‘Well, excuse me—I have a policeman’, Rabiah replied.
‘Oh, no! There’s terrorists on the plane!’ the Englishman cried, and refused to board the aircraft.
Rabiah and her children arrived home in Sydney at the end of October 2003. In the four years they had been away from Australia, the world had changed. In the wake of September 11, the JI bombings of the Sari Club and Paddy’s Bar in Bali had killed 202 people including 88 Australians, catapulting Australia into the role of willing partner in the global ‘war on terror’. ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’, US President George Bush had declared. Rabiah found herself ostracised in her community. Former friends crossed the street rather than talk to her, and the jibes in the supermarket turned to streams of vitriole and threats of violence. The world seemed polarised. The United States and its allies had invaded Iraq. The Bush administration had covertly authorised the use of torture at secret CIA prisons around the globe against terrorism suspects. Hundreds of detainees languished in indefinite legal limbo at Guantánamo Bay. Like many Muslims, Rabiah perceived it as a war on Islam.
‘Since September 11, we have become among the most hated people on the planet, to the extent that we can be detained, tortured, raped, humiliated. And you know what’s so intolerable about it—the lies. If they’ve decided that we’re not allowed to exist, at least be honest about it, don’t lie about it. Don’t make up all these slogans like the “war on terror”. Just say, “We don’t like them and we’re going to wipe them off the face of this Earth”.’
Rabiah had no wish to remain in Australia. But when she applied for a new passport to replace the temporary document issued in Tehran, her application was refused. The notification from DFAT cited an adverse security assessment by ASIO, which was summarised in a Statement of Grounds dated 2 August 2004, Rabiah’s fifty-first birthday:
Rabiah Maryam Hutchinson (born 2 August 1953, Australia) has extensive links to and supports the activities of Islamic extremists both in Australia and abroad. Hutchinson is directly associated with core members of the Ahel al Sunna wal Jamaah Association (ASJA); with senior members of both Jemaah Islamiyah and al-Qa’ida; and has directly supported extremist activities. ASIO assesses there is a strong likelihood that further travel by Rabiah Maryam Hutchinson will involve participation in, or support and preparation for acts of politically motivated violence. We further assess that in continued travel overseas, Hutchinson is likely to engage in conduct that might prejudice the security of Australia or a foreign country.
The ASIO assessment was typical of the pronouncements made by intelligence agencies whose job it is to determine who is ‘with us’ and who is ‘with the terrorists’. It was part fact, part extrapolation, and part assertion of guilt by association. Some of it was demonstrably true. Rabiah indeed has ‘extensive links’ to Islamic extremists and supports some of their activities, though she denies this extends to supporting terrorism. She is certainly associated with ASJA. However, it is a legal organisation, whose leaders and followers remain free to follow their beliefs, regardless of the fact that many Australians consider them ‘extreme’. She is undoubtedly ‘directly associated’ with senior members of JI and al Qaeda. By her own account, corroborated by others, she was a trusted friend and follower of JI’s leaders, and shared their goal of an Islamic state in Indonesia. And she was clearly close to al Qaeda’s inner circle, by dint of her activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan and her marriage to one of its leading strategists. But she has had little direct involvement in JI since 1999, when its militant faction embraced terrorism, and there is nothing to implicate her in al Qaeda’s terrorist campaign.
The assertion that there is a ‘strong likelihood’ that further travel by Rabiah would involve ‘participation in, or support and preparation for acts of politically motivated violence’ is pure conjecture. No evidence has been produced to support this, and in more than a year that I have spent investigating Rabiah’s story, I have come across no such evidence. The same applies to the suggestion that she is ‘likely to engage in conduct that might prejudice the security of Australia or a foreign country’. Australia now has stringent counter-terrorism laws, but Rabiah has not been accused of any crime. Nonetheless she believes she has been judged guilty and punished with what she deems to be another form of house arrest.
‘They don’t need to charge me with anything. They don’t need to put me in jail. They’ve taken away everything from me that means anything to me. I have been sentenced to a life of being alone in a society that I hate and they hate me. I have been separated from my children and my grandchildren, from my people, my country. For what? What crime have I committed? What’s the justification for what’s happened to me?’
The cancellation of Rabiah’s passport was not extended to her children, and in late 2004 her sons Mustafa and Ilyas, by this stage aged eighteen and sixteen, and her 14-year-old daughter Aminah, left Australia again bound for Yemen to continue their Islamic studies. The three of them were enrolled at a private Islamic institute in the Yemeni desert town of Mahrib to study Islamic law.
In October 2006, Mustafa and Ilyas were detained by the Yemeni police as part of a counter-terrorism operation led by the CIA and MI6. Its targets were a group of Europeans who lived in the same apartment block where Rabiah’s sons were staying with their sisters in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, and who were reportedly suspected of funnelling weapons to neighbouring Somalia with the backing of al Qaeda. An Australian newspaper reported that Mustafa and Ilyas were detained after Australian security agencies passed on information about their whereabouts. They were held for almost eight weeks in a windowless underground cell, lit by a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling and empty except for a soiled mattress and a swarm of cockroaches. They were blindfolded and Ilyas said he was beaten on the soles of his feet by a guard with a cane. They were interrogated at length by the Yemeni secret police and ASIO. They said the ASIO agents brought newspaper clippings about Rabiah from Australia to show the Yemeni police. According to Mustafa and Ilyas, the Yemeni guards later sneered, ‘Are they afraid of old women in your country?’
Mustafa and Ilyas were released without charge in November 2006. Yemeni prosecutors said seven of the eight foreigners arrested had no case to answer, and a Yemeni lawyer told the Australian they were freed because there was no evidence of their involvement in any conspiracy. Despite this, they were deported from Yemen after their release. They travelled to Lebanon but when the authorities there learned of their history they refused to extend their visas. So they moved on to the United Arab Emirates, but there were visa problems again, and having a ‘deported’ stamp in their passports had ended their hopes of going on to study further in Saudi Arabia. They now assumed that wherever they went they would be targeted. With nowhere else to go, they returned to Australia in December 2007. Rabiah bridles at their treatment.
‘My sons are not allowed to exist, they are not allowed to live anywhere on the face of this Earth. Why—because I’m their mother?’
Rabiah’s daughters Rahmah and Aminah, who were also in Yemen, have remained in the Middle East with Rahmah’s nine-year-old son. Aminah recently married and, in August 2008, gave birth to a boy, Rabiah’s third grandchild. Her granddaughter Huda is living with them and studying at an Islamic school.
Rabiah has had no contact with her elder children, Devi and Mohammed, since before she left for Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1999. She says it is they who severed contact. ‘If that is because I was a bad mother or because their lives were so traumatic, then for that I am truly sorry’, she says. She also remains cut off from her brother and sister, George and Susan. Her sister never called her again after reading an article headlined ‘Australian Mum Married into Al Qaeda’ (written by the author) in the Australian newspaper in November 2006. Rabiah’s notoriety brought one benefit: in 2008 she resumed contact with her half-brother, Roderick, who has struggled with depression since his troubled childhood, when he rang to tell her he had been in
spired to convert to Islam after seeing her interviewed on television.
It is 2009, and Rabiah is living in a rented house near Lakemba in southwestern Sydney with two of her sons. Their home is a neat three-bedroom brick bungalow with patterned rugs covering a white tiled floor, upholstered cushions lining the walls, a television set usually tuned to the news, and a shelf full of mementos of her travels. A goldfish tank bubbles in a corner, under the watchful gaze of a fat fluffy cat, named Benny after Huda’s lost teddy bear.
After a lifetime of journeying, nowadays Rabiah leaves her home infrequently. When she ventures out veiled in her black niqab, she invariably attracts harassment and abuse. People in her community are loath to associate with her lest they too are branded as being ‘with the terrorists’. She has stopped holding Islamic classes for young women because her students found that they, their husbands and families were automatically targeted for attention by ASIO.
Rabiah gazes forlornly around her fastidiously kept piece of Australian suburbia, as the drone of a lawn mower drifts in through an open window. While a home on a three-quarter-acre block in the suburbs was what many of her generation aspired to, it’s a far cry from the dreams Rabiah has been pursuing for much of her life.
‘This is not reality to me; it’s not real. Those mud houses and no electricity in Pakistan or Indonesia or Afghanistan—that’s reality to me. This is just a nightmare that I hope I’m going to wake up from one day, and find it’s not true.’
The ordinariness of the setting makes a surreal backdrop for the extraordinary story that has unfolded as we have met here (and in her previous flat in Lakemba) once or twice a week for most of the last year and a half. The unfolding of the story has itself been a journey, for both of us. She has wept, shouted, laughed and railed in fury as she recounted a life lived on the frontlines of an ideological war, which has seen her a witness to and participant in some of the historic episodes of our time. I have been amused, disturbed and astounded, and have grown to deeply admire her courage and sheer indomitable will. I do not share her politics or her beliefs—although she has never stopped trying to convert me—but I respect her unwavering commitment to them, notwithstanding that they are indeed ‘extreme’. If it’s true that her home is a prison, then in some ways it’s one of her own making; a product of her unrelenting conviction and refusal to compromise on those beliefs. For this she remains fiercely unapologetic. She rejects sympathy but asks that we consider it from her perspective:
‘How would you like it if the government said to you, “Right, we don’t like the way you think”. Then they picked you up, separated you from your children, forced you to live somewhere you don’t want to live, for the rest of your life until you die—just because they don’t like the way you think and your beliefs. And you have no way of refuting it. I could have come back here and portrayed myself as something other than what I am—to regain my passport, to be reunited with my family, to feather my own nest. But I can’t do that. I am a Muslim, I want to live and die a Muslim. I want to defend my right to practise Islam.’
In many ways Rabiah personifies the polarisation of the world, the so-called ‘clash of civilisations’ between the West and Islam, which was seemingly cleaved wide open with the events of 11 September 2001. But thankfully, in early 2009, the world is changing again—the swearing in of a new US President seeming to herald a more hopeful world order, the harsh language of the ‘war on terror’ replaced by a new rhetoric embodied in Barack Obama’s appeal: ‘To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect’.
This new order will face enormous hurdles in the coming years. One almighty challenge will be persuading those who have resorted to terrorism in the name of Islam to join the quest for a new way forward. Another challenge, for us in the West, will be learning to live with, tolerate and even respect people whose beliefs we regard as foreign and extreme, because those beliefs don’t necessarily make them terrorists.
As for Rabiah Maryam Hutchinson, there’s no telling where the next leg of her extraordinary life’s journey will lead. She herself has no idea, but she is fortified by a profound conviction that inshallah—God willing—she is in good hands. ‘I firmly believe that nothing will happen to me except what Allah permits—and in the end Allah brings good out of everything.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Without Rabiah’s decision to entrust me with her story, this book could not have been written. I thank her for the leap of faith, her children for supporting it, her daughters Rahmah and Aminah for sharing their memories of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Mamdouh and Maha Habib for providing the introduction that made it possible.
Many people have given generously of their time, expertise, friendship and support over the year and a half it took me to write this book. Michael Doyle and Mary Neighbour provided invaluable feedback on early chapter drafts. Sarah Curnow read the entire draft manuscript and her encouragement kept me going. Sidney Jones and Greg Fealy were as generous as always, in particular by perusing the Indonesian chapters and correcting my errors. I am especially indebted to Ken Ward who read much of the manuscript and provided crucial advice on Indonesian and Arabic terminology and the history of the Islamist movement. The authors and journalists whose works I have drawn on, particularly on Indonesia and Afghanistan, are too numerous to mention here but they are acknowledged in the notes that follow. Others who helped personally include Mark Corcoran, Amanda Collinge, Stephen Hutcheon, Liz Jackson, Anthony Johns, Takeshi Kohno, Bill Maley, Brendan Maxwell, Virginia Moncrieff, Tim Palmer, Cameron Stewart, Marc Sageman, Quinton Temby, Geoff Thompson, Leigh Sales and Daoud Yaqub. (To anyone else I have neglected to mention, I apologise—and thank you!) The priceless Natalie Hurrell doubled as research assistant and child minder. My executive producers at Four Corners, Bruce Belsham and Sue Spencer, and ABC News management led by John Cameron allowed me the leeway without which I could not have embarked on this project.
In Indonesia, Faried Saenong proved the finest guide, translator and fixer one could hope for. For my trip to Afghanistan I am indebted to Nick Barker of the Overwatch Group who arranged safe travel, logistics, transport and accommodation, and facilitated the services of my driver and guide, Ahmad Sadiqi; and to Rory McGregor, Pat Gleeson and their colleagues at Asia Security Group who looked after me on the ground. Thanks also to Michael Dwyer, Chris Dover, Major David Harris, Heather Grace Jones, Shqipe Maloushi, Amy Corcoran and Terry Shiel, who assisted and entertained me in Kabul. Time and budget constraints prevented me on this occasion from travelling to Cairo, but I am grateful to Anthony Bubalo, James Piscatori, Linda Herrera, Malika Zeghal and Issandr El Amrani for their advice and expertise on Egypt and Al Azhar. Most of the people who assisted my research in Australia are acknowledged in the text or the notes. However, I would like to single out Sandy Sheridan at the Mudgee Historical Society, Ian Goodacre, Craig Johnston, Roderick Hutchinson and Nadia Aboufadil for their patience and generosity.
I am extremely thankful for the boundless enthusiasm of Louise Adler at Melbourne University Publishing, and for the advice and support of her colleagues Foong Ling Kong, Elisa Berg, Cinzia Cavallaro, Eugenie Baulch and Moira Anderson.
Finally, to Michael and Oscar—thank you, for everything. For what it’s worth, this book is for you.
NOTES
1 Robin Merry Hood
Page 3, Another atomic weapons test … rabbit stew: Stories in the Mudgee Guardian, 3 August 1953, p. 1. Courtesy of Mid-Western Regional Council Library, Mudgee.
Page 3, ‘A bonny baby daughter’: Birth notice in Mudgee Guardian, 3 August 1953, and NSW Birth and Baptismal Register for 1953.
Page 3, the birth of their son George: I have changed the name of Robyn’s brother at his request.
Page 3, Wayne, who died at four months: NSW Birth and Baptismal Register 1950; and author visit to Mudgee Cemetery.
Page 4, Mudgee in the 1950s: Information from the Mudgee Historical Society and Mudgee Guardian. Addi
tional information about Mudgee in the 1950s and the life of Robyn’s family provided by Mudgee residents: Sandy Sheridan, Pauline Bassingthwaighte, Lisa Gervais, Stephen Gay, Una Gay, Colin Gay, Ken Sutcliffe, Hugh Bateman, Gary Cook, Norm King, Lorna Pitt, Annmarie Hanchard, Mervyn Neal and Keith McCallum.
Page 5, 51 Horatio Street: The house numbers in Horatio Street have changed since the 1950s and the historic home now at number 51 is not the house where Robyn lived.
Page 5, ‘like infuriated soldier ants’: ‘Jim Hutchison and George Riley Win Soldiers’ Bowling Club Pairs Title’, Mudgee Guardian, 10 February 1955. Jim’s family name is spelt ‘Hutchison’ in this article; he appears to have used both spellings.
Page 6, The son of a Lithgow coal-miner: Author interview with Jim’s son Roderick Hutchinson, Sydney, 14 May 2008.
Page 6, He enlisted in the army in 1943: Australian Military Forces Attestation Form, war records held by the National Archives of Australia, and World War II Nominal Roll, Commonwealth of Australia.
Page 7, Scotsman named Archibald Roy McCallum: Information on Robyn’s forebears is from the Mudgee Historical Society and NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages.
Page 8, eulogised in the Guardian: Mudgee Guardian, 27 June 1949. Provided by Sandy Sheridan, Mudgee Historical Society.
Page 10, ‘He was always violent’: Roderick Hutchinson.
Page 11, the Woolpack Hotel: Mudgee Historical Society.
Page 12, ‘a rough and tough typical Aussie’: Interview with Stephen Gay, Mudgee, February 2008.
Page 14, the old Mechanics Institute: Author visit to Mudgee, February 2008.
The Mother of Mohammed Page 36