty parts of the Quran, and they don’t understand a word. Rote learning—of the Quran or anything—is bad, because it stops people thinking.’

  Like her mother, the now 14-year-old Rahmah took a dim view of the lax standards at Al Azhar. The girl had grown into a mature and forthright young woman who combined her mother’s penchant for speaking her mind with an unfailing politeness and a tact that Rabiah lacked. ‘I had to do a mama today’, she would announce after holding her ground in an argument; ‘only without the shouting and banging on the counter’, she would usually add. ‘Rahmah is the complete opposite to me’, says Rabiah. ‘The more irate or upset someone gets, the calmer she becomes. Rahmah is a negotiator. I think it’s all the years of having to deal with me— like when we were in Egypt. There were so many times when I could have been shot or thrown in jail, but Rahmah has an ability to defuse the situation.’

  Like her mother, Rahmah habitually wore the niqab, which was frowned on by the school authorities. She had little regard for the female hadith teacher who wore a midi-skirt, red lipstick and a hat instead of hijab, while lecturing her young charges on the need to live by the Sunnah of the Prophet. Rahmah hoped to go on to university to become a scholar in Islamic jurisprudence, but found the standards at the Al Azhar school uninspiring and told them so.

  ‘Azhar was a joke’, says Rahmah. ‘From being the first Islamic university that was founded on pure Islamic teachings, it has become a place ruled by a system that is all about the powerful rule, and the weak—well, who cares. Totally opposite to what I grew up with in Pabbi. I was made to repeat a year only on the basis that I disagreed with many of the things that they taught … I was told that if I knew what was best for me and my future then I should learn to sit and shut up. And that is something that is not taught in our religion; no matter how young you are, if you are saying the truth, then you (should be) listened to. So to come into a system where you are muzzled from even saying the smallest things was a tremendous shock to me and I had great difficulty accepting it.’

  As Rabiah tells it, Rahmah’s patience finally snapped during a lesson on biological evolution, when she stood up and announced to the rest of the class: ‘Listen, if you want to be descended from a monkey, a gorilla, a giraffe or any other animal, that’s up to you. But me—I was created by Allah, and my first ancestor was the prophet Adam.’ She walked out of the classroom, went home and confronted her mother.

  ‘Mama, I want to ask you a question and I want you to just answer me yes or no. Does the curriculum and methodology of Al Azhar follow the Quran and Sunnah in their entirety?’

  ‘Well …’ Rabiah began.

  ‘Mama—yes or no?’

  ‘No’, Rabiah replied. After that, Rahmah never went back to the Al Azhar school. Not long afterwards, 10-year-old Ilyas followed his big sister’s example.

  ‘Mama, didn’t you teach us that the Prophet said you’re not allowed to learn your deen from liars and hypocrites?’

  ‘Yes, Ilyas.’

  ‘Well why do you send me to Al Azhar then?’

  ‘I couldn’t answer him, so I took all the children out’, Rabiah says. ‘There is no learning institution anywhere that compares to the high level of Arabic at Al Azhar. A lot of people attend for that alone. But my children were brought up (with the belief) that you never compromise your religion.’

  The withdrawal of the children from the Al Azhar school left Rabiah and her family in a precarious situation, because all of their visas hinged on their student status. Moreover, after three years, living in Egypt had become expensive, and the political climate had deteriorated. In November 1997, the Islamist upheaval climaxed in the massacre of fifty-nine foreign tourists and four Egyptians at the temple complex at Luxor by terrorists from the Islamic Group and al Jihad. The atrocity triggered a wide crackdown with hundreds of arrests, and turned Egyptian public opinion decisively against the extremists. Rabiah and her friends had to stop their weekly meetings after the secret police paid a visit to the apartment block where they gathered. ‘I was more or less told indirectly that if I wanted to say in Egypt, I should stay at home and mind my own business, so it all became complicated and a little bit iffy’, Rabiah recalls.

  The decision about their immediate future was made for them when Rabiah took Aminah to see a heart specialist in Cairo for an annual checkup. The child had previousl
y been diagnosed with a hole in her heart, a condition that Rabiah was told was not life threatening but required regular monitoring. The Cairo specialist’s opinion was that Aminah needed open heart surgery, a procedure that Rabiah was told would cost US$15 000 in Egypt. So, in the winter of 1998, Rabiah decided there was no alternative but to return to Australia. ‘We came back for the same reason we always came back—there was no other option.’

  On her return to Sydney in 1998, Rabiah’s friends and acquaintances saw a conspicuous change. Previously in Australia she had discarded her black niqab, in deference to the advice of her teacher Sheikh Omran that it was unnecessary and provocative. She no longer cared what people thought, and now chose to keep it on. The spectre of a woman shrouded from head to toe in black with only her eyes visible behind a slit in the fabric was a rare sight on the streets of Sydney. It provoked a range of reactions, although not yet the naked contempt it would later arouse.

  ‘In those days the resentment was because it was seen as cultural garb’, says Rabiah. ‘It was viewed like someone wearing a kilt. People objected because it was not the Australian thing to do. They’d make fun of you, rather than spit at you.’

  ‘Go back to where you came from!’ the occasional heckler would call out in the supermarket; at which a strident Australian accent would snap back: ‘Shut up, you idiot! I’m from Mudgee, I don’t want to go back there!’

  In the mainstream Muslim fraternity, Rabiah’s garb occasioned mild alarm. Her long-time supporter, Sheikh Khalil Chami, saw the niqab as an emblem of Wahhabism, the rigid strand of Islamic orthodoxy pioneered by the eighteenth-century Saudi desert preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. ‘I wasn’t happy when I saw her in niqab because I know then she’s turned from the mainstream. I said to myself inside, “We lost this girl”. From her talk and her actions I think she’s with the Wahhabis. We don’t need those groups here in Australia. We need unity of Muslims, we have to work together. Wahhabis give a bad face to Muslims.’

  Silma Buckley was unsurprised to see her former friend in full Salafi regalia. ‘It was predictable for somebody like Rabiah, who went to extreme lengths. If she thought anything was required, she did it.’ Silma herself disapproved of women concealing their faces. ‘Practically, academically, theologically, I don’t believe it’s sound. And it’s a destructive influence because you can’t communicate with people.’

  For Rabiah, however, it was simply a personal choice. She believed it was ideal (though not compulsory) for a woman to conceal her face from unrelated men, and wasn’t prepared to compromise simply because it caused onlookers offence. To her it was simply a case of practising Islam in its ‘purest’ form, and she couldn’t fathom that anyone would disapprove of that. ‘There’s no such thing as “radical” and “non-radical” Islam. There is just pure Islam—and then there are degrees of corruption. People say, “But that’s the puritanical interpretation of Islam”. I say—“Isn’t pure good?” People nowadays use the word “Salafi” as a term of abuse. But how can the word “pious” mean something bad?’

  As for being branded a ‘Wahhabi’, she says: ‘I’m not a Wahhabi and I take great offence to that, because it indicates that you are a follower of a human being. The only reason I accept the teachings of Imam Abd al-Wahhab is because they’re in keeping with the Quran and Sunnah as taught by the Prophet Mohammed. But it’s totally unacceptable to be called anything other than a Muslim, because that’s the name Allah gave to people who accepted Islam.’

  Despite her peripatetic habits and wish to live in an Islamic country, for Rabiah there were ways in which Australia still felt like home. She remained an ‘Aussie’ girl in much of her behaviour, mannerisms and mode of speech. She had an essentially love-hate relationship with her homeland. ‘People might say, for someone who hates Australia so much, she keeps coming back. But it’s not Australia I hate. Australia is one of the most beautiful countries in the world and I’ve travelled all over the world. It’s not Australia I hate—it’s the system.’

  While she could move with ease in and out of Australia, for her children it was a difficult transition. After four years in Egypt, they felt more than ever like strangers in their native land, their upbringing and experience almost entirely foreign to that of their peers. ‘My children are like aliens—they don’t fit in here’, Rabiah says. ‘Even children who’ve been brought up here with a relatively strict Islamic upbringing—they can’t relate to my children and my children can’t relate to them.’

  Rabiah now bypassed both the state education system and the local Islamic school and registered the children for home-schooling. For the next year she tutored them herself, following the compulsory New South Wales public school curriculum combined with a Saudi program of Islamic studies. She also opened another weekend Islamic school, which she ran from her home in Lakemba, attended by about twenty-five children from local Muslim families. They sponsored an orphan in Sudan through Human Appeal International, and once a month Rabiah would shepherd her flock up Haldon Street to deliver their donation.

  ‘I used to march them up the street singing Islamic songs’, she remembers. They became a familiar sight in the Haldon Street shopping strip: a horde of children in Muslim caps and headscarves marching and chanting in unison: ‘Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! (God is Great!)’ Passers-by would stop and wave while motorists tooted their horns at the odd procession. Rabiah’s own children recoiled with embarrassment at the spectacle.

  After studying for more than a decade in Indonesia, Pakistan and Egypt, Rabiah was by this stage widely acknowledged in the Muslim community as a minor authority on matters Islamic, particularly on the Sunnah (customs) of the Prophet Mohammed as recorded in the hadith. Sheikh Chami concedes she was ‘very knowledgeable in Islam’. She began giving weekly lessons on Islamic parenting at the Salafist musalla (prayer room) in Haldon Street, and sessions on Islamic faith and practice for women at her home. ‘The lessons were more like gatherings, to pass on to them what I had learned’, she says. ‘They were talks that would encourage people to come back to the true Islam and remind them what the shahadah (declaration of faith) means, and to encourage them to seek knowledge.’

  Women from the Muslim community flocked to her classes, and she became the mentor and spiritual guide for a widening circle of young women, drawn by her knowledge, charisma, experience and passion. Her students gradually took to wearing the niqab, and the all-enveloping black shroud became an increasingly common sight on the streets of Lakemba. Some of the men found her far too confronting. A male convert who met her in this period says, ‘Rabiah was very big on women’s rights in Islam. She was always demanding her rights as a woman and rights for Muslim women in general.’ This man, a friend of her former husband Abdul Rahim, found her ‘too pushy’ and ‘extreme’.

  With a friend, Rabiah created a Muslim ‘prayer kit’ consisting of a book, DVD and calico prayer mat printed with step-by-step instructions on how to perform the ritual salat (daily prayers). The prayer mat was a great success according to Rabiah, with thousands sold in Australia and overseas and the funds channelled back into a charity she ran that provided assistance to needy Muslim families in Sydney and donations to Islamic charities abroad. She was often consulted for advice and direction on points of Islamic law and behaviour. People who sought her advice—or received it unsolicited—were often shocked by her bluntness. On one occasion she chastised Muslims for adorning their walls with pages from the Quran, telling them they might just as well hang up strips of toilet paper. Some took deep offence, missing her point that it is not the paper the Quran is printed on that should be revered, but the knowledge contained in it. ‘It would be like going to a doctor, getting a prescription, and then instead of taking it to the chemist to have it filled, hanging it around your neck’, she explained.

  Eight months after their return to Australia, the four-bedroom house they were renting in Lakemba was sold. The new owner was perturbed to learn that his tenant was a veiled ‘Wahhabi’ with a horde o
f children. ‘It would have been better if I’d had an elephant as a pet’, she later mused. The lease had expired and the owner announced it would not be renewed. Rabiah was served with an eviction notice and told that if she did not leave voluntarily the police would be called.

  Not for the first time, Rabiah and her brood, which now included her granddaughter Huda, found themselves with nowhere to go. Devi and Mohammed had made their own lives on Sydney’s northern beaches and had little contact with the family; likewise Rabiah’s brother and sister, George and Susan. She could not turn to her former husband Abdul Rahim, who had left Sydney and moved to Perth in Western Australia, after a power struggle for control of the Dee Why mosque ended in a fist fight. The imam, Zainal Arifin, had taken out an apprehended violence order against Abdul Rahim and his twin, the Afghan veteran Abdul Rahman, who had also migrated to Australia.

  Rabiah received an offer of accommodation from a friend named Jamilla, a fellow Australian convert who lived with her husband on a large block of land surrounded by market gardens at Lidcombe, in Sydney’s south-west. They had a large garage, which her husband had carpeted and turned into an office and library, and which Jamilla now invited Rabiah and the children to stay in until they found somewhere else.

  Jamilla’s husband was Sheikh Mohammed Feiz, a rising star of the Salafi set in Sydney. He was a former drug-taking street punk who had first made his name as a body-builder and teenage boxer, fighting under the moniker ‘Frank the Beast’. Like so many other troubled souls in search of fulfilment, he had explored Christianity, Buddhism and even Judaism, before discovering Islam. Then, as Feiz himself puts it: ‘I found the truth’. Like Rabiah, he was drawn to the stark clarity and prescribed life guide offered by Islam. ‘I don’t believe in unclear concepts. Everything divine must be clear’, he later said. Feiz had become a student of Sheikh Omran, who recognised the young man’s zeal and potential and sent him to Saudi Arabia to study Arabic and Islam in the holy city of Medina. He returned seven years later as Sheikh Feiz, and became the star attraction at the Haldon Street prayer room, where his charismatic persona and electrifying delivery drew large crowds to the weekly sermons in which he denounced the ‘Zionist pigs’ and Christian Crusaders bent on destroying Islam.